It seems to us that the more a person, organization or publication embraces global warming alarmism, the more reliably they also embrace a range of other left-wing causes and vice versa. Including, as we observed last week, the weird and grotesque tendency of climate activists to support Hamas. The “mainstream” media are certainly in that category and it has not helped them in their growing struggles to retain an audience and avoid bankruptcy. But for a while the more notable organs of scientific journalism, like Scientific American or National Geographic, managed to produce generally apolitical journalism about scientific topics. It ceased to be true about climate-related issues quite some time ago. But now it is an inescapable pattern on a much broader scale, and they too are deteriorating fast in consequence. As James Meigs recently wrote in City Journal: “over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism – even at the top publications – has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.” It’s no longer possible to pretend otherwise: science journalism has become leftwing commentary in disguise regardless of the topic.

The supposition that climate alarmism shares deep ideological structural features with left-wing radicalism is nowadays a mere commonplace. Especially when, as the Manhattan Contrarian recently observed, in the face of a growing political backlash against the cost and futility of the supposed energy transition:

“So far, the official talking point seems to be to belittle the resistance to fossil fuel restrictions as some kind of scheme of the ‘far right.’”

Nothing reveals one’s membership on the far left as much as perceiving every criticism, including from the centre, as a scheme of the ‘far right’.

COVID lockdowns are another obvious example, in which appropriate skepticism both about the origins of the pathogen and the appropriateness of drastic governmental responses was shelved for the parroting of often-changing official positions. And now we also get items like, for instance, “Abortion restrictions are spreading, even though science shows they’re harmful” from, yes, Scientific American.

Invoking a talismanic phrase like “science shows” on behalf of a polarizing opinion makes politicians and journalists alike sound like bullying leftist liars. This notion of “following the science” has gone from being an appeal for open, rational and civil debate to a tool for scorning and silencing those who will not take orders from their betters.

Meigs’ article laid out the situation under the pointed but appropriate heading “Unscientific American”:

“American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism – even at the top publications – has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview. It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to ‘problematize’ notions of objective truth.”

Though if it’s hard to think of a single name that applies, it is not hard to think of the one everyone agrees does not: right-wing. Show us an article in any legacy science-related news publication that comes from a right-wing perspective and we might re-think this (though our first response will be to predict the author will soon be unemployed). Until then the principle seems undeniable that what was formerly called science journalism has become thoroughly political and should be judged accordingly.

At the risk of sowing calm, there just might be some grounds for hope here. In the Wall Street Journal on May 13 of this year, James Freeman notes that Nature, which has been far from innocent here, just published a powerful contrarian commentary from “Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge” called “The importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism“ that cautioned that:

“While I have no problem with scholars taking public positions on climate issues, I see potential conflicts when scholars use information selectively or over-attribute problems to anthropogenic warming, and thus politicise climate and environmental change. Without self-critique and a diversity of viewpoints, scientists will ultimately harm the credibility of their research and possibly cause a wider public, political and economic backlash. Likewise, I am worried about activists who pretend to be scientists, as this can be a misleading form of instrumentalization.”

So far so good. And it gets better:

“I find it misleading when prominent organisations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest summary for policymakers, tend to overstate scientific understanding of the rate of recent anthropogenic warming relative to the range of past natural temperature variability over 2000 and even 125,000 years. The quality and quantity of available climate proxy records are merely too low to allow for a robust comparison of the observed annual temperature extremes in the 21st century against reconstructed long-term climate means of the Holocene and before. Like all science, climate science is tentative and fallible.”

Yeah yeah, some may say, the usual suspects with the usual rationalizations. But nay. What’s noteworthy here is that this same Ulf Büntgen, a “Professor of Environmental Systems Analysis” (another in modern academia’s strange proliferation of microdisciplines) in the Department of Geography at Cambridge, is no “denier”. Indeed, a piece in YaleEnvironment360 published on May 14 of this year contained this passage:

“The summer of 2023 was the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere since the height of the Roman Empire, a new study finds…. ‘When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,’ said study coauthor Ulf Büntgen, of the University of Cambridge. ‘2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.’”

Freeman’s piece is tentative, as the headline suggests: “A More Honest Climate Science?” And the subhed says “Maybe scientific journals are ready to move past the era of politicized pronouncements.” Which again prompts our sardonic “unless they’re not”. But they certainly should be, and we hope they are.