The current buzz words “Go with science” or “Science is settled” are political jabberwocky; not science.
Anyone paying even scant attention to the COVID debate about putting our children back in schoolrooms, should know how chaotic and unsettled science can be; or, that it has become so politicized as to be contradictory, confusing and an uncertain basis for rational decisions.
There are many things scientists don’t fully understand from the ground beneath our feet to the origin of life on Earth; or the onset and ending of ice ages; or when humans shifted from hunting and gathering to farming.
Scientists don’t know how or why clouds form; why there is so much water on Earth or how it formed or where it came from; and why our climate is changing so rapidly (once again).
Here’s a startling scientific finding from research being done west of Boston in the Harvard Forest: “Natural processes in the soil contribute more than six times as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year than does the burning of fossil fuels.” Oh, my! (Harper’s Magazine, June 2020, p. 38.)
Settled science told us there we nine planets. Oops; in 2006 the ninth planet — Pluto — was kicked out of the planetary class so now school kids learn there are eight planets. Alas, the school kids don’t learn how little we really know about our own solar system and its relation to climate change.
The ultimate jabberwocky is renaming the latter years of the Holocene Era the Anthropocene. This new name comes from (politicized) science claiming humans caused climate change with its (politically) scientific conclusion that we “must stop climate change, now.”
This is the exact anthropocentric arrogance that got us onto the precipice of climate disaster that now portends a new age of dislocations, evolution and extinctions for many Earthly creatures including our own homo sapiens.
Paul M. Craig
Northampton