The Et Cetera Post

The scientific method has given us a lot of great stuff. Thanks to science we now live longer, travel farther, eat better and blow up more stuff than ever before. It has gotten to the point that in our culture, we pretty much put our lives in the hand of science every day. We do this without even having the faintest clue how most of the things we use all the time actually work. All I know is that if I put a bag of corn in the microwave for a few minutes, it’s all popped when I pull it out.

Yet despite our utter dependence on–and unquestioning trust in–the goodies science give us, there are some areas where we just don’t like what science has to say. Look no further than the issue of climate change, AKA global warming.

The fact is, an overwhelming majority of highly-respected and educated scientists say that climate change is happening and that it is due to the bad stuff we humans are doing–and I don’t mean the rampant fornication, debauchery and general sinfulness of humanity. If those things caused global warming we would have been cooked a long time ago. No, the consensus is that our use of fossil fuels is a greenhouse effect that is warming the planet. You’ve heard the story.

Anyway, the naysayers out there like to call into question the motives of scientist–as if scientists have banded together in some kind of mass conspiracy. But really, do scientists have a lot to gain from spreading misinformation about the climate?! I’m sure they like burning fossil fuels as much as the next guy. Seriously, if anybody is conspiring to make sure that we keep chugging the gas, it’s the oil industry. In the game of climate change, that’s the team with the most to lose. As it turns out that’s also the team that has the big bucks to fight climate change. And I don’t mean fight the problem. I mean fight to make sure people don’t see climate change as being a problem.

Now I can understand that there may be people out there who are generally skeptical about science. They may shun the use of microwaves and prefer horse-drawn carriages to a cars. To those people I say, “thank you”. Their skepticism about global warming, microwaves and cars means that they probably aren’t causing the problem anyway (since they don’t heat TV dinners or drive SUVs). And really anyone who is skeptical about what science has to say is probably generally a cautious person. A cautious approach would be to say, “well I’m not so sure about this climate change thing, but just to be safe we should probably try to do something about it since the worst case scenario is the end of civilization as we know it.”

When it comes down to it, isn’t doing something about climate change a good thing? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever stuck your nose into the tailpipe of a running car but it really, really stinks. Having a little less of those toxic fumes in our air would certainly make for clearer visibility over our cities, less asthma for our kids and fewer deaths due to air quality. Making a change would involve encouraging innovation that will create new jobs and industries. This may be bad news for oil tycoons but hey, they’re already filthy rich anyway.

We have science to thank for superglue, calorie-free sweeteners and pretty much everything else we use to live everyday. But not all discoveries of science will be good news for our erectile difficulties. In the case of climate change the news could be very bad. But rather than suddenly mistrusting the experts, we need to unplug our ears and listen to what scientists are telling us. Then we need to act on it.