Re: [asa] Global Warming, Ethics, and the Precautionary Principle

>>> gordon brown <gbrown@Colorado.EDU> 01/25/07 6:31 PM >>>also speaks (and
eloquently) for me, when he writes:

"I get tired of reading this sort of thing. Human induced global warming is

a serious but difficult scientific issue. I can't imagine any scientist
worthy of the name who looks to a nonscientist politician to give him the
answers to scientific questions. ... scientists don't look to
politicians to do their science for them."

The process of theory formation is not entirely immune from political
influence, I would say, but careers can be made on the basis of persuading
the scientific community that the currently received view is off target. If
we were to require "certain demonstration" (as Roberto Cardinal Bellarmine
put it in Galiileo's day, relative to the earth's motion) of everything
before it can be considered scientific knowledge, then we might as well toss
out most of the science since Galileo--even though we base much of our lives
and our technical successes on its basic accuracy. "Proof" is for
mathematicians, not scientists; "truth" in science is more open, empirical,
and tentative than "proof" in mathematics (though I grant some contingency
also to mathematical "proofs" as well, since they have to be acknowledged as
such by a community of specialists), as Alfred Tarski and others have
argued. Heck, we don't even have "proof" in the sense of "certain
demonstration" for the earth's motion around the sun--no one, flat no one,
has ever gone milliions of miles "above" the plane of the solar system,
stayed there for several years, and watched the planets go around the sun.

Janice, you need to keep thinking for yourself (I have no doubt you will),
and if you are not convinced that our use of fossil fuels has fueled global
warming, then you are not convinced. But you really need to give up this
song and dance about how naive and stupid these poor, duped scientists are
by the lefties. If the evidence weren't there, we wouldn't have anything
like such a high percentage of experts from many different disciplines
reaching similar conclusions. This is definitely short of "proof", but it
looks "true" to a whole lot of pretty sceptical people--ie, to people whose
training makes them intuitively sceptical about hypotheses, people who look
pretty hard for ways to test ideas vs impersonal "nature."

Ted

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Received on Fri Jan 26 09:02:51 2007