Growing Segment of American Voters Skeptical of Science
Here’s an article whose theme we’ve discussed a great deal here: the disdain that certain of our elected leaders have for science. Personally, I have a tough time with people who expect to be taken seriously who write off evolution as “just a theory – one that has some holes in it” or dismiss climate change as a hoax despite the testimony of 97+% of the scientific community.
It looks like my viewpoints are losing ground here, however, since, as the article shows with a great precision, there is a large and rapidly growing segment of American voters who harbor an active distrust for science. I share the conclusion the author provided: “Yikes. That’s certainly not a good sign for fans of reality-based decision making.”
“Dont’t bother me with the facts, I’m in denial or I have an agenda” I refer to such spinning as confusion. Incomplete “factoids” are used to spin or confuse so willing fence sitters fall off out of imbalance. There is always an agenda, leaders, followers, facts, and too often mostly mis information. I suggest mandated education, I am serious mandated. No options, everyone must be educated or you cannot vote, drive a car, get a loan or a job zip everything would require an education. To make matters better, owning a home would require more than renting, getting a license to be a Plumber or Lawyer an MD requires such. This makes sense, I know it sounds different, but we need change. Smarter people will cost less to rule over for the Government.
I thought the point of a democracy was that you should not be ruled over by the government, it’s suposed to be ‘Government of the people, for the people, by the people’. However I have to say I often consider the UK democracy ‘Government of the people, for the Government, by the Government’, so in reality you’re probably about right Greg
By the way, I would suggest that what most kids get in school is teaching, not education. I would further suggest that if you are properly educated you can generally teach yourself most tings from books or by watching others.
For high school graduation, chemistry, physics, biology, and logic should be required subjects. At the college level, the same subjects should be required to get a degree. However, that is no guarantee that people will use the knowledge acquired. I have in mind a women with a philosophy major from a respected university; she may have been intelligent, but still she was unable to think clearly and logically. She quickly jumped to conclusions that were contrary to the facts.
Not only is logic not required in high-schools, it’s not available! Remarkable.
Fortunately, I was a preppy at which logic WAS available. Also, before that, when I was in public school, we were taught propaganda techniques and given examples. It’s interesting to see the obvious propaganda techniques used by some of our presidential candidates. “Plain folks” is a fairly common propaganda technique they use.
We were given examples of syllogisms and shown how people had little trouble arriving at the logically correct conclusion when there was no emotional content, but how emotional content often caused them to arrive at invalid conclusions. How people rated the attractiveness of photographs of women was influenced by the names attached to them. For example, if the name “Sally Smith” was attached to the photograph of a woman, it was rated higher than if the name “Rachel Finkelstein” was attached to it.
The media are well aware that people are often irrational; advertisers take full advantage of it. Commercials are often presented by an announcer that intones his spiels in a manner that would be more suitable for cheering a soccer team of children; often there is an annoying thumping of drums in the background.
Science is not a religion, a faith or a way of life it is a methodology for ascertaining how things work, much the same as a recipe is a method for making a cake, but a bit more complex.
Anyone who believes in the existence of atomic weapons, antibiotics, jet travel, computers, mobile phones and a vast array of other commodities must believe in science, even if they pretend they don’t, because without science and the validity of scientific methodology none of these things would exist, unless you believe they are magically created out of thin air by you know who.
This also precludes the concept that the world and we are only a few thousand years old because the scientific methodology that gave us all those items above is the same as that which is used in archaeology and cosmology to determine the age of the earth, or in climate science to understand the mechanisms of global warming.
It seems to me that the hypothesis that climate deniers have ostrich DNA in their ancestry would be just as likely.
True; as you say, “Science is not a religion, a faith or a way of life…” However, religion, faith, etc., often affect to degree to which people accept science. For example, people who are 100% committed to believing that there is no evolution will not accept evolution regardless of the evidence presented. They will offer other explanations, such as saying that the devil placed the fossils to undermine faith. They also insist that people who accept evolution thereby reject the existence of God, which is often not true.
Man all I can say is ARGH!!!
I had to set up a test for an electrical engineer I was working with who had at least 8 years of work experience under his belt. The test was to measure the heat at 20 points on a finned casting that a transmitter board was mounted to. He wanted to lay it flat on the table and I said we had to mount it vertical because the casting was designed to transfer heat to the air through convection and the hot air would rise drawing cool air into the fins. He asked and I kid you not “What’s convection?”. I thought he was kidding. He was dead serious. I learned this in grade school. He had an electrical engineering degree and 8+ years of experience and apearently never learned it and claimed he had never heard of it. You cannot have anything to do with electronics without knowing about the dissipation of heat. That’s what that whole “Watts” thing is all about.
I know plenty of people who have no idea about science at all but somehow think they are qualified to comment on our choices of energy.
Craig had a blog entitled “The Enemy of Reasonably Priced Clean Energy: Bad Ideas”. I contend that in fact a bigger enemy of reasonably priced renewable energy is people with “No Idea”! They cannot even imagine that it is possible and so they are against it.
This comment brought to you entirely by solar energy stored in batteries….because, you know, that stuff doesn’t work.
Brian McGowan
http://home.comcast.net/~bigvid
I’m not against renewable energy. There are certain limited situations where it is probably the best alternative. However, I do not see it as a practical source of energy to meet the requirements of large developed countries. If it can actually be made to work, the cost, including the huge amount of storage required, would make it politically impossible to implement.
There are many possible nuclear energy technologies available. I believe that we have not selected the best possible nuclear technologies and that the nuclear technologies which we are using should be phased out by better nuclear technologies. It is no more rational to condemn nuclear energy than it would have been to condemn automobiles because too many drivers broke their arms cranking them. Electric starters solved that problem, and better nuclear technologies can solve the problems associated with the nuclear technologies which we are currently using.
Frank; I agree, in principle, with your second paragraph, and if nuke was the only viable or best solution I would say go ahead, although I believe it isn’t.
However I’m not convinced with your statement; “If it [RE] can actually be made to work, the cost, including the huge amount of storage required, would make it politically impossible to implement”, because using the same logic you used to justify nuclear one can conclude that; ‘… Electric starters solved that problem, and better RE technologies can solve the problems associated with the RE technologies which we are currently using’ and, based on the evidence from my own investigations/research, I am sure it can.
Some of the cheapest sources of electricity are renewable, e.g. hydro and geothermal but there are only limited resources of these. Admittedly you have identified the main problems with many of the other current RE technologies (cost and storage) but have incorrectly assumed that they are insurmountable. Take PV for example; there is a company producing a CPV (Concentrating PV) system that can produce electricity as low as $0.06Aus (~$0.062 US) per KWh with no subsidies from utility scale installations, well below the average cost of electricity in the states and about 1/3 that in the UK. I am sure this will reduce significantly in the coming years just as conventional PV has. [ see -http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/]
Whilst there are still relatively cheap and accessible stocks of fossil fuels I am sure there will be situations where fossil generation can provide the cheapest solution, as long as the operators are allowed to dump the waste (CO2) in the atmosphere for nothing. However RE will become cheap enough in its own right, and probably cheaper than nuclear, and storage solutions will be found. So, unless one takes the attitude ‘all I’m interested in is getting the cheapest electricity possible and b****r the planet and the legacy for our descendants’, then I believe that renewables can solve the energy challenge but may get a little assistance from nuke and possibly CCS in the short term, although I not convinced that this will be absolutely necessary.
Nick,
It may well be that future developments could make RE more practical than it is now. Whether it could ever be made sufficiently practical to implement as a major source of power for large countries is questionable, but development should continue because it could very well be practical in small island nations and in remote areas where Diesel power is now being used; in fact, it is already practical in some situations.
About a year ago, I found a comparison of the amount of concrete and steel required for RE vs. coal and nuclear. The comparison was extremely lopsided; RE required far more steel and concrete, in addition to far more land area. You may wish to do your own research work on that.
Even with unlimited storage, wind and solar would have to have a name-plate rating several times greater than continuous sources of power just to compensate for the fact that they are not continuous sources of power. That greatly increases the investment costs. Then too, because of their diffuse nature, the cost of collecting and distributing the generated power is far greater. And currently, there is no acceptable storage technology available to make wind and solar acceptable. Also, China and India must be considered. The population density of China is about three times the population density of the U.S.; the population density of India is about eight times the population density of the U.S. Even if RE becomes practical in the U.S., the population density of China and India would probably make it impractical there.
As for nuclear power, the technology we have chosen, i.e., pressurized water thermal reactors using enriched uranium, is very unfortunate. That reactor type requires that natural uranium, which is 0.7% U235 with the balance being U238, be enriched to from 2% to 5% U235 by discarding most of the U238. So, even the enrichment process is exceedingly wasteful. The reactor then extracts about 0.5% of the available energy from the enriched fuel, with the rest being treated as waste even though most of it is actually unused fuel. Thus, our present nuclear technology is not even sustainable. It is possible to make fast breeder reactors which will operate on natural unenriched uranium and use the fuel much more efficiently, after which it can be reprocessed to get even more energy from it. However, the ones tested use sodium cooling which makes me very uneasy because of the reactivity of sodium. Even so, the risk is mainly to the investors since good design would protect the public even if the system is destroyed. There are ways being considered that would greatly reduce the risk of a sodium accident, including proposals to use molten lead instead of sodium as a coolant. It is even possible to make reactors which use thorium instead of uranium; a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) was successfully tested years ago (it was being considered to power bombers for the U.S. air force). It would most likely be much safer and more economical than uranium reactors and, by using the Brayton cycle instead of the Rankine cycle, could eliminate the need for water cooling. The following link provides more information on LFTR nuclear technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
As I see it, we should put much more effort into developing a better nuclear technology. If RE, through R & D becomes practical, fine, then we can implement it. Until then, we have little choice but to expand using our current nuclear technology until R & D produces a better nuclear technology or until RE becomes practical, if it ever does.