It's been quite ridiculously cold in Perth these last few mornings. Frost on the ground. Frost on Windows. Frost on pets and duvets, for crying out loud. And I've been finding it hard (well, easy suffused with irony) to reconcile the rather overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming dangerously, with the tinkling sound emanating from underneath all of the brass monkeys in the vicinity of the metropolitan area.
And I've come the following conclusion: any speculation regarding climate change ought to be made illegal for anyone stupid enough to try and establish a connection between a shift in the entire planet's weather patterns with a short burst of unusual conditions.
It is a simple enough trap - we live on the earth, and therefore assume we understand it. It's actually more logical to deduce, from having a body, that one understands medicine. (That is, overwhelmingly not very.) It is the deferential "science" of personal experience, rather than quantifiable evidence. It is fundamental to our various senses of self that firsthand experience equates to knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom, and it is axiomatic in our modern age that other people are either stupid, or have an agenda of some kind with which they are trying to screw us. In an age where scientific specialisation is inherently necessary to better understand our world on an increasingly complex level, such illogical deductions are unhelpful to the point of being harmful.
We need to get comfortable with the idea that other people know more than we do about a great, great many things. That's hard enough, but that's only half of it: we also need to trust in the intentions of other people. Why? Because the survival of any society - never mind a global one - requires some degree of cohesion and co-operation. It would be a shame if mistrust turned out to be the secondary cause of environmental disaster.
To that end, it is hereby decreed that ill-informed opinions ought to be - if not banned outright - at least not considered to be of equal value to those which have been shaped by decades of objective research. If we can't come to accept that there is a quantifiably different degree of intrinsic worth between these two perspectives, then frankly, our species is in trouble.
Now if you'll excuse me, the cat needs defrosting.
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