World-famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says people who disagree with the theory humans are causing catastrophic global warming are “missing a piece of their education,” “do not fully understand what science is,” and a danger to “informed democracy.”
In an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN on Sunday, Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, said climate change is a fact that only those who are uneducated disagree with.
"If anyone utters the word, 'it's just a theory,' it means they're missing a piece of their education where they do not fully understand what science is and how and why it works," Tyson said.
Tyson said electing people who deny climate change is dangerous to the continuation of democracy.
"Today you have people who, who will just accept what anyone tells them, or think that they can deny an objectively established scientific truth and then I don't mind that in a free country, think what you want,” Tyson said. “But if you now rise to power and have, and have jurisdiction over legislation, and you pivot that on what you don't know about how the world works, that's a recipe for disaster."
Tyson said this “recipe for disaster” is “the beginning” of the end of “informed democracy.”
"I would say it's the beginning of the unraveling of an informed democracy," Tyson said.
Late on the evening of April 21, one day before thousands of protesters took to the streets to participate in the March for Science to express their displeasure with President Donald Trump’s suggested cuts to various scientific programs, Tyson tweeted, “Show me a Nation with a science-hostile government, and I'll show you a society with failing health, wealth, & security.” The tweet was “liked” more than 155,000 times.
Show me a Nation with a science-hostile government, and I'll show you a society with failing health, wealth, & security.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 22, 2017
Tyson’s attack on people who disagree with the theory humans are responsible for climate change ignores the many scientists and well-educated people who have examined the evidence and reject the conclusions Tyson has come to.
A survey of members of the American Meteorological Society by the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and the American Meteorological Society found only 29 percent of the 4,092 respondents said they believe climate change over the past 50 years “is largely or entirely due to human activity.” Thirty-eight percent said they think humans are responsible for “most” of the change, but not all of it, and the remaining 33 percent of respondents, more than 1,300 scientists, said they don’t think humans are primarily to blame or that they don’t know (6 percent).
In 2013, James Taylor, the president of the Spark of Freedom Foundation, reported in an article in Forbes a peer-reviewed survey of geoscientists (earth scientists) and engineers found only 36 percent of those surveyed believed humans are primarily responsible for global warming.
(H/T: Washington Examiner)
Justin Haskins
