think, muhammad ali. these people of all known you and now it comes time for you to speak about yourself and you see for your epitaph it should be he was just enough to have the courage to stand up for his convictions no matter what problem his actions have cost him, he was just enough to perform a miracle to we got to east and the universal prison of sleep, to regain his humanity and living hell. he was just enough. just enough. ..

>> this year playing host to the 16th annual los angeles times festival of books. the festival of books is the nation's largest literary festival, two days over here in los angeles hosting 400 authors and hundreds of exhibitors from publishers, book sellers, and literary organizations. booktv is going to give you a real flavor of the nonfiction books featured this year. two days of coverage of panel sessions from inside the taper hall, and also a number of call-in programs with nonfiction authors.

let's look at what's coming up later on today. in just a few minutes, the first panel session is called inconvenient truth, and i'll tell you more in a few minutes. it's followed by a call-in program and the new book called the threat matrix in the age of global terror. the coverage continues after that with a panel called history, identity, and purpose, california and beyond. that's moderated by he recollects -- hector. then, one nation under sex, how the private lives of president's, first ladies, and their lovers changes the course of history. then, american history, blood and backrooms moderated by diane smith, and two books featured in that, thomas powers, the killing of crazy horse, and jim newton.

then, a call-in program with gayle, and then the final panel is boiling point, climate, population, and environment, a number of authors with aspects of the environment moderated by a "los angeles times" staff writer. let's talk about what coming up in a couple minutes with inconvenient truth moderated by a media columnist including timothy ferris, the science of liberty, democracy, reason, and the laws of nature. seth who wrote about the true story of medicine, science, and fear, and two co-authors of "merchants of doubt, how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on tobacco smoke. live coverage begins shortly on

the festival of booksment thanks for being with us. [inaudible conversations] >> okay. it's on me. the woman in green says it's on me. we'll get started. i'm the media columnist for the "los angeles times". i write twice a week and blog for the times and tweet and all those other things that we all have to do in today's new media landscape. i have a couple announcements to make to start out. the first is the standard please silence your cell phones, so that especially because we're being recorded. we don't want to pick up a lot of tweeting and bleeding. as you already heard, there's a book signing following the session, so i think you make -- what was it, 17 lefts -- [laughter] and then a right?

[laughter] three lefts and a right, and it's signing area three, i think your maps should have that, and then also you're not supposed to be regarding this because c-span is recording it, and you can get whatever you need from c-span. all right? what i'll try to do is introduce our speakers, kind of get the discussion going, and then if everybody is still with us, we'll take questions for at least the last 15 minutes or so of the session, and anyway, we have a really interesting panel here, and a really interesting topic and the title their have chosen is inconvenient truth. i have the three books we'll be discussing here. we're coming to the panel today at a time when with the internet we have unprecedent access to information, the ability to obtain knowledge and december seminate knowledge has never been greater. however, we're in an era when

our institutions from the government, the media, to the academy to universities like the one we're here at today are under increasing attacks, their authority questioned. the three books today are all about the importance of information in a democracy, how we come to con sen toc on -- consensus on topics like universal concerns, climate, or protecting our children's health through immunization. the debate rages on how to settle the issues on what's true and what's not. i recently wrote a column about what we, i hope most would agree is a settle the matter which is -- settled matter which is the place of birth of the president of the united states. [laughter] and, yet, this morning in my inbox, this morning's column if you want to pick one up, yet this morning it would be amusing

if we had the time, i could read you the e-mails from the people who want me to explain exactly how that long form birth certificate was digitized. [laughter] as you can see, it's very hard to settle things these days. anyway, without further adieu, we'll introduce the panel and get into this, and from my immediate left here. timothy ferris is the author of the science of liberty, democracy, reason, and the laws of nature. here it is. he's been called the best popular science writer in the english writer today by the christian science monitor and the best science writer of his generation by the "washington post". he's written a dozen books including seen in the dark and the mind's eye, both new new york time's best books of the year. his articles appeared in every major publication i can think of, "time," "scientific

american," produced three pbs specials, and cricketed -- contributed to cnn. there's seth, and there is a vowel in between his name, his book is the "panic virus" a story of medicine, science, and fear, the contributing editor another "vanity fair" magazine. one book he published was hard news, the ensuing sort of meltdown in the newsroom. "new york times" and the trouble of the editor and such. he also wrote "feeding the monster about the boston red sox and rise to power after being a perennial also ran.

seth, i'm familiar with his work because he wrote about the media. he wrote a terrific story about the new york times reporters serving in iraq. just to his life is dr. nay -- dr. naomi, how a handful of scientists gathered the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. her co-author will joins at some point. he's stuck in traffic at this point. [laughter] anyway, she is a profession of history studies. her study beyond the ivory tower was sited by al gore in an inconvenient truth as a seminal look in climate change denial. her more general terms research focuses on the historical development of scientific knowledge. she's wrote about continental drift and the inviz the of women --

invisibility of women in science. provocative. okay. [laughter] hopefully, we will get erick conway in here at some point of the he's not with us yet. anyway, first, i think we'll have each of the panelists go down in the same order i introduced them, and give me a quick summation of what your book tells us, and what's the gee-whiz moment when you talked about your book preachesly and people -- previously, and people who road it, what grips them and something they never knew before about your topics? >> in 30 seconds or less, okay, two-three minutes. [laughter] >> i hear it's ruining people's lives in that they stop everything else in order to not just read the book, but read the biographies the people in the book. that's been the -- i hadn't expected that, but i've been receiving angry calls, and i

can't do anything now but concentrate on science and liberal democracy. [laughter] i thought it might be useful to briefly sketch a little bit of history. because of the way any subject we learn, including our own history or the nature of the universe or anything like that, there's always a problem that one backs into it. you can't conduct research and learn things the way a college course would later be structured. you learn things in a happen hazard way, and that distorts our understanding, and i think this is true of our history. we study our history in terms of a few highlights. in terms of science, we make much of a few efforts by the ape she want greeks to --

and shentd -- ancient greeks or the efforts of the golden age of the arab empires when mathematics and sort of like scientific subjects were pursued, but science didn't really get established anywhere in the world. the first scientific institutions anywhere in the world date from the 17th century at the very earliest. consequently, because science changed the world so much in every regard, we tend now to forget about the long period that proceeded the discovery of science. during that time, and actually well into the first century or two that there was science, the entire human species knew relatively few facts. it's true that some of what they knew are lost to us, that there

was a lot of knowledge of herbs and plants in the jungle, and that there's a lot of stories that were never written down, but there's no way around the fact that prescientific humans just didn't know many facts. the intellectual tradition that grew up on this consisted of analyzing and rearranging and having clever opinions about those few facts that were known to humanity. the rate at which humanity required new facts discovered things prior to advent of science was comparable to how the economy grew, and they are linked, and that's at 1% a year. if you knew 100 facts in one year and you knew maybe 100.5 facts the next year and so forth. that produced a tradition that endures to this day in which instead of facts, there is a tendency for us to use dogma and

ideology which is an intellectual heritage, and to simply apply our -- these ideological ideas to thingings around us. it's simple, quicker, and has a distinguished intellectual heritage, but it is increasingly in vairnlings with the number of known facts that doubles every decade or so. the rate of learning now is so astonishly fast that's it's quaint to use old dogmas to try to deal with it. now, to sum up because i'm using up all my time here, it was inevitable that we were going to have a clash between science which reduces fact and does not have an ideology, all opponents of science claim it's a preideology, and that's false. science is a method, and these methods have changed the world. no one in ancient times imagined

that people would be as healthy, as wealth, as free as they are today, and it was the combination of science and democracy that brought that about, but the majority of people don't know how science works or have a sense of what it has learned. they still adhere to the old tradition of a kind of dogmatic ideological way of looking at the world, so we've been set up for a clash between these two things, the actual facts of the world and the shorthand waves of dealing with facts that date back to medieval time, and that clash is now upon us in the form most dramatically of global warming. thank you. >> seth, why don't you -- [applause] summarize for us about the pain virus and what you learned in this controversy about vaccines and autism. >> after covering the history of facts in two minutes -- [laughter]

i feel like i have an easy task just covering my book. the panic virus is a book that i began working on because of a reason that very much relates to what we're talking about today. a little over three years ago, which was before i had a child, i started noticing in conversations with my friends when the issue of childhood vaccines, vaccine safety started coming up, the answers i got to questions about how people went about making these decisions were answers, very much in the language as feelings or intuition. it feels to me like children receive too many vaccines today. it makes since to me that the number of -- it makes sense to me that the number of antigens in vaccines

overwhelm immune systems. the reason i find that so interesting is because it's the approach to the lang -- language that my peers used when it came to other topics with an intersection in science and public policy. for instance, global warming. if we had a conversation and they said we had three feet of snow last year. it doesn't feel to me we could be going through global warming, or a conversation involving evolution where someone said, well, it just doesn't seem right to me that we could be desended from apes. those same group of peers were incredibly dismissive of and very much looked down their nose towards, you know, these stupid people who don't understand or accept the science involving the other topics, and what was interesting to me was not that

they were wrong in their opinion, because actually i didn't know at the time whether vaccines were or were not connected in some way to developmental disorders like autism, but this is how they went about making those decisions, so i naively started working on this project thinking that it would be an interesting, maybe magazine story, looking at how we decide what counts as truth, some of the issues that get raised in this, and here i am three years later. no, i couldn't interest any magazine in it, and i think one of the oddities and theories of book publishing is that, and i had this experience before, it can sometimes be hard to convince someone to let you write a 5,000 magazine story, but you can convince someone to allow you to write 110,000 word

book which is what happens here and maybe why the book industry is in so much trouble. [laughter] well, one of my thoughts were the books out there on this topic is from someone who came into with already in one camp or the other believing their child was vaccine injured and vaccines were dangerous, or someone involved in the medical community. well, i thought i'll write a book from the perspective of someone who isn't coming to this from one side or the other, and then people will, you know, read it, and think, oh, well that's very interesting, something i can trust, and that is not the case. the people who have disagreed with my conclusions definitely have not viewed it as an interesting book that someone happened to write who did not come at this with a preconceived notion. i learn daily of my ties with

pharmaceutical companies and big business. [laughter] if there are pharmaceutical company reps out there, i'll give you my bank account number. i'm happy to take your money at this point. [laughter] the book is out. i figure if i'm getting blamed, i might as well see some of the benefits of that. [laughter] so, i really have been -- i've been shocked and it's been eye-opening as to how much a topic of which i think there's really not a lot of continued debate, how much debate there is in both the political and public realm and that the implications of that are. there's very severe implications. ten children died of whooping cough in california last year, nine of them under nine months old, too young to be vaccinated. there's an measles outbreak in

minnesota right now. i think this is an issue that we are only going to see come up more often, and i'll leave off there, and i'm sure we'll have an interesting conversation. >> okay. dr. -- [applause] >> the thing i thought was fascinating about your book is taking the next step from this not that just people rely on their feeling or so-called common sense, but that there are some sort of shadowy figures out there or make not so shadowy after your book who are taking these doubts and playing on them and making a career out of exacerbating our concerns about the science, in particular around global warming. in your summary, your summary of your book, maybe work in that notion about how this is very

specific. this is not random, the fact people have doubts. >> yeah, definitely. thank you. thanks for inviting me today, and i really appreciated your introduction because i think exactly what you said is the tone we address in the book. we're all a wash of sea of information, but a lot of that information is not just subjective and possibly incomplete or incorrect, but actually disinformation. that led us to realize we really needed to write this book because people ask us, how did you decide the topic? this topic was like a stray dog you find. a dog finds you, and then you can't get rid of it. [laughter] we didn't set out to write, but historians working on the history of science, and like seth describes for autism, it was interesting how settled the debate of global warming was. i didn't think that was a really controversial thing to write an article in a peer reviewed

scientific journal summarizing what was being said, but i was wrong about that. i got very strange e-mails, death threats. i said don't these people have televisions to watch? [laughter] it's a strange world that we live in, but the important part of the story is it's not all just ignorance or subjective feeling and confusion. that would be one thing. i think that's important. the confusion and excess subjectivity can do damage, no question about that, but in addition to my mind we face more troubling phenomena is that people who should know better, people who are not confused, people who are highly educated who are deliberately promoting disinformation driven by ideology more than money, but money plays a big role. i've spent a lot of the last year on the road promoting the book, lecturing about the topic. i've been to a lot of states and

countries. i've been to cool places like kansas, so it's a great experience to talk to a lot of people. [laughter] you know, not just speak to the choir, and one of the most interesting things said to me, and it's remarkable how many times the same comment comes up whether it's in l.a., new york, or kansas. people say, i never knew that science was so old. [laughter] i think that's just a great, great comment. they are not taking about galileo, but the science of global warming, climate change, because we do live in this sea of information and disinformation, and continued voices. most of us have very little understanding where knowledge is coming from, how robust it is, when scientists felt they had, in fact, resolved a problem, and so for people to realize and understand that actually it's not just that climate science is settled, but it's been settled since the early 1990s, 20 years

since the framework on climate change that we forgot about and seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia because we are drowning in information. people have forgotten that president george hw bush signed the framework, committed this country to stop dangerous interference. i find that there's this shift. you can almost feel the mood in the audience shift and say, oh, that's right, why did he sign that? it's not like he was a member of green peace; right? [laughter] in a way it's been extremely gratifying experience for me because it's made me feel a renewed dedication to this to realize the way in which history can really be informative not just about not repeating the mistakes from the past because lords knows we do that all the time, but knowing what the path is, knowing what we ourselves committed to doing, knowing what we are promised to do in past

years. i just want to say one other thing about this issue that i think is really important for people to understand. one of the reasons why this issue is so extremely vexed is that we have scientists, scientific educate perts make -- experts making claims based on certain methodology approach, and you know, it's proved robust over time. i'm sorry to say they are quoted in newspapers, and los "los angeles times" of course totally accepted. [laughter] if they read a climb -- claim in a newspaper written by a claimed scientists, it's understandable that ordinary

people would think there's no debate going on so i think the media has the responsibility to address that and to address these people who claim to be scientists but are not in fact. but there's a harder deeper part which is what we try to get to is that actually some of these people are scientists, and that makes it harder. that's where questions of credentials, expertise, who are they, who pays for it? it's not always paid for by the forces of darkness, but sometimes it is. [laughter] >> why are you looking at me? [laughter] these are all questions to be asked, and we really hope that part of what the book has done is to raise the questions and make people realize we need to have a fuller conversation about these sorts of issues. >> all right, thank you. [applause] >> so, timothy, the undertone or overtone of all of this is we

have this incredible level of knowledge increasing and the dissemination is there, but yet everybody is running amuck. is it getting worse in reaching consensus and find truth or seem like that because we have the echo chamber of the media and the interpret, or are we doing better at reaching consensus both within the scientific community and then when that knowledge goes out into the body politic? >> well, you know, i think arguably the greatest discovery in human history is the discovery of science, but moreover that science works in free societies, so if 47% of all humans now live in democratic societies which is a flabbergasting fact. in movies it's still portrayed that way that science works best in a secret group creating the

death ray, but it doesn't. science works in free societies, and so answer your to your question is they are always like this. they are a terrible mess. it's a pain in the neck. it's always the nature of a free society, and -- but it would help, i think if those of us who are enthusiast of science and those of us who are scientists were a little less defensive about the actual situation, and so let me try to state it simply. you have a choice in life between answers that are absolutely certain and false and answers that are conditional and might be true. that's a fact. there is no such thing, not even in mathematics as an absolutely clear fundmental statement that everybody can agree is true for all time. this does not -- and i have to include in this religious

dogma. i have no quarrel speaking with a classic liberal or people's religious beliefs, but it is flabbergasting to imagine this world is being controlled by some kind of superintelligence who cares about us because the world looks exactly the way it would if there was no such thing. [applause] the only reason you can believe that is because you believe, and our culture is full of indications that you got to believe. well, no, you don't. what helps is to know. that's much more humane historically than believing, and the best tool for knowing comes from science. i've been advising scientists because scientists are under the impression that some philosopher somewhere has demonstrated that science is just one of many ways of knowing, and that it's conclusions are to be privileged when compared to others.

i spent 15 years researching this subject, and i can assure you there's no basis for that statement whatsoever. science is the best method for reducing facts that's never been found and best method that there can be because it's so simple. you test your ideas through controlled experiment and act on the basis of the result. that has changed the world for the better by every conceivable measure of what betterment could be, health, wealth, happiness, every major is what my book is about with the possible exception of the loss of certainty. people used to be certain, and now they aren't anymore. well, what they were certain about was false. [laughter] there's no reason to be no no stall jibing. 60 million civilians, not wartime casualties, but 60 million people murdered by their

government in the 20th century alone. no scientist was exiled from the kingdom of science because there's nothing with being wrong. what's wrong is to have a fiery belief in things that ain't so. >> all right. [applause] >> one thing that's interesting in your book is there's beside some of the scientists that is propping up some of the things that are wrong, your book talks about there's a cult of celebrity around the vaccine autism connection. tell us a little bit some of those big names who are most certain, and i think one in particular that's interesting, i was hoping she'd be here today is jenni mccarthy and her establishment with the

connection after having a very unusual theory before that about what caused her son's autism. >> yeah. i think jenny mccarthy is clearly the best known public figure whose come out and discussed her belief vocally that in her case the measles mumps vaccine triggered or caused her son's autism. i think in this instance if there's a celebrity that's more responsible, it's probably oprah winfrey and not mccarthy. one of the things that makes this issue a little bit different certainly than climate change where i think there's sort of an opportunity up -- injection of doubt. the most fervent believers in this theory are almost entirely

parents who completely genuinely believe that their children have been injured by vaccines. >> right. >> and parents who -- and many in the vast majority of cases have also been incredibly let down by the medical establishments, have not received the support they need or deserve on any number of levels, and i think that's one of the things that makes this unique and one of the things that makes it so emotional a topic and certainly emotional in a way that i never experienced. my wife frequently says to me, why can't you go back to writing about politics or crime or something that people don't care about? [laughter] and it's true. i've never got the types of responses that i've gotten here, and i think that in terms of celebrity and in terms of

celebrities really doing an up credible amount of damage here, i think that it has media figures like oprah acting as if any view point is just another viewpoint, and if there's any dispute or debate, it needs to be presented as on the one hand, on the other hand, and i think that's absolutely false. it sort of reenforces the lack of volume control that can be present a lot on the interpret -- internet where there's one link, but it's hard to tell what the evidence is behind that compared to something else so when various media figures like oprah or media outlets takes debates on vaccines or global warming and feel compelled to present it as, well, on the one hand, this person believes that vaccines

cause autism, and on the other hand, these 99% of people in the field do not believe that, but you quote one person on each side to give that balance. i think that does an incredible, incredible disservice to the public, and i think that there hopefully will be and should be a reckoning on the part of, you know, among our peers about the damage that has been done, not just surrounding this issue, but really in health and medicine much more generally. something that i think is really fascinating is in the media culture, health and science in medicine, the standards that we hold ourselves to are distinct from most other fields with the exception of politics i think, so, you know, so and so claims barak obama is a nigerian

foreign agent, and barak obama says i was born in hawaii, it's not the type of coverage you see if i said, well, guess what, apple computers is about to go out of business. no one would write a story that says on the one hand, seth says apple is going out of business, and on the other hand, steve jobs says who is seth? [laughter] if you say that's crazy enough, that's the coverage you can get a lot in science and medicine and health and politics. my favorite would be, on the one hand the lakers claim they won the series -- >> occasionally we get those. >> true, right, and just to come back to mccarthy, one way in which the public health establishment failed in this is taking people like jenny

mccarthy how do they believe this former stripper, former playboy bunny, and she wasn't a stripper as far as i know, misses the point. the people watching oprah or listening to what she says, we're not talking about 15-year-old boys, you know, looking for old issues of playboy. we're talking about parents who relate to another parent taking about their experiences and their experiences with their children, so, yeah, i think this is a little bit distinct. you get to the same end point you do with a number of other things, but the way you get there is slightly different. >> so naomi, it's probably harder in what you cover for reporters mainstream reporters and publications like the "l.a.

times" to ignore someone with a ph.d. in front of their name. why is it time after time there's this falseity in global warming or other topics you write about? >> well, i keep saying you tell me. it's your business; right? [laughter] it is a mystery to me why this is so difficult. >> i don't do that. >> i know you don't, but, you know, i think on one level it's understandable that a journalist who has a five o'clock deadline and is is not a specialist in science can be confused. okay, i have the national academy, and now i need a different perspective, and if somebody has put something on their desk as often as people do, and there's ph.d. at the end of it, oh, okay, here's a ph.d.. i had journalists saying what

credible journalist can you recommend to me that doesn't believe in global warming, and i have to say none, and then they think i'm bias. i'm waiting for these college tuition bills -- >> money on green fees. >> i don't know how to answer that question. i think you need to have a panel of journalists to talk about why it's so difficult because it suspect just in the -- isn't just in the daily papers, but in well-researched magazine articles, newspapers of record, it's very, very persistent and troubling. what was said is right. it's not so much that there's a celebrity who says i don't believe in acid rain. it's the fact it's taken up by media people viewed as credible by the american people, and it's not just oprah. she's one example, but i think one of the things i found most disturbing just talking with

neighbors, people you meet in daily life, how widespread it is in the business community among highly educated people, some have ph.d.es, but read "forbes" the other magazines, and well-researched, but it's not that the people are saying we know for sure there's no global warming. if they said that, it's an easier argument to refute, but what they say is we're not really sure. we don't know for sure. there's always doubts, and, of course, this is a clever strategy because they are right. there's always doubts. science never proves anything absolutely positively. that's a dream that collapsed in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. science can never prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt just so people can ask questions and it's endless, you know, it's

deconstruction and it's endless. it's important for people in position of influence to recognize that and say, yes, i could write an arable about -- article about the ways in which modern technology makes it possible to fake a certificate and photo shop in the signatures. you're doing a disservice to the american people if you did that. >> you think so? >> yeah, i think so. [laughter] >> okay, well -- >> there's an ex week's coal -- next week's column. [laughter] i got to go now. [laughter] i'm told in the old days there was mics in the aisles, but i'm told we're sophisticated here unlike ucla that we just speak. [audience reacts] i can see the websiters out there. people have questions, if you just want to raise your hand, i'll call on you, and i'll

repeat the question if it's hard to hear. starting with you. >> so comprehensive and realistic and given the nobel peace prize and this gave everything you guys were talking about -- [inaudible] there's articles on autism and related to the vaccine, there's kids for many years, and i've heard and talked to parents, and that's what it is. it's the vaccine, period. [laughter] >> let's be respectful, let him ask the question. seth? >> i'm not being sarcastic, but what's the question? >> i just stated my question. >> i thought it was a statement. you have to make it a question. >> why is al gore's inconvenient

truth used for a platform for global warming? >> okay. >> you guys disseminate it. >> why do we accept what al gore says? >> you're dealing with both. take the facts. >> i can't speak to the up convenient truth, but the article with robert kennedy j.r. has been retracted and oddly disappeared by rolling stone. there's no longer any mention of it on their website. it's disappeared from their archives. it eventually there were over 500 words of corrections appended to it including things like, you know, we thought that this was x times the amount, and actually it was 1/100th of that. i don't think there is a very good parallel between rfk j.r.'s

efforts which have been derided by the community and al gore's efforts which have not. your comment highlights something about this debate which is that a lot of people have firsthand experience that supports very strongly their belief that vaccines cause autism. a lot of parents have experiences where they had a child they felt was developing normally. they -- that child was vaccinated, and then everything changed. i'll give a quick story about that. there's been a series of omnibus cases involving vaccines and autism representing over 5,000 families with three different test cases of the families whose

evidence and testimony was supposed to support that fact, and wop of the families -- one of the families from yuma, arizona, the mother testified e elegantly about her daughter and what happened to her after she was vaccinated in detail. in that case, there was video evidence and doctor's notes about that -- about michelle's development during those times, and it did not match up with the mother's recollection, not because the mother was not being completely honest, but that's what our brains do. we create narratives for events in our past. we reorder things in a way that makes more sense to us, so i very much understand why parents believe that. i think the fact that we still do not have any real satisfying

answers for the causes of autism or satisfying treatments in many cases exacerbates that, and i wouldn't try and diminish those parents' experiences. in cases in which there has been other evidence we can look at, it doesn't seem to match up. >> okay. if we can get a question, hopefully directed to dr. naomi or timothy foreclosure erri -- ferris. how about that -- >> are you bias in favor of baseball caps? >> yeah, a pattern is developing. >> there's a very serious heart felt thank you for the work that you do. you are the unsung hero. [applause] i don't know why you don't get more press. i mean, we are hungry starving.

>> save your applause and by the books. [laughter] >> okay, we appreciate that. do you have a question, too? >> yes, i do. is the next natural progression to all of this, and in my mind is where does the law stand on this? we're happy to hear the truth, not so happy to hear the false rumors, inknew went dos, can we just say anything these days? do you know anything in terms of where the law stains on what is acceptable, or is there anything unacceptable? >> tim, do you want to start with that? is there a way the government is changing in how it relates in science and plays a part in decision making? >> oh, yeah, the economics alone made a tremendous difference in

the competence with which the democratic manage, and i know it's popular to know, and the only thing anybody knows about economics is what, you tell me the phrase, economics is? a dismal science; right? that dates from before there even was a science of economics to even comment on, so, yeah, we are in some danger of having an educated upper class to run countries and that runs in every major country of the world, and there's no debate there, and then a general class of people who are less educated who fall prey to rhetoric, and you see it

most conspicuously when the calculation is like this. if you're an insurance company, you say what's the risk, and what do we pay out if it happens? you multiply them together. what global warming and autism have in common is that the risk is horrifically large. global warming if allowed to go uncheck can wreck human civilization. not forever, but can set us back a good deal that the cost of fixes things are greater than the vail funds. we're within 1% of gdp to reverse that, and that scared people off. autism is horrible when it happens to your child that you can seize on a suggestion of a connection, then that, the emotional quality of the testimony that people respond to, and i have close friends, two of my closest friends believe it was a vaccine that caused it, so the -- when you

get into that calculus at that point where -- with these big questions, it's difficult in democracies and difficult because leaders of democracy and the democratic countries are much healthier, stronger, but leaders can't get out in front of the public, so when the public is so far behind the curve with regard to science and technology, it's hard for the leaders to lead. >> can i follow-up on that? it's exactly what al gore was trying to do, and i never worked with him permly, i don't get money from the gore campaign, so i have no invested interest in it, but one of the things he recognized in the late 80s even was that global climate change is both a scientific and a political and an economic problem, and i think he understood as you said, you can't get too far in front of the people, and when you have issues that involve complex science, that's really

challenging; right? you can't ask people to act politically if they don't understand why they have to act. in the case of climate change, people do need to understand something about the science, and so i think he took it as part of his task to learn the science and spend time with scientists, spent time with a lot of scientists that i know. he does actually read scientific articles, whether he understands them, i don't know, but to try to explain the science in language that people could understand and with visuals and graphics and all the rest for this reason to be not too far out in front. it's an important issue because without the science, we wouldn't know way we needed to do because we could solve the energy problems here in the united states with coal and natural gas if not for the impalgt of greenhouse -- impact of greenhouse gases. unless you understand how those gases change the environment, we don't understand why we are asked to do the things we are now, in fact, being asked to

do. >> okay. right here in front. >> yes, i have a correspondence going with freeman, a very prominent scientists, outstanding physicist who took the opposing viewpoint on global warming, and referred to the risk cost analysis as a swindle. i was surprised at this. now, he's not a climbtologist, and that's all i can say to forgive what he told me, but i would like to know if you could explain if tim could explain what you believe is at work here that a scientist of his stature would come out so strongly against global warming as a hoax, or at least the thought of

global warming. >> the question was why would freedman, the physicist from princeton be a skeptic about global warming, and his objections have to do primarily with calculations about things called the discount rate which is this weird deal. it's mentioned in the last chapter in the science of liberty, but has to do with the question of if you're going to spend a lot of money on a big problem, do you spend a lot right now when the dollar is worth more, i mean in absolute terms, or wait until the economy is bigger, and them the spending is cheaper, and he was critical of some of the economic analysis into that. he also ultimately believes that a technological fix savings us from having to do conservation measures with regard to global warming. i sure hope that's true, but i wouldn't want to bet our whole

civilization on it. >> yes, i mean, this is a good example of what i refer to. some of the people are, in fact, scientists, but it's important to realize he's now 90, 9 # -- >> he's real sharp. >> moreover, he actually has changed his opinion on this. he doesn't talk about this in public, but i had exchanges with him because back in the 1970s and 1979, the jason committee, this very, very high-level confidential advisory committee, now it includes other folks, from the u.s. department of energy, he did some of the oldest modeling work, and he was the reviewer of that report, and praised it and said how great it was, and then in the acknowledgements of the report, they thank him to be the first person to bring out the issue. i think one of the things that again journalists especially need to understand that scientists are people like everybody else. they get lonely, crave

attention, and especially scientists who have been famous in their earlier period of life, and it's hard to lose the limelight. we've seen that here. the other thing if you read his books, you know he has a self-image that the great scientist is a rebel, and the most important thing a scientist can do is needle society, poke at conventional wisdom. he's not wrong about that. there's a role for that obviously, but it can be damaging and unhepful, and in this case, it's clear on what side it falls on. >> it is a good point, and it is a good function, but global warming is not a subtle finding question. to really take the other side, you have to say, okay, we know that these are global warming gases. there's no question about that. we know that the predictions from more than over 100 years ago is if you pump these into the atmosphere through industrial processes, the world's going to warm up, but --

and we're now doing that, pumping the gases in, but we think for some magical reason, the world's getting warm for a different reason. we have nothing to do with it, and pump this into the atmosphere that is thinner relative to the planet than the water layer on your eyeball, and we can pump this into the atmosphere and the fact that we're getting the results the scientists predicted is irrelevant and it will be okay. to get from here to there is such an enormous territory and hardly matters whether individuals have different opinions or whether al gore politicized the issue a bit because i think the title of this pam reflects al gore did a lot for the issue, but he created a political lightening rod in himself against which opposition can be directed. >> right. okay. another question.

i won't discriminate against the staff. there's a volunteer there. >> hi, where can people who are scientifically thinking like hopefully we are, where can we gather in support each other against all the dogmas? are there websites where we can communicate back and forth and support each other? >> seth? >> i guess i have a couple of quick thoughts about that, and one is sort of an note. seven years ago, i was talking about the book i wrote about the new york norksz, and i was -- "new york times," and i was in front of an audience complining bitterly about the quality of the media and how there wasn't in-depth reporting out there, and if i may ask how many people in the audience were paying subscribers to a newspaper or to

magazines, and it was a very small number, so i think one thing that people who support science can do is show that support by actively supporting people, and i'm not making a pitch for us. >> no, no -- >> but, actively supporting media outlets, and not just with your money, but one of the huge issues, and certainly a huge issue in this debate is the people who are motivated to speak out and to write, to columnists or to tv networks are the people on the extreme side of this, so if you're covering this, you'll get 50 or 100 e-mails and messages about how you are only representing the viewpoint of the establishment, and you're not representing the parents who believe this, and i know from being on this