Probing the scientists

Because we clearly needed something else to be angry about, today we have: a cadre of four senators who are calling for an investigation into the National Science Foundation's grant program designed to educate meteorologists about climate change.

The four senators are James Lankford (Oklahoma), Rand Paul (Kentucky), Ted Cruz (surprise! -- Texas), and James Inhofe (even bigger surprise! -- Oklahoma).  Inhofe, you may remember, is the knuckle-dragger who doesn't know the difference between weather and climate, and illustrated the fact by bringing a snowball onto the floor of the Senate and presenting it as evidence that the world wasn't warming up.

Along the same lines, every time Inhofe eats dinner, world hunger goes away for a while.

The four drafted a request for a probe into the NSF's Climate Central program, stating that it was "not science -- it is propagandizing."

My question is: what would it take to make the NSF's stance on climate "science?"  Saying that fossil fuels are great for the environment because plants like carbon dioxide?  That dumping coal ash into streams -- now completely legal in states that do not have a standard "maximum contaminant level" for water, and have demonstrated the need for "regulatory flexibilities" -- is perfectly safe?  That we should all be optimistic, because even if it does warm up, it'll make the Alaskan tundra nice and toasty warm?

These four -- and others like them -- have zero respect for science.  Science, to them, is what is expedient for their constituents and (especially) the lobbyists who fund their campaigns.  They've somehow confused "peer-reviewed valid science" with "science that aligns with the way I'd like the world to work."

And anything that doesn't align in that fashion is summarily dismissed.  Can't have the universe be inconvenient to your preconceived biases, after all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Welp.sk, Air pollution, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central, was (understandably) livid at the impending investigation.  "Climate Central is not an advocacy organization, and the scientific consensus on climate change is not a political viewpoint," Strauss said in an email to NBC News.

Which, I predict, will have exactly zero effect, given that Scott "Fuck Ethics" Pruitt, who said last year that "Science should not be something that's just thrown about to dictate policy in Washington, D. C." is still in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, despite having amassed more allegations of misconduct in his short tenure than any other appointed or elected official I've ever seen.

So if we shouldn't use science, what should we use to dictate policy?  Astrology?  Divine inspiration?  Thoughts and prayers?

The anti-science bent goes all the way to the top, given that every time any science-related subject is brought up with Donald Trump, he gives evidence of having maxed out his science education when he outgrew My First Big Picture Book of the Universe in second grade.  All you have to do is look at the list of appointments he's made to high government positions to convince yourself that if you're a anti-intellectual young-Earth creationist, you've got a good shot.  (Just to mention one particularly egregious example: Teresa Manning, who was deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Population Affairs, went on record as saying that contraception "does not work to prevent pregnancy."  After making use of the revolving door Trump has installed in all of the government offices, Manning was replaced by Diane Foley, who said that teaching teenagers how to use condoms correctly was "sexual harassment."  Foley's qualification for the post seems to be her tenure as president and CEO of "Life Network," the mission statement of which is to "present the gospel of Jesus Christ.")

I know I'm prone to hyperbole at times, but I don't think it's overstating the case to say that the people in charge right now wouldn't know a valid, evidence-based scientific argument if it walked up and bit them on the ass.

I'm finding it harder and harder to stay optimistic, here.  The pro-Trump faction, along with their answer to a North-Korea-style state sponsored media (Fox News), have done their job too well.  When we've devolved from respecting the research of the people who actually understand how the world works to accepting whatever Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity say without question, we've entered a realm where facts -- hell, reality -- doesn't matter.  As I've said before, once you teach people to doubt the data, you not only can convince them of anything, no logical argument you could craft will ever change their minds.

As a long-ago environmental science student of mine said, things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before people will wake up.  We've already seen prolonged droughts, killer storms, blistering heat waves, and various other weather weirdness that (taken together) form a pattern that is incontrovertible.  But for most people in the United States, it hasn't become dire enough yet.  We can still sit in our comfortable homes, go to the grocery store to pick up food, turn on the tap and get clean water, cool things off with air conditioning.

Once those things start being affected by climate change -- when we get jolted out of our complacency, and say, "Hey, maybe the scientists were right after all!" -- I'm afraid it will be too late to do anything.

Which is just what Paul, Lankford, Cruz, and Inhofe want.  They're just counting on it being delayed long enough for them to retire with cocky grins and full bank accounts.

******************************

This week's book recommendation is the biography of one of the most inspirational figures in science; the geneticist Barbara McClintock.  A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller not only explains to the reader McClintock's groundbreaking research into how transposable elements ("jumping genes") work, but is a deft portrait of a researcher who refused to accept no for an answer.  McClintock did her work at a time when few women were scientists, and even fewer were mavericks who stood their ground and went against the conventional paradigm of how things are.  McClintock was one -- and eventually found the recognition she deserved for her pioneering work with a Nobel Prize.

Foxes running the henhouse

I can't remember when I've ever been this worried about our capacity for seriously fucking up the world we live in.

Strong words, I realize.  I'm 56 years old, so I remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  I remember the BP Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster.  I've read about the collapse of the entire ecosystem around the Aral Sea, and the slow-motion train wreck of deforestation in the Congo, Amazon, and Southeast Asia rainforests.

All of that is peanuts compared to what we face today.

As the most powerful economy in the world, the United States is uniquely poised either to do tremendous good or to accelerate our downward slide beyond the point where it can be halted.  And this weekend I read three horrifying articles that are leading me to believe that our government is choosing the latter option.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first is a piece in CNN Politics in which we find out that President-elect Donald Trump is still claiming that "no one knows" if climate change is real.  In interview on Fox News, he made the following statement:

I'm still open-minded.  Nobody really knows.  Look, I'm somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It's not something that's so hard and fast...  Now, Paris, I'm studying.  I do say this.  I don't want that agreement to put us at a competitive disadvantage with other countries.  And as you know, there are different times and different time limits on that agreement.  I don't want that to give China, or other countries signing agreements an advantage over us.

So we've taken a nine-year step backwards in time to George W. Bush's tired mantra that "we need more data" before we can act.  Which, of course, is simply a way to stall, a way to let corporate interests trump science -- because the fact is, we do know that climate change is real.  We've known for years.  There is no more an argument among the scientists over whether climate change is real than there is over whether evolution is real.

Oh, wait, we're still fighting that battle, too.

Then we have a New York Times piece by Coral Davenport in which we find out that the transition team of President-elect Trump has sent out a 74-piece questionnaire to employees of the Department of Energy asking if they had attended climate change policy conferences -- and if so, who else they might have seen there.  It asks that copies of emails referencing climate change be submitted for review.

If this brings up comparisons in your mind to the McCarthy blacklists, you're spot-on.  But Michael McKenna, a former member of Trump's transition team who stepped down when his status as a lobbyist became known, begs to differ.  "If meetings happened and important stuff was decided, voters have a right to know," McKenna said.  "It’s not a matter of national security.  The transition is not asking about nuclear weapons.  They are asking about meetings about modeling for God’s sake...  The career staff at D.O.E. is great. There’s not a soul in the world who wants to do any harm to those guys."

No?  Take a look at Lamar Smith, head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who has spent the last three years harassing administrators at NASA and NOAA for supporting research into climate change.  And Trump's team has already pledged to defund the Earth Sciences Division of NASA -- the department that is in charge of climate research -- calling their findings "politicized science."

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for thinking that Mr. McKenna's reassurances are horseshit.  And my suspicions only strengthened when I read the report of a Nexus Media reporter, Philip Newell, about his attendance at an all-day Heritage Foundation event last week -- an event that can be summed up as the fossil fuel industry saying over and over, "We're in charge now, we can do whatever the hell we want."

Lamar Smith was in attendance, as were Representatives Gary Palmer and Pete Olson, and Senators Mike Lee and James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe.  All of them heaped praise upon the Trump choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been described as "a blunt tool of the fossil fuel industry."

Inhofe was the one who made the most puzzling statement, that he "believed in climate change until he heard about the costs of doing something about it."  Because clearly if your car's transmission is going, and the mechanic says it'll cost $1000 to replace, you can magically make the transmission work again by saying "That's too expensive."

But such a meeting would not be complete without a contribution from climate denialist and general crank Craig Idso, who was the lead author of the cherry-picked and scientifically invalid report from the "Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," and who ended his talk by saying that "carbon dioxide is the elixir of life."

So the foxes are running the henhouse, and we're in for a slaughter unless responsible, informed people start confronting corrupt elected officials and corporate interests.  We need ethical congresspeople -- and I know there are some out there -- to make a commitment to fight tooth and nail against the ones who would sell our planet's future to the highest bidder.  The pro-science members of our government, on the local, state, and federal level, need to say to the President-elect, "You are dead wrong.  Anthropogenic climate change is real, and the consequences will be devastating."  They need to stand up to goons like Inhofe and Smith and say "Enough.  Go ahead and add me to your blacklist.  I will fight you every step of the way."

Resisting strong-arm tactics can work.  If you need an example, read this New Yorker piece about the David-vs.-Goliath fight of California state controller John Chiang against then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger, in an attempt to leverage the Democratic-led state legislature into accepting his budget, issued an executive order reducing the salaries of two hundred thousand state employees to the minimum wage (then $6.55 an hour) until they met his demands.

Chiang stood up and said, "No.  Not on my watch, you won't."  Schwarzenegger sued him, but the suit languished in the courts and found little popular support.  In 2011, Schwarzenegger stepped down, his ratings at near record lows, and the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit entirely.

As for Chiang, far from being hurt by his act of bravery in the face of authority, he became California's State Treasurer and plans to run for governor in 2018.

So it can be done, but it requires backbone, and a willingness to stand up to power being wielded unethically.  And I hope like hell that the Congress has its members who are willing to be this fight's John Chiangs.  Because this time, what is being gambled is not the salaries of state employees, but the long-term habitability of our planet.

Silencing the experts

First, we had Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper imposing a rule on scientists mandating that their research pass government approval (i.e., not say anything that contradicts the party line) before they could publish it.  That rule was, fortunately rescinded within nanoseconds of Justin Trudeau winning the election last November, once again allowing scientists to speak to the media freely.

Then, here in the United States, we have such intellectual featherweights as Lamar Smith and James Inhofe at the helm of committees overseeing scientific research -- making about as much sense as putting weasels in charge of a henhouse.  The result has been round after round of budget cuts for scientific agencies, a pledge to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, and a campaign of harassment against climatologists researching anthropogenic climate change.

Now, presumably because this has all worked out so well for Canada and the United States, the leadership of the United Kingdom are doing exactly the same thing.

According to an op-ed piece by Robin McKie in The Guardian, the Cabinet Office has decided that researchers paid by government grants will be banned from lobbying for changes in laws or regulations.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm sorry, but isn't science supposed to inform government, and not the other way around?  The universe really doesn't give a rat's ass if you're liberal or conservative; data has no political spin.  The desperation of politicians to muzzle scientists when the science they're working on is inconvenient for the dominant political agenda is maddening at best and dangerous at worst.  Despite forty years of warnings from the scientific community, we here in the United States have sat on our hands with respect to all of the problems that come with runaway fossil fuel use -- environmental degradation from oil drilling and fracking, skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and a global temperature rise that is predicted by mid-century to melt most of the Earth's remaining on-land ice, raising sea levels enough to inundate nearly all of the world's coastal cities.

And why?  Because of a disinformation campaign waged by anti-science politicians who are being funded (i.e., controlled) by the petroleum industry.  (I can't even bring myself to call them "climate change deniers" any more; at this point, the data are so completely clear that in order to disbelieve in climate change, you'd have to ignore the evidence deliberately and completely.)

Despite all of this, the British government is going ahead with its policy of keeping the experts out of the decision-making process.  As Robin McKie writes:

The government move is a straightforward assault on academic freedom...  [C]ritics highlight examples such as those of sociologists whose government-funded research shows new housing regulations are proving particularly damaging to the homeless; ecologists who discover new planning laws are harming wildlife; or climate scientists whose findings undermine government energy policy.  All would be prevented from speaking out under the new grant scheme as it stands.

Cambridge University zoologist William Sutherland agrees.  "If they go ahead with this new anti-lobbying clause – and they are leaving it very late if they are not going ahead – then we will have many more poor decisions being made by government for the simple reason that it will have starved itself of proper scientific advice."

The illogic of preventing the people who know the most from influencing public policy is apparently obvious to almost everyone except the ones in charge.  "Politicians don’t have to agree with scientists, but does anyone believe we will make better decisions without hearing what the evidence says on flooding, climate change, statins and e-cigarettes?" said Fiona Fox, head of Britain's Science Media Centre.  "The anti-lobbying clause will send some of our best researchers back to the relative safety of the laboratory and away from the media fray they already fear.  That will be a victory for ignorance and a blow for the evidence-based policy that our politicians claim to want."

"Claim" being the operative word, here, because as we've seen over and over again, most politicians are only interested in science if it supports the views that are expedient for their political agenda.

So the whole thing is infuriating, and it's to be hoped that the outcry from scientists and science-minded citizens will overturn this decision.  In other words, that they follow Canada's example, and not the United States', where (by and large) the anti-science types are still running the show.  Here in the US, my fear is that it will take some kind of catastrophe to demonstrate that letting the tail wag the dog is a bad idea -- and by then, it will be too late.

Rising tide

At what point does choosing to ignore the facts cross the line into being morally responsible for what happens?

Because I think we've reached that point with respect to climate change.

Folks, we've been warning people about this since the early 1980s.  James Burke's seminal documentary After the Warming first aired in 1989, and predicted not only the dire consequences of anthropogenic climate change, but the resistance of the powers-that-be to doing anything to halt it.  (If you watch it now, many of its predictions sound like history -- his timeline for what was going to happen from 1990 to the present came so eerily true that it almost makes me want to believe in precognition.)  However much Al Gore is derided for his politics, his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth has also proved to be prescient.

Scientific paper after scientific paper -- peer-reviewed, based in hard data -- has demonstrated incontrovertibly that our world is warming.  There is no controversy amongst the climate scientists any more.  And still we shrug our shoulders at politicians who brand climate change as "liberal claptrap" (Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California), or those who say that if it's real at all, it will be "beneficial to society" (Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma).  Scientists who research climate have faced gag rules, funding cuts, and harassment from the likes of Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who somehow, bafflingly, has ended up chairing the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

This all comes up (again) because of a study by Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen et al., who last week released a paper in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that is rightly scaring the absolute shit out of anyone capable of reading a scientific paper (thus disqualifying Rohrabacher, Inhofe, and Smith).  The title of the paper is unequivocal: "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence From Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that2◦C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous."  (Note: the link is to a draft released last year; the paper itself appeared after extensive peer review, and with only minor modifications, in JACP last Tuesday.)

[image courtesy of photographer Angskar Walk and the Wikimedia Commons]

If the title by itself doesn't spook you enough, take a look at this excerpt from the abstract:

There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 ◦C warmer than today.  Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings...  We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters.  Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years... Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms...  Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 ◦C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous.  Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.

Co-author Eric Rignot put it more bluntly in an interview with Slate:

Ice sheet loss is non linear by nature.  You push the ice sheet one way, they do not react; you push them more, they start reacting; you keep pushing and they fall apart...  If we get there, we won't be able to fix it.

Among the scarier predictions of the Hansen et al. paper is a sea level rise of five to nine meters.  Do you recognize what this means?  The states of Florida, Delaware, and most of southern Louisiana would be underwater.  As would the nations of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.  All of the world's coastal cities would be inundated, with the exception of a few that have higher ground, like Seattle and San Francisco -- which would then become a string of islands.  This isn't talking about frost-free winters and warmer summers, and having to run your air conditioner more; this is talking about turning a significant proportion of humanity into eco-refugees.

Climate scientist Anna Liljedahl, of the University of Alaska, has said that the trends she's seeing are evidence of runaway warming.  The situation in the Arctic is dire.  The permafrost is experiencing widespread melting, with a resultant additional contribution of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere:

The scientific community has had the assumption that this cold permafrost would be protected from climate warming, but we’re showing here that the top of the permafrost, even if it’s very cold, is very sensitive to these warming event...  At the places where we have sufficient amounts of data we are seeing this process happen in less than a decade and even after one warm summer.

We have reached the point where ignoring the facts and ignoring or ridiculing the predictions of the people who are trained to understand the Earth's systems is a profoundly immoral stance.  There's a principle from Roman law that applies here: "Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit."  "Those who remain silent, when they should have spoken up, may be considered to have agreed."  If you support politicians who are complicit in hoodwinking the American citizenry with regards to the magnitude of this problem, you participate in that immorality and bear some of the responsibility for the outcome.

Which in this case, is increasingly looking like it will be horrific on a scale we have never seen before.

Moronocracy

Here in the United States, we have a fine old tradition of electing people to public office who are entirely unqualified to fulfill their duties.

Several of those have been frequent fliers here at Skeptophilia.  We have Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, despite being a rabid climate change denier who gets off by finding new and creative ways to cut the budget for NASA.  We have James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, who somehow ended up in charge of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, even though he calls anthropogenic climate change a "conspiracy" and has vowed to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency.  We have individuals like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, and Rick Brattin, each of whom alone would be sufficient evidence that having an IQ lower than your shoe size is not necessarily an impediment to winning a majority of the votes in an election.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that there's some kind of mathematical rule of politics in which (vote count) x (IQ) = a constant.

So I suppose it should come as no great surprise that this week, Sylvia Allen was appointed to be the chair of the Arizona State Senate Committee on Education.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Allen's been here before, too.  Regular readers might recall her statement from March of this year, in which she interrupted a hearing on concealed-carry laws to offer the following puzzling insight:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What this has to do with concealed-carry laws, I have no idea.  Probably Senator Allen doesn't, either.  After all, this is the same woman who posted on Facebook that she believes in chemtrails and weather manipulation:

Ok, I do not want to get into a debate about weather.  However, I know what I see weekly up here on the flat where I live outside of Snowflake.  The planes usely [sic], three or four, fly a grid across the sky and leave long white trails streaming behind them. I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover.  It is not the regular exhaust coming from the plane it is something they are spraying.  It is there in plain sight.  What is it they are leaving behind that covers the sky? 

Things are happening all around us that we see everyday and just don't get what it is.  I think we throw the "conspiracy theory" at people when we don't understand or have the information they have so we try and explain it that way.  Plus we just don't want to believe that our government would do anything terrible to us.  Well, just a few examples, the IRS attack on the Tea Party, Benghazi, wire taping [sic], Fast and Furious just to name a few and we think that they would not manipulate our weather?

It almost goes without saying that she's also a creationist:

The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with...  We need to get the uranium here in Arizona, so this state can get the money from it.

And this, dear readers, is the person the Arizona Senate chose to lead the oversight of education in the state.

I keep thinking we're getting to a point where we're wising up, that we're figuring out that when we elect idiots, they (surprise!) do idiotic things.  But I guess we're not done yet.  Sylvia Allen, a woman who not only knows nothing whatsoever about science but is apparently functionally illiterate, is now in charge of such issues as school funding, curriculum oversight, and assessment reform for an entire state.

I'd like to end on a positive note, but I don't see one here.  All I can say in conclusion is that some days, it's hard to remain an optimist.  Lately, I'm more sliding over to the "we deserve everything we get" camp.

Follow the money

There is nothing like blatant hypocrisy to put me in a blood-boiling rage.

It's even worse when the hypocrisy is coupled with mealy-mouthed self-righteousness.  That puts me in a condition that calls to mind the word "apoplexy."

And as Exhibit A, I give you: Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology.

How Smith ended up in a leadership role in the oversight of scientific research is one of those mysteries that even the Peter Principle is insufficient to explain.  Whenever Representative Smith opens his mouth, he utters such moronic statements that you have to wonder how he successfully got out of grade school, much less how he got elected to public office.  This is the man who said in 2009,  "The greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack. The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias."  He claimed in 2014 that the policy of allowing immigrants to achieve US citizenship by serving in the military -- a policy that has been in place since the country's founding, and the awarding of citizenship to Baron von Steuben by George Washington -- was "President Obama aiding and abetting an immigrant crime spree."

But on no topic has he as vividly illustrated an understanding of the world that would be sub-par for an eighth grader as on climate science.  Smith is a diehard climate change denier, and in fact wrote an op-ed piece in 2013 that contained the mind-boggling line, "Contrary to the claims of those who want to strictly regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy for all Americans, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science."

I'm not sure in what BizarroWorld a near 100% consensus amongst climate researchers constitutes "a great amount of uncertainty," but that is evidently Lamar's viewpoint.

[image courtesy of NASA]

What is most appalling about all of this is that one of the rallying cries of the deniers is "follow the money" -- implying that the scientists are getting rich off of fat government research grants, so they have every reason to cook the data to make it look like the world is warming up.  If there was no anthropogenic climate change, Lamar suggests, the funds would dry up.  So the scientists are inventing an ecological crisis in order to feather their own nests.

You have to wonder how the scientists are also conspiring to make the glaciers melt, surface seawater heat up, and creating an El Niño that is shaping up to the the most powerful one since records have been kept.  Mighty desperate, those scientists, to go to those kinds of lengths.

But you haven't heard the most appalling part yet.  Lamar Smith, who brands climate scientists as self-serving liars who are making shit up so they can get money, is now threatening Kathryn Sullivan, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with a subpoena -- in a move that is hinted to be only the first of a sweeping attack on anyone influential who is researching anthropogenic effects on climate.

"NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda," Smith said, a statement that ranks right up there with "When did you stop beating your wife?" in the Heads-I-Win, Tails-You-Lose department.

Of course, there are people who are just tickled to pieces about Smith's campaign of harassment.  Robert E. Murray, head of Murray Energy, the largest privately-held coal mining company in the US, thinks that Lamar is just wonderful.  The climate researchers are "not telling hardly any truth" [sic] about what the global climate is doing.  The world is actually cooling off, Murray says, which I'm sure will be a tremendous relief to all of you who listened to the scientists when they said that 2015 is almost certain to be the hottest year ever, shattering all previous records by a considerable margin.

Don't listen to those damn ivory-tower thermometer-wielding geeks, Murray says.  "They’re crony capitalists.  They’re making a fortune off of you the taxpayer."

And if you're not already mad enough, guess who funded the gathering at which Murray dispensed his wisdom?  The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a "nonpartisan research institute" that is still completely nonpartisan and unbiased after receiving the bulk of its funding from Koch Industries, Crownquest Oil & Gas, AEP Texas, ExxonMobil, VF-Russia, Texas Western Energy Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Chevron, and Henry Petroleum LP.

Speaking of following the money.

And outside, the world continues to warm, the ice caps continue to melt, and the weather continues to destabilize.  As we speak, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change is going on, a conference that is very likely to follow in the footsteps of the ones before it in accomplishing nothing -- because science research oversight in our country is being kept in a stranglehold by anti-science loons like Lamar Smith and his counterpart, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, another climate change denier who astonishingly enough has ended up chairing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

You know, by nature I'm an optimist.  I like to think that most of the time, most of us are doing the best we can to live according to our moral codes.  But when I find out about stuff like this, I start slipping over to the world of the conspiracy theorists, and that worries me.  I don't like to think that our country is being led by people who know full well that we're headed for an ecological catastrophe, and from a combination of greed, short-sightedness, and stupidity are willfully lying to the American people about it.

But increasingly, that's what looks like is happening.

A recall-the-idiots clause

There should be some kind of provision for removing from office politicians who unequivocally demonstrate that they are morons.

Being in public office is highly demanding, requires thinking on one's feet, and necessitates having a working knowledge of a great many different areas.  So I'm not expecting perfection, here.  Everyone makes missteps, and our leaders are no exception.  They should not be excoriated just for uttering a gaffe here or there.

But sometimes, there are examples of idiocy so egregious that they really should prompt a recall of some kind.  We need to be led by the best minds we have -- and if politicians demonstrate that their IQs are lower than their shoe sizes, they should be shown the door.

Because I'm guessing that some of these people are too stupid to find the door unassisted.

I bring this up because of four -- count 'em, four -- examples of deeply ingrained stupidity in our elected officials just from the past three days.  WARNING: put a pillow on your desk, because I'm guessing there will be multiple headdesks to follow.

Let's start with Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who was asked at a press conference about the link between vaccines and autism.  He responded that he chose not to vaccinate his own children.  "We didn't immunize," he said.  "They're healthy."  Which is analogous to a guy saying, "Seatbelts are unnecessary.  I drive without a seatbelt, and I'm still alive."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Representative Loudermilk is on the House Subcommittee for Science and Technology?

Then we have Idaho Representative Vito Barbieri, who was in a hearing about a bill that involved the use of telemedicine -- using tiny remote devices to give doctors information, such as a little camera that could be swallowed in place of a standard colonoscopy.  Barbieri asked a doctor who was giving testimony in the hearing if the same technique could be used to give doctors information about the fetus during pregnancy.

"Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy?" Barbieri asked.  "Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?"

The doctor patiently explained that that wouldn't work, because a woman's reproductive system isn't connected to her digestive tract.

"Fascinating," Barbieri replied.  "That makes sense."

Is it just me that finds it appalling that we're allowing men who don't know that a woman's uterus isn't connected to her colon to make decisions regarding women's health?

Even worse is New York Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti, who wants a bill passed blocking the use of GMOs in vaccines.  Here's the language he wants passed:

PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF VACCINES CONTAINING GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
1. NO PERSON SHALL BE VACCINATED WITH A VACCINE THAT CONTAINS GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
2. “GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM” SHALL MEAN: (A) AN ORGANISM THAT HAS BEEN ALTERED AT THE MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR LEVEL BY MEANS THAT ARE NOT POSSIBLE UNDER NATURAL CONDITIONS OR PROCESSES, INCLUDING RECOMBINANT DNA AND RNA TECHNIQUES, CELL FUSION, MICROENCAPSULATION, MACROENCAPSULATION, GENE DELETION AND DOUBLING, INTRODUCTION OF A FOREIGN GENE, AND A PROCESS THAT CHANGES THE POSITIONS OF GENES, OTHER THAN A MEANS CONSISTING EXCLUSIVELY OF BREEDING, CONJUGATION, FERMENTATION, HYBRIDIZATION, IN VITRO FERTILIZATION, OR TISSUE CULTURE; AND (B) AN ORGANISM MADE THROUGH SEXUAL OR ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION, OR BOTH, INVOLVING AN ORGANISM DESCRIBED IN PARAGRAPH (A) OF THIS SUBDIVISION, IF POSSESSING ANY OF THE ALTERED MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORGANISM SO DESCRIBED.

There's just one tiny problem with all of this.  The processes he's describing are the ones used to inactivate the viruses and bacteria used in vaccines.  If the bill passed, it would require that vaccines contain unmodified pathogens -- i.e., the strains of the microorganisms that cause disease.

Can't you hear what the doctors would have to tell parents?  "Just to let you know, Mrs. Fernwinkle.  One of the side effects of this tetanus vaccine is that your son will get lockjaw and die, because I'm injecting him with the tetanus bacteria itself."

But no one is a better candidate for the "You Are Too Stupid To Govern" award than Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is the chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, and who this week brought a snowball into the Senate and threw it on the floor.  "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, 'You know what this is?'  It's a snowball, from outside here.  So it's very, very cold out.  Very unseasonable."

Which makes me want to scream, "There is a difference between weather and climate, you illiterate moron!"  "It just snowed" is not an argument against climate change, just as "I have lots of money" is not an argument against world poverty.  And ironically, the same day as Inhofe did his idiotic demonstration, scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced that they had data directly correlating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere with the trapping of thermal energy -- something that has been demonstrated many times in the lab, but never under ordinary conditions out in the environment.  The data -- which has been collected over a period of ten years from two widely-separated sites -- agrees exactly with climate-change models that nitwits like Inhofe think have been manufactured by evil scientists for their own personal gain.

So I really think we need to have an option for recall.  An "I'm sorry, we have to hold a revote, because we accidentally elected a blithering idiot to public office" clause.

I mean, seriously: do we want these people in charge of making decisions about our future?

Now, I have to go.  I've got an ice pack and some aspirin waiting for me.  My forehead hurts.

Inconvenient science

There is a frightening tendency for policymakers to request advice from scientists, and then ignore it if said advice doesn't agree with the party line.

Give us advice, in other words, unless it's inconvenient.

The perception of science as dangerous to political expediency has resulted in a number of troubling moves in the last few years.  Here in the United States, the general approach has been to put the wolves in charge of the sheep, explaining why the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is populated at least in part by creationist climate change deniers.  It's why the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is soon to be led by Senator James Inhofe, who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo, and the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space by notoriously anti-science Senator Ted Cruz.  It's also why Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has forbidden scientists to speak to the media without rigorous prior approval, and has cut the position of National Science Advisor.

Toe the line, in other words.  You can play around in your labs and wear your white lab jackets and so on.  But if you make a discovery, you damn well better make sure that you're discovering something that supports our political stance.

It's not just the right wing that does this, of course.  The left has its own bêtes noires, and one of the main ones is genetic modification.  GMOs are evil, goes the party line.  The big genetic research companies are trying to profit at the expense of human health, and all GMOs should be banned.  Further, they claim, the research facilities are suppressing any information that might get out showing the dangers of genetic modification, because that could hurt their bottom line.

It's this kind of categorical, zero-sum thinking that led to the axing this week of the position of Chief Scientific Advisor to the Juncker Commission, the executive body of the European Union.

Why?  Largely because of pressure from Greenpeace and other virulently anti-GMO groups.  Outgoing CSA Anne Glover was perceived as too pro-GMO, even though her position was supported by a vast consensus of scientific researchers and oversight organizations -- including the World Health Organization.

This is just as anti-science, and irrational, as the right's insistence that climate change isn't happening.  There are rigorous testing protocols for establishing the safety of GMOs, and when health problems are found, the crops are pulled from production.  Just this week, in fact, a genetically modified pea was scrapped after it was established that consuming it caused allergic lung damage in mice... after it had been in testing for ten years.

Not exactly the heartless behavior the anti-GMOers would have you believe, is it?  But even this gets spun the other way; I've already seen the above-linked article posted several times, with messages that amount to, "See?  We TOLD you that GMOs were dangerous and cause allergies!"

So even when the scientists publicly announce that they have cancelled an expensive program because of human health concerns, they're cast in the role of Dr. Frankenstein, trying to unleash their monster on the unwitting public.  You can't win.

Unless, of course, you just crowbar your political stance into place by ignoring the scientists altogether, or duct-taping their mouths.

Facts are facts, folks, and scientific consensus is what it is.  And when political or philosophical dogmatism blinds you to what the science actually says, you do so at your own risk.