The war on science's first casualty: Our quality of life

image by Nickio Benvolio

I recently saw a story of a company that had an issue with employee complaints about air quality.  The likely culprit was a sewage backup that once fixed, the air quality improved.  Unfortunately, the perception became that the air was bad, and without any evidence to the contrary, the label stuck.  The company called in an air quality expert with limited technical knowledge of buildings who found any number of possible causes, and recommended huge expenditures of energy and material to solve a "potential" problem.  In analyzing the problem, engineers arrived at a simple solution, but the company responded that the resolution was not "visible" enough.  The people in the area had it in their minds that a problem existed, and no scientific explanation would satisfy them.

We live in an age of paradox and irony.  Evolution, climate change, and conception remain hot topics of debate in the public sphere.  However, from the point of view of the scientific community, debate about relatively settled science detracts from implementing smart policy to improve quality of life related to the issues.  The lack of understanding of even basic science among the populace in general and political/business leaders in specific, hinders the implementation of sensible policies to make our life better.

As we survive what hopes to be the last sub-zero day of the winter (my Weather Channel forecast has a 40+ degree day on the horizon!), no issue has brought more attention to this than winter 2013-14 in the US.  The scientific understanding of climate change predicts that circumstances like the extreme cold of this year can and will happen.  However, news coverage and political discourse points to the weather and calls any form of climate mitigation a fools errand.

Over 95% of the scientific community agrees that these extreme weather events (don't tell the people in Australia or Alaska that we have returned to normal weather) will continue and result from human intervention with our atmosphere.  We cannot get 95% of economists to agree that unfettered, free market capitalism is the best way to manage an economy, but almost every climate scientist agrees our world is changing, and just slightly fewer agree that we have caused it.  The only explanation for this comes from a deliberate devaluing of science in the public sphere.

Science values questioning.  Using new knowledge to challenge old beliefs has great value.  That said, our current approach to science and policy is to spend most of our resources challenging science and less implementing solutions consistent with accepted science.  The more fronts we have to wage this battle, the less likely we are to find solutions.  We need to shift that balance so that we put more effort into finding solutions and less into questioning.  As a side benefit, should nature prove us wrong, the act of finding solutions usually produces tangential results that have value.

I do not recommend the acceptance of every crackpot theory.  Science already has a process to weed out bad ideas, and focus on valuable ones.  When that process produces consensus, then we need to have a mechanism that allows for debate on solutions without having to reinvent the wheel each time.  If we cannot find a way to do this, to avoid the constant war on science, we place ourselves in greater jeopardy.