WISHFUL THINKING OR IS IT WORSHIPFUL THINKING OR IS IT JUST PLAIN OLD SELF INTEREST THAT GUIDES US?

            I met my alter ego, Foley, while placing a box of oatmeal in my shopping cart.  “Crummy weather,” he noted.  This was our nineteenth day of rain, snow, slush, or grey clouds as the winter was beginning to yield its grip in southern Indiana.  I told him, “It’s likely due to the global warming that is causing more frequent extreme weather than in the past.”  “I don’t think so,” Foley came back, “I heard on Fox News that global warming is a liberal myth.  Weather is constantly changing. There was no Industrial Revolution during the Ice Ages.”  Foley felt he had me there.  I told him that “The Ice Ages were due to the wobble of the earth as it shifted its axis every 24,000 years.  The current climate change is due to green house gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.” 

        Foley was not impressed. He claimed the earth was pretty big. “You could pack all of humanity in a container that is about two miles in height, width, and length.  Whatever humans do, earth will repair itself. That’s what nature or Providence does.”  Foley went on to explain that after the biblical flood that wiped out most of humanity, God promised he wouldn’t do a punishment like that again. “Either way, God or nature, we are protected.”  I was not reassured.

       “Nature showed its stuff in 1815 when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted.  It was a bigger blast than Krakatoa in 1883.  So much volcanic gas and dust was emitted that crops failed in temperate zones because of global cooling. The year 1816 was called the year without a summer.”   Foley scoffed, “How can you have global cooling if you are dumping all that gas into the atmosphere?”  I told him that in those gaseous discharges was millions of tons of vaporized lava that dimmed the sunlight for two years.  “It was great for artists painting spectacular sunsets,” I told Foley, “but it led to a massive immigration of Germans to the United States after their crops failed.”   

Foley scoffed. “Nature can do spectacular things but humans can’t.  It’s arrogance to think we’re that significant in changing the earth.”  I told Foley to look at some satellite photos of earth at night.  “You’ll see the industrialized countries lit up like the US, lower Canada, coastal regions of Australia, Asia, and most of Europe, but dark areas for central Africa, central South America, Greenland, Siberia, or the polar regions.”  

        We made little headway discussing what we should do about climate change and global warming.  “Do nothing,” reassured Foley. “Do you think industries want to go out of business by drowning our coastal cities or turning the southeast into a huge desert?  The invisible hand of capitalism has worked in the past and it will work in the future. Why should they spend sums of money on a problem that doesn’t exist?” 

“What would convince you”, I asked?

“When I hear it on Fox News.” Foley smiled as he rolled his cart to the checkout aisle.

  

Is there a role for the uses of science besides crying wolf or fiddling while Rome burns?

Nedra and I enjoyed the presentation of Naomi Oreske at Indiana University’s Patten lecture.  She discussed why scientists become controversial over certain issues regardless of whether they endorse, reject, or ignore the applications of science to society.  She argued that from 1865 to 1945 science was largely regarded as championing reason, responding to social needs such as public health or helping farmers and manufacturers and promoting the idea of progress and civilization.  She calls his the Aspirational Era. It ended in 1945 because science, for the first time, had developed weapons of mass destruction that entered a worldwide arms race.  She called this the Existential Era of science. It led to efforts by scientists to speak out, Einstein and Nils Bohr were its major advocates.  By 1950 a third effort emerged that she calls the Select Committee Era in which presidential science advisors, and agencies of government were used to advise Congress on legislation.  It was the era that banned DDT, enabled legislation on acid rain, and pitted “truth to power.”  The present era, which began in 1973, she calls the Assessment Era,  It began with President Nixon abolishing the Presidential science advisor position because he resented the scientific criticisms of the use of napalm , carpet bombing, and Agent Orange spraying in the Vietnam War.  It has forced science to criticize government individually or through its own science organizations.

The distancing of government from science advising creates a tension between “crying wolf” and “fiddling while Rome burns” among scientists.  If they fail to advise they are blamed for their cowardice.  If they do advise and their fears do not come to pass, they are accused of being extremists or hysterical.  In her discussion of climate change, she showed why the ban on fluoridated carbon  compounds used as refrigerants and in can sprays worked to lessen the ozone hole at the south pole that was associated with these compounds in the stratosphere.  It was relatively minor in its economic impact to ban these compounds.  The manufacture was almost entirely done by one company (DuPont).  There were alternative chemicals that could be used.  And DuPont made hundreds of other products that were profitable.  But climate change is largely directed at fossil fuels and the companies that extract them only do that and most of the world feels economically tied to fossil fuels for its cars, utilities, airplanes, and a substantial part of the economy.  That is why these companies hire scientists to present their views as legitimate science.  They have the money to hire many scientists to publish papers that are contradictory and they will keep submitting peer review rejected papers until they find a journal that will publish that work. 

Scientists in general try to avoid going public with the implications of their work because they feel they lack expertise in politics, they fear loss of credibility,, and they prefer to be in their laboratories.  Oreske feels scientists need to add a moral dimension to their science. If their work can lead to harm and they see this, they should speak out.  She feels they should enlist the support of moral leaders, like the Pope or the leaders of most of the world’s religious community who favor a stewardship role of mankind for nature.  She argues that a major role of science is to improve out lot and this includes being a whistle blower when bad outcomes are recognized by scientists through their work.