To my mind, the Legislature's war on the science of climate change is symptomatic of the tone this year: anti-U.S. government, anti-Obama, anti-anything but hard-right Utah Republicanism.
All that couched in a year when the burden of a sparse state budget seems to be falling on students, the poor and sick and disabled, the blameless children of undocumented immigrants.
Our Legislature wants to make Utah a haven for in-state gun manufacturers; reject any national health care plan; oppose a federal commission on state Workers' Compensation laws; repudiate mainstream climate change science and federal efforts to reduce carbon dioxide; and drop out of the Western Climate Initiative.
All are sponsored by Republicans and reflect their disdain for the feds, Democrats and those of us who disagree with the Republicans and even retain a little faith in science and the federal government.
Joe Andrade, a mostly retired bioengineering professor at the University of Utah, stopped by on Friday to talk about his and other scientists' reasons for opposing resolutions to reject global warming and the Western Climate Initiative.
The science is solid, Andrade told me, based on decades of data. Temperatures are higher, the oceans are getting warmer and more acidic. Glaciers are melting. Carbon dioxide -- which contributes to air pollution and thus climate change -- is at an all-time high.
That said, Andrade and his colleague, Thomas Reichler of the U.'s Department of Atmospheric Science, will say that scientific inquiry is always learning, questioning, going further.
"Scientists are still arguing about gravity," Andrade said. "The essence of science is uncertainty. That's the joy of it."
And Reichler emphasizes: "In the big picture, the fact that global temperatures are higher is rock solid, no doubt about it." That's based on 160 years of instrumental record-keeping, he said. And across the globe, 2009 was one of the warmest years on record.
So they, and other U. scientists, along with their colleagues from Brigham Young University and other institutions, are rising up. They're talking to legislators, to the degree they can, writing letters and appearing at committee hearings. Friday evening, they held a news conference at the U. to reject House Joint Resolution 12, which urges the Environmental Protection Agency to abandon its effort to regulate carbon emissions.
Like all resolutions, it's nonbinding. But it and similar resolutions emanating from the House and Senate speak volumes about the contempt so many Utah lawmakers have for anything but their own convictions and those of their fellow-travelers on the Hill and back home.
And it's surely no coincidence that 2010 is an election year.
