Recent stories in the Morgan Hill Times indicated that our schools have made progress in teaching basic science.
I called the school district and validated that it was real. That is great. Being knowledgeable about science is becoming increasingly important in our ever more complex world. It is unfortunate that too many schools have taken too long to achieve any sort of proficiency and we pay for this as a society, often being taken in by political slogans supporting solutions that will never be.
Science provides a factual description of how the world works. Nearly everyone understands the simple concept of a lever. Given a strong stick and a small rock, I can move a much larger rock. Science would tell you exactly how long the stick needs to be and how big of a rock you can move.
I rather wish that more of our legislators, both locally and nationally, had gotten past this basic level. If they had, we might not be in the predicaments that we are in today.
Watching the Republican National Convention, I was appalled by the fervor with which the words "Drill, baby, drill" were chanted. There seems to be an overall feeling that drilling for more oil, either on the Outer Continental Shelf or in Alaska will alleviate our addiction to petroleum or the need to import it in large quantities from countries that are not necessarily our friends. Neither could be further from the truth.
Peak production from new offshore drilling is forecast to reach 200,000 barrels per day by 2030. That is a long way off and will provide for only four days of our requirement. This should not become the basis of our energy policy and those who would make it so may be delusional, ignorant or lying through their teeth. Or, it may be that they just don't understand basic science.
We know that the world is warming. That fact can not be denied. Some would deny that the burning of fossil fuels has anything to do with it.
Those who do are also deficient in their understanding of science. If any reader wants to challenge me on this, I would ask them to read The Carbon Age by Eric Roston. Buy it from BookSmart, check it out from the library, but read it. The science is not that difficult.
I read it recently and became even more convinced that climate change, a major disruption in what Roston calls the Carbon Cycle, is the single biggest threat to civilization as we know it ... perhaps to much of the life on this planet.
Most scientists who have focused on the manner in which greenhouse gases are changing our climate indicate that our atmosphere will continue to warm when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 350 parts per million (ppm). It is now 385. Even if we were to stop all burning of fossil fuels today, the earth will continue to warm.
Both the Obama and McCain campaigns use the term "clean coal" to describe a solution to our need for electricity in which the carbon in the emissions of new power plants will be captured and returned to the earth in some manner. The problem with that hope is that there are absolutely no clean coal plants in operation. There is talk, there are plans, but there is nothing working and the earliest that any can be expected is 2015.
This says nothing about what we do with the large number of coal-fired power plants that are already in existence, or those that will come on line in other countries over the intervening years. It says nothing about the level of environmental destruction that arises from the mining process. In West Virginia, it is called Mountain Top Removal. Just think of taking the top off of El Toro, using the material to fill in Uvas Canyon and then trying to find another source of fresh water to replace Uvas Reservoir. That is happening every day in Appalachia. You do not have to earn a PhD in physics, or biology to understand that much of what you hear does not make sense. All it takes is some curiosity and the time to do a little reading.
Yes, it is encouraging that the Morgan Hill Unified School District is improving science education. It is encouraging that we have a congressman with a degree in mathematics.
But when I listen to so much of the populist political pandering that passes for fresh ideas, those who would be the new boss sounding like the old boss, I just hope that we have enough time to educate a new generation of young people who will not be fooled again.
Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. Reach him at wrolley@charter.net.
Wes Rolley Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
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