Letter: Of facts, opinions and incomplete science – Chico Enterprise-Record
A fact is a fact it has been said many times. In geological evidence and the night skies it presents itself, and truth of a type is repeated in print and at the top of our voice, but in the wilderness it is in vain. (Insert irony here.)
But when it is mixed in with opinion it becomes something that I refer to as soft/ incomplete science. When it is mixed with fear and promoted with a political will it can become a powerful tool as we have seen in the last few election cycles. Donald Trump and Joe Biden became POTUS but Hillary did not all facts) yet some still to this day think she was cheated out of the presidency so 4 1/2 years of searching for a reason /evidence to overturn the 2016 election.
Our inland empire has been a glacial ice field, an inland sea and urrently ranges from an irrigated desert, a flood plain and contains some of the most productive lands in the world ( a truly amazing fact) so climate change is also a fact. The current argument is whether human action “caused” this which goes down the road of soft science IMO. Using “thinking” machines to model the past, mix in opinion, political will and predicting the future goes down the road of prophecy and not necessarily science. I suspect the human experience has not risen to the level that we can predict the future, much less control it.
— James Jenkins, Oroville
