Selective Information Overload

Here’s your weekly Science Matters column by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola.

Selective Information Overload

The most powerful force shaping our lives is science, especially when
it’s applied by medicine, the military and corporations. All too often,
new technologies become part of our lives without much forethought as
to their full impacts on our society, let alone that of the non-human
environment. Just think of nuclear power, genetic engineering, and the
development of new toxic chemicals to keep our lawns greener or
vegetables blemish-free, for example.

When I began my television career in 1962, I thought that all
the public needed was more information about science and technology so
it could make better decisions based on facts. Well, people are getting
far more information today than they ever did 45 years ago. Although
there are more facts, there are also more opinions. And we still make
ill-informed decisions.

I now believe we are experiencing a major problem in the early-21st
century: selective information overload. And by this I mean that we can
sift through mountains of information to find anything to confirm
whatever misconceptions, prejudices or superstitions we already
believe. In other words, we don’t have to change our minds. All we have
to do is find something to confirm our opinions, no matter how
misguided or wrong they may be.

Whenever I give a talk on global warming, someone in the audience
often tells me that the Earth is going into a period of global cooling
and should be burning more fossil fuels. When I ask for evidence, they
typically answer, “a website”. Well, yes, there are lots of websites
saying that global warming is some kind of left-wing plot, junk
science, baloney, etc.

There are also dozens of websites, books and videos about
intelligent design or creationism, pyramid power, UFOs, the Bermuda
triangle, crop circles, Atlantis, alien abductions, and so on. And this
brings us back to our big challenge: sifting through information
overload.

In fact, our own government’s use of science to inform public policy decisions has not gone unnoticed.

Recently, the internationally respected British science journal,
Nature, published a strongly worded editorial that listed the federal
government’s skepticism on the science of global warming and its
retreat from Canada’s Kyoto commitment.

Canada’s current government has also phased out the role of the
national science advisor, and refused to accept the recommendations of
its own expert science panel on biodiversity (COSEWIC) to legally
protect several endangered species, including beluga whales, the
Porbeagle Shark, and two populations of White Sturgeon that live in
British Columbia’s Fraser River.

For people who do not want to believe the painstaking evidence
accumulated over decades by thousands of climatologists that
human-induced global warming is real and demands an urgent response,
all they have to do is rely on selective media reporting.

Of course, if we are each going to have some say in where we are
going, we need information. And we need to inform ourselves using real
facts put forth by credible sources. But even this is in jeopardy.

President Bush has made things more difficult by imposing a heavy
hand on scientific reporting, deliberately distorting reports and
censoring information. Scientists, including a number of American Nobel
prizewinners, have raised the alarm over this intrusion of politics
into science.

Sadly, this practice is not confined to the U.S.

This is a big problem.

Science provides the best information about the world around us. Of
course, it isn’t a perfect system. Scientific conclusions are often
tentative, and can only become more solid after more debate, more
research, and more observation. The process can take years.

And scientists, being human, also have their own biases and points
of view that can influence the way they ask questions and interpret
data. But in the arena of open scientific debate, over time, consensus
can generally be achieved regarding the best possible understanding of
an issue.

Scientific consensus does not mean we will always get the right
answer. But if I were to bet on an issue, I’d put my money on
scientific consensus over an observer’s hunch, a politician’s opinion,
or a business leader’s tip.

If we don’t have the best scientific minds and information to guide our
policies, where do we turn? The Bible? The Koran? The Dow Jones
average? This is something that we all need to think about, regardless
of political stripe.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.