The scientific method runs on falsification of existing theories. One doesn't make a statement and try to prove it, but try to disprove it. And a good theory exists only until it dies out. ANd scientists make their careers by challenging the prevailing theories of their peers. In this way science makes progress.
Note that this method is different from religion that holds God tells us what to do and you should all listen up or roast in hell.
Carl Sagan says that a certain number of nuclear detonations would raise enough dust in the air to create nuclear winter. The climate gets cool because of a volcanic explosion, I might think Sagan has something right.
Michael Benton, author of When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of ALl Times, tells me that the warming of the earth would lead to the release of carbon and methane gasses trapped in ice and the oceans and that this caused the last great extinction. I am tempted to both question his theory as well as worry about what a few degrees warming might do to the air I and my children will breath.
Does science botch it. Yes, that's partly the nature of science.
Has science done right? Yes, enough to consider it carefully.
If Garrett Hardin illustrates the Tragedy of the Commons Problem, than his examination of that problem might tell me something about why the Grand Banks gets overfished, why the Med gets polluted and how to deal with it.
If we can learn that lead posioning is due to lead gasoline emmissions, and that a reduction of lead in the atmosphere due to unleaded gas leads to fewer cases of lead posioning- I would have to credit the scientists for that one.
Same with PCB's being dumped in the water ways, or the health consequences of nuclear testing, or the consequences of smog, or the increase in mercury (dumped from Eastern European factories) in fish leading to one of the first international environmental conferences in Stockholm. ANd the list goes on.
That said I will agree that environmentalists often prophesize doomsday if something isn't done. Often they are wrong, but they are right plenty enough to pay attention too.
Should DDT be used to kill mosquitos carrying Malaria- that's been argued. Probably. Until the mosquitos evolve to be immune from DDT. Of course the questions of why we can't come up with either a cheap vaccine for Malaria or an alternative insecticide than DDT should also be questioned.
SOrry CCR, I question your claim that scientists, as a body, are a bunch of nutty lunatics terrorizing us with claims of doom and catastrophe. If they offer us warnings, they give us reason to check their theories but also reason to take action on our own.
In the 1970s the US had major environmental problems, according to scientists, leading to the enactment of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and numerous other environmental protections. As a consequence the quality of the environment has, overall, improved. We can credit the scientists, and not the preachers, for that advancement.
Ok, so the scientific method should have some balance with human value- I will agree with that CCR, but that's basically a non-issue.
The question is- if you dismiss the scientific method for explaining and making sense of your world, perhaps even improving it, what else do you have to replace it with?
