The Comparison Method
One of the limitations of scientists’ perceptions is the situation itself. You can mix hydrogen and oxygen together in a laboratory and see that it creates water. That’s a very simple experiment, so the logic is easy to test.
On the other hand, if you found a species of bird living on an island and you wondered what the island’s environment would be like without the birds living there, you can’t test that by killing all the birds, because once you satisfied your curiosity, you wouldn’t be able to undo the experiment and bring all the birds back to life. So instead you have to use what’s known as the comparative method. You can go find another island that has the same environment but doesn’t have the birds and see what that environment is like. It won’t be the same island, so the environment won’t be exactly the same, but you could get an idea what the first island would be like without the birds. Then you could go look at other islands that had similar environments but didn’t have the birds, compare all the islands to each other, and get a better idea that way. Then you could apply laws of biology, chemistry, and physics to your discoveries and get more information that way. If the birds didn’t live on the island, the food cycles of the island would be different, because there would be more of whatever the birds ate and less of whatever ate the birds. Now with all that information, you could make a good estimate to see how the environment would balance itself out. This experiment is a lot more complicated than mixing chemicals in a laboratory, but this is the only way it can be done.
The effect that humanity is having on the global environment works the same way. Humanity’s effect on the global environment is a planetary chemical experiment. We only get to try it once, and our descendants will have to live with the results forever. Currently, the planetary chemical experiment is being carried out by people who have no idea how our planetary environment works. For the people who are figuring out how our environment works and how our planetary chemical experiment is going to turn out on its present course, we only have one planet to look at. That means we can’t compare our planet to another planet where the people tried something else. That means that we have to use what we’ve learned about physics, chemistry, and biology in other ways, and apply them to the entire world. That means we have to use the comparative method of science on a much bigger scale, in a much more abstract way, than we did when we were studying the environment of our hypothetical island.
That makes planetary biology the most controversial field of study in history, because we can make predictions, but the only way we can test them is by living through them. That makes it really easy for people who are opposed to science and who don’t really know anything about science to convince the public that the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about—because there’s no way to test their discoveries ahead of time. So for anyone who doesn’t know how science works, it sounds like scientists are just a bunch of tree-hugging Communists who are making things up to try to scare everyone.
Ultimately, I’m not using science to tell everyone what to do. You’re the ones who are thinking of what to do. A lot of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries are trying to figure out where our societies went wrong and how to keep from making the same mistakes in the post-revolutionary society. Where our society went wrong and how to fix the problems has been discovered, and that’s what I’m here to tell you about. If it sounds like I’m using science to tell you what to do, that’s only because I’m not talking about abstract ideas, I’m specifically answering your big question of how to solve the problems you’re rebelling against.