The Brief Spring of Global Science: How Climate Science is Affected by Nationalism and Propaganda

The start screen of the "Climadrom" site, kept by Aleksander Zhabskiy. The site is strongly oriented toward rejecting the current scientific interpretation of climate change, labeled as "climate alarmism," "hysteria," and the like. This view seems to be fashionable in Russia in all sectors of society and, nowadays, Russian science seems to have rejected the current understanding of climate change as seen in the West. Yet, we must keep trying to bridge the gap: if people don't speak to each other, the only way they have to communicate is to fight. In this sense, the site by Mr. Zhabskiy has some merit in seeking for a discussion at the international level. I did present my views that he correctly published.

There was a time, during the 19th century, when Darwin's ideas on natural selection were rejected by the whole French science. One reason was the influence of Baron George Cuvier who had interpreted the geological record in terms of mass extinctions periodically caused by planetary catastrophes (see this link to know more about this fascinating story). French scientists saw Cuvier's role in nationalistic terms and thought that it was outrageous that their great master was contradicted by those silly Britons.

The concept of "National Science" was rather common throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Earlier on, scientists were still communicating with each other in Latin, but that was abandoned with the 19th century and that led to science being more and more constrained by national borders and national cultures. There are many examples of how this evolution affected the scientific debate: one is how the work by Alfred Wegener on continental drift was widely rejected in the 1950s in part because of anti-German sentiments in the West (a link). I could cite examples of how the Fascist government in Italy tried to purify Italian Science from foreign influences in the 1930s. Then, of course, there was "Soviet Science," supposedly different from the decadent capitalist science practiced in the plutocracies collectively known as "The West." An example is how the Ukrainian biologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko fought Western Genetics.

But all that seemed to be past and gone with the internationalization of science after that the American legions had imposed English on the rest of the world, just as the Roman legions had imposed Latin long before. As a young researcher, in the 1980s, I perfectly understood that science was international: everyone, anywhere in the world, could be a scientist by accepting two fundamental tenets: publish in English and speak in English. International science was egalitarian, global, and suspicious of national borders. The researchers of my age even tended to mock the older generation of scientists because of their limited command of English. The fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, seemed to give the final push to the full internationalization of science: there would be no more "Soviet Science." Just as the world's economy was being globalized, the same was taking place for science.

That was just a brief spring: today, nationalism is returning everywhere with a vengeance and science is not immune to the trend. I can tell you how the capability of my younger colleagues to speak English seems to be going down every year a little more and one of the shocks of my life was when, a few years ago, one of the students engaged in a laboratory exercise complained to me that the instruction manual of the instrument he was using was in English.

The downfall of English is just a personal impression but it seems clear to me. Some people in Italy seem to find it totally incomprehensible that I keep a blog in English. Actually, I don't know another example of an Italian scientist who keeps a blog in English, except for my coworker Ilaria Perissi. (If you know of other examples, please let me know!)

How about Climate Science? As it is normal, it is an international field that encompasses contributions from all countries with a significant budget in scientific research. But it seems to me that in Italy climate science is especially neglected. Don't get me wrong: there are several excellent climate scientists in Italy, but the average effort in the field is not impressive. Some evidence of the problem is a recent petition denying the anthropogenic origin of global warming, said to have been signed by 90 leading Italian scientists. Actually, the  "leading scientists" are a ragtag band of elderly scientists, scientists with no competence on climate, and people who are not even scientists -- some of them belonging to all three categories at the same time. Nevertheless, that such petition exists is a symptom of deep problems. Much worse was when, in 2015, the president of the Italian Society of Physics (!!) refused to sign a statement on climate science in support of the ongoing Paris negotiations.

So, what's the problem in Italy? Perhaps the same the French had with their Baron Cuvier. In Italy, we have Antonino Zichichi, an elderly particle physicist who has left a strong imprint in Italian physics and who, today well in his 90s, is still active in criticizing climate science in ways that we can define at least questionable. But it is also a question of science being intertwined with politics: the Italian movement called "sovranism" is clearly suspicious of climate science as a foreign scam.

And let's go to Russia. Judging from what can be read in the scientific literature in English, Russia may be in the same conditions as Italy in terms of neglect of climate science, perhaps even worse. With the best of good will, I couldn't locate much in terms of major contributions to climate science by Russian scientists working in Russia, with the work by Gorshkov and Makarieva being the main exception with their concept of the "biotic pump". I asked my colleagues if they could name a serious Russian climate scientist working in Russia and they couldn't. Maybe they are publishing in Russian?

I may be wrong if I say that Russia is neglecting climate science, but there is clearly a problem, there: a much larger one which has to do with politics. I must admit that, If I were a Russian citizen, I would find it hard to dismiss the idea that the whole story of anthropogenic global warming is just one more psyop coming from the West. The Western media are producing so much propaganda and so many lies that the temptation is to disbelieve anything that comes from a Western source. It is the destiny that befell the Moon landings, now widely disbelieved in the very country that was so proud of having sent men to the Moon not long ago. The same destiny may be affecting climate science: despite decades of efforts of thousands of excellent scientists, it tends to fall into the same category of government-sponsored propaganda. All this goes together with the locking up of science and scientists within national boundaries, something that may turn foreign scientists from colleagues into enemy agents and foreign science into political propaganda.

And now? Could we ever recover a unity in science allowing us to act together against climate change? Could we do that before it will be too late? For sure, at present, we are moving in the opposite direction. As usual, when people refuse to talk to each other, the only possible way to communicate is to fight. And, unfortunately, it may be where we are heading to.

I am grateful to Mr. Aleksander Zhabskiy for the useful conversations we had on the matters covered in this post.

Putin eats babies: lies, damned lies, and psyops

Google Ngram's results for "propaganda". The term seems to have been most popular in a period that went from the 1940 to the 1970s, gradually losing interest in the following years. Of course, however, propaganda didn't disappear - it just went undercover.

I distinctly remember one day when I was - maybe - twelve; when my father saw me reading something that was lavishly illustrated with red flags and with hammers and sickles. He looked at that, very worried, then he relaxed. "Oh..., " he said, "that's fine: it is our propaganda." At that time, in the 1960s, my father was active in politics and the house was full of pamphlets of the Christian Democratic party. 

What I was reading was one of those pamphlets, full of vivid images of the deformed faces of Soviet communists crushing women and children under their booted feet. Those papers have disappeared from the house long ago, but examples of that old propaganda are easy to find on the Internet. You can see one on the right; it is an image that goes back to 1944, but the style and the message are the same of the time when the cold war was in full swing. Note how the caption says "Dad, save me!" echoing the well known slogan that "communists eat children".

Of course, also the other side, that of the communists, was using the same kind of naive propaganda methods and neither side seemed to think there was something wrong with that. My father, for instance, found natural and legitimate that his political side would openly engage in propaganda. It was "our" propaganda, fighting for us in the political struggle, just as "our" artillery was fighting for us in war. In a war, nobody would claim that the guns on their side were shooting flowers at the enemy.

It was only in later times that propaganda changed its face. The term never disappeared from usage, but it slowly fell out of fashion, at least in the sense that it became politically incorrect to say that one's faction was using propaganda. It was only something used by "them," not by us. "Our" side would never debase itself by using propaganda.

In part, the term "propaganda" was replaced by more neutral terms, such as "consensus building" and "public relations." In large part, however, in the West, propaganda went undercover; fully exploiting Baudelaire's observation that "the finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." It became refined, unobtrusive, subtle. And it was incredibly successful in convincing Westerners that it didn't exist - maybe for a while it even disappeared for real! Perhaps it wasn't needed any more during the period of Fukuyama's "End of History," when everybody got genuinely convinced that the collapse of the "evil empire", the Soviet Union, had shown the superiority of economic liberism.  At that time, everyone knew that we just needed to sit down and relax to enjoy the goods that free markets would bring to us. There was no need any more to be told over and over that our enemies were dangerous, baby-eating monsters.

But, in recent times, something has changed. Propaganda is back with a vengeance. Here is just an example:

You see? No matter how you see the recent crisis in Ukraine, you have to admit that, in terms of propaganda, we are back to the methods of the 1950s and the 1960s, just a bit more sophisticated in graphical terms, but still based on the same simple theme: our enemies are baby-killing evil monsters. It is an accusation that has been fashionable and effective from the times when the Romans accused their Cartaginese enemies to sacrifice children to their god, Baal. Note how, in the image, they have managed to put the image of a child close to the title, "Putin's killed my son," even though they are completely unrelated stories (that shows, incidentally, the contempt they feel for their readers.)


We are not yet arrived to accusing Vladimir Putin of eating babies, but - as things stand - we may not be far away from that. Look at the image, here, titled "Bloodymir;" where Putin is shown with blood on his mouth, as if he had just finished his breakfast of child meat. And these are just a few examples of the new wave of propaganda that is invading the Western media. It is amazing how these simple tricks worked in the 1950s and 1960s and still seem to work today. And it seems that they are being used to take us straight to a new war. A lot of people, indeed, seem to be reasoning today just in the same way people reasoned in the 1950s: it is "our" propaganda, hence it must be good.

We can see propaganda as one of the several failed technologies of the 20th century, just like nuclear powered cars and weekend trips to the Moon for the whole family. Propaganda never promised to take us to the Moon, but, at the beginning it, was touted as a way to build informed consensus in a democratic society. That was the theme, at least, of Edward Bernays' 1928 book, titled "Propaganda," where he stated that that propaganda is not just good, but essential for democracy: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."

Evidently, something went wrong with these ideas. In its commercial version, propaganda became an instrument to convince us to buy things we don't need, while, as a political tool, it turned itself into the evil form we call today "psyops," the deliberate dissemination of lies to cast an enemy in a bad light. It is a form of black magic; powerful but extremely limited and often backfiring. Psyops can only create enemies, not friends. In the end, the effect is the opposite of what it was supposed to do in Bernay's times: by casting an external or internal opponent as "evil", consensus is destroyed, not created.

Nevertheless, Bernays had a good point: we need consensus. Of course, we don't need the forced uniformity that can be achieved by a dictatorship, but, without consensus on some basic points, it would not be possible to keep a democratic society going. The rule of the law, the need of due process, people's basic rights, are all part of this consensus. And there never was a moment as today in which we are so badly in need of consensus on such vital subjects as climate change and resource depletion which threaten the very existence of human civilization. But we are not achieving a significant consensus on these critical issues; what passes for "debate," today, is a sterile clash of absolutes were psyops have been used with great effect to destroy the credibility of a whole generation of climate scientists.

So, we are stuck: we need to manage a planet, but we don't know how to do it. Will we ever be able to find an agreement on something important that doesn't involve hating or bombing someone? Maybe there are ways, but we haven't found them, yet.




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(*) Maybe you are curious to know what was the effect of a massive exposure to right-wing propaganda on a teenager (me) in the 1960s. Well, it is a long story, but I can tell you that too many and too blatant lies can badly backfire. The story of my very wavering juvenile political positions is not so interesting, but I can say that one of the reasons that led me to become a scientist was to search for an unbiased truth, somewhere, perhaps the result of the overexposure to propaganda I experienced in my youth. Over the years, I found that even science is not without biases, but, at least, in scientific debates we don't accuse our colleagues of eating babies.