When Science and Politics Clash

I found a short article written by Joel Achenbach (of the Washington Post) in the May issue of National Geographic very interesting. It discusses the differences in perception on global warming -- those who work with uncertainty (scientific theories) and those who work in absolutes (politics). Given my belief in global warming and having a background in science, I'm obviously on the scientific side of this line. ;)

Since the article is short, I'll post it here verbatim.

"Last fall many people asked a simple question: Did global warming cause Hurricane Katrina?

Here's a complicated answer: Global warming hasn't caused any specific storm. There is no evidence that it has changed the number of hurricanes. But there is new data showing that, as seas have warmed in recent decades, tropical cyclones, such as hurricanes, have become more intense. So no, but yes.

But before anyone fires off an angry email, we need to remember that global warming is both a scientific and a political topic, and science and politics don't mix well. Science deals with tentative conclusions, and politics in absolutes. Science is invariably an enterprise built on uncertainty, and people who make policy decisions see uncertainty as a reason to do nothing at all (or to demand more studies).

Journalist Bill McKibben, writing recently in the New York Review of Books, laments the 'overhedged' scientific reports about global warming and argues that journalists in general have 'proved unequal to the task of separating scientific consensus from minor or trivial descent.' In almost any debate that incorporates science, they tend to give equal time to both sides of every argument (which is like giving five minutes to those who say the Earth is round and five to those who say it's flat). It happens with the whole issue of global warming. Almost all scientists are persuaded that human activity is altering climate in a perceptible way. But there's always a maverick voice demanding airtime and ink.

Now consider hurricanes again. In the fall of 2004, after four hurricanes had struck Florida, Kerry Emanuel, an MIT climatologist, said that there was no evidence that hurricanes were either more numerous or more intense. But there was evidence - buried in unexamined data. Emanuel found it himself over the next year. 'I hadn't looked at the data carefully enough,' Emanuel says. 'We believed that if there was a global warming signal, it wouldn't be detectable yet in the dta.'

In August 2005, just before Katrina, Emanuel published a paper showing that since the 1970s there has been a marked increase in the intensity and duration of tropical storms, including North Atlantic hurricanes. Then in September, right after Katrina, a different group of scientists published similar findings.

Theories are always being tested. This is just how science works. All the more reason for citizens to become as scientifically literate as possible - to figure out where the center of gravity is in any given debate. Because at some point, a scientific civilization has to take action, uncertainties not withstanding.

'At what point in the evolution of uncertainty does one choose to act?' Emanuel asks. Good question. How about now."