Welcome to Episode 8 of Warming World Explained. I’m Beth Stoeckly, your host. When I started this podcast, I intended to talk about science and leave my listeners to make their own decisions about politics. Unfortunately, we have now arrived at a juncture where the very concept of science is a political question in the United States. Some would say that the concept of reality has become controversial. And so, inevitably, this podcast will border on the political.
Abraham Lincoln liked to ask, “How many legs would a dog have if we call the tail a leg?” The answer is “Four, because calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
Friends, listeners, FACTS MATTER. Facts matter, because they are facts. If you deny them or ignore them, they can come back to bite you.
Sometimes it’s a small thing. When my husband and I were first married, we lived upstairs in a big old Victorian house that had been divided up into apartments. And the roof leaked. The landlady, who lived downstairs, had called the roofers. She was a widow, and she was absolutely convinced that everyone was trying to take advantage of her. She wanted them to fix the roof, but they insisted she needed a new roof. So every time it rained, she got my husband to crawl around among the beams and trusses of the attic placing cans and buckets under the drips. After the rain, she’d call another roofing company, and they would say she needed a new roof. Then she’d get her handyman to smear tar on the roof. But you couldn’t tell from where it dripped in the attic where the water was getting in. And the next time it rained, the roof would leak as badly as ever. Rob placed the cans and buckets, because if he didn’t, it would have leaked into our apartment. And we wondered when the roof would collapse from the weight of all the tar smeared on top. The landlady’s certainty that everyone was trying to scam her kept her from solving the problems. Miraculously, the building was still standing when we moved to California.
Our landlady chose to believe what she most feared. More often people choose to believe what aligns with their desires. This is not a new idea. For instance, in 1620 Francis Bacon wrote “… what a man had rather were true he more readily believes”.
And we see it all around us. The ice caps are melting. Hurricanes and wildfires are more frequent and more severe than they used to be. The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic and coral – which provides habitat for a multitude of other species—is dying. But if someone comes along and proclaims there is no problem; so-called climate change is a hoax; there are people who will follow him and believe him. Because if there is no problem, then we don’t have to inconvenience ourselves to solve it. If there is no problem, we can keep on doing things the way we are used to, and there is nothing to worry about.
Fantasyland is a delightful place. Until it isn’t. Because saying something doesn’t make it true.
People choose what to believe for all sorts of reasons. I have a friend who once told me something must be true because she got the information in an email. I asked who had sent the email. Turns out it was from someone she hardly knew.
FACT. My friends, you can write anything in an email.
So if we can’t trust that something is true because it aligns with our fears or our hopes, or, God help us, because it came through the internet, then how should we decide what to believe?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist and science communicator and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He said it succinctly: “I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method..”
That is succinct, but perhaps not directly useful. Carl Sagan (who was the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of an earlier generation), laid out the basics in his “Baloney Detection Kit”. It is his guide for skeptical thinking. He explains that the question is not whether or not we like the conclusion of a line of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the starting point and whether that starting point is true.
I would like to talk about 5 of the tools for skeptical thinking in Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit:
First, wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of “facts”.
My husband was a staunch follower of this idea. If I said, “It’s raining,” he would go to the window to look. It never bothered me that he checked, but it did bother me that he always sounded surprised that it was, in fact, raining.
Second, there should be substantive debate on the evidence by proponents of all points of view.
This means people of different opinions actually talking to each other; not, as has become common today, shouting their views on different networks and different platforms to different audiences.
Third, arguments from authority carry little weight. Authorities make mistakes. Again, saying something does not make it true, no matter who is saying it. We may give more weight to the words of someone who has the background to know what they are talking about on a given subject, but we shouldn’t believe anything just because someone says it.
Fourth, we should always consider more than one hypothesis. What does Sagan mean by “Hypothesis”. Imagine you find a package that you didn’t order at your front door. “Oh my,” you say, “the Easter Bunny left us a present” Your family looks at you very peculiarly, and you say, “Well, it’s just a theory” That is the everyday English use of “theory”: a possible explanation that covers at least part of what happened, but that needs a lot more testing before you can really believe it. In science, that is what we call a hypothesis. In science, a theory is an explanation that has withstood every test anyone can think of to try to disprove it.
If something is to be explained, we should think of all the ways it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might disprove each of them. Whatever hypothesis resists disproof has a greater chance of being the right answer than if you had simply grabbed one.
And try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis because it is yours. Compare it fairly with the alternatives.
Fifth. Quantify if possible. If what you are explaining has a numbers attached to it, use the numbers, Because it is the numbers that make the case compelling. Let me make an analogy. Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle, but not the box it came in. You dump the pieces out on a table and move pieces of the same color near each other. Perhaps you decide the picture is a horse pulling a cart, or a sunset at the beach, or whatever the pieces suggest. But you are guessing; you aren’t sure. But if you put the puzzle together, with every little bump fitted into the matching hollow, then you can look at the picture and know what it is without any doubt. Testing hypotheses with numbers is like putting the puzzle together. And when everything fits, then you can believe you understand the picture.
If you are going to seek truth through skeptical thinking you have to be comfortable with sometimes not knowing. Sometimes temporarily, while you study the possibilities. Sometimes forever, because there will never be enough evidence in our lifetimes to be sure.
I never realized how uncomfortable some people are with uncertainty until a friend said she envied people in the Middle Ages because they had certainty. She was talking mostly of religious certainty, I think. But how could anyone living in twentieth century America envy someone from the Middle Ages? She was a historian; she knew life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and short. I was appalled.
But if you value truth enough to evaluate statements and insist on evidence and logical reasoning, then you have to accept that sometimes you will not be sure. The alternative is that you will believe things that are not true, just to avoid doubt. Of course, you may occasionally believe something untrue anyway, but much less often than if you if you aren’t skeptical. And because you may sometimes be mistaken, part of being skeptical is being willing to change your beliefs if new evidence shows them to be untrue.
Does this all sound like a colossal pain? It isn’t, really, when you get used to it. But even if it were, this kind of thinking over the last several hundred years has enabled science to give us not just an understanding of the world, but a standard of living, a level of comfort, and a kind of health care that people in earlier centuries could not even dream about.
So how did skepticism, science, and even the belief that there is a reality get such a bad name? And why does it matter?
It matters because denying facts doesn’t make them go away. Saying something doesn’t make it true.
If a politician tells you prices are going down, when in fact they are going up, you still have to pay more for things.
If a politician tells you that unemployment is down, when in fact, it is up, (and even if he fires the statisticians who said it is up), people are still out of work.
If a politician tells you that all of science, or just the part relevant to climate, is a hoax, the polar ice is still melting, hurricanes and wildfires are still causing unprecedented levels of devastation, and the coral is still dying.
Of course, you can apply skeptical thinking to try to find the truth in other areas than science. Law courts have their own rules of evidence. Historians and journalists have their own standards for accepting statements as true – or not.
I think some people distrust science because it is often badly represented in the news and in advertising.
We have all seen ads on TV with an actor in a lab coat claiming to be a scientist or a medical doctor and also claiming that the brand they are recommending has been “clinically proven” to be better than other brands. Whatever that means. Do I need to say it again? Saying something doesn’t make it true. But just because advertisers abuse the respect science once commanded, well, don’t blame that on scientists.
In the area of climate news reporters stress disagreements over shared understanding. The greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid 19th century. It is not controversial among scientists. But how the extra energy will distribute itself and affect local weather is harder to predict. The atmosphere and the surface layers of land and water form a very large, very complicated system, and detailed predictions are difficult. The problem is that news reporters don’t tell us about the large areas of century-old understanding and agreement, because that isn’t news. They concentrate on disagreement, even if does more for their ratings than for our understanding.
Perhaps it seems that you would be giving up a lot to adopt a skeptical attitude, well, you might, if you value certainty over truth. But if you sometimes feel overwhelmed or baffled by the streams of contradictory statements we hear daily, then here is way to find a measure of clarity: verify purported facts, consider alternative explanations, and be OK with uncertainty. You can have more peace and more confidence in the things you finally choose to believe.
Let me leave you with another quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson: “I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.”
And remember: Facts matter. Saying something doesn’t make it true. And calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.
Good night for Warming World Explained.