Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have penned a rather strange article in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2073); the dilemma being addressed is how we–the children of the Enlightenment–failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind–even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074).
The sci-fi bit is just millenarian mumbo jumbo of course, but I was amused by some of the more historically oriented stuff.
The year 2009 is viewed as the “last best chance” the Western world had to save itself, as leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try, for the fifteenth time since the UNFCCC was written, to agree on a binding, international law to prevent disruptive climate change. Two years before, scientists involved in the IPCC had declared anthropogenic warming to be “unequivocal,” and public opinion polls showed that a majority of people–even in the recalcitrant United States–believed that action was warranted. But shortly before the meeting, a massive campaign (funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations, whose annual profits at that time exceeded the GDPs of most countries6), was launched to discredit the scientists whose research underpinned the IPCC’s conclusion.7 Public support for action evaporated; even the president of the United States felt unable to move his nation forward.
The references given are:
6 At the time, most countries still used the archaic concept of a gross domestic product, a measure of consumption, rather than the Bhutanian concept of gross domestic happiness to evaluate well-being in a state.
7 http://unfccc.int/meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/meeting/6295.php [This is just the COP15 home page].
It's extraordinary how this "massive campaign" by fossil fuel interests has gone almost entirely undocumented. There is, to the best of my knowledge, virtually no evidence to support the claim at all. It is something of an indictment of the standards in academia that this kind of conspiracy theorising goes unremarked and entirely unchallenged.