It is often said that those who question the imperative for hurriedly attaining Net Zero do so because they are anti-science. The logic offered is very simple: scientists claim it is essential, and nothing says anti-science quite like disagreeing with a scientist. A number of explanations are offered for such disagreement, ranging from a supposed failure to understand the scientific method through to a refusal to accept any facts that threaten a treasured way of life. Such claims may actually be valid for certain individuals but there is an important fact being overlooked here. Whilst it is true to say that science is what scientists do, it is equally true to say that what scientists do is not always science. The problem is one of ideology and how it can subvert. For example, it can suppress mention of previously established facts, dictate what can and cannot be researched, call into question the primacy of the scientific method and even transform academic recruitment into an exercise in blatant discrimination. Indeed, ideology, particularly in the form of critical social justice (CSJ), can result in scientists doing more harm to science than any sceptic possibly could.

Take, for example, the harm currently being meted out to biology. First and foremost, we have the well-known attack on the idea that there are only two sexes: the female producing the larger, immobile, single gamete (the egg) and the male producing numerous smaller, mobile gametes (sperm). Since this is such a well-established scientific fact, one would expect scientists in academia to be the first to defend it against counter-claims that the sexes are mutable through gender reassignment. But alas no. The idea of immutability is seen as psychologically harmful to minorities who wish to self-identify. And, because academia now casts itself as the defender of human dignity ahead of being the protector of scientific facts, we find that the scientific organisations themselves are at the forefront for pushing the anti-science of non-binary sexing.

Specifically, in October 2018, the leaders of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), alongside the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), co-signed a formal joint letter opposing efforts to define sex as a strict biological binary. Their argument that there is no scientific support for the dichotomy of the sexes was based upon the existence of the continuum of sexual expression. Not only was this argument scientifically specious, it was entirely politically motivated since the statement was overtly aimed at protecting transgender and intersex individuals from restrictive legal policies. Such was the desire for promoting CSJ, that the basic facts of biology were not only overturned, they were declared null and void in the name of science. Worse still, the new ‘reality’ was quickly assimilated within the education system as teachers who attempted to stick with the biological facts were hounded out of their jobs.

This denial of the reality of a binary sex has serious scientific implications that go well beyond the management of transgenderism. Just about every biological statistic that appertains to traits and behaviours depends upon sexual classification. To deny that such a classification even exists, replacing it with the social constructs of gender identification, transforms biology from an evidence-based science into a confused and chaotic pseudoscience. And it doesn’t end there, because medicine, in which much of diagnostic and prognostic understanding is founded on the fundamental truth of sex-based morphological differences, finds itself mired in controversy as practitioners run scared of CSJ diktats. Once again, it is the medical professionals themselves who are pressing the onslaught on the science. In the UK the BMA criticized legal frameworks that enforce a strict biological binary. In April 2025, after a UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of ‘sex’ should be based strictly upon a person’s gametes, a branch of the BMA passed a formal motion condemning the ruling as “reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical“. Here an ostensibly scientific organisation, albeit with political and ideological motives, was choosing to brand as “scientifically illiterate” those who were attempting to re-introduce a scientific clarity. Not for the first time a narrative of science under attack from external forces was being concocted by scientists who were actually the ones subverting the science for their own ideological purposes.

Of course, it isn’t only the vexed question of sex classification that has succumbed to the CSJ proclivities of the scientific establishment. Nor is the problem restricted to the biological sciences. It is now not only commonplace but indeed universally mandated that all departments engaged in STEM subjects declare their full allegiance to the cause of CSJ. A department that fails to sign up to the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) project, explaining how CSJ lies at the heart of everything it does, will not receive its necessary funding. In some countries, an individual who does not include an acceptable EDI-style statement in a research proposal, clarifying how the research will further the CSJ cause, will not succeed in his or her request (in the UK such material is expected to be embedded in the proposal rather than offered as a separate statement). And this goes for all requests no matter how little the research has to do with societal issues. Physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science: it doesn’t matter what the subject is, your chances are vastly improved if there is a CSJ dimension. Hence one sees courses such as ‘Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos’ being taught in Cornell University. Then there is the paper by theoretical cosmologist and physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, titled ‘Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics’, in which Albert Einstein’s principle of general covariance from General Relativity is co-opted to explain the evils of ‘white empiricism’ within the physical sciences.

In fact, far from being exempt from the CSJ gaze, the STEM departments are very much under its scrutiny since the physical sciences are deemed to be a hotbed of racism and misogyny — not to mention the last bastion of colonialism. Apparently, all of this can be discerned simply by looking at the demographics of your typical physics department. Not that long ago the CERN physicist, Alessandro Strumia, was driven out under a hail of invective for daring to suggest that such demographics have more to do with innate differences between the sexes rather than institutionalised prejudice. Worse still, he dared to use bibliometrics to support his case, which is never a good move when the very idea of using numbers to argue a case is deemed to be the hallmark of the colonialist and ‘white empiricist’. This is where recent efforts to ‘decolonialise’ science and mathematics are coming from.

The idea that science and mathematics needs to be decolonised goes hand in hand with the notion that there are ‘other ways of knowing’ that are equally valid to the western scientific method. One might think that the proposal that indigenous peoples have ancient wisdom that has been lost on the colonial’s scientific brain is a hippy-trippy nonsense that scientists would be only too keen to challenge. However, you’d be wrong. In fact, there are a number of major scientific establishments that advocate for treating alternative frameworks — specifically Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) — as legitimate, complementary ways of knowing alongside western science. These establishments include: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); The UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); The Australian National Science Agency (CSIRO); The International Science Council (ISC); Royal Society Te Apārangi (New Zealand); Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC); The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM – US); and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And let us not let the World Health Organisation (WHO) off the hook here, as there is a highly significant, well-documented push by the Chinese government to embed Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) into the World Health Organization’s global framework.

But what exactly is involved in decolonising something as objectively verifiable as physics? Well, perhaps the good folk of Concordia University can help me explain. In their project ‘Decolonizing Light — Tracing and Countering Colonialism in Contemporary Physics’, they say:

For our purpose, it is important to understand physics as a social field rather than as “pure knowledge” independent from social values and decisions. Physics is more than the laws that describe and predict natural phenomena: it is the overarching field of work with its societal dimension, its history, and the circumstances and purposes of physical knowledge production.

Yes, just put your postmodernist hat on and all will become clear: lenses only work in telescopes because a dominant western culture is obsessed with a colonial concept called optics. But none of this is necessary when you have other ways of knowing and other ways of seeing.

And what of mathematics? Did I not say that it also was in dire need of decolonizing?

Well, I’m not going to dispute that the Inca Empire used complex systems of knotted strings called khipus for bookkeeping, or that African villages are sometimes set out in fractal patterns, or that the Polynesian Pacific Islanders used sophisticated geometric and wave-pattern calculations to navigate. But what I will point out is that, had it been left to the Incas, African villagers and Pacific Islanders, there wouldn’t be the modern canon of mathematical theorems and results that underpin the vast majority of modern science and technology. So, if you want to teach mathematics and illustrate with examples, maybe it would be wasting everyone’s time to treat African village planning on a par with the stuff that put Man on the moon (not forgetting the women with a penis). Yes, there may be other ways of knowing, but none as far as I can see that could solve the Jacobian Conjecture, or would even want to.

Note once more that it isn’t anti-science outsiders who are pushing this nonsense, it is the scientific establishments themselves; establishments that seem inordinately keen to divest themselves of their ‘physical knowledge production’. And this disturbing ambition is made all the more worrying when one begins to appreciate how the priorities of CSJ can manifest themselves in recruitment policies. Focusing upon the enrolment of the best science candidate, irrespective of their social group, would seem a good way of protecting the traditions of scientific excellence; but, of course, judgmental meritocracy is another of those colonial ideas that everyone seems keen to shed. So instead, one finds concerted efforts to exclude anyone from applying who carries colonial baggage (i.e. heterosexual white males), no matter how good they might be at what they do. This is a particular problem in Canada, where the federal Canada Research Chairs (CRC) programme relies on Section 15(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to allow ‘special programs’ aimed at improving the conditions of historically disadvantaged groups. As a result, the University of Toronto recently published a job posting for an Assistant Professor in Data Science that explicitly stated that it would only accept applications from individuals who identify as “women, gender minorities, indigenous peoples or persons with disabilities”. In so doing it cited the university’s obligations under its CRC Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Action Plan. Similar ‘affirmative action’ can be found in the hiring practices of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, the computer sciences department of the University of Waterloo, and the biology department of Université Laval. Quite apart from the highly questionable ethics involved here, one has to consider the damage caused to the quality of the scientific community. It is a sobering thought that Albert Einstein would be excluded from applying for tenure under such strictures – unless, of course, he self-identified as a female Inuit and pledged to devote his ideas on general covariance towards improving the lot of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.

Taken as a whole, there is nothing in the above that gives cause for optimism. The rot seems well and truly set-in within academia, and all of the current selection pressures are working towards worsening the problem — a problem that routinely sees the refusal to publish research that may offend, or to allow guest speakers who are deemed by students or faculty to hold unacceptable views. That said, many academics will not recognise there is a problem, since they are statistically much more likely to share the ideologies that lie behind this attack on science than be opposed to them. This is nearly as true within STEM subjects as it is within the humanities. There was once a time when the hard sciences were ruled over by professors that were every bit as disinterested in ideology and politics as were their Tolkien-obsessed, nerdy students. Times have certainly changed, and nowadays even the STEM departments seem to be run by either those who are fully bought in to the leftwing liberal woke agenda or are too afraid to admit they are not. It is going to take a great deal of personal courage to swim against this tide.

In the meantime, it might help if those of us that are critical of this situation were not to be labelled as anti-science when, in fact, we are simply pointing out how anti-science academia has itself become. In particular, the climate sceptic who points towards the ideological underpinnings that seem to motivate much of what climate scientists get up to should not be readily dismissed as anti-science. Climate science, after all, is not immune from the current malaise that has academia in its vice-like grip. In her recent book, Friederike Otto (the public face of extreme weather event attribution) readily admits her ideological motivation to be one of climate justice, intersectional feminism, and scientific activism. In his most recent book, Mike Hulme openly talks of what he calls ‘climatism’, in which everything is viewed through a reductionist climate science lens in the furtherance of ideological goals. COP proceedings are dominated by negotiations aimed at reparations designed to address perceived historical social injustices. We are constantly told that ‘women, gender minorities, indigenous peoples or persons with disabilities’ are disproportionately affected by climate change. And, as I have already mentioned, the IPCC is actively looking at ‘other ways of knowing’ to augment the western scientific approach. So, I would have to say that all of the evidence points towards climate science being no stranger to ideologically-driven anti-scientific leanings. Indeed, from my climate sceptical position it would appear to be very much at the forefront.