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In February of this year Rep. Mike Noel summed up his life's work with this statement: "We ought to declare open warfare on environmentalists."
In this fall's edition of Noel's Holy War, the recipients of his fire-breathing contempt now include 98 percent of the world's climate scientists and 76 of the world's international scientific societies, all of whom believe the evidence is overwhelming that a human-caused climate crisis is inevitable without drastic cuts in CO2 production. Last month, 18 of the nation's top scientific organizations wrote to Congress, repeating previous warnings about global warming.
Incidentally, the number of scientific societies that are on Noel's side of the battle is zero. Let me repeat that score, 76 to zero. Those 76 include the main societies for physicists, chemists, meteorologists, geologists, engineers, astronomers and now the American Medical Association and the World Medical Association. You can now count the AMA as an environmental "wacko" organization that Noel wants to engage in open warfare.
As fear of H1N1 flu mounts, note these words from the president of the WMA: "Climate change represents an inevitable, massive threat to global health that will likely eclipse the major known pandemics as the leading cause of death and disease in the 21st century."
If Noel were just your crazy uncle that everyone avoids at family reunions, his medieval world view wouldn't matter. But he is an important legislative
Recently, Noel called the president of Utah State University to complain about the statements of a USU instructor, physicist Robert Davies, who courageously identified Noel's "scientific expert," Roy Spencer, as someone with an extreme minority scientific view who has an intense political, ideological and religious agenda. Spencer is a creationist, a member of the right-wing George C. Marshall and Heartland institutes, and is selling a book on "climate hysteria."
Noel may not be able to make war on scientists outside Utah, but in a gesture of suppression worthy of the Dark Ages, the Grand Inquisitor from Kanab is doing his best to intimidate Utah's state-funded institutions of higher learning from indulging in too much of that "higher learning" on the climate crisis.
I have personally had scientists at Utah's universities and state agencies decline my invitations to speak in public on environment, climate and health for fear of retribution by the Legislature. The repercussions ripple into every corner of the state.
Everyone, especially China, now knows the backbone of the world's new economy will be clean energy. What scientific superstars in clean energy will want to remain at or come to Utah's universities knowing that Noel and friends will hover over them like J.R.R. Tolkien's Dark Riders? What clean energy companies will come to Utah when the Legislature eschews tax incentives for wind, solar and geothermal, and preserves tax breaks for the polluting dinosaurs of energy: coal, oil and gas?
Notwithstanding Utah's highly educated work force, clean, high-tech companies will avoid a state whose cities are, or will be, smothered by air pollution, whose mountains, reservoirs, forests and farms are decimated by drought, 10-degree hotter temperatures and the dust bowl that scientists now predict for the interior West. Scientists warn that if you want to get a glimpse of Utah's climate future look at the inferno that was once Australia.
But in Mike Noel's humble opinion, those 76 international scientific societies, including the world's best and brightest, are all wrong. And he is so convinced that he knows better he is willing to drag the rest of the state with him back to the days before Descartes and the development of the scientific method. Noel fanatically champions "freedom" from government. But now he menacingly demands that the rest of Utah join him in his freedom from common sense, freedom from science and the freedom to keep our heads stuck firmly in the sand.
Brian Moench is president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.
