Global Warming
April 9, 2010admin 2 Comments »http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2010-04-09§ion=2&id=3
I’m worried about this one. Mostly because I go to a school that has a polar bear floating on a lone piece of ice in the middle of an ocean on it’s front website this week. I had to rewrite this piece more significantly than I have most of the stuff I’ve done this year. I’ve probably said this before, but I always wish that everyone could read the shitty first draft followed by the final draft. Then, if they weren’t impressed with my final, they still might be impressed at how far it came along.
I’m really worried that this piece is going to get misconstrued by those that read it. My writing is not nearly as good as my thinking (in most things) and, while I feel confident that I could sit down any rational person and get them to either agree or acknowledge the point that I’m making, I fear those that will read “skeptical of global warming” and want to call me a right wing looney.
In case it’s not obvious, I was trying to simply raise the point that most of us have pretty firm beliefs about global warming yet I don’t think most of us have really done the research on the issue. This goes for skeptics and proponents of global warming alike. And then I want to argue that that is bad because we should be scientific, and not political, about scientific questions. I hope that comes through. Let me know what you think (or if you disagree with me).
Posted on April 9th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
I’m glad to see you talking/writing about science:) And I like your point about evolution:)
On the other hand…I think the phrase you mean to use is “Global Climate Change.” While the earth is overall warming (and there is no real scientific debate about that nor has there been in at least ten years) over the last hundred years and on a much more rapid scale than seen in geologic history, not every place on earth is feeling warmer, even on average for that place over a year. Some places are cooler, some places are wetter, some places are drier. Overall, the earth is warmer, but what really worries the scientists and informed public is Global Climate Change. Increased intensity and duration of El Nino/La Nina events, for instance.
It disturbs me to think that college students might think there is some debate over global climate change. Science is not a democracy, but if you notice that there are less than a handful of scientists on one side of the debate and they don’t actually have any publications or their publications are in, for example, magazines by the Discovery Institute, you can probably guess just how good the opposing scientific claims are. It can be difficult to decipher major debates in science, claims about cancer or safety of home-births, but if you are interested, follow the paper trail. You begin to see a pattern with where and how often people publish and then you can also see if only one lab group is ever finding supporting evidence but multiple other studies from different labs are producing opposing evidence. You can also find a scientist you trust, major a blogging scientist and get some insight from their reviews of certain topics.
Anyway, I think college students should be getting good training in reading scientific literature and forming an opinion about scientific hypotheses–especially those that affect human health! This is one of the best ways colleges can arm a student as they face the rest of their lives!
–Heather
Posted on April 23rd, 2010 at 8:26 am
Heather,
Thanks for you response! I really like hearing people respond to what I’m writing (I don’t get much of it so it’s especially exciting for me.)
I used global warming because I was referring more to the political rather than scientific idea. As far as politics is concerned, global warming and global climate change are interchangeable.
I also agree with you that college students, and for that matter everyone, should have better training and reading in scientific literature and in interpreting good and bad scientific facts. That said though, not everyone is going to be a scientist, even in a perfect world, and so we still need to a way to transmute good scientific thought across our communities. It’s not clear to me what this is, since many people, I would argue on both the right and the left, want to simply accept the science they want to, rather than the science that is best.
I personally recoil at answering aloud whether or not I think global warming, or global climate change, is real, not because I have any clue about the evidence (and really any evidence I’ve seen and anyone that I’ve talked to, like you, are convinced unequivocally), but because it’s such a political question and I recoil at making broad political statements. Perhaps what I didn’t make clear in the article is that what I really want is for science to no longer be political but factual. Then it doesn’t really matter what I think of global warming, or climate change, because I’m not a scientist. And people I trust, like you and Michael, who do know the answers to these kinds of questions, can let me know what’s what while I go work on other things that I have better expertise in.
Thanks for sharing,
.