THE SCIENCE OF CIVIL PROTEST
World’s scientists rally against political war on fact-based evidence,
WASHINGTON // Thousands of scientists worldwide left their labs yesterday to join students and researchers on the streets in a protest to push back against attacks on science.
The March For Science demonstrations were organised in response to what is seen as mounting political pressure on factsbased inquiry.
The casualties of this assault, said organisers, included efforts to fight climate change, the teaching of evolution and sexual health and budgets for vital research.
Protesters in Sydney in white lab coats and carrying banners reading “without science, it’s just fiction” and “we need thinkers not deniers” called on politicians to support the scientific community.
Demonstrators turned out in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and other cities as well as Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand.
“In this day and age, there’s so much fake news and alternate facts going around that it’s important to remember that science is what has built the socie- ty we know today,” said Parissa Zand, who was at the Sydney march with her mother, a molecular biologist.
High school science teacher Byrne La Ginestra said science had been getting a “bum rap”, adding that “we need to teach people that science isn’t a political agenda, it’s just facts”.
Canberra last year reversed a decision to cut hundreds of jobs from the national science body CSIRO after a public outcry.
Protesters in major university cities in Europe posted pictures on Twitter of marches in Bonn, Helsinki, Munich and Stockholm.
In Paris, a banner in French read: “We are the resistance against the orange menace in Washington. Defend science.”
The London rally was attended by actor Peter Capaldi, who plays TV’s time-travelling hero of science, Doctor Who.
Other rallies were scheduled in Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria and South Korea – part of a campaign that was expected to unfold in more than 600 cities. The biggest turnout was in surdity lies cause for hope,” Paul Hanle, chief executive officer of Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists and journalists, wrote in an oped this week.
“Seeing the assault on factbased thinking, scientists are energised.” At a time when the Earth has marked three consecutive years of record-breaking heat, and ice is melting at an unprecedented rate at the poles, risking sea level rise in the decades ahead, some marchers said it was more important than ever for scientists to communicate and work towards curbing fossil fuel emissions.
Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, said he was marching “not so much to fly the flag for science – although I believe it is something worth celebrating – but because I think that in these fractious political times, when we are facing challenges that are truly global, it has never been more important for scientists to go public”.
Professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, David Reay, said scientists were “not famous for their camaraderie”.
“We are trained to question and, where needed, contest each other’s work,” he said.
“That we are now marching together is testament to just how threatened our disparate community feels.”
Seeing the assault on fact-based thinking, scientists are energised Paul Hanle Chief executive of Climate Central
Washington, where the US organisers said the event was non-partisan but admitted president Donald Trump has “catalysed” the movement. Mr Trump has threatened to cut budgets for research at US agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, Nasa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which could lose one-third of its staff if congress approves the proposal. He also named as head of the EPA Oklahoma lawyer Scott Pruitt, who claimed last month that carbon dioxide is not the main driver of global warming, a position at odds with the global scientific consensus.
“In the response to this ab-