A Twist on Climate Change, Risk, and Uncertainty
In this country, we teach kids that science is a collection of hard facts. We teach them that scientists come up with a hypothesis—an idea that might explain some aspect of how the world works. Scientists then test their hypotheses and find out whether it’s correct or not. If it’s correct, then it becomes something that children must memorize. That story is true. But it’s also vastly oversimplified. It gives people the impression that every scientific question can be answered with “yes” or “no.” And if it can’t, then the real answer is probably “no.”
That perspective might work okay when you’re sitting in a high school science lab, studying the digestive system of a fetal pig. But it doesn’t work as well in the real world. And it leaves people completely unprepared to understand something like climate change, and how we assess the risks associated with it.
I note that “That story is true” is correct, but we would be better off if it weren’t. That’s one of the common themes in any discussion in the blogohedron about scientific literacy and science education: reducing science to a list of facts misrepresents the essence of science and also tends to kill enthusiasm for learning science.
That’s not to say that facts aren’t a part of science and science literacy. I think you can distill literacy down to three components — facts, concepts and procedures. You can’t do much without remembering a few facts, and you need to have a basic grasp of some concepts in order to see how those facts fit together. That’s part and parcel of any discussion/vote on what the most important element of scientific literacy — everyone trots out their favorite “must know” tidbit.
Uncertainty is inescapable in science, and you have to account for its presence in interpreting any scientific result, which is a concept that needs to be included in the list of what comprises basic science literacy. We have to fight the attempts to turn it into a pejorative, since a common implication is that any uncertainty means that we know nothing — a world is portrayed that’s black and white, with no tolerance for shades of grey.
Worry less about the sloppy parts of science than about fundamental errors commited in the name of academic elegance. Euclid was The Truth for 2000 years. Euclid contains no errors of derivation. Euclid’s one non-coincident line parallel to a given line is no better than postulating zero or infinity lines (though more convenient). Reality is a more interesting place than originally imagined. A big danger is being stuck with what you factually have as your appetites grow. A bigger danger is trading faith for observation.
Noether’s theorems plus symmetries seemingly provide an inescapable set of rules for all else. Local time is homogeneous, local mass-energy is conserved. No “energy-plus” anything, right at the start. Local vacuum is homogeneous, local linear momentum is conserved. Local vacuum is isotropic, local angular momentum is conserved. Etc. Positive feeback is a hog trough of hurt – economics, psychology, meteorology – but strong conservation laws are never locally violated.
Noether’s theorems do not include discontinuous symmetries, explicitly. The only absolutely discontinuous symmetry is parity, the stark reversal of coordinates’ signs: [( /-)x,( /-)y,( /-)z] goes to [(-/ )x,(-/ )y,(-/ )z]. In principle, one could be real world very naughty with a metaphoric pair of shoes. Conservation laws would be weakened for this singular pathological case. Somebody should look,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
Two geometric parity Eotvos experiments
Sloppy is bad. Wrong is worse.