President Trump and Joe Biden, in the run-up to the Presidential election, have staked out dueling positions on the climate, suggesting voters either care (the Democratic stance, pretending to know) or not care (the Republican view, oblivious to nature’s evolution) about our environment.
“There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.”
Tom Robbins
Neither position is rooted in our best understanding of nature’s truth. Thus both are false and contrary to the pageantry of positivity and, in the end, punitive to humanity—the reason why I describe the endorsement of today’s politics as a bifurcated trench leading to the slaughterhouse of human excellence.
Science Of Nature
In the words of Richard Feynman, science is nothing more than the study of nature. Science, to put things in perspective, is not the source of knowledge but a derivative of nature’s truth. A manmade process, as I explain in Learn To Think, to establish, optimize, and question our evolving proxy of nature’s truth.
Climate change is not a hoax but is not manmade, albeit accelerated by human solipsism and ignorance.
Our climate, as I have explained before, is subject to entropy. An irreversible process of declining energy availability as the fallout from the Big Bang explosion 13.72 billion years ago. In scientific terms, a fallout caused by the asymmetry innate to entropy, with an organized state, before the outbreak, leading to an unorganized state as the fallout of the explosion. Think fireworks in slow motion.
Thankfully, the process of energy decline is slow relative to human renewal. Our best estimates suggest Earth will exist for another 3.5 billion years. Not bad compared to the paltry lifespan of only 100,000 years of human existence, depending on the point at which you consider the cognitive ability of our bipod species to be human. I can name quite a few people living today as the exception to reasonable cognitive disposition.
Climate change cannot be reversed, for nature’s entropy cannot. We can only pore less gas on its fire and offer our best defense against nature’s entropy.
Politics Of Science
These days, to be called a scientist is as easy as being called an author. A meaningless attempt to justify the mere existence of research or the number of studies published begets merit. In the same way, writing about something often does not necessarily mean you know what you are talking about. Not all science is created equal.
Natural scientists, like Einstein or Feynman, sought to discover unprecedented normalizations of truth upstream, the inverse of crowds of rebels without a cause ruminating in downstream sub-optimizations of foregone conclusions, supported by the data of hindsight, also calling themselves scientists.
The discoveries of Einstein, Feynman, and modern-day scientists like Lawrence Krauss are awe-inspiring. As with any real outliers in life, an army of me-too wannabes starving for attention is now teaching high-priced garbage to students soiling the reputation and education of science.
On the opposing side, the game politicians play, either to rely on the self-proclaimed disciples of science or to ignore them, does not – on its own – infer any meaningful association with nature’s truth. It is as easy to disclaim the value of science pontificated by the many charlatans in science as it is to latch on to science from its astounding discoveries subsequently ignored.
In using science as a proxy for nature’s truth, a false-negative is as destructive to humanity as a false-positive.
Wrong By Ignorance
Both Trump and Biden are wrong in their assessment of science.
Trump is wrong in asserting we do not know what causes our climate to change and no pertinent response is needed. Like Al Gore, Biden is wrong to think humans can fix climate change, as he was wrong in signing up to cure cancer (remember?)—another example of ill-advised bandaging of undesirable wounds of correlation taking away resources from the discovery of causation.
The battle of human ignorance is playing out in front of our eyes, once again, to the embarrassment of the world. A war that will have the same Pyrrhic victory as before, a dumb and solipsistic prioritization of human wants over human needs in blatant disregard to our dependence on nature’s principles.
Lead, Or Get Out Of The Way
We must elect better leaders. Leaders who comprehend how nature controls us and only our best-evolving understanding of nature’s truth, with or without the help of the manmade practice of science, can improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy.
The choice for a leader is not a political one; it is a choice for the best proxy of nature’s truth upon which we all depend, regardless of political views.
