Time Essay Warns Antiscience Is an Existential Threat to Climate and Public Health
Authors say coordinated disinformation from funders, media and foreign actors is undermining responses to worsening climate extremes and emerging pandemics
A new essay in Time warns that an organized, ideologically driven assault on science has become an existential threat to humanity by crippling collective responses to climate change and pandemics.
The authors describe a three-headed crisis: a steadily worsening climate emergency, increasingly deadly infectious-disease risks, and the deliberate weaponization of antiscience that erodes public trust in scientific guidance. The essay cites recent extreme-weather episodes — including code orange air-quality alerts in Philadelphia tied to Canadian wildfires and a generation-defining flood in Texas — as examples of events made worse by human-caused warming.
Beyond climate, the Time piece warns of continuing and emergent pandemic threats. It lists avian and other zoonotic influenzas, Nipah and Hendra viruses, and novel coronaviruses emerging in Asia as sources of catastrophic respiratory outbreaks. The essay also highlights a significant expansion in South America of mosquito-borne viruses such as dengue and yellow fever, and says outbreaks there can migrate to U.S. states including Texas and Florida.
The authors contend that these biological and climatic threats are being compounded by an "antiscience ecosystem" that spreads doubt and outright denial. That ecosystem, they write, operates through coordinated funding of think tanks and front groups, amplification on social media by bots and troll armies, and sympathetic coverage on some cable news outlets. The piece recounts that scientists and public-health officials have faced harassment and death threats while trying to communicate risks.
The essay cites reporting and analysis that trace parts of this ecosystem to wealthy funders and media owners. It points to long-standing support from the Koch family for groups that have promoted climate denial, and to the role of NewsCorp properties in amplifying both climate and COVID-19 disinformation. The authors quote Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy describing how some groups "turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own ‘science’ to attack COVID mitigation policies." The Time piece also asserts that after Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to X, the platform has become a more prominent venue for anti-vaccine and climate-denial messaging.
The essay further cites state actors, naming Russia and Saudi Arabia, as having engaged in online campaigns that polarize publics and spread antiscience narratives. It says those campaigns have at times sought to undermine global climate agreements and to amplify anti-vaccine rhetoric in ways that could destabilize democracies.
On the toll of distrust, the Time piece cites estimates that COVID-19 caused about 21 million deaths worldwide and argues that vaccine refusal contributed to many preventable fatalities. It links such outcomes to the broader problem of eroded trust in scientific institutions, and warns that similar dynamics could worsen outcomes from future disease outbreaks and from climate-driven disasters.
Turning to the United States, the essay argues that political decisions and staffing choices have weakened federal capacity to address scientific threats. It contends that actions by recent administrations and congressional majorities have reduced funding for climate and vaccine science and have placed officials who reject prevailing scientific consensus into key positions. The authors single out media figures, private funders and some policymakers as accelerants of the antiscience trend.
The Time piece concludes with a call for an unprecedented, coordinated response: stronger international cooperation among scientific organizations and their governments, renewed investment in public-science infrastructure, and concerted efforts to counter disinformation. The authors portray the task as urgent, saying the stakes include the future stability and health of global civilization.
Time published the essay as part of a wider conversation about how disinformation, political influence and technological amplification interact with tangible environmental and biological risks. The magazine’s authors and cited analysts frame antiscience not as a series of isolated falsehoods but as a strategic, organized challenge to evidence-based policymaking and public-health practice.