06/07/2008 (The Post Chronicle) - Just what is it that makes erstwhile respectable scientists sacrifice the ideals of science and the commitment to truth and objective analysis to the god of political expediency? Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pronouncements of environmental scientists on the issue of global warming and climate change. Environmental scientists are becoming so obsessed with the righteousness of their cause that they are damning those who wish to use science as an objective tool in public policy decisions.

Few arguments in favour of action to mitigate the effects of climate change begin without claiming that 'the science is in'. For instance, James Garvey's The Ethics of Climate Change is no exception. There begins an account of the 'science' which forms the basis of an unassailable consensus that the world faces a terrifying future. The account is a breathless list of tragedies that await us: sea-level rises, species-extinctions, glacial retreat, resource wars, and climate refugees, all of which will be worse for the poor, and most of which have been caused by the industrialised world. We face 'planetary upheaval, the deaths of countless living things, human suffering on an enormous scale and all sorts of other horrors', Garvey tells us. Be afraid.... be very afraid.

Needless to say, "environmental organizations have been quick to jump in, all for their own personal reasons and agendas. Nothing it seems should and have been spared and so the "scientific accounts" generate the imperatives that we, in this perilous world, are supposed to respond to - if we want to be 'ethical', that is.

Palm oil, of course has not been spared. Dredging up every imaginable environmental transgressions that they could think up, "environmental organizations" such as Greenpeace, the Friends of the Earth (FOE), Wetlands, Treehugger and Mongabay.com have thrown wild accusations palm oil's way, ranging from deforestation to destruction of orangutan habitat to extinction of the great apes, right up to global warming and climate change. Despite the "environmental pretensions", it is still unprincipled nonsense - unprincipled because, nothing could be further from the truth, at least where Malaysian palm oil is concerned! Consider the following:

Palm oil has been planted in Malaysia for more than a hundred years. Despite its wide footprint, a large part of Malaysia (more than 65%) remains under green cover - read that as two thirds forest cover. That's far far greater than the forest cover prevailing in the developed west from where these moral guardians of environmental utopia hails! And that's because palm oil in Malaysia has traditionally been planted on legitimate agricultural land or logged over areas.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, the argument of Greenpeace, FOE et al is unprincipled because it violates the very foundation of science as well as the basic idea that there are certain things that we do not do in public discourse. The public does not take kindly to being misled, even with the best of intentions!

So the argument is even more offensive to science than it is to democratic principle. For science is founded on an objective search for truth. As Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has said: "Science is a tool of some value. It provides our only way of separating what is true from what is asserted. If we abuse that tool, it will not be available when it is needed." The tale about the boy who cried wolf is of particular relevance to environmental organizations and scientists. Without objective truth, science and environmental organizations like Greenpeace, FOE and Mongabay et al, have little value to society.

Why, then, is the scientific and environmental community so intent on going down this self-destructive path? We should remember Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, and his characterisation of the ruling paradigm, which scientists are almost required to subscribe to and defend. Sadly, environmental alarmism has become such a paradigm, with consequences similar to those described by the great thinker C.S. Lewis in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength. A good young scientist goes to work for a research institute that requires him to lie to gain more powers for the institute. He ends up seduced by "that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men."

Scientists and environmental proponents who argue for alarmism, on the whole, are not very bad men but the course of action they propose is very bad indeed - for science, for scientists and for society as a whole.

Fortunately, honest and objective scientists still exist. In a shocking expose, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, told Discover magazine in 1989 that "to capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, we should not hesitate to interrogate the claim that palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation and climate change, nor explore the idea that it is not as bad as many bogus statistics trundled out by environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, FOE and Mongabay et a l, suggest it is. As with any challenge to climate change alarmism, the answer is 'but the science says...' In this sense, science is environmentalism's fig leaf.