Science: In July 2003, Republican Senator James M Inhofe delivered a speech to the US Senate on the science of climate change. He summarised his speech with a remarkable charge:
"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phoney science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."
Inhofe's claim, that global-warming alarmism is a conspiracy designed purely to rake funds into the coffers of worldwide environmental organisations, was made just two years after George W Bush's withdrawal of the US from the Kyoto Protocol, designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. The day after Inhofe's speech, three "experts" were invited to debate the issue before the US Senate. One was Michael Mann, a University of Virginia climatologist representing the overwhelming consensus amongst scientists, that human activity is responsible for global warming. The other two scientists were climate change sceptics with demonstrated ties to the petrochemical industry, specifically to Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, also known as Esso. Naturally, the Senate was bewildered by their conflicting views, leading one senator to exclaim: "We are expected to make some policy decisions based on what we ought to be doing with regard to these kinds of things, but yet there does not seem to be a basis for that kind of decision."
If the scientists were apparently in disagreement about the fundamentals of climate change, how could policy decisions regarding greenhouse-gas emissions even be considered? The picture Inhofe presented of the state of play in climate science was utterly skewed - where in fact the scientific community was in almost universal consensus on the contribution of greenhouse gases to global climate change, Inhofe presented an image of uncertainty and disagreement by stacking the odds in favour of hand-picked industry-sponsored scientists. Rather than representing an isolated incident, Chris Mooney argues that the "hoax" argument about climate change forms part of a systematic undermining of science on the part of the Bush administration, which connects the teaching of creationism in schools to embryonic stem-cells and child obesity to the depletion of the ozone layer. This approach to science, dubbed "the manufacture of uncertainty", was not created of a piece by the Bush administration, but emerged from a particular strand of conservative thinking in the Republican Party, seen in embryonic form under Ronald Reagan, uniting on the one hand industry concerns about excessive governmental regulation and, on the other hand, the interests of the religious right. The book's only real weakness is in the simplified discussion of the embryonic stem cell debate, a case of industry interests and the values of the religious right coming into head-on collision.
The recipe for what the Republicans like to term "sound science" is simple: where scientific consensus presents inconvenient conclusions, hand-pick scientific "experts" with contrary views. Use the media and lobbying groups to generate the public sense of a controversy and lack of scientific consensus, and to justify either the lack of regulatory action (in the case of environmental/health issues) or the embracing of a plurality of views (in the case of Bush's advocacy of the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolutionary theory in schools). As Republican tactician Frank Luntz put it for the climate change debate: "The scientific debate is closing [ against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message."
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute (API) advocated investing millions to "maximise the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences". Victory over climate change advocates would be achieved when "recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom", through the recruitment and training of scientists with new faces, without a history of public visibility in the climate-change debate. The public relations ju-jitsu technique advocated by both Luntz and the API strongly echoes the methods used earlier by the tobacco companies in dealing with the health consequences of cigarette smoke. As tobacco company Brown and Williamson put it in a key 1969 document: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public."
The Republican proponents of so-called "sound science", inevitably contrasted to the "junk science" espoused by liberals, place ever higher hurdles in the way of regulatory action that might be costly to industry. Mooney is keen to emphasise both that the liberals are guilty of their own abuses of science (for example in some recent over-emphasis on the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and global climate change), and that not all Republicans are guilty of spinning the science to suit the policies they wished to pursue all along. However, the current administration's approach to manipulating the facts for the pursuit of the interests of industry and the religious right is well summed-up by the comments of a senior adviser to Bush to journalist Ron Suskind in 2004. The aide described Suskind as a member of "the reality-based community", who believed that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". When Suskind agreed and muttered something about enlightenment principles and empiricism, the aide cut him off: "That's not the way the world really works any more. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."
While the conversation was ostensibly about US foreign policy, the same could clearly be said for the Bush administration's dangerous brand of science.
Michael John Gorman's most recent book, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility, is published by Skira. He is project director of Arkimedia, a project of The Ark to develop connections between art, science and new technology, and research associate at the Department of Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin
The Republican War on Science By Chris Mooney Basic Books, 342pp. $24.95