Science on Faith: What do you believe?

In her recent speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination for the office of President of the United States, Secretary of State Clinton said the following:

I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs.

Part of me was happy to hear these words. On the one hand, it's refreshing to hear a politician state so succinctly what I have understood for a long time, and putting it into a pithy phrase that carries the solution as well as a statement of the problem was a real speechmaking coup.  But the use of "believe in" is, in some ways, troubling.  I don't want Secretary Clinton to have to take, on faith, that climate change is "real." I want her to understand it and be able to explain it at a level that the population can take away the main points, which are:

1. We rely on the absorption of radiant energy from the sun to make the earth habitable. Some water and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is necessary for this.
2. Certain molecules - including water, carbon dioxide, and methane - have, by their very nature, the capacity to absorb radiation from the sun in a way that others - including oxygen and nitrogen - do not.
3. At present, owing to our reliance on fossil fuels, there is too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and at our current rate of fossil fuel use, our best models suggest that this will continue to rise. We must find another way to generate electricity that doesn't lead to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
4. Fracking, which also unfortunately leads to increased methane leakage during extraction, is not a good solution as it leads to an environmental "double-whammy" of (a) when you burn natural gas you still get carbon dioxide and (b) methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  

Of course, I don't expect Secretary Clinton to understand electromagnetic radiation, heat capacity or, for that matter, how carbon dioxide is different from, say, oxygen.  Nor do I expect her to be able to explain how the computer models - which have shown to be remarkably accurate - work.  I don't expect her to understand quantum mechanics, applied spectroscopy, or anything beyond a few relatively simple ideas.  These don't require "belief" or, even, excessive time spent in science classes.  I expect only a critical mind, one which has served Secretary Clinton extremely well as she went to Law School, worked on health care reform, became a Senator and later, Secretary of State.

In many ways, the economy of the United States is much more complex than the problem of climate change but this doesn't stop politicians from claiming mastery of it and insisting on their prescriptions (which often take the form of calls for lower taxes).  I don't need to have a masters in economics to understand the idea behind the phrase describing some banks as "too big to fail."

But scientists have explained, ad nauseam, how climate change "works" and how their results have been self-consistent – over 97% of peer-reviewed papers by climate scientists are coming to the same conclusions – for years.  97%? When, in life, its there such consensus? I wonder, sometimes, if politicians are expecting miracles instead of results.  So, no, I'm not looking for "belief" or "faith."  If there are senators out there who don't "get it," there are a lot of scientists out there who are ready to take on all of your questions.  Just ask.

What, then, is faith in the context of science?  For me, it's not a "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1, if you're keeping track). I think it's a confidence that if I do my experiments correctly and analyze the results carefully, I may develop generalizable knowledge about the world. Faith, then, is my belief that the answer is out there and, if I keep at it long enough, I'll find it.  And if not, I'll try another experiment and tackle the problem differently.

Heat and Light

Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron, 19^th century French Engineer and Physicist is generally credited with developing what we know to be the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, and his work has allowed us to evaluate the upper limit of efficiency in an internal combustion engine (hint: combustion engines are not particularly efficient).  But, to my knowledge, there is no historical record of him ever baking a Madeleine cake so, well, he can’t have been all that great.

There’s been quite a lot of fuss about light bulbs lately.  Some people don’t like the new, energy efficient ones because they look weird and take longer to illuminate to full brightness.  It is true that it can be little tricky to attach a lamp shade to the new design (but do we really think this is an unsolvable problem?  Really?), and the new ones don’t generate enough heat to drive an Easy-Bake oven but they do two things well: light up a room and use less energy when they do so.  The shape is actually necessary because, unlike an incandescent bulb where the light emanates from a white-hot filament (typically tungsten; thorium, a radioactive isotope is often produced during the fabrication of tungsten filaments – oops!), the new bulbs generate light at the surface of the bulb only and you get more light out when the surface area is higher – which it is in the curly shape.  But there’s a little more to it than that.  The bulb is really a twisted fluorescent lamp in which UV light from excited gas atoms inside the tube excites a fluorescent compound painted onto the surface of the bulb.  In fluorescence, typically higher energy light goes in (in this case UV) and lower energy light comes out (in this case visible/white light).  It sounds weird that you put in one kind of light to get another kind but you can see lots of examples – black lights, which emit ultraviolet light, will cause fluorescent paints to “glow” in the dark (next time you’re in a disco, make sure that you brush your teeth and wear something brightly colored – it will be dark, but you’ll see what I’m talking about.).

We need both, sure, but there’s a time for each.  Light informs, illuminates, opens the doors and reveals the details for all to see.  Heat, not so much.

Less heat.  More light.  Please.  The good news is that reasonable people seem to be leaving the drama to Broadway, and Glee (here is a recent NY Times story on the subject).