Gotta love "Democracy Now"!
To human-caused global warming deniers: Why has the political establishment taken such effort to filter the scientists, within our own system, from communicating their findings??? As you may notice in the YouTube video it occurred under democratic and republican administrations.
To those who envision science as another social construct (albeit a useful one): Why would a social structure (scientism) continue that, based on its very purpose, is used to objectify, and cast doubt on social constructs themselves? Wouldn't science, then, be self-eliminating?
Just fodder for discussion.
HH =)
5 comments:
My only issue with the global warming crowd is that they never account for previous periods of global warming which ended the previous ice ages. The planet has had a number of periods of drastic warming and cooling, going back to long before humans were around. I get nervous when I hear that "everyone agrees" that global warming is man made and that if you don't believe that it is man made then you are essentially a dolt. Not to say that it can't be man-made, I just don't know. It probably doesn't hurt to be on the safe side and reduce CO2 emissions anyway.
However, I am definitely all for ending our use of oil/fossil fuels, primarily so that the Middle East can go back to being a bunch of broke camel-herders, as God intended.
I wouldn't say this is an example of government anti-scientism. More like a government acting in its own insane interests by censoring threatening information about the direct consequences of its policies.
Rod, who is this "global warming crowd" that doesn't account for previous periods of global warming? I know there aren't any climatologists in that crowd. And probably not many scientists, period.
HH wrote: "Why would a social structure (scientism) continue that, based on its very purpose, is used to objectify and cast doubt on social constructs themselves?"
A whole lot of assumptions there: science is used to objectify and cast doubt on social constructs? That's the "very purpose" of science?
First, I thought you said that science is just a method--that it doesn't have a purpose. Second, I don't think science exists to challenge social constructs. "Scientism", in my view, exists to prioritize one form of knowledge (measurable and specialized knowledge) over others--to aid in the process of making the universe controllable. That clearly has social and political value in the world we now live in. Granted, there are some people out there (a good part of the "global warming crowd") who use science correctly and not merely to service the consumer culture, but 'scientism' clearly has its place within our world. All of our social constructs--religion, entertainment, economic theory, the electoral process--sometimes challenge the status quo. But that doesn't mean they're self-eliminating (or that they don't primarily promote hierarchy). We live in a really complex time, when all kinds of tools can be and are used or abused. You CAN use the Master's tools to dismantle the Master's house, but that doesn't mean the tools were created for that purpose.
Thanks for the clip. I might have to send that to my dad.
I meant that when we see a story on CNN, etc. on global warming that I would like to see more direct comparisons between CO2 increases after large volcano eruptions or debris from comet collisions that led to previous warming periods with increased CO2 levels from fossil fuel emissions today.
Not to say that this data isn't out there (I'm sure it must be), but I would like to see an emphasis on these comparisons in the general media when talking about climate change. I would like to see the data, but I don't know where to go to get it in a form that I can understand.
Some of us (i.e., me) don't have time or are too lazy to seek out this information or weren't paying attention when it was more widely presented. If you have any good links, please share.
As far as the Bushies are concerned - I am not at all surprised that they would suppress scientific findings on climate change, seeing as how they favor teaching creationism and oppose stem-cell research.
Rod,
I musty agree with Shane here. I know of NO MCGW (man-caused global warming) advocates who have ever denied that variation has occurred. I read some excerpts from a doubter on the CNN website. He (climatologist) claimed that we only have data going back 100 years or so. That was simply untrue. We have ice samples collected that age back hundreds of thousands of years.
To be sure, I haven't spent the time studying I ought to be as certain as tne national academy of scientists, nor the World Science Associatoin.
However, given the funding of oil and coal companies for the global warming deniers crowd I am, at least, suspicious of the biases there.
As your suspicion of Bush admin. itself I agree with you. Yet, more globally, I am of the mind that those who have nothing to hide, hide nothing. When anyone attempts to suppress information it is, without exception, nefarious and subject to a high degree of suspicion.
As you aptly put, who really should care. No one argues that pollution is a bad thing, and that renewable energy is a moral coarse of action we ought to follow.
Shane,
You are correct that I have articluated (on more than one occasion) that sience is a method and not a philosophy. But it is a method for what purpose? To reveal what "is." If a belief that we hold is demonstrated untrue as the result of scientific endavor, then has science, then not contributed to doubt?
If scientism is analyzed via science, and found to be unsupported by objective study then wouldn't science as a socially biased "ism" be self defeating?
I will state that it is still my view that the scientist comes to the table with biases and a social learning history which may skew the outcomes in certain ways. However, I am still of the opinion that when applied, science provides the only means of determining with high certainty the truths of nature.
The questions of "ought" are, in my view, question of "reason." And subjects of philosophy.
What I do not understand from your world view, and Ron's, is what are that other possible ways to know/understand? Other than reason, and science I mean?
I have more, but my battery is dying...
Trav
Rod,
You're right. CNN and the mainstream media do a horrendous job of presenting the issue of global warming (and any other issue for that matter, other than who Britney Spears is dating). And the fact that they, like Al Gore in his movie, oversimplify the issue does nothing but provide fodder for those who WANT to ignore the real scientific evidence that current global warming is a man-made phenomena. Here's a fairly good link: http://www.realclimate.org/
There are other good sources of info. I found when, years ago, I researched this issue, but I can't remember most of them, and, as a non-climatologist, I had to work pretty hard to make sense of it all. Fortunately, I have a little more leisure time than your average Nine to Fiver--and I have a computer. But CNN wouldn't have been any help at all.
HH,
Most of your questions I think I've responded to already, so I'd rather not go over old ground. Here's how I answered your last question in the comments to my blog post called "Postscript":
"There are LOTS of other forms of knowledge. When a turtle digs a hole to bury, conceal, and protect her eggs, or when a predator attacks its prey from behind where the prey is least likely to counter-attack, or when birds improve their survival rates by migrating South during Winter, they are relying on instinctual knowledge. They didn't receive that knowledge via the method. And I think you could make a good argument that what's known as intuition has something to do with instinctual knowledge, as well.
When you practice free throw after free throw or putt after putt or serve after serve, you're gaining kinesthetic knowledge, which, again, has nothing to do with the method. (And I believe you could extend the idea of kinesthetic knowledge to more than just athletic activity--to meditation, to bird-watching, to smiling, to sex, to thinking....).
When you learn how to be a better parent, friend, conversationalist, or party-goer, you're not relying on the method but on knowledge that comes via social interaction and emotional awareness (maybe a combination of kinesthetic and instinctual knowledge or a whole new category)--EQ knowledge, in other words.
I could go on and on here. Most of what we do in our daily lives is informed by non-scientific knowledge. And, I would argue, almost all of the things that make our lives worth living, namely, creating quality relationships, are uninformed by scientific knowledge."
(The scientific method, in other words, in comparison to other means of knowledge-production, has barely made a dent in defining what "is", as you put it)
The URL for that post is http://asanoutcast.blogspot.com/2008/02/postscript.html
(sorry, i'm too lazy to put that in as a link). I think all of your questions can be answered in that post and the subsequent comments.
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