Science and the seven senses

It goes without saying that as a scientist I honor education above almost any other human endeavor.

The terrifying success of corporate attacks on climate change facts and predictions is the latest observation to arouse the reflexive response that we must strive harder to educate our companions on this planet.

The basic science is simple, clear and easily demonstrable. Carbon dioxide molecules hold heat. You can measure it in a Bell jar or my father's greenhouses, or the domed stadia. Simple straight forward it's just math to figure out how much does what. Why big storms that bring ice to usually warm areas?  Just fill up a pot, or to make it more realistic a big glass bubble with water.  Put a flame under one section of it. Depending on the size of the flame this area becomes warmer while other areas remain cool. The fluid begins to move near the flame, rising and circling; low flame, most of the action is nearer the flame. Juice up the flame and the bubbles get bigger and the currents expand to cooler regions. They take some cold water to warm places and replace the cold with warm. Hike it up a bit more and the currents and bubbles get really big and  move faster and faster.  As any cook will tell you,  until the entire pot of water is not evenly hot until there is a full boil. (If you are going to cook rice or spaghetti evenly you don't put it in until that happens.)

As with the spaghetti pot, if the warming of the planet's atmosphere by our heat conserving effluences continues to build it will boil.

The little example above is middle school science.  It presents the concepts and more important the method of examining observable data and their meaning.

Simple. Why don't we teach it? For most in this country we have. Doesn't work. In fact it seems recently to lead to good collective decision making less and less. Delving a little deeper  I come to the conclusion that as applied to human life and culture truth has always been determined politically and not by scientists.

On reflex I think science, good factual numbers and observations as above, should rule.

But on reflection I think of my generations'  elevation of  science and technology to highest authority and the countless disasters it has caused; taking many lives, causing unimaginable suffering and really coming close to dehumanizing our civil society.

At some level I am relieved to see skepticism, even from the creationists, flat-earthers, birthers, warming deniers and all. But fears that science driven truth will be totally rejected and lost are strong. Paradoxically, should that happen the results would be the same.

We must culture and nurture that "political" aspect of decision making that validates and makes sense of what science shows us but we cannot renounce information that comes to us by any of the seven senses.

Political or not, we are living in times when truth is in great danger. To preserve reason, perhaps to survive as a species, there must be a road forward that resembles that backward to a time when science, religion and politics were one. We need it all in this organic box Osler called the temple where life resides.