大象传媒

Years ago, tobacco companies discovered the link between their products and lung cancer. Did they warn their customers? No鈥攖hey denied the link entirely, misleading the public for decades while killing their customers.

Similarly, ExxonMobil scientists made about climate change as early as 1982鈥攁nd then to sow public doubt about climate change.

They didn鈥檛 need to convince the public that the climate crisis wasn鈥檛 happening. They just had to muddy the waters 别苍辞耻驳丑听to prevent us from doing anything.

They provoked uncertainty: Maybe the climate crisis isn鈥檛 happening. And even if it is, maybe it鈥檚 not caused by humans burning fossil fuels. (Of course, it is happening and it is caused by humans.)

The result was inaction.

If we aren鈥檛 even sure that a human-caused climate crisis is afoot, why should we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels? It would be highly inconvenient and very expensive to go to all of that trouble unless we鈥檙e absolutely certain that we need to.

After all, the argument went, 鈥渙nly鈥� 97 percent of scientists .

I鈥檓 a scientist. Let me tell you, when 97 percent of scientists agree on anything, the evidence must be overwhelming.

Scientists are trained to critique and argue with one another. We make our careers by pulling apart other scientists鈥� theories and exposing the flaws in them and then supplanting them with better theories of our own.

You couldn鈥檛 get 97 percent of scientists to agree that puppies are cute or chocolate is delicious.

What about the other 3 percent? You can always find one or two nutty so-called scientists with inaccurate, fringy theories out there. There鈥檚 probably a scientist somewhere attempting to publish a study asserting that Bigfoot exists鈥攐r that climate change isn鈥檛 happening.

Science is a community endeavor in which we try to collectively discover and advance the truth. The goal is that the community as a whole achieves a consensus or near-consensus that is as accurate as possible.

If 97 out of 100 scientists agree that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, that鈥檚 a consensus.

The difference between lying about the deadliness of tobacco and lying about the deadliness of fossil fuels is who gets harmed by those lies.

Tobacco is deadly鈥擨鈥檝e lost two grandparents to its ill effects鈥攂ut tobacco is most harmful to those who use it. The climate crisis is deadly to everyone, whether or not they are responsible for causing it. It will continue to hurt people for generations, even after humans stop polluting at such alarming levels as they do now.

The Exxon Mobil executives who鈥檝e profited from fossil fuels did so while knowing that they were trading a few decades of profits for the entire future of the planet and all of the species on it.

We鈥檙e beyond the point where we tell ourselves that changing our light bulbs can help. The fix for the climate crisis must come from the highest levels. It requires large-scale systemic changes and not a few insufficient individual actions.

And it could start with consequences for the industry that caused the crisis on purpose.

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for 大象传媒 Magazine.

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