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Pain is one of the most common reasons that people end up in the doctor's office. And yet, until 1983, the field of pain management did not have its own medical society; today, the specialty still isn't widely taught in medical schools. For centuries, doctors even debated whether eliminating pain was morally acceptable: would it, for instance, defeat God's purpose in condemning Eve's daughters to suffer in childbirth...
...would pop up - it seemed like a never-ending battle. You keep pushing the rock up the hill, right? They were pretty meticulous at hunting down new poisons. And is it a never-ending game? Absolutely. We're always inventing new, creative industrial chemicals. You see the thing same today that you saw then, which is when we get 'gee whizzy' about things and put them out there in our every day lives without having enough proper respect or understanding of them...
...field evolve to where it is today? Increasingly you start to see this hand in hand match of the criminal justice system and the forensic scientist. These professional forensics programs, once they got started, gave a support system for people who really believed this mattered. So they weren't just fringe scientists. Before they were kind of the creepy guys who liked dead bodies, but it grew into a respectable profession. Now, we're fascinated by the science...
Back in the Pliocene era, between 5 million and 3 million years ago, the average global temperature was about 7°F warmer than it is today, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about the same. If carbon dioxide were the sole factor in warming, that wouldn't make any sense. It isn't, of course; there are several other contributors, including the brightness of the sun and the location of the continents (whose positions dictate, among other things, where ice caps can form) - but these were all pretty much the same in the Pliocene as well...
That in turn suggests that if we keep pouring CO2 into the atmosphere and warm the globe by several degrees, even a successful effort to bring carbon dioxide back down to today's levels may not restore the temperature. "You might," he says, "end up with a different climate...