CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The April 22 March for Science brought out at least a hundred thousand people on the west coast alone. If we count the demonstrations in other American cities including Washington D.C. -- and the marches in dozens of other countries around the world -- the world wide attendance was likely in the millions.
The importance of the event is summarized in the speech by noted seismologist Lucy Jones, which communicated the theme that reality matters. More of that below.
Unfortunately, what I saw of local television news ignored the Jones speech. The few seconds of coverage available on the 11 o'clock news involved brief comments from marchers, shown as if this were the Rose Parade. The efforts of tens of thousands of serious minded people can't compete with car chases. So much for the myth of liberal media bias.
Luckily, the Los Angeles Times ran Lucy Jones' speech (linked above). Please read it if you haven't done so already.
Reality matters. The idea seems obvious. Why must we have to recite it out loud? And why is doing this so urgent? The answer is sadly obvious: It is the underlying political environment that made this speech and the march necessary.
Reality matters in the sense that we can't continue to ignore global warming without enduring serious consequences not only on a global level, but also in our own communities. To borrow from an earlier Zocalo discussion, if the San Fernando valley were to suffer a heat wave that went to 127 degrees for several days in a row, how would our people deal with it? What would the death toll be? What would happen if this were to become the normal state of affairs in most summers yet to come?
That would obviously be a reality that matters. The only question is whether it will happen, and how soon.
Jones (photo) pointed out, "No one who understands how climate works thinks we can continue to pollute our atmosphere without catastrophic cost."
That message, repeated by other speakers and by many scientists over the past few years, leads us to the central point that television avoided and public radio kind of dodged. The March for Science was in fact totally political, but not because science itself either is or is not political. Science has tried to be science rather than politics for most of its existence. But the march was necessary and it was necessarily political because a war against science has emerged out of the political right wing as a cynical and utterly dishonest political technique.
The motives for this attack on science are presumably economic rather than philosophical, but whatever the ultimate origin, the result has been an assault on facts, reason, and rationality. It started as a political attack against governmental regulations, and has gradually expanded, by now including direct attacks on the actions and budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and other critical departments. The situation has now become so serious that rational people feel that they have to respond. To put it a little more bluntly, the new administration has ramped up the war on science so aggressively that a determined response became necessary.
Public radio did get one thing right. The Republican war on science is a war on environmental protection. Attacks on the functioning of the Environmental Protection Agency serve a remarkably cynical economic purpose. But in order to rationalize those attacks, the congress relies on two strategies -- (1) attack the science that has already become publicly known, and (2) forbid the agency to fund new science.
The careful observer might notice one little subtlety in all of this. If climate change brought on by human action is a myth, then further research will eventually reveal that as a fact. On the other hand, if climate change is ongoing and is the result of human actions, then continued research will continue to be consistent with that result. Working theories that are based on solid natural events continue to give positive results no matter how you study them -- we will continue to find that DNA determines heredity using whatever methods happen to be at hand, because DNA is the hereditary chemical. Such theories are robust in the sense that experiments based on them continue to give positive results. So far, anthropogenic global warming is looking to be a robust theory.
In championing the denial of climate change as the result of human economic activity, the Republicans have profoundly endangered the future not only of countless species but also of the human race.
Consider the sum total of the following: the scientific method, the results of using that method, and the sum total of scientific findings (ranging over climate science, medical science, geology, biology, and more). For this collection of techniques and results, we used the word science as the defining symbol on April 22. In a sense, the word science is being used here to represent both reality and our best methods for discovering what that reality is. Reality matters.
It's relevant to insert a few words from the famous Richard Feynman speech titled Cargo Cult Science, talking about the scientific method:
That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.
Feynman was a strong exponent of another principle which I will paraphrase as follows: The one test for whether a scientific idea is valid is experiment.
Suffice it to say that in science, it's the facts and the theoretical analysis of the facts that matter. Unfortunately, some politicians and corporate hacks have adopted a different approach, in which attacks on the scientists themselves have become the norm. For years now, the core right wing attack on climate scientists is that they tailor their work to what funding sources demand. When you look at the attacks on climate science by the politically motivated, you come to realize that the attackers are simply projecting their own worst quality -- slavish obedience to dogma -- onto scientists. Instead, those who attack climate science should be looking in the mirror.
Perhaps some of the more thoughtful conservatives should reconsider being anti-science
It's curious that the leaders of a couple of coal companies have recently asked the Trump administration to hold off on pulling out of the Paris agreement to limit global warming. It's not so much that they've suddenly gotten religion over scientific facts. It's that they would like to be included in international negotiations over the use of coal because they want to be able to export their coal overseas. This is the utilitarian motive for being part of the discussion. You can't go into an international discussion babbling like a fool and expect to be taken seriously.
There is another reason. As the facts accumulate and as global warming becomes more and more apparent, the denial group looks more and more irrational. At some point, those who deny the reality of scientific findings will be seen to be idiotic. It's not a happy position for those who want votes from the more thoughtful members of the electorate.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
Why LA Marched for Science: Because Reality Matters!
