There are none so blind as those who will not see.

     According to media reports, President George Bush says that he will not see the new movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, the movie where Al Gore sounds the warning bell about global warming. Apparently the truth in that movie is just a little too inconvenient for Bush. He would rather avert his gaze and pretend that nothing is wrong.

     There is a consensus in the scientific community that global warming is caused in large part by human activities, and that it threatens disaster on a worldwide scale if we do not take immediate action. Many believe that hurricane Katrina is just a foreshadowing of much worse which is yet to come.

     The arctic north is particularly sensitive to the effects of global warming, and may play a significant part in accelerating the warming when the permafrost melts. The pack ice is disappearing, and with it the polar bears. Bush should be taking steps to save the polar bears, but he prefers to imitate an ostrich.

     President Bush is certainly not the only person who makes choices about what to believe and what to disbelieve. Everyone selectively filters the information they receive. One of the primary tasks of the human brain is to distinguish between important and unimportant information. We are constantly bombarded by far more information than we can process, and the vast majority of it must be ignored and discarded.

     People also tend to retain information that reinforces their own existing mental models of the world, and to discard information that contradicts those models. We are capable of overcoming that tendency when we make an effort to do so, but in most cases the default filtering system operates unimpeded.

     There are some fundamentalist religions and other belief systems that take advantage of these natural human tendencies by extolling the merits of faith, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. The followers of these belief systems are told that the truth revealed to them is infallible, and can never be questioned. This tends to encourage loyalty to the belief system, and discourages the adoption of new ideas as new evidence comes to light.

     The reason that science has been so successful in explaining the world around us is because it rejects faith and revealed truth as a source of information, and relies instead on logic, evidence and testing. Scientists continually question, test and retest the explanations put forward by other scientists. When scientists reach a consensus, as they have on the issue of global warming, it is because the evidence available so far is overwhelming.

     By choosing to reject the scientific consensus, withdraw from the Kyoto protocols, and do nothing to prevent global warming, Bush has shown that he prefers faith over evidence, and revealed truth over science. This should not come as too much of a surprise, because Bush belongs to a fundamentalist religion which has taken positions against the scientific consensus on other issues like the age of the earth and Darwinian evolution.

     Conveniently, his policies also benefit his friends in the oil industry.

     While it is not a surprise that Bush prefers willful ignorance over rationality, it should be deeply troubling for those of us who expect to live on this planet over the coming decades. The scientific consensus should not be tossed aside in favor of one man’s faith, especially when the stakes are this high.

     On the other hand, perhaps he just has faith in his ability to handle any disasters that may arise.

---