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| Please Do Not Spin the Moon |
...rather than our heads. Although, I think this might be an Emu.
The National Academies - Science, Engineering, Medicine, Research - has a page called "America's Climate Choices." I feel our coy obfuscation for the moneyed has reduced our time necessary to respond. As a democratic republic, we should demand more of our elected officials and the sacred trust of representative government.
Especially in this country, there's obviously a litmus test on how much science one can deny. There was a People's Climate March in New York City last Sunday, and you wouldn't know it from most corporate-owned media. Google (the owners of Blogger) had to be embarrassed at a shareholder's meeting by climate activists to finally sever ties with ALEC - responsible for not only climate change denial and deniers, but the authors of "Stand Your Ground" legislation that has resulted in fostering a frontier climate in (at least on the calendar) a modern republic; a modern trail of tears and blood beyond Oklahoma's Native American history.
The Sociological Quarterly published a riveting study of the politicization and polarization of climate change in America in 2010 by Aaron C. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap. It's more than that: it's now whether we accept reality represented as data gathered and analyzed, or unicorns.
When someone asks me "do you believe in global warming"; "do you believe in the Big Bang"; "do you believe in Evolution" they are expressing articles of faith, which the Constitution freely allows. My response is usually: "Do you believe in the Pythagorean Theorem?" Blank stare...crickets..."of course I do!" Or the other one: "that's avoiding the question." I calmly state, no it's not. Not in any particular order:
A Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître first suggested the big bang theory in the 1920s when he theorized that the universe began from a single primordial atom. The idea subsequently received major boosts by Edwin Hubble's observations that galaxies are speeding away from us in all directions, and from the discovery of cosmic microwave radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. National Geographic
Science never takes places in a void and evolutionary thought is no exception. Although Charles Darwin is considered to be by many the "father" of evolutionary thought, he was in fact aided and guided by the works of many scientists before him. The theories and ideas proposed by his predecessors were limited to the information available at the time. Darwin himself had no knowledge of genetics and therefore, his theory of natural selection as an explanation of evolution was based solely on what he observed and knew at the time. AAAS Science Net Links
Even though Pythagoras' name is on the theorem, several other people - the Babylonians (now Iran and Iraq), China and India - all had possibly discovered it well before his birth in Samos, Greece.
I present an embed (a link in some platforms) I fetched from the National Academy's site. Once opened, start with the formula bar, education for those open to it.
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