Sound decisions are grounded in science, evidence

Imagine you are a city manager.

You observe an outbreak of small pox in your city. How do you respond?

Would you gather a team of epidemiologists and virologists to learn about the disease and use their knowledge in formulating a plan?

Or would you declare small pox isn't a threat, go on with business as usual, and hope for the best?

If you chose the latter, you are not alone.

There is a current of anti-evidence-based decision-making sweeping the country, from West Virginia University to Washington, D.C. – and it needs to be called out.

Last week, a column was published on this page by David Ciarolla titled "Having faith is more useful to mankind than logical thinking."

In it, Ciarolla attacks those of us who use evidence to formulate our perspectives and demand logic for conclusions, calling us hypocritical, Orwellian, arrogant and dogmatic.

In one shining gem, he says, "Evidence-based decisions are the ultimate authoritarian telling people what to do, for they must adhere to the truth of the universe."

Damn gravity, always telling me what I can and can't do.

If it were just some college student espousing this nonsense in a campus newspaper, it wouldn't matter.

The problem is, this sort of thinking – if it can be called such – reaches all the way to the U.S. Congress.

The modern Republican Party has become anti-evidence, anti-logic and anti-science.

If you want to base your personal decisions on faith, go ahead.

It may not be good for you to ignore evidence, but it's really none of my business.

The problem is when public policy is based on anything but evidence, logic and science.

Public policy affects all of us, from our security to our economy and our forests to our health care.

Since the decisions legislators make affect all of us, they must be based on evidence that is realizable to all of us.

Faith, by definition, is not that way.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines faith as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof."

In contrast, the greatness of science, the foundation of the Enlightenment, is independent of the observer.

Science is beautifully impersonal.

Unfortunately, it seems some of our politicians would rather silence science than use it to inform the policies they write.

Last week, the so-called Energy Tax Prevention Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bill would silence scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who have concluded greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and the environment.

The congresspeople who wrote the bill are worried regulating emissions will hurt the economy.

That is a legitimate concern. But the proper response is to assemble the best climatologists, energy scientists and economists to examine the evidence and make projections, and then base policy on those findings.

Instead, these Congresspeople have told the scientists to shut up, that the best peer-reviewed science cannot be used in formulating regulations.

Congressman Henry Waxman wittily analogized the situation: "Republicans in Congress can't cure cancer by passing a bill that declares smoking safe. And they can't stop climate change by declaring it a hoax."

Preemptively preventing coal ash regulation, as well.

Coal ash is what it sounds like – it is the ash which remains after coal is burned.

We burn a lot of coal, which makes a lot of ash, and we need to figure out what to do with it.

Scientists are hard at work figuring out what happens to the heavy metals in the ash if it is placed on mine sites during reclamation or on farms as a sort of fertilizer.

Naturally, if it turns out coal ash is dangerous when it is applied to farms, we should want the government to regulate such use.

But in another amendment in brazen contempt of science, House Republicans have proposed the EPA's authority to regulate coal ash be stripped before it is even begun.

It shocks me these politicians are so arrogant as to think they know what is best for us better than the best science.

Ignoring evidence on wolves.

Gray wolves are critically important. Our killing of predators like wolves are why we are overrun by deer and rabbits.

Populations of the gray wolf in the Continental U.S. are so low as to put them at risk of extinction.

But House Republicans think policy on wolves should be decided by politicians writing federal budgets instead of expert scientists.

An amendment to the House budget resolution would remove gray wolves from the Endangered Species list, which would lead to their being hunted and their populations being decimated.

Never mind what science says, the politicians will decide what's best.

Is that really what we want for our country?