It's strange the conversations one can have as a reporter. A while ago, I was speaking to someone who claimed to have definitive proof of the falsity of quantum theory.
Though he had no more than a high school physics education, he was all but certain that the brutally complicated, mathematically-intense physical theory that had given Einstein hang-ups close to a century ago just didn't work. Wave-particle duality, quanta, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum entanglement? All bunk. Some of the greatest mathematical minds of this century, working with revolutionary mathematical concepts, conducting technically sophisticated experiments altering our understanding of the very nature of reality? I was told they had been mistaken.
The dismissal took all of a few minutes and used nothing more than extremely simple mathematical concepts. I remained understandably unconvinced, even though my understanding of quantum mechanics didn't go beyond the debates that were happening in the mid-1920s.
Now to be fair, this didn't actually happen. Outside of a university physics department, you won't find many arguments about quantum physics, except from armchair pontificators with nothing better to do. But switch the science, and suddenly people are up in arms.
Young-earth creationists, for example, joyously explain away the century of work done after Darwin in innumerable fields of science, in a vainglorious attempt to declare the Bible scientifically accurate.
But in the real conversation mentioned above, it was climate-change science that was under attack, from the forces of seventh-grade science, questionable quotations and a hearty dose of pomposity. The script was more or less the same. Thousands of scientists working in diverse fields with some of the most sophisticated computer programs in the world for decades are wrong. Never mind that over 90 per cent of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming, or that there simply isn't a single scientific body that disagrees humans are responsible for climate change. They're wrong.
I never responded to his anti-science rant, and with good reason. I'm no more qualified to talk about climate change than he is. And, furthermore, science isn't purely democratic. It doesn't matter what the majority of the public think.
The fact that we were having this discussion in the first place revealed some interesting things about human psychology and the nature of science.
The first, obvious thing is that some people look to the proportion of climate scientists who agree with the idea of anthropogenic global warming and see a different number. Rather than focus on the overwhelming majority, they focus on the small minority who agree with their preconceived notions.
The reasons for this are complex and psychological. But they are also related to the definition of science itself.
Philosophers have struggled with the definition of science for centuries, but modern philosophers of science have never disagreed with a basic component of the definition - that science does not give us truth. The few creationists with a simple understanding of evolution love to point to unresolved questions, controversies and disagreements within the scientific community as evidence that the science around evolution is no good. Scientists can't explain how a certain organ was formed, disagree about a certain chemical process or realized they were wrong in some of their prior assumptions? Creationists proudly proclaim it would be best throw out the whole theory.
But science is best understood as a raucous, diverse forum angling towards accuracy and accurate prediction. The process invariably involves mistakes, doubts, misplaced assumptions and tyrannical paradigms. Science is not, philosophically, concerned with "truth," except tangentially, because there is always the creeping assumption that a new discovery might be wrong.
If we think of new scientific discoveries as "true," it's easy to become disheartened if they are disproven a few years later. I think, for example of T. Rex drawings from my childhood showing the dinosaur dragging its tail. As I grew older, the picture changed, showing the tail perched in the air for balance. Now the same T. Rex is shown covered in feathers. None of these drawings were "true," and none of them will be. But they represent the closest scientists were able to get to the truth at the time. According to our current understanding, the feathered, balancing T. Rex is the most accurate picture we can make.
The same is true of climate change research. Like any science, it has seen its fair share of doubt, confusion and revision. Certain critical aspects of the theory, including predictions about cloud formation, remain unresolved. The global climate is not something that lends itself to easy predictions.
But tens of thousands of scientists from countries around the world, studying in innumerable different fields have come to the same conclusion: that the earth's climate is changing, that this change has to do with human activity, that the results have the potential to be catastrophic.
Could this be wrong? Absolutely, just as Newtonian mechanics were scrapped, the Bohr Atom was relegated to textbooks, phrenology was dumped and "racial" studies were deemed unscientific. But it nevertheless represents the best, most informed, most researched guess of the only people in the world qualified to guess in the first place.
Ask most people about the standard model in particle physics, and they will quickly become very quiet. The deficiencies of the standard model have plagued scientists for decades and concern literally everything in the universe - every particle and every force. The search for solutions to the standard model's problems has been, and remains, one of the largest sources of controversy in the scientific world.
Anthropogenic climate change and evolution, on the other hand, are accepted more or less universally by the scientific community that studies them, and yet everyone else seems to think that there's a "controversy."
I've considered writing a column about global warming for a while. But I was concerned that, as a layperson with no special training in climate science, I would be no better than the man I had avoided an argument with. I didn't want to write a column filled with evidence I only half-understood with a request at the end to trust what I was saying. After all, I'm not a scientific authority, and there was probably enough research done this year on climate change to spend a lifetime studying.
So instead of finishing with a request to listen to me, a community newspaper reporter, I'll finish with a request to learn humility, especially where science is concerned. Some people in our society have devoted their lives to studying questions far beyond the understanding of 99 per cent of the world's population. They will not always be right. But if you feel the need to disagree with the world's scientists, you'd better have a damned good reason.
