I am more than a little bothered by the current tendency to decry inconvenient science as “unproven theories.”
Whether it’s putting stickers about “evolution” on science textbooks, or disseminating simply false information about contraception, (or even the number of people who still think most overrated dictator of 2003 Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11) there seems to be a more than trivial part of the population that would rather put their heads in the sand than look at reality.
I read recently that the most important scientific breakthroughs often come, not with the words “eureka!” but rather with “that’s funny…” Scientific theories often represent nothing more than our best current understanding of the world. Most of the time, we cannot “prove” these theories, but we can confirm or refute them by obtaining data that is either “consistent” with the theory, or “inconsistent.” The latter tends to indicate a problem with the theory. When a scientist — a real scientist and not just someone who knows a few facts and is willing to parrot the party line — comes across facts that do not fit theory, he looks at those facts and tries to figure out why. Is there a measurement error? Has something gotten into the data that shouldn’t be there? Is this some peculiar exception to the theory? Can the theory be refined to reflect this new data? Or is the theory simply wrong?
At some point, there is enough confirming data that a theory is accepted as more or less right. We don’t need more experiments to tell us that actions have opposite and equal reactions, or that germs cause disease, or that water is made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
Information keeps coming in that suggests that the theory of climate change, or global warming, is coming to pass. The world is definitely getting warmer on the whole, and strange things are happening to our weather as a result. The Pacific Northwest is having an unusually warm, dry winter, so the bulbs are blooming early and summer drought is expected. Las Vegas has had snow two years in a row. Field biologists in Alaska have noticed changes over the course of years. Europe and Japan have had record heat waves. Florida has been pounded with more hurricanes than usual.
How much confirming data do we need?
What is a subject for debate is exactly why the world is getting warmer. Is it the “greenhouse effect” of Carbon Dioxide trapping heat? How does that fit with the fact that the world has been getting less sunlight over the last few decades? Is this just a perfectly normal fluctuation in the temperature that humans are only now able to measure?
It is not possible to run experiments on something as large as the world’s climate, and even if it were possible it would be extremely irresponsible; if something went wrong it could have absolutely devastating consequences, like the death of all life on the planet. However, just because we can’t experiment doesn’t mean we can’t look for things that happened at the same time. We do know that as the world has been getting warmer, humans have been putting out progressively more pollution. Our power plants and car engines put out more carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide our cows fart more methane, and our trees are being cut down more than at any point in the past. We can’t prove that these things cause global warming, but we can’t rule it out either. And in any event, pollution isn’t good for us, either.
That is why people are getting involved. Shareholders are holding corporations responsible for pollution. That is why the Kyoto Agreement went into effect this week, and why some states and municipalities are trying to comply with it even if the United States won’t. Kyoto won’t cure the world on it’s own because too many countries are exempt. This is a real shame, because the underdeveloped nations that are exempt had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the developed world. If they seized the chance to install clean technology the first time, they could skip the environmental and health consequences that we face here.
Kyoto is not perfect, but it’s better than anything else on the table. Unless of course you are one of the huge polluters.
In closing, I don’t like Hillary Clinton, but I do like this idea: make Election Day a national holiday, mandate receipts for voting, and require all the new rules to be in place by the 2006 elections. Remember, this isn’t about partisanship, it is about making sure your vote counts. As many really close elections as they have been in the last five years, that’s really important. Thanks to Pandagon for pointing out this item.