Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets

Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

The measure made no mention of evolution, but opponents of efforts to dilute the teaching of evolution noted that the language was similar to that of bills in other states that had included both. The vote split almost entirely along partisan lines in both houses, with Republican voting for it and Democrats voting against.

The relationship of the evolution-denialists and the climate-change-denialists should surprise no one. Both propositions seem to include the somewhat contrary idea that scientists are the last people you would want to ask about science. I've highlighted the snippet about carbon dioxide in the South Dakota resolution just to point out how really not-at-all adept the thinking is with this denial crap.

Yes, plants need carbon dioxide. Just like people need oxygen. But it has been established that too much oxygen is harmful to people. To put it more simply, water is completely natural, and we need it to survive, but you'd be foolish to think that means you can't drown. This should be obvious. It just fails to be obvious to someone who has decided that science is necessarily wrong because it doesn't confirm their own biases.

The creationism vs. evolution debate doesn't pose any real immediate concern for us as a society. Some children will have a thorough science education, be able to understand the concepts involved in natural selection and some won't--so what? But understanding of how chemical reactions occurring in our atmosphere can affect the overall climate is a more immediate concern because it affects how people will vote, the choice they will make regarding carbon output, and because the choices they make will actually be seen in our lifetimes. Because we already have seen changes in the environment during our lifetimes. Even if there was a question regarding the time-frame in which, say, Himalayan glaciers disappear, it has no bearing on the fact that we are already witnessing the erosion of the ice shelf of the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Canadian Northwest passage is navigable. Kenyan coffee-growers are moving their crops to higher elevations. And don't get me started on the polar bears.

The story of evolution, although wonderful, took place largely in the past. It happens on a micro-level that can be witnessed experimentally if you are looking at bacteria, for example, but generally, it takes a great deal of time to see significant change within a population. But this climate change thing--it isn't necessarily a slow process. The worse things get, the worse they can get. Take this story:

Prodigious plumes of planet-warming methane are bubbling from sediments across a broad region of Arctic seafloor previously thought to be sealed by permafrost, new analyses indicate. The resulting increase of methane gas in the atmosphere may accelerate climate warming, scientists say.

Though immense amounts of carbon are known to be trapped in the peatlands of Siberia, a larger, often unrecognized carbon reservoir lies hidden just north of that frigid region, says Natalia Shakhova, a biogeochemist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf — a 2.1-million-square-kilometer patch of Arctic seafloor that was exposed during the most recent ice age, when sea levels were lower — is three times larger than all of today’s land-based Siberian wetlands. When the region was above sea level, tundra vegetation pulled carbon dioxide from the air as plants grew. That organic material, much of which didn’t decompose in the frigid Arctic, accumulated in the soil and is the source of modern methane.

Because of warming, there is less ice, and because there is less ice, there is more of a gas that increases the warming, which....and so on. Not to sound like a doom-sayer--but that is bad.

And it is also bad, and intellectually dishonest, and political hackery, for people to glom onto this denialist business. For crying out loud--let real scientists set the debate about what real science is!