The Triumph Of Ignorance

As our society deteriorates, politics intrudes on all issues. Education declines and knowledge, however well established, is rejected. Wisdom hardly exists. Eventually, after our society goes further and further downhill, the Triumph of Ignorance will be complete. On March 15th, ignorance's inevitable victory was convincingly demonstrated in the House of Representatives. Sean Bean of scienceprogress.org gives us the details—

March 16 — House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee demonstrated their commitment to science denial yesterday by unanimously voting down three separate amendments offered by Democrats to reaffirm basic facts about climate science. They then unanimously voted to pass the Upton-Inhofe bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific endangerment finding on greenhouse pollution.

Let’s be clear. Congress should not attempt to make scientific decisions. The role of Congress is to take the best science and use it to make the best possible policy. The three amendments rejected unanimously by committee Republicans each lays out a fairly basic statement about generally accepted climate science.

• Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado offered an amendment that simply reaffirmed what EPA scientists stated, that “‘the scientific evidence is compelling’ that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions ‘are the root cause of recently observed climate change.’” That amendment was rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no...


• The last amendment, offered by Rep. Henry Waxman of southern California, asserted even more unassailable scientific findings. His amendment stated simply that “Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.” It was also unanimously rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.

This is really getting ridiculous. In countries around the world, political parties on the left and right are debating how to deal with climate change. But by continuing to debate whether the world is even warming—an objective, empirical, verifiable, scientific fact—our great nation is demonstrating to the rest of the world that we are still in the Stone Age on this issue.

Sean says Congress should not attempt to make scientific decisions. That's putting it mildly. I'll be a little more precise. Nobody who is unfamiliar with the science is entitled to an opinion about the matter. This applies equally to Congressmen and the man on the street. Suppose a Congressional committee is presented with a hypothesis H with an associated probability P. After testimony which presents the evidence supporting or disconfirming H, and why P is what it is, a Congressman can either take  H seriously or not as something requiring policy action. But that Congressman has no useful opinion about H.

Note: Cartoon source.

But in the circus-like political atmosphere of our times, everybody is allowed to have an opinion about scientific matters they know absolutely nothing about. It is as if the physics of how greenhouse gases behave in the atmosphere is a partisan issue. Democrats accept the scientific findings. Republicans reject the scientific findings. As Sean said, this is really getting ridiculous. It sure is.

The only reason I have a useful opinion about global warming is that I studied the subject in-depth for about seven years, starting in about 1997. After that, I quit reading the scientific literature (in the journals Science or Nature or whatever I could get my hands on) because as far as I was concerned, the climate issue was settled. No reasonable doubt existed. Results since then have mostly re-confirmed what was known at the time. Some probable outcomes are worse.

If you want to learn the science, read the realclimate.org blog and all the archives there. Gavin Schmidt and some other climate scientists started it in late 2004. Unfortunately, this useful blog didn't exist when I was pouring over journal articles at the library. And you would be amazed how many important scientific papers can be found on the intertubes.

And now let me be blunt. I am talking to all of you who doubt that burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. If we're discussing this "hot" topic, and you don't know the science, it's going to be a very short, one-sided conversation. If you can't tell me, at a minimum, what the difference between a climate forcing and a climate feedback is, then shut the fuck up. If you can't tell me whether higher levels of water vapor in a warming atmosphere—water vapor acts like a greenhouse gas just like carbon dioxide (CO₂) or methane (CH₄)—is a forcing or a feedback, then shut the fuck up. If you can't tell me what the Earth's carbon cycle is, or what a carbon sink is, then shut the fuck up. And so on.

If you choose to not take anthropogenic climate change seriously, that's your business. But don't tell me you don't "believe in it." Don't give me your worthless opinion. And it gets worse. Republicans voted unanimously to reject the well-established fact that the Earth is warming, regardless of whether that warming is caused by humans or not. This is the Triumph of Ignorance, and the death of learning. If you and these Republicans want to return to a pre-scientific world in which the Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it, I suppose there's nothing I can do about that.

But I don't have to accept our return to pre-scientific ignorance just because that's how a very large minority of the people view the situation—they happen to be well-represented in Congress and control the House. Quelle surprise! In fact, I don't give a damn what the Great Unwashed think. Sean Bean writes—

Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll (the scientific kind with random sampling, rather than self-selecting Internet sampling) indicates more than 50 percent of the public believe global warming is happening and is mostly due to human activities. But again, opinions–even scientifically polled public opinions–don’t determine science. Just because 99.99 percent of the world public believed the sun revolved around the earth in the time of Galileo does not mean his theory of heliocentrism was wrong.

Here's Penn State paleoclimatologist Richard Alley and climate researcher Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore explaining to Congress why we know the anthropogenic warming hypothesis has a very high probability of being correct. The good stuff begins at the 2:10 mark. If you have your "doubts" about anthropogenic warming, maybe you'll even learn something.

 

Comments

[Morocco Bama]

The Poseidon Adventure is great metaphor for this debate, except there's NO Way Out. At least in the movie they had a chance of they realized the gravity of the situation and chose the right path. As this video so aptly proves, too many do not have the capacity to grok the concept let alone the magnitude of its implications. As Gail's video yesterday mentioned, people suffer from Normalcy Bias....to such an extent, the part of their brain that would allow them to understand and accept such concepts has atrophied like a compromised thyroid gland.....and there's no medication like Synthroid to mitigate the deficiency.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk839jm_ZTQ&feature=related