The View from Right Field

Global Warming and Carbon Credits

The best comment I have seen about global warming appeared in a column by Jim Hopkins in The New Zealand Herald on September 28, 2007:

"Carbon credits are just the papal indulgences of a new religion. A way to keep sinning and still feel virtuous."

Facts Are a Transient Thing – #2

Following up on this post is an article in the March 26 issue of Newsweek: "Health: Can Exercise Make You Smarter?" According to this article, recent findings tell us that not only can aerobic exercise make you smarter, it can keep you smarter longer.

What makes this particularly interesting is that some of these discoveries are the exact opposite of what scientists thought just ten years ago. For example, the article notes that last week "researchers announced that they had coaxed the human brain into growing new nerve cells, a process that for decades had been thought impossible".

Similarly, "[u]ntil the mid-‘90s, scientists thought the loss [of neurons in the brain] was permanent – that the brain couldn’t make new nerve cells to replace the dead ones. But animal studies over the last decade have overturned that assumption".

This article reminds us how important it is to maintain a healthy skepticism when we are told that questions have been answered and nobody can disagree. The fact is what science "knows" today is some times wrong tomorrow.

Therefore, when it comes to acting on what science "knows," we need to be careful to stay within ourselves, especially when it comes to big programs over long periods with huge price tags. Money is not unlimited. We need to make sure the money we do spend does the greatest good for the most people at the lowest cost.

We need to remember that just because there is a problem does not mean we know the solution. While doing something may make us feel better, if the money is not spent wisely, other problems we know how to solve will go unaddressed because of a lack of money.

When we see a problem, it is not easy to not do something, to not rush off with a big solution to a big problem. But sometimes we have to. Global warming, anyone?

Thoughts on the Rehabilitation of DDT – and Global Warming

The recent decision by the World Health Organization to lift its ban on some uses of DDT in the fight against malaria was interesting in at least a couple or ways.

First, it is interesting because it was Rachel Carson’s attack on DDT in Silent Spring that helped start the modern environmental movement. Ms. Carson’s book led to a world-wide ban on DDT that, because other anti-malaria methods were not as effective, resulted in countless additional deaths from malaria in the Third World. This was particularly unfortunate because the science against these uses of DDT was never proven. (If Ms Carson had been a Republican, I am sure Democrats would have been saying by now, "Carson lied, people died.")

Second, it is interesting because it is another example, similar to the story of the comatose woman in my post "Facts Are a Transient Thing," of how often what we "know" turns out to be wrong.

Which brings me to global warming. Scientists tell us that global warming is irrefutable and that something must be done. Of course, environmentalists told us that DDT was bad and had to be totally banned. Doctors knew what was going on in the minds of comatose patients, except they were wrong.

This is my concern with the view that says we must do something about global warming because we know what causes it and we know it is a problem. Well, even if we "know" it now, will we still know it in the future?

But we are told that, even if we are not totally sure about global warming, we still need to do something because we cannot take a chance. The problem with this approach is twofold. Money is not unlimited (in spite of what those whose answer to every problem is to tax the rich might think), so the money we spend on global warming cannot be spent other things. As shown in the report of the Copenhagen Consensus 2004, it is not at all clear spending money to combat global warming is the best way to help the most people.

But even if money were not limited or if we had enough money to combat global warming plus do the other things we need to do, what if doing something actually hurts? What if doing something makes things worse? Maybe we will be interfering in something that we do not understand or that we have gotten wrong. Maybe we will stop the earth from naturally correcting the problem or maybe we will stop from happening what needs to happen.

We need to remember how often what we know turns out to be wrong. We need to understand how little we really know. We need to approach problems with a humbleness of spirit and intellect, and as we consider how to make things better, we must be sure we do not make things worse.

Facts Are a Transient Thing

Sharon Begley has a fascinating article in her Science Journal column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, subscription required): "There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought". Begley’s article discusses a report in the current issue of Science magazine describing a 23-year-old accident victim who suffered a severe brain injury. The woman fell into a coma and eventually "fit the medical criteria for being in a ‘vegetative state.’"

But tests of the woman’s brain activity show results quite unlike what is considered normal for people in such a state. The young woman’s "brain activity [is] consistent with conscious awareness." Begley goes on: "Although the woman fits the diagnosis of being in a vegetative state, her brain activity raises the intriguing (or disturbing) possibility that there is a fully conscious being locked in that unresponsive body after all."

But what I find most interesting about this article is not the woman herself or even what it might say about at least some people in comas. What is most interesting is what this says about what we "know" about things.

Before this study, medical science had some pretty clear ideas about people in comas or vegetative states. Now, it appears, we may not be so sure.

When I was growing up, only Saturn had rings. Now we know Neptune and Uranus have them, too.

In George Washington’s time drawing blood with leeches was proper medical practice. Now it was considered barbaric. I fully expect physicians in the future will someday consider our chemotherapy treatments as primitive as doctors today think of leeches.

The point is how often what we "know," what science "knows," turns out to be wrong. This is not a result of prejudice or deliberate misleading. These are honest mistakes, made by people doing their best.

But even though they are doing their best or trying their hardest, what they think they know as fact turns out to be wrong. We need to remember this when people talk about what experts "know," and we need to approach "facts" with a caution coming from an understanding that much of what we "know" is merely today’s best wrong guess.

[Update 9/9/06, 6:45 p.m.  An article in the Chicago Tribune on the report in Science can be found here.]