I read The Daily Campus on Wednesday and saw an article titled “Keep America Pro-Science,” which expressed outrage about how few Americans believed in climate change.
It continued to blame the conservatives in the Republican party in particular, which is what really made me annoyed. The GOP is not anti science because they don’t believe in government solutions to climate change.
First of all, anyone who describes something as “settled science” is lying to you. Six hundred years ago, it was “settled science” that the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe. More recently, in the 1970s it was the opinion of the vast majority of climate scientists that if we didn’t cut down on carbon production (also known as exhaling), we would be headed for a second ice age in the near future.
Science by definition is never settled, new things are always being discovered and new theories always disprove old ones.
When climate scientists tell Americans that this is 100 percent fact, without question, they think to themselves, “The weatherman can’t even tell me accurately what the temperature is going to be in a week, and these people think they can tell me with 100 percent certainty what the temperature will be in 50 years?”
Further, when it is said that the only solution to this problem is more government regulation, Americans are lead to think that their goal isn’t scientific, but political.
The scientists don’t help themselves when every time there is a snow storm they blame global warming, and then every time there is a heat wave they do the same thing. It doesn’t come across to the American people as particularly believable.
I also thought the use of Newt Gingrich as the poster child for the anti-science thoughts of the GOP candidates was particularly ludicrous. Calling the guy who wants to colonize the moon anti-science is just inexplicable. Gingrich loves science so much that at times he’s described as a futurist.
The one final problem I had with the article was its use of Republicans being against stem cell research as evidence that they are anti science.
No, in fact ,we aren’t against stem cell research, and it doesn’t make us anti-science either. Science is actually on our side in this one.
We are against embryonic stem cell research because it facilitates abortion and results in the destruction of life. We are, however, in favor of adult stem cell research, which isn’t destructive. Science has actually seen this as a more promising use of stem cells than embryonic ones, as they are much easier to work with and the bioethical problems are all but nonexistent.
Why continue to destroy embryos when you have had more success with a much safer and less controversial source of embryos?
So no, the Republican party is not against science. What we are against is people touting theory as fact, using science as a justification to advance a political ideology, and people demagoguing the opposition as neo-luddites against any form of progress in society.
And one more thing — we really don’t like people calling us uneducated when we don’t agree with them.
Tucker is a sophomore majoring in political science.
Dear Tucker,
Thank you for your response to my article in The Daily Campus. I appreciate your interest in the paper and your willingness to respond.
For the record, I never called Republicans “under-educated.” In fact, I claimed that GOP candidates were highly educated, but chose to publicially refute widely accepted views on climate change in order to appeal to a wider voter base.
My assertion that the Republican Party cannot become the anti-science party is actually an echo of Jon Huntsman, who warned on ABC’s “This Week” that, “the minute the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election of 2012.”
Also, like most relatively new scientific hypotheses, climate change has been subjected to intense scrutiny. The fact that the scientific community is slowly rallying behind climate change is further testimony to its validity. I doubt that anyone would say that the hypothesis of global warming has not been thoroughly vetted. In reality, the scientific community almost encourages scientists to refute global warming in order to gain fame because a scientist who could disprove global warming would gain a lot of media attention.
However, at the same time, it is true that we cannot be completely positive that humans are contributing to global warming. But scientists have found that additional human carbon production has upset the balance of carbon. Before our industrial lifestyle began spewing about 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into the atmosphere each year, carbon levels were naturally relatively stable.
Finally, my point was that the Republican candidates refuse to accept climate change in general, which sidesteps discussion of how to deal with very real climate change at all. My problem is not that Republicans don’t want to control climate change with government regulation, it’s that many of them don’t think that anything needs to be done at all!
All of our presidential candidates have very influential platforms with the public because they are so visible. They have the power to change public opinion. For this reason, I think that the very intelligent, well educated and patriotic candidates of both parties should endorse action against climate change.
After all, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Sincerely, Paul
