Author Archive for homer

From the New York Times:

Warming continues to shrink the snow and ice cover that defines the Arctic, signaling the region’s shift to a new climate pattern, scientists said yesterday.

The area covered by sea ice hovered near its historic low this summer. In Greenland, record-high temperatures this year have helped accelerate the melting of the country’s massive ice sheet. Throughout the Arctic, permafrost is warming and the blanket of snow is shrinking.

Those changes appear to be long-lasting, said an international team of climate experts who wrote the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.

Its blunt headline? “Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely.”

“The Arctic is a system, and the system is changing,” said Don Perovich, a sea ice expert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who worked on the report. “It’s not just that sea ice is being reduced. There’s changes in Greenland, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, and these changes are affecting human activity.”

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From an essay review by Philip Kitcher in Science:

In one of the earliest and most eloquent pleas for open discussion and debate, John Milton wrote:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. (1)

Two centuries after Milton, in the same year in which Charles Darwin published the Origin, John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (2) added further arguments for the free exchange of ideas, suggesting that such exchange is vital for intellectual and social health. Although both Milton and Mill stand behind ourcurrent acquiescence in the value of extensive free discussion, both of them knew that they were opposing ancient suspicions about the viability of democracy. The political theorists and philosophers of the Greco-Roman world viewed ordinary folk as vulnerable to deception and exploitation. Allowed to determine the direction of the state, the folk would be easily seduced into believing falsehoods aligned with the interests of charismatic leaders, so that the popular voice would enthusiastically clamor for disastrous policies. Better, then, to entrust the ship of state to wise navigators, whose wisdom embraced both depth of understanding and moral integrity.

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A letter to the editor of Science from a group of prominent US scientists:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

For the complete letter and related material…