The current war on science, and who's behind it

"Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named storms, exactly as predicted by Exxon scientists back in the 1970s. The United States secretary of health and human services advocates against using the most effective tool we have to fight the infectious diseases that have ravaged humanity for millennia. People are eagerly lapping up the misinformation spewed and disseminated by AI chatbots, which are only just getting started."

"Michael Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who, in 1998, developed the notorious hockey stick graph, which demonstrated that global surface temperatures were roughly flat until around the year 1900, when they started rising precipitously (and have not stopped). Peter Hotez is a microbiologist and pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine whose group developed a low-cost, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine using public funds (i.e., not from a pharmaceutical company) and distributed it to almost a hundred million people in India and Indonesia."

"Neither of them anticipated becoming crusaders for their respective fields-and neither probably anticipated that their respective fields would ever actually need crusaders. But they each have taken on the challenge, and they've been rewarded for their trouble with condemnation and harassment from Congress and death threats from the public they are trying to serve. In this book, they hope to take what they've learned as scientists and science communicators in our current world and parlay that into a call to arms."

Summers across the global north now feature flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontrollable wildfires, and intensifying storms consistent with historical fossil-fuel industry forecasts. A high-level health official advocates against the most effective infectious-disease tools while AI chatbots amplify vaccine misinformation. Michael Mann developed the influential "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction showing rapid 20th-century warming. Peter Hotez led development and distribution of a low-cost, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine to tens of millions in India and Indonesia. Both scientists have become public defenders of scientific evidence, enduring condemnation, congressional attacks, harassment, and death threats as they confront misinformation and call for collective action.

Read at Ars Technica