The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding Read Free Book Online Page A

agreed protecting the environment was critical to sustained prosperity for humanity. The resulting declaration recognized many important principles that remain relevant today, such as the “precautionary principle”:
    Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. 1
    They also signed on to the UNFCCC, which committed them to “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.” 2
    So in 1992, a road map for the subsequent decades of action was set. How did we do?
    Any analysis of the state of the world’s capacity to support human society must be based on the physical sciences—measurement and trend analysis of actual physical activity based on our understanding of physics, biology, and chemistry. Therefore, I first want to make some comments on how nonscientists (people like me and most readers) can approach such information. I am often asked by people not involved in these issues day-to-day: “So how am I supposed to come to a view in these debates? I hear this side and that, and it just seems very confusing.”
    The way through this confusion lies in a combination of a basic understanding of the scientific process and some good old common sense. In explaining this, I will use climate change as an example to make my point, but the principles apply across the board to all areas of sustainability-related science, which is my focus here.
    As our starting point, it is critical to understand that the scientific process is deliberately designed to encourage the questioning and challenging of ideas. This is good. Otherwise our progress to greater knowledge would be much slower and ideas that are wrong would not be exposed as quickly. Humans in general, scientists included, get attached to ideas and ways of thinking, so skepticism is healthy as it pushes against this attachment and therefore should be encouraged. This makes genuine skepticism useful in life but especially in the scientific process.
    The problem comes when people with a particular agenda use the debate this healthy skepticism creates to cherry-pick science that supports their position. It gets worse when they then use that narrow piece of science as supposed “evidence” that a whole area of analysis should be in doubt. The climate debate is very challenging in this regard because that process, which occurs anyway, is further driven by powerful and well-funded interests in a systematic and deliberate way. The book The Merchants of Doubt explores the way this has become endemic across many issues, from tobacco to climate change. 3 A recent example on climate change would be Koch Industries, a U.S. oil and chemical giant with $100 billion in annual sales that has spent almost $25 million funding organizations involved in spreading climate denialism. 4
    The way past all this for the non-specialist is a simple one. In considering the complexity involved, you should be comfortable that no single scientist understands all the detail, either. They can’t, because they have one or a small number of scientific disciplines, whereas understanding something with the complexity of the global ecosystem requires many disciplines to be considered together. Any one individual who claims to understand it all in full detail, including a number of prominent skeptics, clearly doesn’t and should be treated with caution.
    For this reason, the science already has a process embedded in it to deal with the challenge of cross-discipline issues and the inherent uncertainty they involve. This is important because we use scientific conclusions to guide everything from approval for medical processes and drugs to the design of bridges and the safety of airplanes. What happens is scientists come together and intellectually fight it out to reach what they call