IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES TO REPORT, TO WARN AND TO RECOMMEND

It is incumbent upon scientists, indeed upon all scholars, to accept the professional responsibility and moral duty to report, to warn, and to recommend action to reduce destructive impacts from natural and anthropogenic processes. These responsibilities are fulfilled in situations of imminent volcanic eruption and landfall of tropical storms. However, for the reality of anthropogenic global warming and its manifold impacts, the responsibilities to warn and recommend are often ignored and shirked. James Hansen tactfully characterized such reluctance as “dangerous scientific reticence” (2016) “because, I believe, the affliction is widespread and severe. Unless recognized, it may severely diminish our chances of averting dangerous climate change.”

As is well documented, extreme climate and weather events have increased significantly; shifting climate patterns disrupt vital water-supply and agricultural systems; droughts and historic heat waves reduce crop yields and increase wildfires; rising temperatures facilitate expansion of insect ranges and insect-borne diseases; escalating sea levels exacerbate coastal flooding, erosion and salt-water intrusion; ocean acidification is killing coral reefs; and pervasive pollution drives widespread species extinction and challenges to human health.

An ominous result of ineffective clarification of the threat by scientists is widespread citizen disdain for evidence-based knowledge and the methods of science. This is problematic in the extreme. An informed, rational citizenry is essential to the survival of democracy. This foundation of a free society is currently being undermined by a pervasive propaganda campaign designed to discredit scholarship and reason and to elevate uninformed opinion and partisan parroting to a level of equal validity and credibility in public discourse. When public policy is substantially influenced by or indeed predicated upon myth, suspicion, denial, and demagoguery, then we are in danger of travelling backward in time from the age of reason into the intellectual dark ages. Those of us who stand aloof eschewing our responsibilities to inform and warn are enablers of this deplorable retrogression of rationality that can -- as history abundantly demonstrates -- lead to the decline and collapse of civilizations.