Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century over milieu

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Business lobby USA wil dat Environmental Protection Agency hun officiele
bevinding dat 'greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a threat to
public health and welfare' verdedigt middels een hearing.
Deze hearing wordt dan “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” ;)

Groet / Cees

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/08/28/are-climate-change-deniers-like-creationists/
Are climate change deniers like creationists?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 08.28.09
Looks like it’s time to bring back Clarence Darrow and William Jennings
Bryan: The US Chamber of Commerce wants to subject the science of climate
change to a “Scopes monkey trial.”

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that the world’s largest business
lobby is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public
hearing to defend its endangerment finding, which determined that
greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a threat to public health and
welfare and can therefore be regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act.

The Times describes what the Chamber has in mind:

    Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st
century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who
would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to
dangerous effect.

    “It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the
chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and
regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on
trial.”

In a press release, the advocacy group Republicans for Environmental
Protection bristled at the Chamber’s apparent swipe at creationists, and
what the group called “a cynical attempt to pit science against religion.”

    “The Scopes trial is a false comparison. Regardless of what one
believes about the earth’s origins, the facts about the global carbon
cycle do not change. Excess carbon is stored away in coal and oil
deposits. By burning large quantities of coal and oil, we release that
excess carbon back into the atmosphere, upsetting the natural
balance,” said David Jenkins, the group’s vice president for
government and political affairs. “The chamber’s efforts are both
imprudent and impious.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Jenkins penned an article titled “God’s Climate
Plan” [PDF], which argues that Christians should be concerned about
climate change.

If the Chamber is indeed taking a shot at creationism, they’re probably
alienating many core supporters. According to a 2008 Gallup poll, some 60
percent of Republicans believe that humans were created “as is” within the
last 10,000 years, compared with 38 percent of Democrats. This belief is
soundly refuted by the overwhelming empirical evidence that shows that
humans evolved over millions of years.

But if you flip the Chamber’s analogy – comparing pundits who reject the
science of climate change to those who reject the science of evolution –
the comparison becomes decidedly apt.

Both groups willfully ignore mountains of firmly established scientific
evidence. Both groups falsely portray the scientific community as divided
over settled science. Both groups make spurious appeals to academic
freedom, arguing that “both sides” of the debate should be presented as
though they possess equal merit. And both groups derive most of their
funding from privately funded think tanks, having scant presence in the
science departments of accredited colleges and universities.

The motivations of those who deny climate change and who deny evolution
are probably very different. But in some cases, it’s the very same people
who deny both phenomena. Here are just a few examples:

Steven Milloy, a prominent climate change denier and “junk science”
contributor to Fox News, told the Cato Institute in 2007 that
“[e]xplanations of human evolution are not likely to move beyond the stage
of hypothesis or conjecture.”

Roy Spencer, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville,
author of the 2008 book “Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria
Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that
Hurt the Poor,” and the “official climatologist” of Rush Limbaugh’s EIB
network, wrote in 2005 that “intelligent design, as a theory of origins,
is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.”

Actor and commentator Ben Stein, whose 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence
Allowed claimed that belief in evolution led directly to the Nazi
Holocaust, asserted on Fox News this year that “global warming is by no
means proved.”

And Arthur Robinson, the senior author of the Oregon Petition, that list
of some 31,000 self-described scientists who deny the existence of
convincing evidence of global warming, is also a signatory to the
“Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” circulated by the Discovery Institute,
the primary think tank promoting Intelligent Design theory.

The 1925 trial of John Scopes seems to have done little to change the
minds of American creationists (it took another four decades for
Tennessee’s anti-evolution law to be repealed, and the debate over
teaching evolutionary biology in public schools is still very much alive).
Similarly, it’s unlikely that a modern-day trial of climate science would
be anything more than a tendentious circus.

But climate change, unlike evolution, is happening on a time scale that
humans can directly observe. If the Chamber of Commerce has its way and
action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is delayed, we can expect that
the effects of these emissions will be widely felt and acknowledged by
those who will inherit the climate.

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