Wednesday's postcard, and some record heat for Steve Scalise...

July 26, 2023

“At the turn,” granitic, Ice Age flood-deposited boulder in the Spokane River, in west Spokane

Hot Enough, Steve Scalise?

“I miss the days when you could send a plague and people would listen”

—comedian Jim Gaffigan impersonating a peeved and frustrated God, complaining to a heavenly assistant, in his new “Dark Pale” comedy routine.

One of the things I thought I learned growing up in Panama is that science was a brake on stupid.

To be sure, the Americans and Panamanians needed a dramatic course correction in their politics to address a not-so-small matter—that we’d stolen the most valuable natural resource in Panama, its narrow isthmus and location as a viable shortcut between two oceans. Things got messy. I remember the arguments, the heated struggle at Balboa High School, near Panama City, about which flag should fly, and the ensuing riots. Eventually a new treaty was negotiated and, despite Ronald Reagan’s objections, Panama now owns its canal.

One argument I don’t remember is an argument about protecting the rainforest—the lush tropical watershed that buffers the Panama Canal. The verdant, often misty terrain is a vital, natural sponge to provide the water necessary to lift ships through locks as they move from one ocean to another. Destroy the rainforest and you would run the risk of not having enough water in the dry season to move ships through the locks. Moreover, the small town where I went to kindergarten—Gamboa—is now home to a destination rainforest resort, another boost to the Panamanian economy.

As the son of science teacher, it’s been all the harder to see how science and scientists have been demonized by a populist movement—funded by fossil fuel giants and carried out by populist (nearly all Republicans) political leaders. Anti-science is not just a chaos-inducing, American movement, but we’ve nurtured it in truly perverse ways, and lost incredibly valuable time as a result. Just ask James Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who famously warned the U.S. Senate in 1988—35 years ago—that the world was facing a human-induced, climate emergency because of runaway carbon emissions.

“We are damned fools,” Hansen told the Guardian a week ago. This year’s withering heat waves are a grim vindication of his 1988 warning, and deepened his “sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response.”

I think Hansen was clear enough. I also don’t think it was a lack of intelligence so much as an appalling lack of integrity and stewardship. As I wrote in this space two weeks ago, I’m haunted by the ugly take-down of former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis who, in 2010, was targeted by fossil-fuel-funded advocacy groups because he had come to accept the scientific validity of Hansen’s warnings and actually wanted to do something to reduce carbon emissions. Simply put, it was Inglis’s intelligent and moral response that doomed him, and cost him his seat in Congress—overwhelmingly defeated not by a Democrat but by a fellow Republican.

The trend was clear by then. Never mind that we all use and have gotten used to the gifts of science—our computers, phones, cars, aircraft, electrical grid, air-conditioning, even the GPS systems that, among other things, improve our agricultural productivity. There is a populist blow-back against science because it is considered elite and out of touch with the prevailing, flag-waving, boat parade of the Republican Party with its near-exclusive focus on divisive culture wars. Who has time to worry about your mom getting heat stroke when what really matters is your god-given right to visit Seattle or Spokane without having to witness gay couples kissing or holding hands?

I don’t know what more we could have expected of Jim Hansen who has been bestowed with numerous scientific honors and public service awards, including the Blue Planet Prize. So it did catch my attention that seemingly hours after the Guardian’s article on Hansen appeared that Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana—the GOP Majority Leader in the House of Representatives—had this to say on FOX Business News about the record-breaking heat waves being experienced around the world this summer

Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, addressing a conservative gathering (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Images and photographer Gage Skidmore)

"By the way, we had hot summers 150 years ago, when we didn't have the combustion engine. But they don't want to talk honestly about science. They just want to control your life.”

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