Common sense climate science

“My dad’s stronger than your dad!” “No he’s not!” “Yes he is, times a million!” “No he’s not, times infinity!” “Yes he is, times infinity plus one!”

We’ve all heard some variation of this exchange between children. In the heat of a superposition contest, eventually they confuse (how cute) infinity with a really big number.

Everyone knows that nothing is bigger than infinity. Silly kids.

Except the infinity we know and love — the counting numbers — is only one of many infinities, each new infinity larger than the last one in a meta-infinite version of the playground dispute.

In fact, there are an infinite number of infinities. The silly kids were right all along.

Here is where the common-sense police come to put a stop to this nonsense. Gather the pitchforks, light the torches: we will not have infinity escaping on us.

We like the old infinity, the tame one. The one that wasn’t so ... infinite.

Common sense is exactly what it claims to be: common. It refers to the intuition most people have about the world. As such, common sense is great for choosing what to eat or whom to trust.

But common sense never discovered anything. It never set foot in any place where intuition fails at first. Scientific intuition, for one, takes years to build.

The challenge of an introductory physics class is to break the intuitions built up by living in an environment dominated by subtle forces like air resistance and friction, and replacing them by Newtonian laws and algebraic equations.

The challenge of a modern physics class is to break the intuitions built up in the introductory class in the cases when things are very fast or very small.

Quantum mechanics is weird. Richard Feynman even said it “describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.”

Last week, it snowed a lot in Washington D.C. This fact was used by climate-change skeptics to appeal to common sense: Sean Hannity even said the snowstorm “would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global-warming theories.”

This claim is more absurd than quantum mechanics.

First, it presumes that one man, Al Gore, fabricated global warming. Instead, thousands of scientists have established it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Second, Hannity spouts a common-sense fallacy: that local weather proves anything about global climate. This is untrue.

Bill Nye the Science Guy went on the Rachel Maddow Show to set the record straight, explaining that such flawed reasoning is anti-scientific and even “unpatriotic.”

New ideas always contradict common sense. Newton was absurd because he contradicted Aristotle; likewise, quantum mechanics was absurd because it contradicted Newton.

Both quantum mechanics and climate science are unsettling. One says the universe is uncertain and strange. The other predicts dire consequences if we don’t change our comfortable lifestyles.

But they each hold the legal tender of science — evidence. 

We cannot afford to ignore what is true for the sake of common sense.


 E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu