Mother Jones illustration; Wikimedia, Joshua Yospyn/Wikimedia
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the 1995 book The Demon Haunted World, the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire.
Near the start of their new book, Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World, Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez cite Sagan’s vision of science as a “candle in the dark,” and argue that what the astronomer feared is now coming to pass. In fact, readers may get the impression that the situation is already much worse than what Sagan envisioned.
While Sagan was primarily concerned with the rise of pseudoscience, Mann and Hotez fear that we’re now in the midst of an anti-science boom, led by people, corporations, and governments who intentionally spread false or misleading information. “Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term,” they write. “Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives, produce misguided national policies, and have long-lasting catastrophic consequences, including potentially, the destabilization of our civilization.”
Mann and Hotez describe resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, and add a third: misinformation and disinformation.
Mann and Hotez are not merely observers, but scientists who have found themselves on the front lines of the ongoing attacks on science. Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Hotez is a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. In 2022, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine.
While attacks on science have taken many forms, the authors highlight the current pushback against vaccines and skepticism over climate science as two of the most urgent issues. Mann and Hotez describe the resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, but add that there is a third punch as well, in the form of mis- and disinformation. The authors point to the devastating consequences of resistance to public health measures, especially vaccines, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll from which currently stands at 1.2 million Americans, according to the World Health Organization.
Many of those deaths, they suggest, could have been prevented had people been vaccinated and followed social distancing and mask guidelines. And they’re not shy about saying who’s to blame: “The deaths occurred mostly along a political partisan divide,” they write, “with those living in Republican-majority (‘red’) states disproportionately suffering most of the deaths and disabilities as a consequence of being targeted by propaganda and misinformation from elected leaders, extremist media, and the modern political Right.”
Resistance to vaccines isn’t new, but the authors argue that the anti-vaxx movement reached new heights as the pandemic wore on: “Heading into 2023, the pandemic’s fourth year, we witnessed an expanded alliance of malevolent billionaires, tech bros, and high-net worth individuals—plutocrats, prominent podcasters, and far-right extremists, including Steve Bannon and the ‘Proud Boys’—marching at anti-vaccine rallies and joining forces with the more established antivaccine activists.”
They rebuke Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of Congress, for calling those who administer vaccines “medical brown shirts,” using language associated with Nazis. And (not surprisingly) they chastise those who continue to give oxygen to the long-debunked alleged link between vaccines and autism.
Then there’s the climate crisis. The world is warming, global wind patterns and ocean currents are shifting, ocean levels are rising, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Mann and Hotez call out many sources of climate misinformation, including “petrostates”—nations whose revenues are largely derived from fossil fuels. (The petrostates are one of the five “powerful forces” referenced in the book’s subtitle, the others being plutocrats, propagandists, the press, and pros—referring to scholars who use their credentials to promote unsupported or contrarian views.)
Scientists need to give up any pretense of being apolitical and start actively supporting pro-science candidates and parties, the authors argue.
Of the petrostates, Russia tops the authors’ list. Citing Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels and its authoritarian leadership, including what they see as a desire to destabilize Western democracy, they write: “These factors combine in a perfect storm of consequences for the global spread of civilization-threatening antiscience.”
They describe how Russia-backed operators used social media to spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s climate policies in 2016, to Russia’s advantage. They also see Russia as being behind 2009’s so-called Climategate affair, in which climate data was stolen from a UK university.
And it’s not just Russia. The authors take issue with what they see as Saudi Arabia’s oversized influence on US media, and also point to Texas (Hotez’s home state), where they argue that people linked to the fossil fuel industry have a long track record of political clout.
By positioning themselves against anti-science misinformation, Mann and Hotez have found themselves attacked online, and more. They describe receiving harassing phone calls, and have even been stalked and confronted physically. Mann has faced calls for his firing, and also death threats. He’s also been the victim of antisemitic attacks by those who see him as part of a Jewish conspiracy to promote the supposed “hoax” of climate change.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, attacked Hotez online for refusing to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2023, on the subject of vaccines. (Hotez would later tell NPR: “Mr. Kennedy, he’s deeply dug in, and I know he’s not interested in the science, or he can’t understand the science, or both. That’s why I didn’t want to debate him.”)
Conspiracy-minded people have long latched onto both public health and climate science, but they’ve also, for some reason, objected to the idea of seemingly uncontroversial ideas like “15-minute cities,” a movement obscure enough that some readers may be unfamiliar with it. The idea, first developed by the Sorbonne University scientist Carlos Moreno as a way to re-think urban environments, focuses on ensuring that essential services are within a short walk or bike ride of most residents. Seems harmless, yet various right-wingers have managed to build a conspiracy theory around the idea, pegging it as anti-fossil-fuel, elitist, and a socialist plot designed to keep people in their homes.
Referring to the Republicans’ apparent anti-science agenda, Mann and Hotez write: “There is a solution to that problem: vote them out of power.”
OK, so we’re drowning in anti-scientific misinformation. What can be done about it? Mann and Hotez offer a variety of possible partial solutions, including greater government regulation of social media, improving education (including hiring scientists as teachers), urging scientists to become more media savvy, and pushing journalists to reject the “false balance” that sometimes presents established science and fringe ideas on the same footing.
The authors also suggest that the public can be inoculated against misinformation, if people carefully show them how they’ve been misinformed—a technique that they say works with both climate and public health issues. (The authors don’t specify exactly who would do the explaining, or on what authority, but they do suggest that ordinary citizens can play a role by reporting online trolls and bots, and posting links to more reputable sources.)
Finally, they argue that scientists need to give up any pretense of being non-political, and instead actively support pro-science candidates and parties. Referring specifically to what they see as the anti-science agenda of the Republican Party, they write: “There is a solution to that problem: vote them out of power.”
They even suggest, somewhat shockingly, that other nations might have to work together to thwart the US’s anti-science goals. Referring to what they view as President Donald Trump’s authoritarian aims, they write: “It is therefore incumbent upon other democratic nations such as the European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan to band together (perhaps even joined by the authoritarian nation of China were it to recognize it as being in their long-term interest) to take whatever punitive actions are necessary against bad state actors—the United States sadly now included—to rein them in.”
Science Under Siege, from two leading insiders, is passionately argued, heavily footnoted, and perhaps a little exhausting (and more than a little depressing). It has a definite point of view, and will likely be better received by readers who already share the apparent political leanings of the authors. By way of comparison, other scientists and scholars, including Lawrence M. Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Steven Pinker, have recently drawn attention to the influence of the political left on science in their own anthology.
With the authors’ perspective duly noted, Science Under Siege is clearly an important and timely book. As Mann and Hotez put it: “Unless we find a way to overcome antiscience, humankind will face its gravest threat yet—the collapse of civilization as we know it.”
