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Here’s an article out today about a new climate change study conducted to prove that global warming exists and that scientists are right, have been right, and continue to be right.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawn-...b_1021171.html

To me the real news here is not in the actual story content, but in the fact that it is a news story at all. The real news is that we are still in a place where we have to deal with global climate warming denial. It’s like refusing to accept evolution or insisting the earth revolves around the sun. But it has much more dire consequence. If you insist the earth is 6000 years old and a white haired dude in the sky created it in 6 days and made woman from man’s rib well it’s just weird and mildly offensive in a misogynistic sort of way, but has no real impact on the rest of us unless you try to get it taught in schools not as bible study but as literal and scientific fact.

Keeping everyone stuck in a place of consistently trying to prove that the earth is one hurting planet as a direct result of our actions instead of putting all of our collective effort into coming up with ways to alleviate some of the pressure on the environment may ultimately lead to the demise of the human race as we know it. That seems serious to me, but it doesn’t get the kind of attention that one would assume impending doom would.

I know I said that believing in literal interpretations of the bible and in a 6000 year old earth and the refusal to accept evolution doesn’t impact the rest of us the way consistent denial of environmental issues does but it is subtly dangerous in that it is part of the mindset that allows relatively intelligent people to sit on the fence about serious issues that have real concrete scientific proof.

It is the reason why I am so upset when I see people rejecting science in favor of spirituality as though they were mutually exclusive.

Anyway reading about this study this morning prompted me to find an old article I had read about why anti-science ideology is bad for America and I thought I would post it here.


Why Anti-Science Ideology is Bad for America

Anti-science ideology isn’t completely new in the U.S. — there is a dismaying history of irrational, pseudoscientific, or downright anti-scientific thinking and political culture here. But it seems to be gaining momentum — even as it runs counter to America’s scientific and technological strengths. Such strengths, in fact, underpin our economic and political strengths.

I’m not talking about honest scientific skepticism and questioning – indeed, that is the very basis of good science. I’m talking about a disturbing combination of two factors: political cowardice hiding behind scientific skepticism; and political pandering to special interests by rejecting science, knowledge, and reason in favor of ideology, religion, or narrow economic self-interest.

Sadly and with few brave exceptions, some politicians are active and aggressive at using false, misleading, or discredited science, or explicitly ignoring good science, in setting public policy to support ideology. History tells us this never leads to a good outcome. The Soviets let Lysenkoist ideology pollute their biological and genetic sciences in the 1930s, and they’ve never recovered. We saw it with the long, successful effort of the tobacco industry and their allies to confuse the public and delay regulations to protect public health, leading to millions of unnecessary cancer deaths. We saw it with the veto by Richard Nixon of the Clean Water Act (overridden with the help of some brave and influential Republican senators). And we see it now, in full flower, on the issue of climate change.

Here is what the science conclusively tells us: climate change is real, it is already underway, and it is largely due to human activities. These findings are acknowledged by every single major scientific organization in the areas of climate, meteorology, geology, physics, chemistry, atmospheric science, and hydrology, as well as every single National Academy of Sciences, including our own, created by Abraham Lincoln as an independent non-governmental organization to provide the best scientific advice to the government.

To quote from an open letter from 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences published in the leading journal Science:

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial — scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of “well-established theories” and are often spoken of as “facts.”

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

By pretending that the science is bad, some politicians are trying to avoid the truly difficult policy debates that are their responsibility. And they are simultaneously using claims of budget problems to destroy the nation’s climate research capabilities and stop efforts to improve the science. For example, cuts in NOAA’s budget aimed at eliminating anything “climate” related are likely to lead to a gap in satellite coverage of extreme weather events — precisely the satellites that provided the data our meteorologists used to generate advances warnings for the extreme tornadoes and recent Hurricane Irene. For every $1 saved by delaying replacement satellites, society will face an estimated $3 to $5 in higher costs in the form of damages, injuries, deaths, and efforts to obtain data using other approaches — this is a false savings solely due to anti-climate ideology. And because of inaction on climate policy, uncontrolled climate changes are already beginning to impose serious costs on our economies: reductions in crop yields, extra impacts from extreme storm events, drought costs, and more.

Things have gotten so bad that the highly respected scientific journal Nature called these actions “fundamentally anti-science” and an example of “willful ignorance,” and said:

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness, a sad state of affairs in a country that has led the world in many scientific arenas for so long.”

The problem is, in part, that acting to reduce the risks of human-caused climate change could lead to policies that are inconvenient for powerful vested economic interests. We thus see a very well-endowed carbon-fuel industry willing to spend vast sums of money to confuse the public, support politicians and organizations whose influence they can buy, malign scientists who speak out, and create alternative “science” that is rejected over and over by independent review and analysis. Rather than have an honest, albeit difficult policy debate about what should be done about climate change, they postpone that debate by trying to discredit the science.

There are some modest signs of a return to rationality and scientific integrity. In recent days, one candidate for President, John Huntsman of Utah, has spoken out on the need for integrity of science. He told ABC’s “This Week”:

“When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”

He went on to call on the Republican Party to stop being antithetical to science: “I’m not sure that’s good for our future and it’s not a winning formula.” Ironically, this shouldn’t be news: Huntsman’s comments are only newsworthy in the context of the extreme anti-science positions taken by his colleagues.

It is time to reassert scientific integrity, logic, reason, and the scientific method in public policy. The public may have disagreements about matters of policy, but our elected representatives must not misuse, hide, or misrepresent science in service of political wars and ideological positions.
Dr. Peter Gleick



Climate Study Does Not Placate Skeptics
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

As we noted on the blog on Thursday, a new study designed to address critiques of climate science by skeptics has confirmed that “global warming is real” and the world’s average land temperature has risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-1950s.
The findings, released by a group of scientists and statisticians at the University of California known as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, were welcomed by climate scientists and advocates of climate policy action, who had been hoping that skeptics would finally have to cry uncle.
Not so fast.
At least one of those skeptics, Anthony Watts, had written in March on his climate-themed blog, Watts Up With That, “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But neither Mr. Watts nor other longtime critics of climate science reached by The Times seemed satisfied with the report.