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The makers of a compelling new science series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, coming soon to Foxtel, have attacked the Australian and US government for their “woefully dishonest” response to the climate crisis.

Ann Druyan, the science writer and filmmaker wife of renowned global warming scientist, the late Carl Sagan, described Australia’s response to the bushfire crisis and climate change as “a scandal” and accused Prime Minister Scott Morrison and US President Donald Trump of leading the spread of misinformation.

“In the United States and in Australia, our leadership is woefully dishonest,” Druyan told News Corp Australia.

The 70-year-old Druyan was particularly critical of those who blamed arsonists alone for the worst bushfires Australia has suffered.

Druyan’s husband Sagan, who passed away in 1996, was among the respected scientific fraternity who predicted humans would cause global warming.

“You go back to the 1950s and scientists are sounding the alarm about this enormous lofting of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, methane, into the atmosphere and what those consequences should be,” Druyan said.

“Their predictive power is astonishing, and all of them including Carl were bitterly criticised for being so speculative.

“Yet if you were to trace the global mean temperature as predicted by [Syukoru] Manabe and his colleague [Richard] Wetherald (the 1967 Manabe and Wetherald paper is considered to be one of the most influential climate change reports ever written), if you were to trace their prediction of the global mean temperature from 1967 when they were doing this work with computers the size of giant rooms that didn’t have the computing power of [an iPhone] and how the climate has actually unfolded, those two lines are almost identical.

“They saw it coming, the scientists warned us.

“And yet here we are in 2020, when one of the most beautiful countries in the world has undergone a catastrophe that is just mind-reeling, and people are still saying ‘No, no, no, it’s arsonists, it’s not climate change’.

“In fact, the scientists were conservative in their predictions. The rate at which the oceans are heating, the rate at which the winds are speeding up, the rate at which the polar ice caps are melting, far exceed their most radical projections.

“Yet we are sleepwalking and allowing essentially a tiny few, who really benefit from this deception, we’re allowing them to control our means of communication with each other, and the dissemination of information.

“This is a scandal.”

But Druyan, speaking in Sydney to promote the series with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is confident that the world is becoming wise to the tactics of the fossil fuel lobby and the politicians who are funded by them.

“They like to say that this is some sort of global cabal on the part of scientists, but the ancient Roman doctrine of logic – ‘Who benefits?’ – is still true and it is true here,” she said.

“There is a coalescing global community of people who understand what’s up, and who are committed to changing the situation.

“Since the invention of agriculture, there’s been massive disinformation, we’re talking 10,000-12,000 years, there’s never been a time where standards of evidence dominated the public discourse. There has always been a chance for the powerful to speak up to retain their power.

“I know the entire planet is filled with people who love their children and grandchildren and don’t want to see them subjected to a future of hardships that we’ve never encountered.

“So I have a lot of hope.

“In the United States and in Australia, our leadership is woefully dishonest about our circumstances, but we can go over their heads and talk to each other with [TV series] Cosmos and with a lot of great information that is made public.

“We’re lucky because if this had happened at another time before our communications system had matured to the degree that it is, then we would be helpless. We’re not helpless.”

Cosmos: Possible Worlds airs 8.30pm, March 9 on Foxtel’s National Geographic.