Here in Colorado, and across the country, we’ve got to get our OCD on to save the planet.
Back when I was in the first grade, when we hunted wooly mammoths for fun, a few of us got to sit in on the science class with the big kids.
We made thermometers with straws, water glasses and raspberry Kool-Aid. It was the reddest. What seemed like magic at first, as the red liquid climbed up the straw while the water glass was heated, became a satisfying moment of understanding as we learned what chemical and physical actions at play mysteriously pushed the Kool-Aid up the tube.
There are no unanswered questions about how all this works. The explanation of what heat is, how it increases the volume of liquids and forces it up a tube is at once fabulously complex and easy enough for a first-grader to grasp.
I get it because the explanation is not only easy to prove, but it makes sense when you understand all the moving parts.
It was at that young age that I understood why and how the scientific method was so satisfying. Like someone who can’t stop checking to see if the door is locked, you can at once be pleased that something in nature makes sense, and you can keep trying to jiggle the handle, or re-run the experiment, and get the same, exact results.
That satisfaction in looking closely, understanding and trying it several times, or reading about how some other fastidious questioner did all that, is what science is all about.
Disputing the clarity of things like climate change, vaccination and genetically modified foods is what science tries to battle, and too often loses. Those who deny climate change or environmental science or the cost of gasoline at the pump believe in what they want, not science.
It never ceases to shock and disappoint me.
There’s no doubt that climate change deniers and dismissers of environmental science line up every day to benefit from science they do believe in: air travel, weather prediction, cancer treatment and elevators that quickly take them to the top of impossibly tall buildings.
The science that these deniers don’t believe in, however, would have them make financial and convenience sacrifices to keep all of us from becoming extinct. Extinct, as in, everybody’s dead.
I firmly grasp and appreciate the vast volumes of credible research and analysis that show, without a doubt, that humans have heated up the atmosphere, and the consequences will be increasingly dangerous.
I don’t, however, believe that what we’ve done will end life on Earth — just life as we know it, and more than likely human life. At least dominant human life.
Greedy, naive, corrupt and just plain stupid deniers, however, aren’t the only ones that pick and choose scientific findings like favorite or disagreeable fruits and vegetables at the market.
I know many a bleeding-heart liberal who either outright defies the unequivocal science behind human vaccination, or have some lingering doubts based on nothing that makes a lick of sense or has a page of credible backing.
Many of these same fans of science look for the non-GMO label in their Aurora-area grocery stores. Despite the fact — yes, fact — that there is no scientific evidence that genetically modified foods are any safer nor any more dangerous for people to eat than non-GMO foods, critics continue to believe what they want, and not what science clearly shows.
These sins, however, pale in comparison to a new army of conservative soldiers bent on discrediting science in the same way President Donald Trump tries to discredit liars in the press that keep savagely printing the truth.
Leaders in Congress, and now leaders in key White House jobs, aren’t just placid bureaucrats who get pushed around by politics, these people are armed warriors in the fight against science and reason.
This week, as the nation battles dozens of wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and tens of thousands of acres of land, including grassland in Texas, Trump and his fellow geniuses dismiss the newest red lights flashing on the planet’s dashboard.
Trump routinely calls climate change “the greatest con job ever,” and continues to say efforts by the U.S. and other nations are the “Green New Scam.” Worldwide, scientists with indisputable proof who are trying to warn the planet?
“Stupid people,” Trump said about them.
At the root of it all? We don’t know what in the hell we’re talking about.
In study after study, Americans and students fall further and further down the world list of kids who understand math and science.
The crap I hear and read on social media and in person would depress even a third-grade science teacher, whose job it is to help us first learn to think and then learn to learn.
Right now, we’re far below near-third-world countries that at least have sense enough to trust someone who does know.
Canada, Australia, almost all of Europe and even China have at least looked up at killer tornadoes this week in southern France and said, “wait, what?”
Americans? We’re howling at the moon, led by a man in charge of much of the country’s science who admittedly snorted cocaine off a toilet seat and has a brain worm.
Down the road, we must force our kids to take math and science seriously. In the short term, we need to learn to depend on people who really know.
So who are you going to trust? The guy who invents and builds the stuff you ride, fly and use to treat your illnesses, or the guy who says windmills cause cancer and equates the whole climate science thing to the “Third Reich”?
Channel your inner OCD science kid, folks. If you can’t logically explain it, prove it and make it pass the smell test, but keep looking.
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