As you know, I like to ask questions of Scientists. You can see indisputable proof of that proposition here, here, here and here. This is a special edition dealing with Climate Change. It is customary for me to begin (or end) like this:
Thank you, Scientists! Thanks for putting up with the persecutions throughout history. They continue to this day. Thanks for dealing with the inequitable amount of attention. You deserve so much more.
Thanks for the Scientific Method. My goodness that was big!
Thanks for all of your discoveries and inventions. Thanks for the cures. Thanks for putting up with the inadequate and inequitable pay. Thanks for helping us better understand what is going on in our world. Thanks for the hours and days and months and years and decades of painstakingly complex work that has added to the body of our knowledge. Even if you discovered "nothing," you've shown us the path not to follow.
Thanks for conquering your egos and requiring peer review of your data and experiments. Would we all were so circumscribed. And for demanding repeatability! You force everyone to prove their theory by duplicating their experiments. It seems that Republicans still haven’t learned that one. Thanks for putting us on the internet and getting us to the Moon. Thanks for fighting our battles for us (and not for them). We really need you now! Thanks for our children, many of whom would not be here today without your discoveries.
I highlighted the portion above because it rings true now more than ever. And it leads to my first question:
QUESTION NUMBER ONE: On July 6, 2017, Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, resigned. His term would have ended in January 2018, but he left early. His departure made a splash, as it was reported by everyone from the New York Times to even Fox News. Piercing the GOP bubble a tiny bit, Fox reported the clashes between Trump and the Office of Government Ethics.
Was it worth it for Mr. Shaub to make his splash, but allow Trump the ability to select a preferred head of the Office of Government Ethics six months earlier than expected? That is my question for Government Scientists. Is it better to resign or fight from within? I believe the latter would be more efficacious, but I don’t know that, scientifically.
QUESTION NUMBER TWO: I believe it is now settled Science that whales emerged forty million years ago from ancestors that had walked on land. This means that their ancestors emerged from the water. So, it seems that there were creatures which left the oceans for dry land, didn’t think much of it, and returned home.
Since the ocean is going to overtake great swaths of land, displacing hundreds of millions in the not-so-distant future, can we speed up this evolution thingy? Are there a few of you working on gills? Blowholes?
QUESTION NUMBER THREE: The very first question that I asked Scientists in this series actually had implications for Climate Change. It was this: “Long ago, somebody told me that if you have water in a pot on a stove and you brought it to a boil, it would boil in the same amount of time whether you started with cold water or room temperature water or hot water. I did not believe this person, but nodded wisely. Is it true?”
A very kind Scientist responded to that question, explaining that cold water would take longer to boil than hot water. I believe now that it has something to do with the law of conservation of energy and the concept of internal energy. I imagine the laws of thermodynamics apply, at least broadly, and generally, to the Earth, as if it were a giant pot on a stove. Is that true?
QUESTION NUMBER FOUR: The second question that I asked Scientists also had environmental implications. This query: “I've read about people throughout early history--like the Greeks and Romans--who looked up at the skies without magnification and saw Jupiter and Neptune and other planets that I cannot see now. Why?”
A Scientist also responded to this to note that Jupiter is still visible to the naked eye. However, there is also more man-made pollution, and, near urban areas, we also have light pollution at night.
QUESTION NUMBER FIVE: I live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The folks around here have worked hard to shore up the beach with imported sand. I suspect that our skinny little waif of a beach has only a few decades to go before it is under water. My question for Scientists is this: Once the beach is gone, should we just call the place “Myrtle”?
Or, should we call it “the Atlantic Ocean”?
QUESTION NUMBER SIX: When a young child asks you, as a Scientist, why the sky is blue, do you tell them, “The sky is sometimes white or yellowish. In many places, it’s gray from smog or fog. Occasionally, it is purplish or orange and many other colors. For almost fifty-percent of the time, it is completely black. Sweet baby Jesus, pay attention!”
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
QUESTION NUMBER SEVEN: What do you make of the Science practiced by amateur Climatologist Donald Trump? Let me provide you with some of his data:
QUESTION NUMBER EIGHT: Did that nauseate you? Okay, that’s not my question. My question deals with Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which provides:
Would you say that the plethoric number of Scientists who are now seeking political office constitute an example of Newton’s Third Law? Or, is it just a keen analogy? Take, for example, the candidacy of Jess Phoenix. Besides having a name that sounds like an anime hero, she’s also (1) a volcanologist, (2) co-founder of Blueprint Earth, a nonprofit environmental scientific research organization, (3) the daughter of two FBI agents, and (4) the recipient of public support from Star Trek actors Tim Russ, John Billingsley and Robert Picardo.
Or consider Elaine DiMasi.
She’s on leave from her job for twenty-one years as a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory so that she can defeat Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin.
Then, there’s pediatrician Mai-Khanh Tran. Her story of survival and Science is amazing! As reported by Mother Jones, Dr. Tran made the decision to fight for a seat in Congress after her Congressman, Republican Ed Royce, voted to repeal ObamaCare:
“I felt like my heart was gripped by this overwhelming pain,” says Tran, who spends part of her year treating lepers in her native Vietnam. “But I went to work and one of the first patients I saw in the office was a patient with a very severe illness—she had a brain tumor.” The girl’s mother, who worked at a nail salon, had been able to get health insurance through a subsidy provided by the Affordable Care Act. “We were hugging each other, crying—we really thought that our lives and a lot of our patients would be affected very soon. I didn’t realize how soon.”
Trump’s election was an energizing moment for Tran not just because of her place in the health care system, but because in addition to being a pediatrician and leprosy researcher, Tran is also a refugee.
She left Vietnam when she was nine on one of [the] last “Orphan airlift” flights out of the country before the United States evacuated Saigon. Her father had dropped Tran and two siblings off at an orphanage because it offered the best chance of survival. (They would later reunite in Oregon.) “I kept thinking, ‘What on Earth is he wearing sunglasses for?’” she said of their parting. “’He’s such a proper man, why is he wearing sunglasses?’ And it dawned on me years later that he didn’t want us to see him cry.”
Another amazing fact about that election is that Dr. Tran is not the only Democratic Scientist challenger to Ed Royce! Phil Janowicz, a former Cal State Fullerton Chemistry Professor, will be in the primary. So is this proof of Newton’s Third Law?