Neil and Bill Talk Climate Change | StarTalk

In my field, just as a scientist, we view politics as a barrier between where we are and where we want to go. But of course, in Washington, politics is the currency of interaction. So, how do you, as a professional politician, balance what is objectively true about the world with what people want to be true about the world?

Yeah, there's still a surprising number of people who don't believe in evolution, right? The campaign against evolution has been politically amazingly successful. I think I'm a good red-blooded American, and I will say I don't mind that you don't believe in evolution. You just shouldn't be on a science committee making decisions that affect the entire country or rewriting our textbooks against where 97% of the people are, right?

The same thing is true with climate change. It's inconvenient for some people, so they just disavow it. Maybe those of us who believe in it may be wrong about how quick the adverse consequences would be manifest. But I think, with regard to science, we at least have to get those people who have no interest in it to adopt what is now my mode of thinking: the grandparent test.

That is, you name me one other risk-related decision where if 95% of the experts were here and 1 to 5 percent of the experts were there, any grandparent would take his or her grandchild's future on the 5%. How about this? Suppose the guy wrote one article in one journal and said, you know, I've been thinking about these child restraint seats. I think, you know, there's a one in a million chance the kid could snap his neck, so I recommend just throwing the kid in the back seat and let them roll around.

And 99 percent of people said, "Oh my god, you can't do that! These are working; look at the help! Much the fatalities going down." Name me one grandparent who would choose the 1%. Not one! But that's what we do with climate change. I mean, my theory is nothing would create more new jobs and new enterprises than changing the way we produce and consume energy and other resources.

If you can do it in a way that's good for the economy, it's probably something you ought to do anyway. Scientists need to say, "Look, we're not being dogmatic. If you can show us we're wrong, we'll admit we're wrong. We're wrong all the time. We're still opening doors, we're opening doors, we're opening doors," and that these fields of knowledge are coming together in ways that are beautiful.