I’m going to refer to the most recent entry, and add a brief commentary on it. If you wish to read it first,
go there.
There are a great many social and ecological problems facing humanity in the 21st century, and climate change is the most dire. We’ll need to face, soon, the absolute need to make changes in the way we live, and changes that would not be so drastic had we taken action fifty years ago when it was quite clear that our industrial carbon dioxide load into the atmosphere is raising the global average temperature.
The last week people got all mad in knicker-twisty about a common-sense solution for safer gas stoves, as propagandists raised alarms that the government was going to ban gas stoves and ovens. First, it was not proposed by the government. Second, we really do need to switch our cooking and heating systems from natural gas to electric and sourced renewably or through nuclear power.1
The science that is done on climate is directed towards identifying the problem and finding engineering solutions to mitigate as much as possible the damage and uprooting, but very few people “trust the science” anymore. To me it’s clear that people misuse science, even those we know are experts on science and should know better, and lend their “arguments from authority” to provide a false credence to the science of transgender modifications.
If people can see that this is based on pseudoscience, yet promoted by science by those in the know, and seen as a bedrock belief of progressive politics, then the propagandists against the sciences can easily equate the fake science of transgenderism to the very real science of climate and break down the trust we should have in climate, vaccines and immunology, agricultural, and other sciences that can help us mediate the issues of climate change.
If we repeat the mantra “trust the science” while spreading untrustworthy science then we are defeating ourselves. There is no settled science that shows that transgender people are actually “trans.” There is no theory of mind that allows for being “born in the wrong body.” Non-binary people are not actually non-binary. If someone as trusted as Seam M. Carroll tweets a graphic about DSD/VSD and claims that it proves that people are transgender and says “it’s the science,” then it creates doubt in good science.
Recall the quote from Sagan: “And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.”
Science is a process, not a magisterium. People can do science incorrectly and come to incorrect conclusions, which is why it is dangerous to ever say that “the science is settled” on a subject that has so many variables that have not been properly tested. People need to understand better how science works and how it doesn’t, and spoonfeeding falsities weakens the trust of science.
Nuclear power has its dangers and drawbacks, but compared to coal-generated electricity it’s quite clean even in the problem of waste. There’s a solvable problem there. We might even figure it out by the time fusion is solved and available. I don’t use this Substack account for general science thoughts, but perhaps I will so I can address my thoughts on energy production.