Climate Change and Our Regard for Science

Earlier today, I was driving to a lunch meeting with a potential investor in our clean energy investment opportunities, and I had the good fortune to find a lecture by Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts on the radio.  The talk brought back good memories, as I was heavily into him when I was a young man in the early 1970s. 

Apparently when Watts was a little boy living in London, he happened upon a store with the sign in the window that read “Philosophic Instruments.” Curiosity got the better of him, and he went inside to see what the proprietor possibly could have meant by this, only to find that the store was filled with things like chronometers, scales, slide-rules, and so on—things that we, in our world today, would call “scientific instruments.” 

As it turns out, it was not too long ago that science was referred to as “natural philosophy,” i.e., the love of wisdom of natural phenomena.  This all goes back to Aristotle, who taught us that humankind has an innate affinity, i.e., takes a basic joy, in learning and exploring the ways of our world, both through our senses and through our intellect.

Having said all this, our civilization 2300 years later seems to have lost a great deal of that capacity for joy and the love of learning and science, and, simultaneously, lost some level of respect for those who make science their life’s work.  In no place is this more obvious than our discussions on climate change.  There is no debate about the reality of human-caused climate change among scientists, but our popular culture seems to think it has a right to its own opinion, and views these scientific theories as “just one way” of understanding the universe. 

Although the scientific community is generally quite indifferent to this rather strange way with which it is perceived, there does seem to be a few things that ruffle their feathers.  For example, they’re not at all pleased that several U.S. states have inserted chapters on creationism into school science books.  I’m sure that the typical scientist doesn’t want to forbid our children from learning about the Book of Genesis, but rather wants to point out that creationism, while it may be a belief, is not a scientific theory based on things like fossil evidence, modern molecular biology, etc., the body of which is growing more robust by the day.    

In any case, it doesn’t seem like an easy time for these “natural philosophers.”