Sonia you're not a primate scientist but you're a very distinguished scientist
and astrophysicist what do you think about 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 still about Einstein's theories that led to
nuclear fission but we still know that nuclear power plants do operate and they
do provide electricity and yeah so what's happening here is they're people
who have cultural political religious economic philosophies that 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 so here's
a new truth if this study holds it but an emergent scientific truth for it to
become an objective truth the 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 the 3% of the papers
or the 1% of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that that
is simply irresponsible and what 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
1963 a year when he had important things to be thinking about he signed into law
the the National Academy of Sciences because he knew that science mattered
and should matter in governance and and it and you know we build our cities on
the basis of science we win you know when when we fall ill we don't we don't
go to the local witch doctor right go to a doctor even though all
that science is still you know I mean there are advances gonna be made none of
it is settled in the sense well so you know what it's settled you know it 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 I said
if you think scientists want to always agree with one another you've never been
to a scientific conference because the people are duking it out but what are
they fighting over not the settled science that's been in the books we're
fighting over the the the bleeding edge of what is not yet known and and that is
the natural course of science and a few as a journalist want to eavesdrop on
that meeting you'll think scientists don't know anything about anything but
is the body of knowledge that is accumulated over the decades that
precedes this that becomes the Canon of what if you're gonna base policy and
legislation on that's what you should be thinking about so you would say this is
a moment to listen to climate science I think this 50 inches of I can't even
picture how many raindrops is that 50 inches of
rain in Houston this is this is a shot across our about a hurricane the width
of Florida going up the center of Florida these are these are shots across
our bow that what 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
the fact that we have fewer deaths per hurricane why because you now know weeks
in advance we have models that have trajectories of hurricanes in a decades
gone by it was like there's a hurricane there we don't know should I stay should
I go and then you stay and you die okay so to cherry-pick science it's an odd
thing for a scientist to observe and I don't I didn't grow up in a country
where that was a common phenomenon we went to the moon and people knew Science
and Technology fed those discoveries and the day to politicians are arguing about
whether science is true it means nothing gets done nothing it's the beginning of
the end of an infant to democracy as I've said many times
what I'd rather happen is you recognize what is scientifically truth then you
have your political debate so in the case of energy policy whatever it's you
you don't ask is the science right you ask should we have carbon credits or or
whatever right response right exactly what is the economic dimension of this
that's where the politics needs to come in and it's not the longer we delay the
more I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our
greatest cities are on the oceans and water's edges historically for Commerce
and transportation 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 that's this is happening
faster than our ability to respond that could have a huge economic consequences
on that sobering note Neil deGrasse Tyson always a pleasure and we are in a
hurry to read the book thanks