Neil Degrasse Tyson on climate change denial

[billvon 3,131]

From an interview in April of this year. Good overview on the issue, and great approach to it.

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Q:You recently spoke about who to blame for the state of the climate change debate in the U.S., the electorate or the politicians. Can you elaborate on that?

A:The issue here is not what politicians do because the electorate votes them into office. So what does it mean to complain about what politicians do? We should complain about what the electorate does. I’m an educator, so I see it as one of my duties, especially as a science educator, to alert people of what science is and how it works. About what it means for there to be an objective truth that we would then act upon.

If you want to lean in a political way because that’s your politics, you should do that based on an objective truth rather than cherry-picking science before you even land at an objective truth. You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.

So I’m not blaming the electorate in that sense. I’m blaming an educational system that is not positioned to educate an electorate such that they can make informed decisions in this, the 21st century, where informed decisions based on objective scientific truths will play a fundamental role in what kind of society we create for ourselves.

Q:How does the media fit into this? What responsibility do we have?

A:There’s this journalistic ethos saying if I get one opinion then I need to get another opinion that countervails that. So if I say the world is round, are you obligated to say the world is flat, lest someone think you are being biased in your reporting? Well, that’s absurd. You wouldn’t do that, you’re educated. You know that there are certain points of view that have no foundation at all in objective truth.

So the question arises then at what point should a journalist give equal time to equal points of view that are opposite or in denial of emergent scientific truths. If you allocated column inches in proportion to the scientific consensus of experiments, there would be one sentence talking about people who deny climate change and the rest of the ten columns talking about research that supports it. But that’s not what we see in the public.

I think journalists are abandoning what would be their sensibility of following the emergent truths and in some cases painting a debate as though there’s a scientific debate when in fact there isn’t one — and that makes for headlines and more clicks.

There was one headline that said, “Tyson defends Scientology” and people said, “oh I didn’t know you like Scientology.” I would ask if they read the article, which made no such claim, and they’d say “oh no, i just clicked on the headline.” So I’ve seen some journalistically irresponsible headlines.

Q: Going forward, can you predict where the conversation around climate change will be in a decade or two? And maybe where we’ll be in meeting the challenges it poses?

A:I can’t predict where it will be, but I can suggest where it should go. The conversation that needs to happen — here it is: you have conservatives and liberals in a room, people with power, let’s say they are representatives or senators. They shake hands and say, “ok humans are changing the climate of this planet, this is the consensus of scientific experiments being conducted, what policy and legislation should we debate in the face of the information?”

The Republican is thinking different suggestions from the Democrat, and that is the healthy political conversation that should unfold. Should there be carbon credits or not? Should there be trade regulations or not? Should we invest in solar panels rather than clean coal?

That would be a fruitful debate that could be held in the political arena. But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.
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