How did America rise up from a backwoods country to be one of the greatest nations the world
has ever known?
We pioneered industries and all of this required the greatest innovations in science and technology
in the world.
And so science is a fundamental part of the country that we are.
But in this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems
to me people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not.
What is reliable, what is not reliable?
What should you believe, what should you not believe?
And when you have people who don't know much about science, standing in denial of it and
rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.
Let us demand that educators around America teach evolution, not as fact, but as theory.
Increasing number of parents showing skepticism about vaccinations.
Teachers have approved a ban on GMOs.
Let's call climate change unproven science.
That's not the country I remember growing up in.
Not that we didn't have challenges.
I'm old enough to remember the 60s and the 70s.
We had a hot war and a cold war, civil rights movement and all this was going on.
But I don't remember any time where people were standing in denial of what science was.
One of the great things about science is that it is an entire exercise in finding what is
true.
The hypothesis, you test it, I get a result.
A rival of mine double checks it because they think I might be wrong.
They perform an even better experiment than I did and they find out, hey, this experiment
matches.
Oh my gosh, we're onto something here.
And out of this rises a new emergent truth.
It does it better than anything else we have ever come up with as human beings.
It's a science, it's not something to toy with, it's not something to say, I choose
not to believe equals MC square.
You don't have that option.
When you have an established scientific emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe
in it.
And the sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political conversations
about how to solve the problems that face us.
So once you understand that humans are warming the planet, you can then have a political conversation
about that.
You can say, well, should we, are there carbon credits?
Do we do this?
Do we put a tariff?
Do we fund?
Do we subsidize?
Those have political answers and every minute one is in denial, you are delaying the political
solution that should have been established years ago.
As a voter, as a citizen, scientific issues will come before you and isn't it worth it
to say, all right, let me at least become scientifically literate so that I can think
about these issues and act intelligently upon them.
Recognize what science is and allow it to be what it can and should be in the service
of civilization.
It's in our hands.
