Science Under Siege

You may already know how much i like ABC's Catalyst program. Tonight Mark Horstman did a piece titled Science under Siege - a story about how science is ignored, the public is misinformed, and scientists receive death threats.


Climate science is not the only field in which this occurs, but it's probably the biggest at the moment. Mark Horstman looked at the anti-climate action protests - a campaign based on "a lack of understanding about how carbon emissions warm the atmosphere".

At the heart of this protest is the notion that the people here ... know better than most of the world's climate scientists.

But scarier than the dismissal of science was the hostility towards the scientists themselves. Individual death threats, and rally calls like this one from a leading protester, aimed at the scientists:

We are coming after you, we are going to prosecute you, and we are going to lock you up.

Is this the kind of society we want? As Professor Ian Chubb, Chief Scientist of Australia, asks "We're back to the Middle Ages aren't we? I mean, that's what they tried to do to Galileo."