House of Eratosthenes

The Best Sentence I’ve Heard Lately award goes now to Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) President James Tonkowich, testifying before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works last Thursday, about which we learned via blogger friend Rick at Brutally Honest:

The kind of radical fideism that some evangelical Christians are exhibiting toward catastrophic global warming is a betrayal of science and a betrayal of the Christian intellectual tradition. It is a betrayal of science because science is not about voting. Science is about facts, interpretations of those facts, and conclusions that either align with reality or don’t.

This bears repeating. What was that again?

Science is not about voting.

Lest I be accused of beating a dead horse: This is not something we’ve often pondered over our nationwide, multiple-generations-long argument about climate change f.k.a. global warming f.k.a. oncoming ice ages. This point has seldom been made, and when I do see it made, it seldom sticks. Instead, what I see is the protagonist says “drastic action is needed because all the scientists agree” and then the antagonist, who could very reasonably reply “science is not about voting,” is compelled instead to supply a list of names of scientsts who do not agree. Usually, the protagonist will then respond with a screed against these scientsts who fail to agree, instructing the rest of us to ignore the maverick scientists because they’re stupid, they’re evil, they’re stupid/evil, there’s hard evidence they are “on the payroll of Haliburton and Enron,” or if there is no such muck that has been raked then surely it is forthcoming.

Lost in the flotsam and jetsam, is that simple declaration that in a saner universe, would up-end the entire argument and send it cartwheeling into the nearest ravine: Science is not about voting.

Science really isn’t about figuring out “what must be done,” either — and that is a lesson that could be better learned by some prominent officials in some very high places.

In fact, the whole climate change thing has been suspiciously quiet on exactly two subjects, on which it seems to me it ought not be. And those two subjects are: What is it that suggests to us we’re about to slip past some point of no return should no action be taken…and how do we know that we have not yet? I notice that the scientific mindset, prior to getting all screechy and agitated about our public policies and going supernova with some actvist fervor, would have to be satisfied on those two premises: Continuation of our current behavior, unaltered, will surely lead to catastrophe; and there is still time to mend our ways.

I don’t even see those two presumptions being debated anywhere. Not scentifically. I see charts and graphs and a bunch of allegations that “all the scientists agree” that, when I check’em out, turn out to be codswallop. I see ad hominem attacks. Oh, and I see scientific “experts” who are actually on someone’s payroll…on both sides.

When someone tells me what they know and how they know it, it all boils down to this: The “mean temperature” went up by a degree or so over the last century. That’s all.

And when I start asking probing, scrutinizing questions about what a “mean temperature” really means in a large ecosystem on the crust of a rocky sphere with a nine-thousand-degree liquid iron core, very few people can answer me, and the ones who can, reveal that “mean temperature” doesn’t scientifically describe something with such rustic simplicity, and with such surgical precision, as to justify adrenaline and panic when it meanders upward by a single notch. To put it simply, we really know very little, and it would be fair to replace the word “little” with “nothing.”

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- House of Eratosthenes | 06/12/2007 @ 09:48
You know, at first glance I thought that it must have been a “skeptic” who said “Science is not about voting”. Then I actually read the post, and I was stunned to find out that it was someone on the other side, the side that repeatedly (though not quite directly) insists that science is, in fact, about voting.

W.O.W.
- philmon | 06/12/2007 @ 10:47

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