[font face=Serif][font size=5]Scientists, speak up on climate change[/font]

By James Carroll | Globe Staff November 09, 2014

[font size=3] ‘Science has spoken,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the other day, presenting the latest dire warning on climate change. “There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”

One could almost feel the breeze stirred by the broad population’s collective shrug at this news coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Copenhagen. Almost as astonishing as the looming threat that carbon poisons pose for the planet is theindifference that average Americans seem to feel about it. Such climate denial, now decades old, translates into a lack of political pressure on Washington, which in turn results in the failure of both presidential administrations and Congress to rise vigorously in defense of the environment. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. “Continued emission of greenhouse gases,” the UN panel declared, “will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

Science has spoken, Ban said. But have scientists? It seems so: 97 percent of climate scientists say climate change is real, caused by humans, and threatening global catastrophe. Hundreds of scientific societies, academies, agencies, and NGOs have weighed in without ambiguity. Yet reliable polls show that fewer than half of Americans know of this overwhelming scientific consensus. The fossil fuel industry, and the politicians who do its bidding, have waged a remarkably successful disinformation campaign, making it seem that scientists are divided on the question, when they are anything but.

What would it take for the public to get clear both on the unanimity of climate scientists, and on the urgency of what they see coming? An answer from the recent past suggests itself: scientists, instead of merely providing activists and journalists with irrefutable climate data, must leave their cloistered laboratories to become activists themselves. Scientists must take to the streets and lead, even if that means taking hits in the contentious public square.

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