Failure to communicate
Andrew Jenson failed to recognize the vast majority of scientific knowledge about climate change by relying on rhetoric and religious beliefs to make his point that humans cannot cause climate change and that we should ignore the finite nature of natural resources. There is no scientific literature suggesting that “the planet is going to fry and everyone and everything is going to die” due to climate change. It is clear in the literature that climate change consists of incremental temperature changes, sea level rise and changing meteorological or atmospheric patterns. No legitimate person or group is suggesting that climate change will destroy the Earth, but rather it will inevitably shape human behaviors and habitation.
Climate change occurs naturally, and always will, which is why the planet will endure. But there is abundant scientific literature indicating that human behaviors in the last 150 years have substantially added to natural climate change, mostly through land use (i.e., development) and the emission of fossil fuels. We are all part of an interconnected system: nature and climate affect humans, and vice versa. It is highly arrogant, and blatantly ignorant, to suggest the Earth’s resources are here for our purpose and that those resources are abundant. So, natural resources and wildlife and such have no inherent or intrinsic value? What makes humans so important? This Manifest Destiny-based creationist attitude has resulted in detrimental and unscrupulous use of the limited natural resources we have.
Natural resources are finite. The rate we are using those resources now is highly unsustainable and incapable of persisting much longer. It is not that we will destroy the Earth, it is that we will need to change our behaviors to live more
sustainably with the resources we depend on so others can live on this planet in the future and have access to the resources we depend on to survive and enjoy life.
So get ready big guy, you just might have to get back into that horse-and-buggy before too long if you care about the planet and about future generations. Try not to confuse Bible passages and fictional novels with science too, you’re at a respected university — please take the time to learn about science before making us all look so ignorant.
Sincerely,
-Chad Kooistra
UI graduate student in the College of Natural Resources
Global questioning
In response to “Global Warming or global hoaxing?” May 1, I understand Andrew Jenson is an opinion columnist and that is swell. The use of adjectives and verbs is no joke and I have yet to notice a run-on sentence in the work. However, this use of the English language in general is alienating and patronizing, which makes these articles completely ineffective. Aside from the subject matters being irrelevant to the University of Idaho demographic, being that university students are actually taught to question the world around them, which includes science, a number of assertions are a bit skewed themselves.
He claims that evolution is so named a theory because it can’t be proven. OK, sort of. Something becomes a theory when there is overwhelming proof but no way to replicate an experiment. If there is irrefutable evidence disproving a theory then it just becomes null and non-controversial all together. Along these same lines, how often do you question the existence of gravity? It is also merely a scientific theory. In his piece about the hoax of global warming, Jenson mentions that only nature can affect the climate and so humans cannot. Am I to understand that humans are not a part of nature according to your previously stated creationist life view?
I also noticed that your sources for combating science are Michael Crichton and the Bible. Now, I do not discourage religious practice, but using the Bible as proof of creationism is a circular argument because the Bible is where the idea of creationism comes from in the first place. And anything that Michael Crichton has to say is not valid proof of anything. It’s an anecdote, if that.
Good luck with finals.
-Emma Clements
UI student, sociology and anthropology
Evidence of evolution
The scientific method is straightforward and easy to understand. If you missed that lesson in elementary school, here are the basics: Ask a question or make an observation, form a hypothesis, make a prediction, perform an experiment and state your conclusion. If you failed, start over and try to figure out what you did wrong. If you come to the same conclusion you hypothesized in the beginning, congratulations. You’re on your way to having a theory. Now, publish your findings and other scientists will test the findings again. If other scientists come to the same findings without any objections from other labs, you have a theory.
This process is more active today than ever before — nothing is just accepted in the scientific community. Not too long ago a group of scientists said they had found something that moved faster than the speed of light, which would be a huge upset in countless fields of science. While everyone was getting hyped up, many other labs started testing the same claims. After more tests and opinions from other labs it was discovered the process was flawed and that the particle wasn’t really moving faster than light.
This process keeps the scientific community strong and adaptive. Established theories can be disproven. That is, they have a testable hypothesis, which if it were to fail would indicate a flawed theory. However, a theory is established because time and time again, the hypothesis has been upheld.
When the Origin of Species was written much of the support for evolution was rudimentary or not yet discovered. Today we have mountains of evidence. In fact, if you could disprove evolution, please claim your Nobel Prize. Evolution could be disproved by the discovery of a fossilized modern squirrel, but evolution is also documented and observed around the world. Please, go to Google and search “Observed Instances of Speciation,” and you will find links with tens of thousands of evolutionary observations, which I wish I had the time to list here.
-Jordan Lynn
Freethought Moscow