Sonia you’re not a primate scientist but you’re a very distinguished scientist and astrophysicist what do you think about when people say look this is not settled science there are still questions I sometimes think to myself look there are a lot of questions still about Einstein’s theories that led to nuclear fission but we still know that nuclear power plants do operate and they do provide electricity and yeah so what’s happening here is they’re people who have cultural political religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry-pick one scientific result or another you can find a scientific paper that says practically anything and the press which I count you as part of the press will sometimes find a single paper so here’s a new truth if this study holds it but an emergent scientific truth for it to become an objective truth the truth that is true whether or not you believe in it it requires more than one scientific paper it requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction all pointing to the same consequences that’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct this is a known correspondence if you want to find the 3% of the papers or the 1% of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that that is simply irresponsible and what how else do you establish a scientific truth if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiments and scientific observations Abraham Lincoln the first Republican President signed into law in 1963 a year when he had important things to be thinking about he signed into law the the National Academy of Sciences because he knew that science mattered and should matter in governance and and it and you know we build our cities on the basis of science we win you know when when we fall ill we don’t we don’t go to the local witch doctor right go to a doctor even though all that science is still you know I mean there are advances gonna be made none of it is settled in the sense well so you know what it’s settled you know it is settled settled science is the science that has come out of large bodies of research that all agree when you see scientists arguing and I tweeted I said if you think scientists want to always agree with one another you’ve never been to a scientific conference because the people are duking it out but what are they fighting over not the settled science that’s been in the books we’re fighting over the the the bleeding edge of what is not yet known and and that is the natural course of science and a few as a journalist want to eavesdrop on that meeting you’ll think scientists don’t know anything about anything but is the body of knowledge that is accumulated over the decades that precedes this that becomes the Canon of what if you’re gonna base policy and legislation on that’s what you should be thinking about so you would say this is a moment to listen to climate science I think this 50 inches of I can’t even picture how many raindrops is that 50 inches of rain in Houston this is this is a shot across our about a hurricane the width of Florida going up the center of Florida these are these are shots across our bow that what what will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it even news reports on this channel talked about the the fact that we have fewer deaths per hurricane why because you now know weeks in advance we have models that have trajectories of hurricanes in a decades gone by it was like there’s a hurricane there we don’t know should I stay should I go and then you stay and you die okay so to cherry-pick science it’s an odd thing for a scientist to observe and I don’t I didn’t grow up in a country where that was a common phenomenon we went to the moon and people knew Science and Technology fed those discoveries and the day to politicians are arguing about whether science is true it means nothing gets done nothing it’s the beginning of the end of an infant to democracy as I’ve said many times what I’d rather happen is you recognize what is scientifically truth then you have your political debate so in the case of energy policy whatever it’s you you don’t ask is the science right you ask should we have carbon credits or or whatever right response right exactly what is the economic dimension of this that’s where the politics needs to come in and it’s not the longer we delay the more I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our greatest cities are on the oceans and water’s edges historically for Commerce and transportation and as storms kick in as water levels rise they are the first to go and we don’t have a system we don’t have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles that’s this is happening faster than our ability to respond that could have a huge economic consequences on that sobering note Neil deGrasse Tyson always a pleasure and we are in a hurry to read the book thanks
The Truth Shall Set You FREE!
