Science Evangelist: Climate Blasphemy?

Hope Jahren presents to a joint audience at NOAA, Pearl Harbor, April 10, 2017 (MC1 Troutman),

Review by Bill Doughty

Friend of Navy Reads, Hope Jahren, author of "Lab Girl," edits "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017" (Houghton Miflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2017).

Jahren reminds us that "science is essential and frivolous, jubilant and despairing, lovely and brutal, perfect and broken – all at the same time – just like the scientists who fashion it." 

She brings us essays on emerging fields of study, changing areas of our world, and the "real life" of scientists, warts and all, who wonder, discover, contemplate and explain.

In her introduction Jahren focuses on a theme that runs throughout this book and appeared in "Lab Girl": the effects of increasing carbon in our atmosphere and the resulting climate change and inevitable impacts: hotter summers, more severe storms and rising seas.

Hayhoe quotes from authors of the Bible such as Peter and John.

Sounds Old Testament, right? Which is fitting because one of the best works in this collection is by Sonia Smith, "Unfriendly Climate," from Texas Monthly, about a compelling scientist named Katharine Hayhoe who uses the Bible to explain why people should care about climate change, not just as a scientific issue, but also "a moral issue." Hayhoe consults for DOD and other agencies.

Called by others a "climate-change evangelist," Hayhoe says, "I feel more like a Cassandra, or an Old Testament prophet spreading bad news." 

But Hayhoe, we learn, is also optimistic about the opportunity to preach about renewable energy and the potential for solar and wind energy to eclipse our reliance on fossil fuels – especially in her home state of Texas.

The CoServ Solar Station in Krugerville, Texas. (Photo by Ken Oltmann)

Author Sonia Smith writes: "Over the past 15 years, climate change has emerged as one of the most polarizing issues in the country, ahead of guns, the death penalty and abortion." Yet, the basic science was worked out more than a century ago when scientists Joseph Fourier, Jon Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius came up with and proved the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Today there is robust scientific consensus that global warming is 'real, caused by humans and dangerous'; a study found that 97 percent of climate scientists agree with those conclusions. The Department of Defense calls climate change a 'threat multiplier,' because it exacerbates existing problems. And the year 2015 was the warmest on record, breaking the previous mark, which was set in 2014."

Katharine Hayhoe hopes. (Photo by M. Voelker)

Hayhoe, we read, uses passages from the Bible in her slide presentations to make her point, including this New Testament quote from John 13:34-35" "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples – when they see the love you have for each other."

Agnodike (or Agnodice), Greek scientist.

In another essay we learn about ancient women scientists who contributed to their societies in Greece, Egypt and Babylon: Agnodike, Aglaonike, Hypatia, Aspasia, Merit Ptah, Tapputi, Artemisia and En Hedu-Anna.

The writers who contributed to this volume take us from the mountains and jungle of Virunga to the icy edge of the Arctic, from Assateague Island on the East Coast to Houston and Los Angeles, from the Marshall Islands south to the Chukchi Sea north, from our own DNA to the Milky Way and beyond.

We explore a wide spectrum of topics: effects of overuse of antibiotics, study of rats in Vancouver, hot Santa Ana winds, evolution of altruism, wave piloting, use of public wilderness lands, darkness studies, gravity and quantum theory, space exploration, and down-to-earth investigations of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Elizabeth Kolbert and Eric Rignot in Greenland, where Kolbert reports on the shrinking ice sheet.

But the stifling threats to the world's climate resurface time and again throughout this book. Elizabeth Kolbert's remarkable "A Song of Ice," published in the New Yorker, explains calving and melting ice in Greenland, at the U.S. Army outpost Camp Century and beyond. "I keep finding myself drawn back to the ice – to its beauty, to its otherworldliness, to its sheer, ungodly significance," Kolbert writes.

"I first visited the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2001. At that time vivid illustrations of climate change were hard to come by. Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in the too warm waters of the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the mounds of dead mussels that washed up this summer on the coast of Long Island and the piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River."

In a New York Times Magazine piece by Nathaniel Rich, "The Invisible Catastrophe," we read that "the World Health Organization has called climate change the greatest health threat of the 21st century." Rich writes about the godawful health effects to people and pets from methane gas pollution in Aliso Canyon, Orange County, California.

"The most dangerous threats to our species are precisely those that are most difficult to visualize: long-term, slow-to-emerge, amorphous. These threats include not only warming temperatures but also mutating viruses and political corruption and tend to be invisible, dimensionless and pervasive, like death. Like natural gas."

CJCS General J. Dunford tours Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum May 9, 2017.

Tim Folger is the series editor for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," and he writes a passionate plea for freedom of research, respect for the truth, and the need to heed reality. He compares attacks on science to events in Germany in the 1930s, when mobs of young men burned the works of scientists and Jewish writers considered blasphemous to the Nazis. Authoritarianism thrives when the free press, justice system and electoral process are threatened.

"One measure of the health of any modern society must be the degree to which it supports its scientists. A few days before I started to write this foreword, hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities across the country participated in the March for Science. It was an event at once inspiring and worrisome: inspiring because so many took a stand for rationalism ... worrisome because who would have thought that in the 21st century scientists and citizens would feel the need to gather in support of something so self-evidently valuable as unfettered scientific research?"

Hope Jahren joins a roster of other great science writers who have helmed the series since it began in 2000, among them: Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and another friend of Navy Reads, Mary Roach.

In Jahren's introduction to this volume, she jumps into a charge of "allegorizing human endeavors by way of plant biology," something that makes "Lab Girl" so personal and relatable. Jahren studies how extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps some plants thrive, and she tests how much may be too much.

"Right here, right now, I'll suggest that the Internet is like carbon dioxide for science writers, who are themselves like plants, and that we are living in an unprecedented era of diverse and thriving journalism in the service of science – albeit one that could be cut off and mowed down if we don't actively value and defend it."