Measurements

Getting more scientists into Congress has become a necessity of our time.  Too many of our lawmakers are not making any sense. We need people who make evidence-based decisions that are outcome-driven and measured by performance measures from day-to-day and century-to-century.

Rex L. Curry

There are many origins of human progress; election cycles may not be one of them because of how willing we are persuaded to act in our interests. Sharpened stones and sticks, fire, and the wheel are on the early list of ways to simulate community interests. More recently, the primary source of human advancement today comes from the ability of scientists to explain phenomena in ways challenging, if not impossible, to vary. The political structures of our survival will change for that reason. I will tell you why.

With both excellent and poor results, improvement in the world is due to a verb, science. When Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), criticized Lovelock’s Gaia principle as a failure because it suggests the earth has a cause or a purpose, he got support from the non-theist community. Scientists will accept ideas of God or Gaia as metaphors for profound mysteries the same way they would admit to thirst or hunger. On the other hand, the aggressive acquisition of knowledge for survival requires a far higher footing than metaphors for the unknown.

As a measure, the law has done what it can to expose its deficiencies from a local magistrate to a Supreme Court Justice majority. The necessity of science to become political managers, act in defense of science, and work on behalf of society is apparent but slow to persuade. Speedy persuasions are not like this profession. It is crucial to have a more comprehensive view of things to be done, whether in urgency, over the next century, or more from today. Here is why.

Modern legislation requires science to solve problems. It now needs to be politically persuasive. Organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) examine many contemporary social concerns, from nuclear weapons to food and energy. However, exposing inappropriate political interference is needed to get science out of the crisis news cycle. UCS’s Michale Halpren is the director of the Center for Science and Democracy. This center’s analysis fuels the new kind of talent Shaughnessy Naughton of 314.Org hopes to find. Naughton and her team have excellent methods for putting scientific principles to work in politics. With the help of people from STEM backgrounds, its mission is to find and elect scientists to political offices in preference to lawyers. 314 Action’s national networks of pro-science advocates are organizing to combat notorious attacks on fundamental scientific understanding. The need for leaders who advocate for evidence-based reasoning is a priority for one reason.

Extended problems such as pollution are subject to clinical analysis, and those associated with climate change require continuous outcome-driven policies designed to meet performance measures. As a result, the political dialogue will shift to the debate over resources needed to protect the public. The resource argument is that corporate-survival hype can be a forgivable strategy Evidence from industries in big tobacco, pharma, and fossil fuels is overwhelming.

Leaders in the U.S. Senate, House, State Executive, and Legislative offices who express unwillingness to recognize science as a concluding arbiter require exposure. The name “314.org” elicits a well-known scientific formula for determining the area of a circle – Pi. The  “Under the Scope” project of 314.org aims at the anti-science members of Congress. They analyze votes against the facts, data, and behavior that promotes anti-science policies. The open-ended discovery of knowledge is a counterinsurgency effort aimed at the non-scientific community in all political bodies. The rise in questioning authority and distrust of empirical evidence has never been more critical.

New evidence proves political leaders are highly unreliable sources of knowledge. The explosion of new instruments for measuring phenomena in every field makes the availability of an ever-lengthening chain of cold digital reasoning a matter of record. The capacity of science to test and disprove conjectures continues. What remains is a world filled to the meniscus with adjustable explanations and versions of fact in which misinformation is used as an obstruction strategy. A fact-sloppy world is not a place to solve problems, especially when the tools are in hand. Firm, high-impact daily-actionability is now available in multi-integration forms of data involving cycles from one hundred years to microseconds.

Last Chance to See

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams (writer/artist) and Mark Carwardine (zoologist) describe the journey to see wildlife before extinction. What if it was what we now call a chicken? In an introduction to their book, Richard Dawkins noted that all living things are genetic cousins; some are just more distant than others, so if one unique part of the global biomass slips into nothingness, so does a part of all of us. In this view, Doug and Mark’s journeys are not about species extinction; they are about the problem of not knowing that the species ever existed.

We acquire knowledge of life on earth and the physical universe by testing to disprove hypotheses. Demanding improved flows of information establishes a balance between valid data and theories. Here we come to the central problem of science.

What do we do when what we think we know needs to be disproved continuously?

The exponential nature of knowledge in the world is concerning. One of those expansions draws from Darwin’s initial findings to complete the first Genome Project. Communicating this knowledge widely adds complications as it spreads the demand for evidence. Defining the genetic structure of evolution has been ongoing for a half-century, and the findings continue to be astounding throughout the Dawkins debate.

One Chance

A change in one cell can also produce grave disadvantages, such as HIV and Covid-19. Nevertheless, every variation of the DNA code in cells adds depth to the design of instruments for storing data for knowledge of life. The diversity of beingness builds in these genetic pathways’ toward infinity, and the storehouse is human curiosity plus machine storage with which a more profound relationship is desired.

The best “last chance” example is the evolution of sight. The transformative advantages of responding to light energy are evident in many species, from unicellular eyespots to vertebrates with image-forming eyes. Seeing the relationship between HspB5 (a heat shock protein) in the genetic code for alpha-crystallin reveals how the full spectrum of sunlight became a force in species diversity. The evolution of sight is complicated, so Joshua Harvey details the 500 million-year story of the human eye here for the curious.

Another Chance

Normal atmospheric pressure at sea level translates to about 14.7 pounds [? Men’s shot] per square inch. In the big January 2018 storm hitting the northeast, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) explained bombogenesis’s new metric. With the growing interest in connecting climate change with evidence from big storms, a key element will be the atmospheric pressure change rate. Typically, significant winter storms are nor’easters or winter hurricanes. The “bomb” metric puts the rate of change in the spotlight when the barometric pressure drops 24 millibars or more in 24 hours. On January 3, 2018, at 9:51 AM, the pressure was 1027.0; on January 4, the pressure was 996.2, a 30.8 drop.   A January morning can begin as cold and fair, and 20 inches of freezing snow and fog by the following day. (Table)

A Billion Other Chances

Viable routes to millions of discoveries share a common theme. In explaining phenomena, they tease out the elements that are easy to vary. A mathematical and observational components’ variability provides proof of insufficient data, ineffective thinking, and the lack of a testable hypothesis. In The Fabric of Reality, the quantum physicist David Deutsch promotes the “above all” practice of using two principles: problems can be solved because problems are inevitable. He offers one reason beneficial for every inquiry. Precautionary principles or methods cannot avoid the unseen. These challenges are hypothetical and rare, if not unimaginable, but it is not impossible to implement vigilance.

The questions and procedures that might lead to solutions remain unknown until too late. For example, could the fires that destroyed the towns have been prevented? Yes, but only if the cities were never there. After decades, information proves human emissions of GHGs caused a slowly rising global sea and melting ice sheets at the poles. The location of significant impact areas is everywhere, making the final delay action question: how many people are life-threatened?

The data on conveyed gases into the atmosphere remains an annoying controversy in the scientific community due to a long list of non-scientific reasons built on the attrition model of human survival used in war slowly being applied to the world, but what is to be done as everyone is threatened everywhere?

The losses of both Antarctic and northern ice sheets across Canada, Greenland, and the Russian tundra to the North Pole are facts. They connect to anthropogenic warming. Science links these facts to temperature, a question answered by well-funded analytical rigor. As sea-level rise continues, science suggests it is unlikely to become critical before 2100 (defined as 6.6 to 16.4 feet). Rather than determine the fixed probability set in the unstoppable motion of ice into liquid in the coming decades, there is the irrational belief that it may be alterable. Unknowns are just that, unknowns. Best question contest:

What do you do when the stakes involve displacing over a billion people?

The argument for increasing urban density and resilience is a reaction to the problem of temperature and less so the issue of global warming gases. Rising temperature is the “ugly fact.” So it is the asteroid, in the otherwise beautiful climate change theories. While science may argue methods for managing “atmospheric gases” for decades, it could also peer review the fabric of our reality into neatly defined tipping points of chaos.

Applying Deutsch’s and his colleagues’ extraordinary scientific discipline requires redirecting. Theories of parallel worlds may be fascinating but unhelpful. Instead, it would be far more supportive for the community of scientists to develop full knowledge of the cities we share now in ways that will persuade the whole world to change.

Start Button Pushing

The button string of agency logos above represents multiple agencies attempting to connect “the dots.” The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, often referred to as the Supreme Court of Science, described Climate Change and its dangers as a “settled fact” in 2010. In the 2014 report, specific impacts on a region, such as a significant increase in precipitation, help them share and connect critical buttons. The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) is anticipated in late 2018 and will not combine all of them. Climate impacts quantified by region and season will drive direct hands-on action. Therefore the subtlety in the added detail will not (or should not) be lost on city and state climate analysis organizations or first response agencies. Directly or indirectly, the additional data will enhance localized reactions to and preemptions of specific events. The range of detail now available marks ranges from the upward trend of “heavy downpours” by counties in Iowa to the dots connecting the impact of drought, followed by big fires, heavy participation, and mudslides in the canyons of California.

The discovery of sustainable human settlement ecosystem relationships in the Anthropocene era is well underway. Encouraging climate scientists to engage in testable theory engineering will be more complicated than the advances made by the more practical stepchildren of Climate Change, the proponents of resilience. A diverse and adaptive set of urban settlements worldwide already demonstrate the practice of urban resilience and their trial-and-error relationship with a rapidly changing global ecosystem. Farsighted investments in urban places are underway to make them “climate-proof.” Like temperature, they are available as measures of effectiveness accompanied by several instructive cautions in using variables.

The exact location of these places and the population protected have begun to exhibit the political structure of a “them and us” crisis. The central non-scientific problem is distinguishing between the unseen hazards of survival by location. As physical entities, these places can be socially and economically diverse. They can be resilient and unique laboratories of the sustainable ideal, vast BTU storehouses, exemplary learning centers, and without a massive change in political outlook, little more than a few caves sheltered from the misery of the humans left behind.

When problems are questions, we want or need answers. When the answers are known, and a pathway forward is clear yet impossible to implement, the questions tend to get labeled evil. Examples of the “not enough” type of problem are “money.” These are public education concerns, safety, food, and water security. When measured against fairness or equity, the decisions turn to political power or priority measures. The best use of standards is the general assurance of well-being through governance, accountability, and transparency. The “too much” problem includes corruption, poverty, religious conflict, and large/small-scale warfare. Complex phrases such as Global Climate Change describe combinations of “too much, not enough” questions. The destruction of natural resources, viral pandemics and extreme weather, and thermonuclear war are anxieties without containment; they are sloppy expressions wrapped in cloaks that encourage nervous intolerance, claims of injustice, and many proofs of inequality. The solution is simple but impossible to implement without intensified global awareness. Put every combination of the human condition into one boat or one well-contained set of urban places, and the choice is evident – fix it or sink.

From the pale echo of evening light, from the big bang to the stuff of stars that we are now, the capacity for measurement has only managed to imagine a tiny part of what creates the space that allows “matter” to exist. But, the enormity of cosmological physics aside, the ordinary observer can walk away from dark matter and energy theories with one helpful fact. If only 10 percent of the physical universe is available for measurement, why is human existence in such a tiny part of that completely unexplored? Could it be that the button for that is in our backyards?

Science begins with the unseen and grows with the unknown. Still, given the promise that the revelations of science can continue indefinitely, we face one flaw, an unlikely continuation of intellect in the absence of less than habitable earth and only where the necessities of survival redefine the luxury of inquiry.