Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Global Warming Theory Is ‘an Emergent Scientific Truth’

Hurricane Irma was ‘a shot across our bow’

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

ZAKARIA: "So what role does climate change play in the ferocious strength of hurricane Irma and the intense flooding caused by Irma and Harvey. The head of the EPA Scott Pruitt said that in advance of Irma said that it was insensitive to talk about global warming right now. Neil Degrass Tyson joins me, he's author of the best sell ter "Astro physics for people." When people say, look, this is not settled science, there are still questions, I sometimes think to myself, look, there are a lot of questions about Einstein's here by about nuclear physician. But we know that there are power plants and they do create electricity."
TYSON: "There are people who have religious and economic philosophies they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. You can find a scientific paper that says practically anything, and the press, which I count you as part of, the press will sometimes find a single paper and say here's a new truth if this study holds up. But an emergent scientific truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it. It requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people's research, all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That's what we have, with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence, if you want to find 3% of the papers or the 1% of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that, that is simply irresponsible. How else do you establish a scientific truth if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiments and scientific observations, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed into law in 1863, a year when he had important things to be thinking about, he signed into law the actual science -- he knew that science mattered and should matter in in matters of governance."
ZAKARIA: "When we fall ill, we don't go to a witch doctor, even though advances have been made in science.
TYSON: "You know what is settled? Settled science is the science that has come out of large bodies of research that all agree. When you see scientists arguing, and I tweeted, if you think scientists like agreeing with one another, you've never been to a scientific conference. And you see people fighting over the bleeding edge of what is not known. If you as a journalist want to eves drop on that meeting, you would think that no one knows anything about this, but it's the body of knowledge over the decades that precedes this, that if you're going to pace policy and procedure on, this is what you should be looking at. I can't even picture how many rain drops is 50 inches of rain in Houston? This is a shot across our bow, a hurricane the width of Florida going up the center of Florida. These are shots across our bow, what will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it. Even news reports on this channel, talked about the fact that we have fewer deaths per hurricane, why? Because you now know weeks in advance that project models of hurricanes, in decades ago, it's a hurricane, should I stay, should I go, and then you stay and you die. So to cherry pick science, it's an of the thing for a scientist to observe. I didn't grow up in a country where there was a common phenomenon, we knew that -- people are arguing about whether science is true, nothing gets done, it's the beginning of the end of an informed democracy, as I have said many times. What I would rather have happen is you reognize what is true and then you have your political debate. In the science of energy, whatever, you don't ask is the science right, we ask should we have carbon credits or tar tariffs."
ZAKARIA: "What is the right response?"
TYSON: "That's where politics needs to come into this and it's not. The longer we delay, I worry that we might not be able to recover from this, because all our greatest cities are on the water's edges. And as storms kick in, as water levels rise, they are the first to go, and we don't have a system, we don't have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles, it is happening faster than our ability to respond that could have huge economic consequences.
ZAKARIA: "On that sobering note, Neil Degrass Tyson."

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