Science Denyers?

Sometimes people with certain beliefs simply ignore facts they don't like.

Take climate change.  We have plenty of evidence to support it.  Sometimes you hear people argue that it is part of  natural cycle ignoring the science that shows we are reaching unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The glaciers are melting, the sea levels are rising and storms are getting more intense.

Lets even accept the possibility that it is also related to a natural cycle although that hypothesis is iffy.

Why would we continue to pump additional greenhouse gases into the air?

The question is that even if there are other factors involved, why would we want to make it worse?

Unless you simply deny scientific evidence you don't like.  We don't really get to pick and choose.

Unexplained Items

Sometimes I do think that people are simply clueless.

I don't mean this in a bad way, just that we live in a Universe that hasn't revealed all of its secrets to us.

Now, watching shows about the origin of the Universe will generally start with the Big Bang, an event so mysterious but so accepted.

It pretty much seems like the same sort of certainty religions have when they explain God.

Math supports the Big Bang Theory, although of course it is possible there are other explanations for the behaviors we measure.

You can pretty much explain everything if you accept the idea that at the beginning of the universe there was this event that started an expansion of everything into what we observe today.

The theory may be correct.  It is supported by the math.  Still, where did the first singularity come from?

Intelligent Design?

An old saying goes that the thing you lost is always in the last place you look for it.

It might take a second but of course you stopped looking after you found it.

Similarly there is an argument is support of the existence of God called intelligent design, simply that the world and its creatures are too complex to be random.

If evolution and nature were random it might have some validity, but nature is the one searching for the lost item, except it never gives up.

The planet is loaded with evidence of creatures that thrived for long periods only to go extinct and be replace by more successful ones.

The mutations are random but only the successful ones survive, driving out the ones that don't work as well.

In fact the evidence of features that we lost over time, like vestigial tails, shows the fallacy o intelligent design.  Why add a feature never used or even needed?

Of course evolution is the most intelligent and the most cruel designer.

The only way to survive is to outcompete other organisms.

We have done that.  Now we need to figure out how to survive ourselves.

Science Works, the Government?

We know that we live in a world that has been shaped by scientific discoveries.  Some of these were disputed in the beginning but interesting that the only reason we have so many science skeptics out there is because of science advances in internet technology and communications.

There are some famous instances in history of egotistical politicians disputing science only to be proven ridiculous over time.

So in todays world we have a scientific consensus concerning climate change that is irrefutable by any scientific standard we see another egotistical politician trying to change science with I guess a magic wand.

Climate change is real.  Vaccines work.  We landed on the Moon.  The world is round.

Science isn't going to change because of foolish people who think they can legislate natural laws.

Nature and Science don't care.

Science and Religion

It seems to be a fundamental aspect of human societies to have religion.

The earliest religions and those of aborigine cultures seem to treat nature as god.  Clearly the need for the sun to rise and the prey to come, food to ripen, would have been fundamental things they needed and they would have prayed for them to be provided.

It was likely that one of the members of the tribe was believed to have special abilities to influence these events and was also someone who could help the sick.

It was rudimentary, but the basic elements of most religions came into being.  One or more people with special knowledge of the gods who interceded on behalf of the tribe to feed them, protect them and heal them.  When they couldn't heal them they interceded for them in the afterlife.

In order to provide these services as society grew they needed to be provided for so they could do the rituals, study the traditions and perform other functions.

It was these people who generally made the first strides in things like astronomy, medicine and natural history as they explored the mysteries to better understand the wishes of the god or gods.

There was no conflict between science and religion, they were one and the same.

It was later after the religious rituals and tenets were set in stone, so to speak, that conflicts arose.

When a truth was determined to be from God, change to that truth became blasphemy.

The conflict exists because at the root, religion and science took on the same task, explaining the universe.  It was when some religions decided they had all the answers that the conflict arose.

There is no conflict between the two if we simply accept the simple idea that we still are discovering the true nature of things.

Fundamentally it is the ultimate conceit to believe that everything we needed to know was revealed thousands of years ago and that no new revelations can exist.

Science vs Superstition

We live in an era where many of the things that used to kill us are not much of a threat, assuming we follow prevalent advice.

Of course from our earliest days we tried to overcome injuries and illnesses via use of people who claimed to have certain abilities or communion with spirits.  Some of the things they did with herbs and other remedies actually had beneficial effects, since trial and error often led to moderately effective treatments.

However, they often used a hit or miss approach with no guarantee of success and like many current charlatans noted their successes without ever mentioning their failures.
Once in a while they used techniques that actually were likely to do more harm then good.

While there is evidence going back to ancient times of applied medical techniques using a more scientific approach, it was in the modern era that we developed the technology and infrastructure to effectively eliminate many diseases that had been a scourge to humanity.

Our life expectancy has greatly increased and many diseases that used to be largely fatal are now not.

Unless of course we ignore science and rely on superstitious remedies.

I was reading the story of a young boy who died from diabetes because his family decided to trust a herbalist who told them Insulin is poison.  It isn't.

We see people refusing vaccines because of inaccurate information or studies that have been discredited  because they don't understand or trust the science.

Yes some corporations might make unseemly profits providing drugs, but we do have ways to verify the effectiveness of those drugs.

Sometimes promises are made by non-traditional practitioners that seem too good to be true.  They are.

It is easy to believe that a complex problem has a simple solution that relies of some mystical belief.  If the ancients knew all the cures for everything, why didn't everything get cured?

Science or Opinion?

Not everything is a matter of opinion.

For example, we know when water boils, and if you want to hold a different opinion you are just wrong.

The age we live in has in some ways allowed certain people to treat everything as relative.

Most things aren't.

It often doesn't matter when people decide to reject certain facts.  If you want to believe the Earth is flat, go ahead.  You are demonstrably wrong, but who cares?

If on the other hand you fail to vaccinate your children because you believe the proven fallacies of the dangers of vaccination you are risking them and others to dangerous diseases.

Are vaccinations risk free?  Well nothing is risk free really, but the risks are not related to the wild rumors on the Internet, they are extremely rare.

Similarly, the impact of man on the climate is no longer a matter of opinion if it ever was.

Clearly pumping tons of pollutants into the air is not a beneficial thing and while we had trouble measuring the full impact at one time, science can now determine its impacts and consequences.

Science likes to express some facts as ranges, because even when the data is clear, the calculations almost always include some variables that can change the prediction.

The change is a matter of range, not of reversal.

So if the prediction is that something bad will happen in 50 to 60 years, it is not unsettled science, it is the nature of future variability.

The federal government issued a report after detailed studies which spells out the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we don't do something.  In some cases it is probably already too late.

Denial is not really an option and the results are sound science, not opinions.

You can't wish them away.

Climate

Once again the dontard has gone on National TV and acted like all the scientists in the world are conspiring together about climate change.

The idea that the data itself is making them all draw the same conclusions apparently didn't occur to him.

He appears to be one of the remaining few who hold to that opinion and his belief seems to be that it is some sort of attempt to get us to lose some competitive advantage.

The biggest competitive advantage would be to shift as much energy into renewable since it would require absolutely no imports.

We are going to need to continue to harness some fossil fuels and logically they should be the cleanest ones possible which in never coal.

It is possible to use coal if we scrub the emissions or capture the carbon, but to continue to burn it recklessly is to invite large scale glacier melting and rising sea levels.

Its a mystery to the dontard and he thinks it might just reverse itself.

The part that is due to natural causes does vary, but our emissions of carbon into the atmosphere is a one way street.

It also looks like we may be seeing an uptick in volcanic activity which is natures way of releasing carbon.

Fake news, fake science are not problems.

Fake politicians are.

Weather or Not?

One of the things about science, at least good science, is that it accepts the possibility that new data or new facts might change accepted theories.

Some things are of course much more settled than others, but you will generally never hear scientists say something is 100% certain.

Clearly some science is so well established it approaches that degree of certainty, but a good scientist is always open to the possibility that some new data or event will cause a theory to change.

You see this degree of uncertainty used by some individuals to deny what are probably science facts as "unproven" theory.

We saw this for many years when the tobacco companies tried to argue that they weren't selling cancer sticks.  They knew they were but were able to promote the idea that it was "unproven" science.

Every unbiased experiment and test came to the same result, that smoking was a factor in increased levels of certain cancers but that is only proof beyond a reasonable doubt as opposed to "proven".

As I said most things in science can never be proven but we accept that if every observation shows the same result that it is in fact true.

We see this now with a few people arguing that climate change isn't caused by human activities, and in fairness not all of it is.  What we do know is that human activities, primarily the release of previously trapped carbon into the atmosphere contributes to higher worldwide temperatures.

This greenhouse effect has been tested extensively and al the experiments and calculations show it has that outcome. Is it the only factor? No, the earth has gone through multiple climate cycles over its existence caused by natural factors, but we know that industrial age human behavior has an impact.

Every year we observe weather events that are supposed to be exceedingly rare but are happening fairly frequently.  We see the rise in the oceans and the melt of the polar ice caps proceeding.

Lets suppose for arguments sake that only a small percentage of this is the result of human carbon release. Why wouldn't we stop it anyway?

Is a few dollars saved today worth watching our children being forced to move to higher ground?

The potential future cost of the environmental damage will be astronomical, and like most things early efforts can have significant future benefits.

A single weather event is not climate change.  When weather events form a trend it is.

Complex Things

Life is both simple and complex.

Everyone deals with life and either instinctively or through early learning we develop a set of skills that we use every day.  Walking, talking, observing, planning, and other almost automatic things that we do without thinking much about them at all.

These skills were the ones required to survive before we achieved a civilized status.  Of course some skill common among primitive people have been lost in our civilized world.  Generally most of us don't need to know how to make a fire, something that was essential to our ancestors.

Life gets complex as we attempt to answer the question why.

This may be the trait that makes us most unique on this planet, although we certainly see a certain amount of inquisitive behavior in other species.

I doubt that many animals, even those close to us genetically speaking, spend a lot of time figuring out how did they get here or why the sun rises and sets.  They have to deal with surviving on a daily basis.

It requires a certain degree of security to worry about things that you don't need today to survive.

We want answers that explain the world around us.  The answers are important and it is this quest for knowledge that led to the rise of our civilizations as we learned how to grow the right plants, exploit the right animals, build shelters that allowed us to populate even hostile portion of the planet and our continuing technological development.

Still, many if not most of us understand very little of how much of this works and we rely on people with knowledge to make things work.

We don't even know how to gather and kill our own food, let alone survive in the "wild".

We certainly don't understand how much of the things we use everyday actually work.

This complexity and lack of knowledge makes us susceptible to those who know or claim to know the answers.  It is this lack of knowledge that leads to both gullibility and suspicion.

We like politicians who give us simple answers.  It is reassuring to think that we can solve a problem simply by doing something simple.

Unfortunately it doesn't work so we start to suspect they are lying to us.  They are, some more than others, but we still go for it over and over.

Its just easier to go with the simple answer, we think we understand it.

Reasonable People

One of the things that history teaches us is that unreasonable people often get there way.

Of course that's because what is reasonable is simply something we all agree on.

Take some of our popular media, willing to make accusations based on little or no evidence.

Its become so common that we see the credibility of the media under serious attack.

Of course we have had this issue before maybe most prevalently during the yellow journalism years the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Maybe it never really ended.

What is factual, real news, and what is "fake" news?

Sometimes its hard to say, but we do have some indicators.

Some facts are clearly witnessed by so many people with so much real and photographic evidence that to question them is simply outrageous.

The holocaust did happen, we had survivors, liberators and oppressors who verified it.

The mass shooting also happened.

In fact this idea that there is a group of people, ostensibly run by the Government that is perpetrating hoaxes about these terrible events for some political gain is so outrageous its almost ludicrous.

Except some people believe it.

The number actually seems to be growing.

Take vaccines or GMO foods.  There is pretty irrefutable evidence that the first doesn't cause autism and the second is perfectly safe.  However many people believe exactly the opposite.

Pretty much everyone gets vaccinated and therefore everyone with autism was probably vaccinated.  However, everyone without autism was also vaccinated.

Its simply not reasonable to equate the two.  Reason however is becoming a rare commodity in today's world.

Facts Used to be Facts

Ever since I can remember there have been people who I'll refer to as "roll your eyes" people.

By this I mean people who would express opinions about things that were just so wrong that all you could really do was roll your eyes.

It could be in almost any topic, but the views were so clearly contradicted by reality that it was hard to argue with them.

For example, if someone maintained that aliens were routinely grabbing people and examining them undetected.  You can't actually prove it isn't happening, but there is so much evidence that it isn't happening or couldn't happen undetected that no reasonable person would believe it.

Now, sometimes the person holding these views was otherwise an intelligent person, but for whatever reason he allowed this unreasonable idea to take hold.

It used to be the sort of stuff people would hear on late night talk radio or read in some tabloids and if you ignored all the rest of the world it could almost sound credible.

Over the years as we got an almost unlimited number of cable channels, we have seen these roll your eyes views move into primetime.  In fact we have a whole cable news channel that seems to specialize in this stuff.

It gets ratings and I'm pretty sure most of the people saying these outrageous things actually know better but their audience doesn't.

We have another phenomena that seems sort of new, where people think they can hold any opinion they want despite scientific evidence contradicting them.  I mean people who maintain the earth is flat when there is clear proof it is round.

Its sort of a relativism that I don't remember and maybe it is something with the schools.

There are wrong ideas, at least in the world of empirical science.

The problem is that these views have become more mainstream and now we have a "roll your eyes" administration.  It actually believes some of these outrageous things and doesn't seem to be learning.

All we can do is figure out why we seem to be getting dumber as a nation and see what we can do about it.  Or we can just "roll our eyes".

Lying or Delusional

Whenever the dotard gives  speech the fact checkers point out all the lies, but is it a lie if you actually believe what you're saying?

I'm pretty convinced that he really believes most of the things he says (although he also lies a lot) because his megalomania convinces him that his version of the facts are true.

Of course he gets some ammunition from the silly news he watches on cable. but when he says that he won the popular vote despite all evidence to the contrary he actually believes it.

Unfortunately he is the only delusional person around.

Too many people are willing to ignore reality for their own version.

Politics don't change facts, and even if Al Gore is championing climate change, it doesn't make it political.

We live in a world where things that would have been absolute miracles are now commonplace with airplanes, instant communications, space exploration, computers everywhere, etc. etc.

This was because of science.

People who use the results of these wonderful inventions then question the scientific validity of scientific experiments.

Its OK to have some skepticism, but to simply ignore or deny repeatable experiments that prove a theory is, well insane.

Similarly we have people who actually believe the mass shootings were all staged as part of the gun control agenda.  Really?  If the entire Government and Media was working together they would have already taken all the guns.

No one, or at least almost no one, wants to take everyone's guns, they want to use common sense safeguards to prevent these massacres that keep happening.

They are very real and denying them and harassing the survivors is dastardly.

Science Is Knowledge

The word science comes from the Latin word that means knowledge.  So maybe we should call it what it is, knowledge.

Some people seem to think that science is something that scientists do.  That is a pretty modern concept, because for most of human existence knowing was an essential part of survival.

For many of us, science is now something done by people in white coats in labs.  That's sort of how it was taught in High School and what we do in our everyday lives is just living.

Of course in many ways we don't need to know as much as we once did, while have a lot more data available.

Few of us know how to start a fire from raw materials, although we may vaguely remember it has something to do with rubbing two sticks together, we use matches or lighters if we need to start one.

We observe the changing of the seasons but its more of a curiosity to us than a vital message from nature about what to expect.

Knowledge (science) to our ancestors was essential to survival, and the people with the knowledge were extremely valuable.

Of course it still is and they still are, but many of us don't realize it.

We used to know that we had to get ready for the winter, our knowledge told us so, but now we ignore the knowledge that we need to stop warming the planet.

Just like striking steel with flint produces a spark that can start a fire, filling the atmosphere with carbon will warm the earth.  It isn't arguable, it simply is a fact. 

Now in addition to whatever we are doing, the earth is doing things on its own.  That not conflicting.

We are entering an age where many people think that they can disregard what the scientists are telling them because well its how they feel. 

Of course how they feel is irrelevant, the citizens of Pompeii didn't feel the volcano was going to erupt, but it did and they still died.

Some of the things we hear about science are hard for us to understand, and may not seem relevant to our daily lives.  Of course subatomic particles and theoretical physics is something that is difficult to understand, but we see the results in the products we use everyday. 

The knowledge obtained in the past has led to the technology that surrounds us now, and the research of today will be used in the future. 

Its more than Tang.

More Random Things

So the fleet that Trump said was going to intimidate Korea went to the Indian Ocean, guess geography is more complicated than he thought too.

We have a Civilian Commander in Chief primarily because the normal first reaction of a military person would of course be the military option.  Using diplomacy saves lives, on both sides.

Trump thinks he is being criticized unfairly, he should read his own tweets for the last 8 years.

I keep reading how Trump is disappointing his supporters,  either by doing what he actually said or not doing what he actually said.  Of course he promised things he couldn't possibly do so if you believed him you got what you deserved.

They can add having polluted fishing streams and air to not having a job.

We live in a world where people think they can challenge science based on how they feel about things.  You can't.

If yo don't believe in evolution or climate change, you are exactly the same as people who believe the Earth is flat.

People who question the usefulness of vaccines aren't much better. While everything has potential side effects, the vaccines have reduced or eliminated deadly diseases.  It really is a public health matter.

People who protest common core were the same people who questioned the education the schools provide, so how do they get better without standards?

Education of our young people is essential to the future of this country.  Lets make sure it is effective.

Before we risk more young people in wars that aren't essential, remember everyone who died lost all future potential while we end up with a President who shirked his duty. 

Since we went all volunteer, the people who serve in the Military are much less likely to become members of Congress.  The trend is very clear. 

The most recent data from the 2010 Census shows that only seven percent of Americans have served in the military, while veterans make up 20 percent of the current Congress. In 1971, 73 percent of members of Congress were veterans, but veterans made up fewer than 15 percent of the American population.