The US Ambassador to Canada, Kelly Craft, has only this week been appointed, but she’s already made it extremely clear how keen she is to tow the presidential line. Speaking to CBC News, she claimed that when it comes to climate change, she believes in “both sides of the science.”
“I think that both sides have their own results, from their studies, and I appreciate and I respect both sides of the science,” Craft said.
Now, here’s the thing. Science doesn’t have sides. It’s not like American football, where there is only one winner. What science does have is a system of skepticism and evidence-based debate that leads to an emergent truth. That truth is that humans are driving contemporary climate change.
Scientists debate nuances and predictive accuracies; no serious climatologist worth their salt, or any other academic for that matter, denies the underlying science any more than a biologist denies the theory of evolution.
As is often cited, 97 percent of all scientific studies taking a position on climate change acknowledge that humans are behind it. What you may not know is that the 3 percent that don't agree with this standpoint have all been found to have used flawed data, bad reasoning, or questionable methodologies.
Right now, all but two countries are fighting to drawdown their greenhouse gas emissions to fix climate change. It’s one of the most comprehensive and significant political frameworks in human history, and it’s based on an utterly overwhelming consensus on science.
Craft, of course, likely knows that. Much like Pruitt, and the majority of the Trump administration, she is attempting to make a false equivalence. They’re implying that there’s solid scientific data on the climate denial side which is just as good as the data on the consensus side.
There is not. At this stage, it’s like pretending that there are scientists who have data that point towards the Big Bang kickstarting the universe, and an equal number of scientists who claim the cosmos was sneezed out of a giant space deity’s nasal cavities.
Just in case you were wondering: this isn’t the case either.
