Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
George Roof thinks climate change is — flat out, all of it — a hoax, according to his recent letter: “Am I a fool for dismissing climate change?” In his letter, he made reference to my earlier letter, “Americans can’t ignore climate change.”
However, he did not present any specific refutation or disproof of anything in my letter. Instead, he presented a “counterstory.” In that story, he professed that he accepts science, so we should not say he is anti-science. As I reread both his and my letters, I think the main “shortcoming” in Roof’s thinking is about what I call the problem of “science when you ‘can’ put the experiment in a test tube” versus “science when you ‘cannot’ put the experiment in a test tube.” In the former case, that part of his letter has some validity. But, in a lot of sciences (e.g., evolution, geology, cosmology, etc.), you can still be scientific without the textbook “scientific method.” See below.
Roof said this in his letter: “Science, in its unique terms, rests on three separate idioms: laws, theory and assumptions.” But, when I put this question — “What is science?” — into the google.com artificial intelligence, the first two sentences I got back were:
“Science is a systematic process of gathering knowledge about the universe and the organized body of information that results from it. It relies on the scientific method — making observations, formulating hypotheses, and testing them through rigorous experimentation — to explain how the physical and natural world behaves.” But, sorry, science is a lot more than that. A way lot more. Here is just one article on what I am talking about, from the XPRIZE Foundation: “Ten major breakthroughs that were happy accidents.”
And here is another quote from a result via another internet search: “Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend radically challenged the traditional view of science as a purely cumulative, objective march toward truth. They argued that scientific theories are deeply tied to historical context, governed by subjective frameworks, and cannot be perfectly compared to one another.” I remember when these two famous guys were the “big talk,” decades ago, in scientific circles.
George Roof can call me (or himself) anything he wants, but just saying something is “fake news” without a good “basis” is dishonest and would be an example of the “premature conclusion” fallacy. Every anti-climate change article I have ever read sounded more like something from a flat-earth line of thinking. In his letter, cited above, Roof started out by asking a question, in a snotty way, about whether anyone remembered the comments from a “mentally challenged girl” (Greta Thunberg) and from Barack Obama on climate change. So, maybe it would be fair payback to ask if Roof remembered how “stable genius” Donald Trump, another climate denier, said we should treat COVID-19. Hint, read this article, from TIME: “Accidental Poisonings Increased After President Trump’s Disinfectant Comments.”
Roof may not be able to see the elephant in the room, but an internet search showed me many articles, like this recent one from Cornell University: “More than 99.9% of studies agree: Humans caused climate change.”
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
