If We Don't Have Science, What Do We Have

The Republican representatives up for chairmanship of the energy committee, as far as I know the only large committee dealing directly with environmental protection and climate change on a regular basis, are of course all global warming deniers. That's not a shock when all the new incoming representatives are deniers. These senior representatives, however, are in a place to drastically affect all policy regarding protection of the environment and energy policy and that should be disturbing to most Americans. At least one of them has said that if he gets the chairmanship he is going to have extensive hearings into 'climategate', the fake controversy over some snarky comments made by a climate scientist via emails, a controversy dug up and fabricated by the conservative media universe and especially FOX. They are determined to have hearings exposing, essentially, the fraud of global climate change.

This poses a serious risk to all of us, to our way of life and to the long-term health and national security of this nation. One key area of impact, for example, is the way Congress deals with and supports renewable energy. It will not be long before most developed nations will have cut their use of fossil fuels to where their needs will be satisfied by domestic production because of their development of renewable resources and green technology. In that scenario, we will be in major competition with nations in the processing of developing for those resources and will have become irrelevant in the global debate over the industrial and technological production of green solutions and environmental protection. Moreover it indicates to me a shocking disregard for the future welfare of our children, something that has at least rhetorically been so important to conservatives.

Overall, though, this indicates a disturbing and dangerous disregard and disdain for science and scientific reasoning. This goes along in some ways with my previous post regarding the demonization of education and the educated. It is a major problem for us as a nation if we decide that a major branch of science, one of the central branches in fact, which is Biology and the environmental sciences that arise from it, is irrelevant and inconclusive. There are in fact few credible scientists who disagree with the basic statement that man-made greenhouse gasses are at least partly responsible for the phenomena called climate change as an effect of global warming. The assertion of those on the conservative side of politics and especially the media have made the argument that many credible scientists who would argue with the science of global warming don't do so publicly for political reasons and because of the pressure they're under from the leftist green movement. Really?

Now, it baffles me why science as related to weapons and energy development is trustworthy to politicians yet the similar types of reasoning when applied to global warming is not. If nuclear technology and science is credible and rock solid science, why aren't the principles of thermodynamics as related to geophysics and climatology? In a similar way, why is the field of genetics, especially in relation to the work being done to cure cancer and treat diseases like Alzheimer's, so inarguable yet evolution, the basis and instigator for the study of genetics, is not?

All we have in terms of the ability to observe, measure and interact with the world around us, including the environment, is based on similar principles of scientific reasoning and analysis. They are based on the principles of skepticism and a desire to find empirical data and facts to support hypothesis and theory. If we cannot rely on these principles and the outcomes from them, than we are lost and America will never again be the scientific and technological leader we once were. If we cannot pursue policy that even our most scientifically ignorant president in recent memory, George W Bush, has come to believe is important, policy that is based on scientific knowledge agreed upon by 151 other nations who signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990's, that we are doomed to diminish and eventually become a wasteland of pollution and ignorance.