Brains & Climate

My father ran a medium-sized insurance company in Kansas City in my youth and, when we were driving around town, he would point out accidents waiting to happen—say, leaving one’s bicycle sprawled across a path for someone to trip over in the dark. A more subtle form of foresight is playing the percentages—and some improving percentages lead to my suggestion, “Don’t Sleep Alone!”

 Young adults mostly die, or become permanently disabled, from accidents. Later in life, heart attacks, cancer, and stroke become more common than accidents. Cancers are insidious but the three others strike without warning. They often require fast treatment to prevent permanent disability or death. How fast is fast? (more…)

Mention global warming at a social gathering and see what happens, now that skepticism and glib comebacks have turned into concern and sorrow. People will, of course, assume that you’re a pessimist about our prospects.
     “Not really,” I protest. That earns me a quizzical look.
     “Wait a minute,” she says. “If you’re an optimist, why do you look so worried?”
     Dramatic pause.
     “So you think it’s easy, being an optimist?”
Many scientists look worried these days. We’ve had a steady diet of bad news coming from climate scientists and biologists. To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.
     First, I reflected, the history of science and medicine shows that, once you mechanistically understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. I’m optimistic that we will learn how to stabilize climate.
     When pessimism tempts me, I usually remember the progress that I’ve seen. When I was born in 1939, antibiotics were just a rumor, there were few vaccines, and your chances of dying from an infection were three times higher than they are now.
     I’ve seen an enormous increase in our knowledge about how bodies work, from molecules to mind. The average lifespan has been extended by decades in many countries, just in the time that I’ve been personally observing the scene as a medical school professor. And in the first half of the 20th century, deaths from infections dropped by an order of magnitude even before antibiotics and vaccinations came to dominate the scene . Just the basic knowledge about how diseases spread was what did most of the job, not a needle. Once this new knowledge was incorporated into everyday practices, eight out of ten fatal infections were prevented. We’re used to thinking of science discoveries leading to technological innovation. But here you see how knowledge, pure knowledge, pays off all by itself.
     The reason I’m not so pessimistic about climate is that, once you understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. It is reasonable to hope that we will learn how to intervene and stabilize things in the decades ahead, much as we earlier did in medicine. (To be continued.)