Scientific illiteracy clouds climate-change politics
FRANKE WILMER | Billings Gazzette | January 2, 2010
The most disappointing thing about the small number of political leaders denying the science of climate change is that it reveals the extent of scientific illiteracy in America. Today big businesses that profit from our failure to halt CO2 emissions deny the science of climate change the same way that big tobacco challenged science that linked smoking to lung cancer decades ago.
Everyone with a high school education should know that skepticism — research aimed at disproving findings substantiated by rigorously researched hypotheses — is built into the process of scientific inquiry. The best science aims to disprove or “falsify” a strong hypothesis — almost none of our scientific knowledge has a 100 percent probability of being true. Statistically, findings with probabilities above 95 percent are treated as knowledge that should be acted on as true.
Scientific knowledge where probabilities affect human health and safety is routinely used in engineering and medicine. Building safe bridges means knowing the probability that based on engineering science, a structure will safely hold a certain amount of weight. Medical patients are told their chances of surviving cancer with different treatment alternatives, none with 100 percent certainty of success.
Statistical probability
The International Panel on Climate Change concluded, with a statistical probability of 99 percent, that most of the earth’s land base will continue experiencing more warmer and fewer colder days. With statistical confidence of 90 percent the IPCC predicted increasing frequency of heat waves and heavy precipitation. Bozeman temperatures now average 7 degrees higher than in 1950, 26 glaciers remain of 150 that were in Glacier National Park in 1850, and pine beetles killed 17 million more trees on 2 million to 3 million acres.
Over 90 percent of the world’s scientists agree that we are experiencing effects of human-induced climate change, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, American Geophysical Union, World Meteorological Organization, American Academy of Pediatrics, World Federation of Public Health Associations, American Institute of Physics, and 69 other national and international science organizations. Only six scientific organizations take a noncommittal position. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, once the lone dissenting scientific organization, rescinded its dissent in 2007 to become the sixth organization adopting a noncommittal position.
Deniers claim a scientific conspiracy but fail to identify any motive for climate researchers to mislead the public. It’s easy, on the other hand, to see a motive for denial — short-term profit from continuing to produce the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Most Montanans wouldn’t mind a slightly warmer climate, but that’s not what the science is about. It’s about the extinction of species that, according to Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Chivian of the Harvard Medical School, may provide medically valuable knowledge, like treatments for peptic ulcer disease affecting 25 million Americans, end stage renal disease that kills 80,000 Americans a year, osteoporosis that kills 70,000 Americans a year, Type 2 diabetes killing a quarter of a million people each year, and arrhythmias.
90% of scientists agree
It’s about the economic and geo-strategic impact of regional climate change on agriculture and energy. It’s about migrations of species like bark beetles and their impact on forestry and wildfires. In impoverished countries it’s about more death and suffering from increases in malaria and water and air-borne diseases. It’s about increased radiation and corresponding increases in skin cancer and melanoma, particularly in higher altitudes.
Knowing that 90 percent of lung cancer deaths in men and 80 percent in women are caused by smoking, most of us don’t smoke and encourage our loved ones to quit. When 90 percent of scientists agree that the effects of climate change put us all at risk, and that there is a high probability that failure to change our behavior by 2015 will make those effects difficult or impossible to reverse, we should take that just as seriously as other scientific facts regarding risks to our health and lives that we routinely accept and, accordingly, change our behavior.
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http://www.chiropracticmarketingsecret.com"> Illiteracy means inability to read and write. It is the root cause of ignorance which frustrates all development efforts of the government and the community. Eradication of illiteracy in a country like Bangladesh with so vast a population is undoubtedly a gigantic task. It is the social responsibility of all the literate people. men and women.To make some concerted efforts to remove illiteracy from society. The government of Bangladesh has already undertaken some important Programs in this regard. To provide primary education for at least 70 percent of children of six to ten years of age by the end of 1990. The government has launched a programme called the Universal Primary Education (UPE) Project. There is another education program in which each primary school in a community is to be regarded as a Community Learning Center(CLC). The objective is to involve increasingly the parents and the members of the community in the educational activities of the school. The adults and the out-of-school youths will come to the school in the afternoon or in the evening after their work. Here they will receive not only basic education but also practical training in their vocations. The mass media, especially radio TV and newspapers can play a vital role in marking the people more conscious of the importance of literacy in the life of a nation. They can broadcast and publish regular features on various aspects of basic education. adult education and mass literacy.
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