The ‘Voice Of Business’ Calls For ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ On Science Of Climate Change
The ‘Voice Of Business’ Calls For ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ On Science Of Climate Change
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the 97-year-old organization that bills itself as the “voice of business” — wants to put climate science on trial. As the Environmental Protection Agency nears a final ruling that manmade global warming endangers the public health and welfare, “the chamber will tell the EPA in a filing today that a trial-style public hearing” on the science of climate change is needed to “make a fully informed, transparent decision with scientific integrity based on the actual record of the science.” William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, told the Los Angeles Times this hearing would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century“:
It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial.
In 1925, Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was indicted for teaching evolution against state law. His trial, intended as a test of the law, became a national phenomenon when as the World Christian Fundamentals Association and the American Civil Liberties Union brought the famed lawyers William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow into battle. Scopes was found guilty. Even though the state supreme court overturned the verdict of the “bizarre case” on a technicality, the public fallout was intense. The anti-evolution movement lost steam (before being reborn as “intelligent design“) and science textbooks with biblical quotations were phased out.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is taking a similarly bizarre approach here, calling for a show trial of climate science. Perhaps Kovacs and other officials at the U.S. Chamber believe that the rest of the business world shares their extremist views. After all, U.S. corporations continue to fund their multi-million-dollar lobbying against health care and energy reform.
It’s also possible this is an attempt to disrupt the effort to fight global warming with a culture war, tying the science of climate change to fundamentalists’ unease with evolution. Conservative activists have already made the connection. “It’s still a theory,” a town hall protester confronted Rep. Mike Castle (D-DE) after he supported climate legislation in June. “So is Darwin’s theory of evolution! And yet we have the audacity to say global warming is accurate, it’s more than a theory?”
There aren’t many natural parallels between the physics of greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels and the biology of natural selection, but the American conservative movement depends on the cozy relationship between oil and the Christian right. It seems like a high-risk strategy to convince Americans that God means for us to pollute His creation on behalf of oil and coal tycoons. But when reality is not on your side, there’s not much else left.
Scientists would present evidence for and against the finding. Each side would be allowed to cross-examine the other. An administrative law judge, or an EPA official, would preside and issue the final ruling. The EPA conducts similar hearings routinely, but on much smaller issues, such as issuing permits. Chamber officials say the agency held a large-scale public hearing in the 1970s on the subject of toxic water pollutants. EPA officials say such a hearing would be a waste of time and money - so the Chamber will likely sue in federal court in hopes of forcing one.
These members claim to “support economy-wide reductions in CO2 emissions and/or federal cap-and-trade legislation”: Alcoa, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Eastman Kodak, Entergy, Fox Entertainment, IBM, Lockheed, Nike, PepsiCo., PNM Resources, Rolls Royce, Siemens, Toyota, and Xerox.
5 Responses to “The ‘Voice Of Business’ Calls For ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ On Science Of Climate Change”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Wonk RoomContact Us
Donate
This shows how fundamentally these people don’t understand science. A scientific theory doesn’t mean an idea that we haven’t backed up with facts yet.
August 25th, 2009 at 3:44 pmGood post. I’ve written more on how bizarre this is from a legal point of view at http://legalplanet.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/more-on-the-chamber-of-commerces-extraordinary-demand-for-a-scopes-trial-on-climate-change/ in case it’s of interest.
August 26th, 2009 at 12:29 pmSo, what you’re saying is that we shouldn’t permit these people to make their case to the public? And your reason is that business people are bad people?
It seems to me like you are focusing on the simplistic black and white, and ignoring all of the possible shades of gray. Climate science is tied into our understanding of the Sun, and there remain many mysteries associated with the Sun (believe it or not). For instance, why is the Sun’s atmosphere 100x hotter than its surface? If the Sun’s heat originates from its core, then why does the surface not heat up too? Stellar scientists have proposed a mechanism called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is something that has supposedly been tested and proven in the lab. Yet, for some reason, the lab results keep coming out wrong. Currently, when scientists create a reconnection event in the lab between two electrically charged plasma sheets, the reconnection event takes place at twice the speed theory predicts. In other words, there’s no experimentally-based explanation thus far for why the Sun’s atmosphere is 100x hotter than its surface. That should concern people, and at least temper our confidence in the conventional model.
Then there’s the “inconvenient” fact that neutrino flux from the Sun seems to vary with surface effects – sunspot numbers and the solar wind. We had been told that events on the Sun’s surface were the final result of a nuclear furnace so far from the surface that heating took hundreds of thousands of years as energy was passed, first, through a hypothetical “radiative zone,” then through a “convective” zone. Direct observation, on the other hand, suggests that the emitted neutrinos, a byproduct of nuclear reactions, are being produced in the vicinity of the photosphere, near the surface — not the core of the Sun. Oops.
Then, there is the failure of the solar “wind” to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth’s orbit. What “wind” do you know of which is exclusively a flow of charged particles? Is your computer powered by “wind”? And what wind do you know of that keeps on getting faster as you get farther from the source? In every other scientific discipline, a flow of charged particles is called an electric current. So, why do astrophysicists call it a “wind”? What’s up with THAT?!
If you ask an electrical engineer or plasma physicist how to accelerate charged particles, they will tell you to subject it to an electric field. And yet, that is the one single explanation which astrophysicists refuse to consider. When you look into this question, it becomes apparent that astrophysicists are motivated to believe it must be so because the Big Bang Theory does not allow large bodies in space to acquire or trade electrical charge. Well, what if the Big Bang Theory is wrong? Hm.
There is an unspoken reality to this debate: that the alternative to anthropogenic warming is in fact unthinkable for many people. The idea that the planet may warm up due to factors outside of our own control lingers as a subconscious doomsday scenario that completely dwarfs the notion of man-made global warming. What if the Sun is not the isolated body in space that we like to imagine it to be? Were it not for Arthur Eddington’s guess (yes, it was a guess at the time) that the Sun is powered by its core, we’d interpret the Sun’s inverse temperature at the corona to mean that it is receiving power externally. We cannot see into the Sun, guys. Much of what we “know” about the Sun are in fact educated guesses — which, yes, can be wrong. After all, why is the Sun so elusive when it comes to predicting its behavior? One of the possibilities is that our models are just terribly wrong.
I don’t get it. If the case is so straightforward for AGW, then what is the problem? You sound scared that they might convince people.
I’m 100% Democrat myself, and I can’t think of one other instance where Democrats have argued that we shouldn’t have a civil discussion. One would think that this discussion would center around what we do and don’t know about the Sun — which is a subject which many Democrats could actually learn a lot about … Because, if you ask me, the Discovery Channel is not doing the proper job of explaining it.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:39 pmSince you ar “100% Democrat” you should be used to all the bullshit put out by the Democrats. Let’s see, Algore is a Democrat, right? Thank God Teddy Kennedy is not around any longer. There has never been a bigger leftist liar than Kennedy. Howard Dean is another good example. Obama is going to be the worst president this country has ever seen or, hopefully, will ever see.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:46 pmChris,
Are you denying (or just ignoring) the (natural) greenhouse effect? Or are you just saying that the increase in CO2E in the atmosphere, and therefore the intensifying of the greenhouse effect, is just being caused by other factors?
The science behind the greenhouse effect is solid, whereas you are citing a number of less-researched areas and simply bringing up a number of “what ifs”. Well, what if the answer is simply in some part of string theory that we’ve yet to conceive? What if the answer is totally not in science, but this is actually a Jehovah’s Witness rapture? We could think up any number of what ifs because there is much we do not understand. Meanwhile, we do understand a fair amount of the effects of CO2 and methane and other GHGs in the atmosphere. We understand that their concentrations have skyrocketed in the last 200 years, more or less on track with human development tied to increasing fossil-fuel energy use.
The reason why there is some “fright” about a Scopes-like trial is that those of use who understand that we need to be at 350 ppm CO2 know that we have very little time to make the changes necessary to eventually bring us back down to that level. Civil discourse is necessary (and it is happening), but a show trial is not civil discourse. Millions around the world are organizing to get governments to sign on to real change; a couple thousand, though, could derail this momentum by spouting a bunch of unknowns and getting people who have yet to give climate change much thought reason to believe that it is not “real”. People are constantly questioning what is “true” in terms of science because nothing can be proven to absolute certainty – that is the inherent to all science. But when you’ve got thousands and thousands of leading scientists from various disciplines coming to conclusions that are in accord with one another (not always the exact same conclusion, but pointing in the same direction – that we must do something to curb anthropogenic climate change), it is time to listen up.
If a trial is to occur, argument time should be divvied up in accordance with the number of leading scientific organizations on either side of the issue. That would work, I should think, to educate the public properly rather than just instill a lot of doubt to stop progress on the issue in its tracks.
September 1st, 2009 at 12:04 pm