When my childhood friends came to learn that I’d become an author of materials of environmental sustainability, they sometimes asked for my opinions on climate change. I explain that because climate change is a science, it’s inappropriate to apply the term “opinion” or “belief” to the subject. We have opinions on things like politics, art, sports figures, justice, literature, and philosophy–but not chemistry, physics, or math.
When someone says that he doesn’t believe in AGW (anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change), all he’s really saying is that he doesn’t understand the science. And that’s fine; there are huge swaths of science that lie far outside my knowledge base. But we need to keep in mind that one of the good things about science, as Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, is that “it’s true whether you believe in it or not.”
At left we have John Fetterman talking to people so stupid they’ll believe that it would have been wrong for the British colonists to oppose King George III in the late 18th Century, or for the people of Germany and Italy in the 1930s to stand up against Hitler and Mussolini. What about the people in today’s dictatorships, i.e., the people in Russia, China, North Korea, or any of the other 50+ authoritarian regimes around the world?
Morons tend to agree with the loudest, most aggressive voice of nationalism, regardless of how little sense it makes.
It’s a great moment of opportunity for Fetterman.
Seminal astrophysicist Carl Sagan explains why uncomfortable ideas may be banned in religion, they must not be shunned in science.
This is an important concept in American life today, as conspiracy theorists are convinced that climate change denial cannot be considered in scientific circles.
I happened to bring this up in my interview with Dr. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution, who has been amassing data on global warming since the 1970s. He laughed, and explained, “If I could prove that human activity was not causing temperatures to rise, I’d be be one of the wealthiest and most famous scientists in world history.”
As suggested at left, a great deal of the hardship that has befallen the U.S. was simply bad luck. Al Gore came within a whisker of victory in 2000, a win that would have forever changed the course of our nation in terms of energy policy, education, healthcare, and international affairs.
If Bernie had become the 2016 nominee, we wouldn’t have had Hillary Clinton telling our country’s most mean-spirited and least-educated people that they were “deplorables,” ushering a criminal sociopath into the White House.
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