“Driving the Car Backwards, Part 4”
BBC News- April 22, 2017
“There has been unease among researchers since Mr. Trump was elected in November. More than 600 professors from one of the country’s leading research Universities, MIT, signed an open letter before his inauguration expressing their concerns.
It stated: “The president-elect has appointed individuals to positions of power who have endorsed racism, misogyny and religious bigotry, and denied the widespread scientific consensus on climate change…Science is not a special interest; it is not optional. Science is a foundational ingredient in how we as a society analyze, understand, and solve the most difficult challenges that we face.”
Among the signatories’ worries are the president’s statement that climate change is a hoax, his alleged muzzling of environmental agencies and his apparent interest in setting up a commission to investigate whether vaccines cause autism.” BBC News, AAAS chief puts weight behind protest march. (Science and Environment, by Palab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News, Boston)
March 29 found President Trump signing an executive order to scrap President Obama’s climate policies. According to Trump this will put an end to the “war on coal” and “job-killing regulations.” President Trump has vowed to pull out of the Paris Climate deal, which was agreed upon in December, 2015. President Trump has also proposed cutting the budget of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) by one third.
While acknowledging “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change on other occasion President Trump has said “climate change had been created by and for the Chinese.” In recent days one aide told BBC news “the President now believes climate change is real.” (BBC News)
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Apparently, the purpose of the nationwide March for Science, held on Earth Day, is to express many persons’ concern across the United States and the world that politics can distort science in such a way that many doubt proven facts (as Climate Change) and allow alternate, more politically expedient “facts” to be held in opposition to the truth, while the world continues to move rapidly to a point of no return. Many of the persons denying climate change are older men, as the Koch brothers and others who seem to believe that saying something must make it so, as a parent reading a fairy tale to their children.
Fairy tales inspire the imagination, but are not considered scientific facts. Nevertheless, the Koch brothers hire so called “scientists” to spew out alternate facts to confuse the public, much like the Tobacco industry did for decades until explicit warning labels were placed on cigarettes, undeniably showing a linkage between cigarette and various health conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, emphysema and lung cancer, resulting in a long period in which many persons were damaged and many died of poisons released into their bodies while smoking tobacco.
It is surprising to find in the early 21st century a move backwards away from the scientific rationale and scientific principles and processes which have fueled so many advances of the recent 20th century. It makes a reasonable person wonder why the search for “untruth” has so fueled the human imagination of this age. Have our youth played too many video games? Are we beginning to believe the imaginary animation on the green screens playing at the movie theaters is the reality we seek? What kind of educational system allows intelligent students in our universities to become so gullible as to believe the false news stories propagated on the internet by those wishing to confuse or alienate public opinion from factual truth?
I worry when everyone becomes their own news maker, writes their own stories, and only listens to their own opinions. The Internet which can inform so powerfully is being used now by governments, criminal elements, persons with specific political agendas, or simply those using their great wealth to gain status and power to misinform and manipulate the general public and to disseminate and propagate lies and confuse those seeking the balanced truth. It is becoming so much more difficult to determine which voices should be heeded, when all voices equally seek to be heard! Even the internet search engines are prone to error (witness Google’s hiring 10,000 real human beings whose sole duty is to separate the true from the false news in their own search engine algorithms!)
When President Trump either refuses to appoint a national Science Advisor, or finally appoints one who is diametrically opposed to 98% of the world’s scientific consensus (as for example on “Climate Change”), it is no wonder our citizens and our young people are confused as to which are facts vs fantasy. If the President of our nation believes autism is caused by vaccines, then we know the whole country is truly in trouble!
I would like to have joined the scientists and others who marched on Earth Day simply to remind all of us of the need to adhere to scientific principles, proven consensus and knowledge supported by scientific rationale and empirical principles of discovery. Speaking as a religious person who is also a scientist, using empirical evidence to govern my medical practice, I find myself appalled and somewhat confused at the retreat of our President and other government officials from the very foundational bedrock principles of scientific inquiry and seeking for rational truth which has governed this nation from its beginnings, as our nation and its peoples belong in the stream of both the Reformation and the Renaissance.
We are sacrificing scientific principles for general opinion and anecdotal evidence. We are retreating from an informed and educated public into fantasy and made up “facts” in the rush of expediency and political agenda making. If we deny environment changes related to increased CO2 emissions from human industrial activity simply to promote energy use without environmental restriction, will we wake up when we begin to “choke on our own smoke?” Or will we continue to be so stupid and resistant to the truth about ourselves and our world in which we live that we finally destroy ourselves and all others along with us?
I cannot imagine a President, nor a leadership group of a democratic nation having greater hubris and stupidity than to deny the clear facts of our scientific community! Simply wishing something away, as CO2 building up in our atmosphere to the point of driving us to extinction, will not suddenly make it so!
We can wish upon many stars and sing about “somewhere over the rainbow” as much as we like, but this will not change scientific facts nor reverse human pollution of our own atmosphere!
The only thing which will save us is very hard work to reverse poor and stupid policies of past and current administrations until we arrive again at an atmosphere which will sustain us and all this planet FOREVER! DELAY, DELAY, DELAY IS THE SAME AS COMMITTING FRATRICIDE ON OUR CHILDREN AND COMING GENERATIONS!
If we still hold to the Christian, Moslem and Jewish belief that all men and women will ultimately stand before and give an account of ourselves to our Creator (God), then we all have reason to be concerned! If our responsibilities and gifts in the new world yet to come are somehow dependent upon and related to our stewardship of what is given to us in the here and now, we might do well to listen closer to the scriptural admonition:
“To whom much is given, of that person shall much be required!” (Luke 12:48)
These words from the teachings of Jesus speak volumes to those who choose to listen and serve as a strong warning to those who do not.
I will conclude my short treatise with the words of Jesus to his hearers at the end of his parables:
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Mark 4:9; Matthew 11:15)
“In the name of God our Savior: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen!”
Let all of God’s people say, “Amen!”
“Amen! We praise you, Lord Jesus Christ! To your holy and majestic name be all praise and glory forever!” “Amen!”
The Voice of one crying in this wilderness, “Make straight in this desert a highway for our God!”
Modern Stories of the Way 