"... certain politicians and talking heads regularly rant against science and scientific findings when they don’t fit their political agenda or their worldview."

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Evans: How did science get so political?
By Lynn Evans, May 5, 2014

In the recent bout of destructive storms that hit Mississippi and surrounding states, we were all very grateful for the science of storm prediction. Meteorologists helped save lives by accurately predicting the intensity and location of the storms, and by quickly alerting residents through apps and varied other media when a particularly deadly weather event was headed their way.

Science and the scientific method are directly responsible for the economic and technological boom that we all benefit from today, from medical breakthroughs to the technology revolution to the changes in farming and manufacturing that have raised people’s standard of living worldwide. Nevertheless, certain politicians and talking heads regularly rant against science and scientific findings when they don’t fit their political agenda or their worldview.

Exhibit A is climate change. Frequent opinion pieces in this paper — one just last month by Cal Thomas — argue that the science behind global warming is just a political argument made by a bunch of loose cannons.

Thomas’s latest rant was in response to the UN’s Panel on Climate Change Report confirming global warming with overwhelming scientific evidence, and recommending that the nations of the world respond now to decrease carbon emissions before the consequences of climate change become overwhelming for all living things on our planet.

Many of those who rebut the reality of climate change just deny that it is happening, a tactic that becomes less and less tenable in the face of rising sea levels and melting ice caps. Tactic number 2 is to assert that the earth’s accelerating warming is just a normal climate cycle for which human beings hold no culpability.

Since good science is based on both careful observation and rigorous testing, the hundreds of thousands of temperature readings showing the earth’s accelerating warming since the start of the Industrial Age should trump any argument denying climate change, even one that makes us feel good and suits our politics. In the scientific method, if the facts contradict the hypothesis the scientist reworks the thesis to fit the facts, not the other way around. Simply denying the facts, however, can mean not facing certain unpleasant truths that demand people and nations change their behavior.

We are now learning that our warming planet is experiencing spring earlier, and plants, animals and birds are migrating northward to escape summer’s heat. The earth’s rising temperatures parallel the rise of carbon dioxide and other emission levels in our atmosphere, levels directly related to human activity such as coal burning power plants and vehicle emissions. The biggest threat to people is probably rising sea levels since so much of the world’s population lives in coastal cities.

If we are sick, we want the latest and best medical science to guide our treatment because that increases the chances that we will recover. The earth’s life-span is so much longer than our own, we have trouble seeing that human history coupled with our own action — or inaction — today will have a direct effect on the world inherited by our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

So we struggle to understand how the Polar Vortex and warming oceans result in more tornados and other powerful storms barreling down on us. If we do not soon change our habit of denying the science we don’t want to hear, it will be long past time to do something to offset what have become the very real threats of global warming.
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