Thomas Sowell Quotes
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
Sowell, Thomas. Dismantling America: and other controversial essays. Basic Books, 2010, p. 77.
This is a classic technique used by politicians of the left and right when they are faced with scientific findings that do not comport with their ideological, religious, or political view of the world. Namely to point out that the science is not settled and the field is still in flux. Therefore, they are, that it si too early to make public policy on the basis of that. And they have little trouble finding that the scientists themselves who did the research that they do not like are the first ones to say that the science is in flux. For ALL SCIENCE IS IN FLUX and new findings are being introduced literally every day in most scientific fields. That very rarely does the new knowledge contradict the older science in huge and dramatic ways. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity turned the field of physics and mechanics upside down but it did not change the calculations that engineers and scientists would make in over 99 percent of their measurements. Within a few decades of Einsteins theory being published, it was demonstrated to be wrong—not completely wrong, but inadequate to measure the mechanics of tiny partials like electrons adn quarks. Quantum mechanics was born. And every week or so these days there is more knowledge that makes slight changes in the way we understand quantum mechanics. No science has ever remained settled for 1000 years since the beginning of scientific inquiry, By the 19th century most science did not remain settled for 100 years. In the 20th century “settled” science rarely lasted more than a decade, and in the 21st century, few are stable for even a year.
Here is a case of where an absolutely true quotation is used inappropriately politically. In this case to imply that there is nothing we can do to stop global warming. Just as humans have created some of the climate change in the last centuries, humans can change behavior and stop that portion of the change that we are creating. In addition, there are scientific and technological techniques being developed to alter the climate beyond that which mankind has produced.
Responding to host Joe Kernen wgo asked the new Trump Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt if it had been proved that “CO2 is the primary control knob for climate.”
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
