Letter: Don’t let politics stop scientific progress

Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

Congratulations to Al Gore on his Oscar award for his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." It would be good if that award would to some degree unite us to an awareness of global warming and the dangers in that warming, but that is unlikely. A recent poll found that something like 40 percent of the U.S. population doesn't even know what global warming is about. Additionally, many of my conservative acquaintances deny that global warming is occurring, or that it has human sources. They think it's just a political ploy by liberals.

The politics vs. science schism over global warming is matched by a similar and widening gap between religion and science, concerning such issues as evolution and its teaching in public schools, stem cell research and the origins of our ethics, among others. This is shameful.

Science has proved itself the only reliable method for understanding our world and how it works, and the religion or politics that denies that, and that will not at least be informed by science, denies reality. And eventually, it denies a promising economic future for those under its influence. For at least a hundred years, the most successful societies have been those at the forefront of science and related innovation.

I was a boy when Sputnik was launched. That was a focal point that concentrated our interests in science, although earlier agricultural and health advances had most people - people of all religions and politics - believing that the future of mankind lay with science. I believe that still, and can only wonder at those who deny it, or politicize it, or pervert it in accordance with some doctrine and who, by their confusion, obstruct our progress in it.

Carl Kaun, Henderson