Week Two - Climate Culture/Climate and Society

One of the biggest mistakes that has been made when it comes to climate change is invoking doubt or flat out ignoring the science that has been discovered about it. In my recent reading of Naomi Oreskes’ The collapse of Western Civilization, it is apparent to see what will happen if we ignore the scientific findings of lead researchers, saying that there is just too much uncertainty in their work. The thing that most people don’t understand is that there will always be uncertainty about any scientific work. It is especially true in the case of climate change, not only for the fact that something like this has never before happen in the history of our planet but also for the sheer fact that science is very rarely 100% certain. There will always be doubt in scientific findings. Even things that we generally think of as true have uncertainties about them. Take electricity for example. For the longest time, the space that electricity traveled through was thought to be made up of a substance referred to as ether (not the same as the ether we know today in chemistry). This ether was thought to be the medium that electromagnetic waves traveled through and lead to theories in optics that assumed that since light was an electromagnetic wave as well (EM wave) and that it too must travel though ether when propagating. The space between planets in space was thought to be made of ether but this caused confusion when looking at other theories in physics. It was later shown through the Michelson-Morley experiment that ether does not exist and later on Einstein used this to refute the idea of ether and develop more commonly recognized theories of special relativity.

The point of this example is that for the longest time, the existence of ether was thought to be truth. It was only after some discrepancies were found, that scientists were able to dig deeper find out that this theory wasn’t correct.

Since then we have learned from our mistake of taking most (if not all) scientific finding to be true. We now take them as theories and as something up for discrepancy even if we believe that we know all there is to know about it. Because now we know that there will always be something more to learn about a certain subject.

The same thing can be applied to climate change. We will probably never know all that there is to know about it in our lifetime. All the factors that go into understanding just one piece of what is happening takes perspectives from so many sides (and lots of them aren’t even scientific). If we are going to combat climate change we need to listen to what our lead scientists and researchers have to say. It may not be 100% true but if we can take what we do know now and apply it, we may find that we are able to find out more and more about our climate and then use that to be better able to combat our changing world before it is too late. We have to start now or by the time we are 100% sure of what will happen, we will already be past the point of no return or worse, already be experiencing the dreaded, predicted, end results.