Pickle Barrel
THE MOST POWERFUL force shaping our lives is science. All too often, new technologies become part of our lives without much forethought as to their full impacts on our society, let alone that of the non-human environment.
When I began my television career in 1962, I thought that all the public needed was more information about science and technology so they could make better decisions based on facts. Well, people are getting far more information today than they ever did 45 years ago. Although there are more facts, there are also more opinions. And we still make ill-informed decisions.
I now believe we are experiencing a major problem: selective information overload. And by this I mean that we can sift through mountains of information to find anything to confirm whatever misconceptions, or superstitions we already believe.
Whenever I give a talk on global warming, someone in the audience often tells me that the earth is going into a period of global cooling and should be burning more fossil fuels. When I ask for evidence, they typically answer, “a website.” Well, yes, there are lots of websites saying that global warming is some kind of left-wing plot, junk science, baloney, etc. There are also dozens of websites, books and videos about intelligent design or creationism, pyramid power, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, alien abductions and so on. And this brings us back to our big challenge: sifting through information overload.
For people who do not want to believe the painstaking evidence accumulated over decades by thousands of climatologists that human-induced global warming is real and demands an urgent response, all they have to do is rely on selective media reporting.
Of course, if we are each going to have some say in where we are going, we need information. And we need to inform ourselves using real facts put forth by credible sources.
But even this is in jeopardy.
President Bush has made things more difficult by imposing a heavy hand on scientific reporting. Some scientists, including a number of American Nobel Prize winners, have raised the alarm over this intrusion of politics into science.
Sadly, this practice is not confined to the United States. Recently, the science journal Nature published a strongly worded editorial that listed the federal government’s skepticism on the science of global warming and its retreat from Canada’s Kyoto commitment.
This is a big problem. Science provides the best information about the world around us. But, it isn’t a perfect system.
Scientific conclusions are often tentative, and can only become more solid after more debate, research and observation. The process can take years. And scientists, being human, also have their own biases that can influence the way they ask questions and interpret data. But in the arena of open scientific debate, over time, consensus can generally be achieved regarding the best possible understanding of an issue.
Scientific consensus does not
mean we will always get the right
answer. But if I were to bet on an
issue, I’d put my money on scientific
consensus over an observer’s hunch,
a politician’s opinion or a business
leader’s tip. 
Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.
Post City Magazines’ environment columnist, David Suzuki, is best known as the host of the long-running CBC series The Nature of Things. He is also the author of more than 30 books on ecology.
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