Friday, December 18, 2009
snow & Ball
Snow brings a frisson of enjoyable unpredictability to London, the prospect of the urban landscape transformed into a shining, unfamiliar environment. But the Times chose to see it as an opportunity to threaten children, by devoting its children's page in T2 to snow and its imminent disappearance from the planet if we don't take action to stop global warming.
what action, exactly, can children take to control the balance of gases in the Earth's atmosphere? What purpose can it serve to blackmail them, except to put moral pressure on their parents and sidestep scientific, technical, social and political debates?
Meanwhile, at a seasonal celebration of rationality and free speech, respected science broadcaster Johnny Ball, a man who inspired generations of scientists, was being booed and shouted off stage for expressing his unorthodox opinons on climate change. I cannot better Brendan O'Neill's article about this on Spiked, but I do think that people who call themselves skeptics should hesitate to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and that people who call themselves humanists should show more respect for their fellow humans, even those who don't follow their own (startlingly narrow) range of opinions and behaviours.
Another skeptic, James Randi, has recently put himself on record as a thoughtful sceptic of the climate change orthodoxy. He asserts mildly that the rush to consensus on what will happen to the climate, whose fault it will be, and what we ought to do about it, is premature and a tad unscientific. He points out that climate science tends to ignore the great rule of sceptical enquiry, which is to attack your own favourite theories as if you were trying to disprove them (not to tuck away inconvenient parcels of evidence to hinder your opponents from doing just that). And finally he expresses a political opinion, that "more attention to disease control, better hygienic conditions for food production and clean water supplies, as well as controlling the filth that we breathe from fossil fuel use, are problems that should distract us from fretting about baking in Global Warming."
For which, of course his erstwhile fans and fellow skeptics are shaking their heads over him as if a Salvation Army bandmaster had been caught, sodden with drink, in a brothel.
Free speech, in science as everywhere else, must be defended for everybody, not just for those who already agree with you and all your friends.
what action, exactly, can children take to control the balance of gases in the Earth's atmosphere? What purpose can it serve to blackmail them, except to put moral pressure on their parents and sidestep scientific, technical, social and political debates?
Meanwhile, at a seasonal celebration of rationality and free speech, respected science broadcaster Johnny Ball, a man who inspired generations of scientists, was being booed and shouted off stage for expressing his unorthodox opinons on climate change. I cannot better Brendan O'Neill's article about this on Spiked, but I do think that people who call themselves skeptics should hesitate to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and that people who call themselves humanists should show more respect for their fellow humans, even those who don't follow their own (startlingly narrow) range of opinions and behaviours.
Another skeptic, James Randi, has recently put himself on record as a thoughtful sceptic of the climate change orthodoxy. He asserts mildly that the rush to consensus on what will happen to the climate, whose fault it will be, and what we ought to do about it, is premature and a tad unscientific. He points out that climate science tends to ignore the great rule of sceptical enquiry, which is to attack your own favourite theories as if you were trying to disprove them (not to tuck away inconvenient parcels of evidence to hinder your opponents from doing just that). And finally he expresses a political opinion, that "more attention to disease control, better hygienic conditions for food production and clean water supplies, as well as controlling the filth that we breathe from fossil fuel use, are problems that should distract us from fretting about baking in Global Warming."
For which, of course his erstwhile fans and fellow skeptics are shaking their heads over him as if a Salvation Army bandmaster had been caught, sodden with drink, in a brothel.
Free speech, in science as everywhere else, must be defended for everybody, not just for those who already agree with you and all your friends.
