Neil deGrasse Tyson scolds cherry picking climate science - YouTube

Sonia you're not a primate scientist but you're a very distinguished scientist

and astrophysicist what do you think about when people say look this is not

settled science there are still questions I sometimes think to myself

look there are a lot of questions still about Einstein's theories that led to

nuclear fission but we still know that nuclear power plants do operate and they

do provide electricity and yeah so what's happening here is they're people

who have cultural political religious economic philosophies that they then

invoke when they want to cherry-pick one scientific result or another you can

find a scientific paper that says practically anything and the press which

I count you as part of the press will sometimes find a single paper so here's

a new truth if this study holds it but an emergent scientific truth for it to

become an objective truth the truth that is true whether or not you believe in it

it requires more than one scientific paper it requires a whole system of

people's research all leaning in the same direction all pointing to the same

consequences that's what we have with climate change as induced by human

conduct this is a known correspondence if you want to find the 3% of the papers

or the 1% of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that that

is simply irresponsible and what how else do you establish a scientific truth

if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiments and scientific

observations Abraham Lincoln the first Republican President signed into law in

1963 a year when he had important things to be thinking about he signed into law

the the National Academy of Sciences because he knew that science mattered

and should matter in governance and and it and you know we build our cities on

the basis of science we win you know when when we fall ill we don't we don't

go to the local witch doctor right go to a doctor even though all

that science is still you know I mean there are advances gonna be made none of

it is settled in the sense well so you know what it's settled you know it is

settled settled science is the science that has come out of large bodies of

research that all agree when you see scientists arguing and I tweeted I said

if you think scientists want to always agree with one another you've never been

to a scientific conference because the people are duking it out but what are

they fighting over not the settled science that's been in the books we're

fighting over the the the bleeding edge of what is not yet known and and that is

the natural course of science and a few as a journalist want to eavesdrop on

that meeting you'll think scientists don't know anything about anything but

is the body of knowledge that is accumulated over the decades that

precedes this that becomes the Canon of what if you're gonna base policy and

legislation on that's what you should be thinking about so you would say this is

a moment to listen to climate science I think this 50 inches of I can't even

picture how many raindrops is that 50 inches of

rain in Houston this is this is a shot across our about a hurricane the width

of Florida going up the center of Florida these are these are shots across

our bow that what what will it take for people to recognize that a community of

scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can

benefit from knowing about it even news reports on this channel talked about the

the fact that we have fewer deaths per hurricane why because you now know weeks

in advance we have models that have trajectories of hurricanes in a decades

gone by it was like there's a hurricane there we don't know should I stay should

I go and then you stay and you die okay so to cherry-pick science it's an odd

thing for a scientist to observe and I don't I didn't grow up in a country

where that was a common phenomenon we went to the moon and people knew Science

and Technology fed those discoveries and the day to politicians are arguing about

whether science is true it means nothing gets done nothing it's the beginning of

the end of an infant to democracy as I've said many times

what I'd rather happen is you recognize what is scientifically truth then you

have your political debate so in the case of energy policy whatever it's you

you don't ask is the science right you ask should we have carbon credits or or

whatever right response right exactly what is the economic dimension of this

that's where the politics needs to come in and it's not the longer we delay the

more I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our

greatest cities are on the oceans and water's edges historically for Commerce

and transportation and as storms kick in as water levels rise they are the first

to go and we don't have a system we don't have a civilization with the

capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles that's this is happening

faster than our ability to respond that could have a huge economic consequences

on that sobering note Neil deGrasse Tyson always a pleasure and we are in a

hurry to read the book thanks