KRIS ASHTON

In the early 2000s, I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and came away with more than a few questions. My lifelong interest in science, along with senior high school study of chemistry, physics and biology, left me rather unconvinced about Mr Gore’s ‘truth’. So I began to research global warming and found I was not alone in my scepticism.

 

In the succeeding years, global warming (or climate change) has more or less ceased to be about scientific study and has evolved into a political battleground. Those of us who question it have been labelled “deniers” – holocaust allusions very much intended – and “scientifically illiterate”.  Such appellations irk me for two reasons.

 

First, my objection to the climate change hypothesis is exactly because I’m not scientifically illiterate. Having read widely on the subject, I believe there is enough evidence to question the validity of the hypothesis – so where are the scientists trying to falsify it? Isn’t that how the scientific method works?

 

Perhaps even more infuriating, however, I am an avowed environmentalist in a great many other areas, yet the assumption seems to be that anyone who questions the climate change hypothesis is some sort of earth-raping capitalist ogre. That is a much better indicator of a closed mind, in my opinion, than refusing to blindly accept appeals to authority about the long-debunked “97 per cent of scientists” who believe climate change is a threat to our world.

 

This slavish devotion to The Science™ – which has replaced religion in our increasingly atheistic era – seemed ripe for satire. But I also knew a heretical story that blatantly parodied the climate change orthodoxy would never see print. So, after a very long period of cogitation, I devised an alien world that was ostensibly under threat from a global catastrophe while the real threat was the papal infallibility with which its scientists were regarded.

 

When I write satire, I become James Joyce: every sentence is tedious and painful. Composition is most enjoyable for me when it flows out; satire requires me to stop at the end of every paragraph and ask whether it is serving the overall purpose of the story. At a mere 1360 words, ‘Our Most Esteemed Scientists’ required three sittings across a number of days. But if you’re reading this, I guess it was worth it.

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