I just chose the three things I could think of that scientists agree on yet the public won’t accept Nuclear Energy, Aspartame, Climate Change.
Wikipedia on Aspartame explains:
“Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as ‘one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved’ and its safety as ‘clear cut’. The weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe as a non-nutritive sweetener.”
The public is slow to recognize the scientific certainty of climate change. Not enough people are showing outrage. Far more are showing outrage for things that will help prevent climate change like nuclear energy. The question that I wonder about is “Are the most vocal protesters honestly engaged or are they just followers of manipulators like the environmentalists and higher up the fossil feul companies themselves.
The struggle for scientists and engineers to succeed in bringing about change is like Richard Feynman once said
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Our knowledge has been consistently diluted and misrepresented by the news. If you want the truth you have to seek it painstakingly. Feynman also points out that if it was easy to explain scientific things to the public Nobel prizes would not be needed.
“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.“
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8 Comments
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But we agonized over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 in the West each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually. 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don’t use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane/cyclone/wildfire/earthquake-prone areas – and when they’re demolished by a storm, rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it’s something we’ll never do exceptionally well, it’s almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
Nothing that involves a high concentration of energy and a low concentration can ever be completely safe. Energy is the ability to do work, and it may end up doing work you don’t want it to do. Nuclear power certainly isn’t without hazards, and the industry does itself a disservice by proclaiming that it can construct a reactor that is “inherently safe,” implying a condition in which nothing bad can ever happen. That’s not possible in any manmade creation. It’s also easily disproven the instant something bad does happen — as it did just recently. All methods of power generation involve trade-offs, a balancing of risks against returns. We shouldn’t evaluate nuclear power any differently.
I’m not sure who the person below is angry at but what you are saying makes sense. I have no doubt that you are a good communicator.
Does this mean I have to be against aspartame and nuclear energy now?
Hey! What about climate change? Should we continue to pollute the atmosphere and choke our planet into submission while you diddle daddle?
Have you stopped beating your mother yet?
Fuck you, you lying asshole.
First of all, there is no scientific consensus on climate change. Not least because the data has been rigged and massaged all to hell and back.
And that’s without accounting for the fact that the data is insufficient to erase the overwhelming uncertainties in every conceivable (woefully incomplete and non-linear) model of climate we have!
Second of all, anthropogenic climate warming is even more specious.
Third of all, climate changes all the fucking time. It has changed multiple times in recorded history. So what?
So you start off with a lie and then you ram straight through to laying guilt trips on people about industrial civilization. You also make it blatantly obvious that you’re one of those batshit insane crazy fuckers who anthropomorphizes insensate objects like planets.
And what’s worse is that a warmer climate is a GOOD THING! You lying sanctimonious anti-human anti-civilization asshole.
Maybe I was unfair to Joseph but that is no reason to call me a “lying asshole”.
Or maybe it’s because you have your own agenda to make more money. Not sure why else anyone would be so against improving the quality of life.
I was hoping for a reasonable communicator. Too much to ask for these days.