NPR has been doing a climate change series on its Morning Edition. They recently featured two young women. The first is a future policy wonk college student. She goes at the whole climate change strictly from a socio-economic standpoint. The other is a 16 year old whiz kid who has set the scientific community on fire with her pedantic fine tooth combing of all the global warming research that is out there. Apparently her scientific method is impeccable.
On the one hand it was tremendously encouraging to see the drive and ambition and natural curiousity of these young people. Nice to know there are motivated people out there. On the other hand, the contrasts between the arguments these two make are discouraging in the sense that they are metaphorical as to how the public debate takes place regarding important public issues. The contrast also demonstrates that there are a lot of reasons why we have such a huge number of crappy public policies.
Go to the first link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89567328&sc=emafA Climate Policy Wonk in the Making.
Notice how the subject arrives a substantive conclusions, ie because the percentage of CO2 released from animals is higher than that of cars we should become vegetarians but keep driving.
Then go to:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89619306&sc=emaf
Teenage Skeptic Takes on Climate Scientists.
Notice that even with the accurate scientific approach there are still scientists who disagree.
The peer reviewed science is not unquestionable, yet we will take a nebulous statistic and lobby against meat, despite the fact that I can think of about ten reasons why that makes no sense right off the top of my head (the foremost being that this position is tantamount to "Lets kill all the animals"--wait until PETA gets a hold of her-but that is another matter).
Maybe we just try to do too much with too little data. Ya think?
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