There are still those among us who deny that scientific truth has any sort of hold on free minds. We can believe anything we want and call “true” anything we find comfortable they maintain. But while we can certainly believe anything we want to — there are those among us who think the earth is flat, after all — we are really not in a position to reject as mere “opinion” scientific truths that have the weight of evidence and, more importantly, predictive power, on their side.
If this hasn’t been clear for some time, the recent spate of tornadoes in the South of this continent, together with the devastating category 5 typhoon that recently hit the Philippines should shut the mouths and open the minds of the naysayers, since meteorologists predicted both of these terrible events quite accurately and in a timely fashion. It should but almost certainly will not. While meteorology is not an exact science, given the huge numbers of variables that make prediction difficult, recent technologies together with the satellites that clutter our skies make weather prediction remarkable accurate. And it is predictive power, more than anything else, that makes scientific truth undeniable. Given our uncertainties about the future, any body of knowledge or method of investigation that makes prediction more and more accurate demands our assent. We can continue to say we don’t believe in evolution or the “big bang” theory, but when the scientist brings to the table his charts and graphs and — more importantly — his predictions that continue to ring true, we really must abandon superstitious nonsense and embrace truth, even if it is terribly uncomfortable.
Plato was the first thinker in the West to organize his thoughts into systematic wholes, worry about inconsistencies and contradictions and seek coherent truth. Thus began the transition from religion to philosophy in the West. Aristotle married this concern with an empirical turn of mind and invented what we now call “science.” Even though so much of what Aristotle thought was certain has been proven false — such as the Ptolemaic notion that the earth is stationery and the sun and planets revolve around it — his falsehoods were rooted out by an improved empirical method forged in the minds and laboratories of such people as Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo and Newton. Scientific truth is simply not to be denied and science itself, while certainly not all-embracing (it ignores deep and hidden truths of the human heart that are not open to measurement and quantification) is the best humans have come up with so far.
Thus, the ignoramuses, in Congress especially, who deny global warming are not only flying in the face of reason and science and ignoring salient truths, they are putting human lives at risk by denying the scientific certainties that the planet is warming and will soon become uninhabitable for human and animal life. All in the name of power and profits. One can understand the craving for more and more money — humans by and large seem to be a greedy and stupid lot — but one must also realize that there is a time when certain truths can no longer be denied and time has arrived to begin to try to reverse a process that we humans have helped to bring to the kindling point.
