This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 14, 2013 - I teach a night school course in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at a local university. To encourage classroom dialog, I tell my students that the only stupid question is the one they fail to ask because they’ll never learn the answer to it. Alas, there are exceptions to every rule as Deb Feyerick demonstrated rather convincingly last month.
Feyerick is an anchorwoman on CNN. She was interviewing Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) about an asteroid approaching the Earth on a near-miss trajectory when she asked the scientist whether the cosmic boulder might have been caused by global warming.
Apparently seeking to defuse the embarrassing situation, Nye muttered something about “meteorology” and “meteor” being etymologically related terms. Under the circumstances, his response was both humane and quick-witted.
It’s tempting to suggest that Feyerick was merely playing to stereotype. She is, after all, a blonde — and an attractive one at that. Those physical attributes have as much to do with scientific literacy as climate change has to the trajectory of meteors. Besides, she isn't the only one confused on the topic.
The Aug. 8, 2011, St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured an editorial entitled “Climate Conundrum.” Among the weather anomalies cited as evidence of “human-caused climate change” was “the Japanese tsunami and earthquake.”
As sixth-graders learn in Earth Science classes, the tsunami was caused by the earthquake, which in turn was the result of continental drift. To their credit, the author made no attempt to explain how atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide might influence the plate tectonics of the planet.
I don’t wish to single out the Post and CNN for scorn — they’re just two sources I use a lot. The former is the print daily in the city in which I live and the latter is a cable channel I watch frequently because it seems to reside in the ideological no-man’s land between MSNBC and Fox News. Other news outlets are hardly immune to similar blunder.
We normally shrug off idiotic broadcast misstatements as harmless bloopers, easily dismissed with a headshake and a chuckle. But the adage to the contrary notwithstanding, the things we don’t know actually can hurt us. This is especially true when our ignorance provides the foundation for public policy.
Some while back, I saw Chris Matthews conduct a particularly aggressive interview with some hapless soul on MSNBC. Again, the topic was human-induced climate change.
Matthews — who I suspect was an annoying child — is legendary for asking a question and then talking over his guest’s best effort to answer it. On this day, he was at his rapid-fire finest.
As the guest struggled to opine that the man-made component of global warming had yet to be accurately gauged, his inquisitor became increasingly agitated. Finally, in the midst of a discussion about greenhouse gases, Matthews interrupted to ask the subject if he believed in evolution.
The guy was clearly caught off guard by the non sequitur but finally recovered sufficiently to ask Matthews what the origin of the species had to do with today’s temperature. The obvious answer to that one was “not much.”
But that wasn’t Matthews’ point. He essentially accused the guest of being an anti-scientific member of the fundamentalist religious right — some wild-eyed fanatic who believed Adam and Eve frolicked with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago. Interestingly, the basis for this apparent conclusion was the latter man’s efforts to analyze empirical evidence offered in support of a scientific theory.
Watching this strange spectacle, I was struck by the irony of the situation. Matthews, the putative champion of science, implied that his opponent was a heretic for questioning a hypothesis. Huh? Isn’t that exactly what scientists are supposed to do with hypotheses?
Until some time in the 16th century, it was widely believed that all swans were white. In fact, the statement to that effect was cited at the time as an example of a verified scientific truth. Then, somebody traveled to Australia and met a black one. In the logic of science, the black swan constituted the null hypothesis, which, once proved, negates the theory.
Today, our cumulative scientific knowledge has never been greater. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t scientists. And if student achievement scores are any indication, a large cohort of the population may be regressing toward the Dark Ages.
Yet we expect our elected representatives to formulate public policies based on a variety of scientific assertions few understand. As a result, we wind up practicing a kind of faith-based science, blindly relying on the opinions of experts Given the complexity of the issues and the general ignorance of the basic principles involved, there’s really no practical alternative.
Of course, if we’re going to entrust our future to strangers, it might be useful to distinguish between scientists and charlatans. Here’s a hint: When a scientist encounters the black swan, he kills the theory. When a charlatan meets one, he kills the swan.
M.W. Guzy is a regular contributor to the Beacon.