Fundamentalism is hampering global efforts to tackle climate change, according to Britain's top scientist. In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change "denial lobby".
He will warn core scientific values are "under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East". Lord May completes his five-year term as president of the UK's academy of science on Wednesday. "Ahead of us lie dangerous times," he will say in his fifth and final anniversary address.
"There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and re-emerging diseases, and more. "Many of these threats are not yet immediate, yet their non-linear character is such that we need to be acting today. "And we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future; we even lack basic understanding of important aspects of our own institutions and societies. "Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason."
Lord May will say that fundamentalism applies not only to organised religions but to lobby groups on both sides of the climate change debate. The climate change "denial lobby" and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposed to nuclear power are not exempt from a denial or misrepresentation of scientific facts, he told reporters in London. Speaking in a week that saw the opening of climate talks in Montreal, and the re-opening of the nuclear power debate in the UK, he said there had to be open questioning and inquiry of such issues.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4482174.stm
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