Prince Charles Quotes
It is baffling, I must say, that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything - until, that is, it comes to climate science.
Charles, Prince of Wales. "A Speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at a Reception for The Prince of Wales's Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change." The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall, 19 Nov. 2013.
First Muslim to win the Nobel Prize
Most environmentalists limit the vision of their solutions to using less of our precious natural resources which is very important but just as important and perhaps more so in the long run is increasing the supply of these resources. Food is an example. The major reason that there is no serious food shortage world-wide is that we have increased the productivity of agriculture requiring less labor, less water, less fertilizer, less land, and less dependency on weather. Distribution has also improved, but there is no very good way of distributing something for which there is a great shortage.
Eugenics was an intellectual movement of the first half of the 20th century that was mostly junk science and was debunked. While the analogy is clever and makes her political point about climate change science, there are actually several major differences. Eugenics was never a set of scientific laws that had near unanimous support of all the scientists in that and related fields while climate science is. Eugenics was not an experimental science where its principles were subject to refutation with data. So called Eugenic scientists did no experiments, analyzed almost no data, and were more philosophical and political than scientific. Most of the Eugenics advocates were not scientists at all and had little or no training in science.
This is a classic technique used by politicians of the left and right when they are faced with scientific findings that do not comport with their ideological, religious, or political view of the world. Namely to point out that the science is not settled and the field is still in flux. Therefore, they are, that it si too early to make public policy on the basis of that. And they have little trouble finding that the scientists themselves who did the research that they do not like are the first ones to say that the science is in flux. For ALL SCIENCE IS IN FLUX and new findings are being introduced literally every day in most scientific fields. That very rarely does the new knowledge contradict the older science in huge and dramatic ways. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity turned the field of physics and mechanics upside down but it did not change the calculations that engineers and scientists would make in over 99 percent of their measurements. Within a few decades of Einsteins theory being published, it was demonstrated to be wrong—not completely wrong, but inadequate to measure the mechanics of tiny partials like electrons adn quarks. Quantum mechanics was born. And every week or so these days there is more knowledge that makes slight changes in the way we understand quantum mechanics. No science has ever remained settled for 1000 years since the beginning of scientific inquiry, By the 19th century most science did not remain settled for 100 years. In the 20th century “settled” science rarely lasted more than a decade, and in the 21st century, few are stable for even a year.
Most environmentalists worried about the global warming problem have one basic solution they want the world to adopt. Reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the amount of fossil fuels that we use. However, there are other techniques that are possible and are looking increasingly cost beneficial. But those worried about climate change tend to want to steer public discourse away from other solutions. They worry that if technologists like Myhrvold propose other solutions that may be credible, that will give the politicians of the world a rationalization for stopping the progress on reducing use of fossil fuels and political momentum would be lost with no certainty that these other technologies would be effective or worse whether the politicians would ever appropriate the moneys to give them a try and we would be left with nothing changing and the world warming with all the negative consequences therefrom.
Charles, Prince of Wales is the heir apparent to the British throne as the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II. He has been heir apparent as well as Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay since 1952 and he is the oldest and longest-serving heir apparent in British history. He is also the longest-serving Prince of Wales, having held that title since July 1958. Upon the death of his father, Prince Philip, on 9 April 2021, Charles also inherited the title Duke of Edinburgh.
