Are Rachel Maddow and Glenn Beck reliable sources of scientific information? Image of Rachel Maddow from Wikimedia Commons.
Who can you trust nowadays? That question has some importance for me today. While some of you are read this, I will be anesthetized on an operating table. Doctors will be trying to reconnect a ruptured tendon in my right foot. I’d like to say that I was injured climbing the north face of Old Capitan, but it’s just 50 years of wear-and-tear; running a lot on pavement when I was a teenager without proper running shoes; and the thousands of lunges I did while a fencer in college and later as a fencing coach. And just life—carrying around too much weight on my feet.
I can walk, but I can’t walk for long. And right now I tend to list to the left. So if I want to do any serious exercising, like taking long hikes in Tilden Park, I need to have my foot bones completely connected to my leg bones. So I have to trust the doctors who are helping me, and the nurses and anesthetist, and the physical therapists who will help me recover. (My sister is a physical therapist. She likes to call herself a “physical terrorist”. But that’s not how I experience her or them!)
If you watch cable news channels much you will have noticed an ongoing feud between Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Glenn Beck of Fox. Beck has been poking fun at Al Gore and the scientists who study global climate change. He and other conservative commentators claim that the heavy snow storm in the East Coast somehow disproves global climate change. Maddow has been criticizing Beck on his misuse of the science. And Bill Nye the “Science Guy” went on Beck’s show to explain that global temperatures are already rising well beyond what could be explained as normal, non-human influenced temperature fluctuations. Nye explained that hotter air carries more moisture. More moisture means more snow storms and rain. The worst snow storm in years on the East Coast actually points to climate change already happening.
So who do you trust? Do you trust the scientists who by and large are interested in interpreting data so that we can apply it to solving problems? Or a television commentator who improves ratings by providing people easy and false scapegoats for all the real problems they're facing everyday and who gets monstrously rich by doing that. In a time of crisis the message, “You don’t have to change anything,” is very attractive but usually wrong, especially if there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary.