Cosmos Review: The World Set Free - The Easy Way or the Hard Way

"Cosmos" gives us a glimpse inside a world with runaway global warming.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.”

“The World Set Free” borrows liberally both in words and in theme from John F. Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, delivered in September of 1962 at Rice University.  The episode closes with Kennedy’s words, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and Neil deGrasse Tyson repeatedly reminds us of the many times in our past that attempts at alternative energy sources have failed because we’ve chosen the easy paths of fossil fuels.  But it is the above quotation, from the same Kennedy speech, that has always intrigued me more.  While it’s true that part of why the United States was so eager to reach the moon was to prove its superiority over the Soviet Union, the greater reason, claimed Kennedy, was that somebody had to prove it could be done and nobody else could do it better or faster than we could.

It is perhaps fortuitous then, that “The World Set Free,” Cosmos’s endgame, its raison d’être, comes only two days after President Obama announced an ambitious new program to reduce carbon emissions from American power plants by thirty percent from their 2005 peaks by 2030.  This is a program bound to be opposed by conservative state governments (especially those that approved new coal plants three days before the announcement), but which is a huge first step in the United States taking leadership in combating the scientifically accepted scourge of man-made global climate change.

If it seems odd that I haven’t spoken much of the episode itself, it’s for the simple reason that this was the most straightforward hour of Cosmos yet.  From beginning to end, this was an exploration of global warming: A meticulous breakdown of its causes and its consequences.  The facts are largely agreed to.  The earth is warming.  We know this because long-term temperatures are rising both on land and sea.  We know these temperature increases are being caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; that’s simple physics.  We know that the single largest source of unnatural greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels. 

The consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect are similarly well-known.  We have Venus as the most extreme example, but even modest increases in global temperatures will cause sea levels to increase, likely flooding coasts and bringing regular droughts throughout the world.

The anticipated effects of global warming are not the most depressing aspect of “The World Set Free,” however; it’s the acknowledgment of how close we’ve come to embracing alternative fuel sources on so many occasions.  We first saw the power of the sun at the 1878 World’s Fair.  We even saw how solar power could transform the desert prior to World War I.  But each time, economic realities smacked alternative energy down.  Coal and oil are simply cheaper to turn into power than the energy from the sun or the wind.  It’s probably for this reason that Tyson chooses to focus on Kennedy’s proposition of “easy and hard” ways. 

The ugly truth is that fossil fuels are the easy way.  They’re cheaper to use even with the added costs of extraction.  Where fossil fuels lose their cost advantage, however is when you factor in the long-term negative impacts on the environment.  Economists call these negative impacts externalities, because their costs are borne not by their creators, but by others.  Governments have long recognized the need to minimize these externalities, from Clean Water and Clear Air Acts to anti-smog and acid rain legislation.  

For some reason, the world has thus far avoided addressing the externalities of global warming.  Perhaps there’s an unwillingness to admit the true nature of our predicament.  Perhaps, as Tyson suggests, we’re simply addicted to the “easy way.”  Whatever the reason, Tyson argues, the time is now to invest in alternative energy sources that utilize the immense power of the sun to generate power.  We’re already seeing the initial effects of a warming world and we’re largely doing nothing to abate further greenhouse gases.  Great change is needed, and it must come from somewhere.

“First in war, first in peace,” eulogized Henry Lee about our nation’s first president.  It was in this spirit that the United States first put a man on the moon and it is in this spirit that we must move forward in combating global warming.  As Tyson mentioned a few weeks ago, modern man is perhaps the only species in Earth’s history to have the ability not only to destroy its environment, but to rebuild it as well.  We met yet be the makers of our own undoing, but we also have the ability to be our own saviors, if only we have the will.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can contact him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Cosmos Review: "The Clean Room" - Everything Changes

Scientists play the villains on "Cosmos"

One of the greatest misunderstandings of science today surrounds the nature and purpose of science.  Far too many people view science as a collection of facts that can be refuted by “facts” from religion or other scientists.  But the truth is that science is not just a collection of facts.  It is a process: one that encourages, demands, and requires questioning and honesty.  What “The Clean Room” shows us is that anti-science (that is, anti-process and anti-questioning) opposition doesn’t come solely from the religious, but from the political as well.

Host Neil Degrasse Tyson has received a lot of criticism from the right (and praise from the left) for his apparent antagonism of religion throughout Cosmos.  But “The Clean Room” lays out Tyson’s view of science perfectly and shows how it is not religion that is the problem, but the insistence by some on using “God did it” as the ultimate answer to all questions and to shut down further exploration.  Take, for example, last night’s discussion of James Ussher, the Anglican archbishop who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, purported to calculate the creation of the earth as October 23^rd, 4004 BC. 

While a 6,000 year-old planet has been accepted by Young Earth Creationists as the ultimate “truth,” Tyson does not have any scorn or resentment toward Ussher.  Rather, he seems appreciative of Ussher’s inquisitiveness.  The man wanted to answer a question and he used all of the tools available to him at the time: the Bible and other historical texts.  Tyson even compares him to early geologists who, while more scientific in their exploration, used a similar tactic as had Ussher.  Whereas the priest counted “begats,” the geologists counted layers of sediment.  Neither was right, but being right is beside the point.  For Tyson, science isn’t about being right; that’s just a side effect.  For Tyson, science is about process and exploration and constantly questioning what we think we know.  This distinction is, perhaps, the single most important facet that Tyson can highlight in Cosmos.

For far too many people, science is just a collection of facts, and facts can be disputed and even, occasionally, refuted.  So Young Earth Creationists can put their “facts” up against science’s facts and claim that each set of facts is equally worthy of discussion, therefore we should “teach the controversy.”  Vaccination opponents can put their “facts” up against science’s facts and claim that parents should be allowed to choose which facts they want to believe.  Climate change deniers can use their “facts” to prevent us from taking any measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions.  Or, as “The Clean Room” showed, corporations can hire their own scientists to produce their own “facts” in order to claim that leaded gasoline is not polluting the environment.

When science is portrayed this way, it is easy to refute, but Tyson is doing a marvelous job of showing that science is not just the destination; science is the journey.  We know that the earth is 14.5 billion years-old (give or take a few million years) not because we “discovered” it, but because 450 years ago James Ussher, and others like him, started asking the question.  Their methods and results may have been wrong, but their results were the starting point for others to build on. 

This brings me to the other Big Idea that Tyson has been making throughout Cosmos and which really came into focus in “The Clean Room”: scientific discovery is not linear.  Many people think that science works in a straightforward, linear progression, with Discovery A leading to Discovery B leading to Discovery C and so on.  Given this interpretation, negative results are treated as failures.  In reality, science is more of a branching tree (similar to the evolutionary Tree of Life), in which negative results may lead to dead ends, but which can also spawn new, long-lived branches of research. 

Clair Patterson, the primary subject of “The Clean Room,” did not set out to rid the world of lead additives; nor was he trying to revolutionize decontamination protocols.  He just wanted to figure out how much lead there was in a few rock samples.  All of the developments that came after, while unintended, were a natural result of the scientific process, which generally allows for the expansion of tangential ideas.  Alexander Fleming was studying staphylococcus when he discovered penicillin.  Percy Spencer was working as a radar engineer when he discovered that microwaves could melt chocolate.  Many scientific discoveries have been the result of accidents or tangential research.  That is why a proper scientific method is so important.  It doesn’t cut off discovery by saying “God did it” or by withdrawing funding because the results of the research may be potentially harmful.

It is this final bit that receives the bulk of Tyson’s ire.  He is willing to forgive early religious scholars who had only ancient texts for evidence.  Their ignorance is based in evidence rather than intent.  Instead, Cosmos reserves its deepest scorn for those scientists who should know better, but who are so recalcitrant in their beliefs that they are unwilling to accept the possibility that other scientists could prove them wrong.  The oil companies of the 1960s could just as easily have been the sulfur dioxide producers of the 1970s, the chlorofluorocarbon manufacturers of the 1980s, the tobacco companies of the 1990s, or the greenhouse gas producers of today.  All of them are (or were) having negative impacts on the environment and all of them denied it to their dying breaths, often with scientific research in tow.  It is these scientists, who should understand the process but choose to ignore it for political or financial reasons, who are the most deplorable according to Tyson.  They should be encouraging new avenues of scientific exploration, but they instead stifle it due to non-scientific forces. 

“The Clean Room” is, by far, the best episode of Cosmos to date because it clearly states every purpose the series has.  First, science intends to have a meaningful impact on our lives.  The most esoteric research into the age of the earth can affect day-to-day humanity, even in inadvertent ways.  Second, science is meant to encourage innovation, not to stifle it.  What hindered Ussher and the geologists who followed him was their methods, not their ideas.  New ideas should always be encouraged even as old methods are discarded.  Finally, what most harms science is the appeal to authority.  That authority can be God or it can be other scientists.  But no new evidence should be beyond honest questioning.  The reason we readily accept today that smoking causes lung disease, or that lead additives cause health problems, or that greenhouse gasses cause global climate change is not because we believe these things to be true.  It’s because there is a preponderance of evidence pointing to these conclusions and no new evidence has been effectively presented to refute them.  It is not religion that obstructs science, but an unwillingness to accept new data that is the true enemy of science and mankind.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.