A climate of embarrassment

Sunday's column:

FRANKFORT — Introducing the main speaker at an interim legislative committee meeting Wednesday, Chairman Jim Gooch mistakenly pronounced what should have been a silent “s.”

As a result, Viscount (“ví-kount,” according to Random House Webster’s College Dictionary) Christopher Walker Monckton became a “vizz (rhymes with fizz)-count.”

Although Rep. Mike Cherry, D-Princeton, got it right when he later addressed Monckton, several other lawmakers on the panel repeated the “vizzcount” mistake often during the course of a lengthy meeting. 

Should Kentuckians be embarrassed that some of their legislators don’t know a viscount from a vizzcount? Probably.

But hey, back in the day, I joined other folks where I grew up in claiming to hail from “Warshington” County instead of Washington County. So, who am I to cast pronunciation stones?

Besides, a mispronounced title was the least of the reasons Kentuckians should be embarrassed about the bizarre farce Representative Gooch, D-Providence, perpetrated on the state last week.

We should be embarrassed that he insulted our intelligence by providing Monckton and James Taylor of the Heartland Institute a forum to spread the gospel according to them on climate change — said gospel being that there is no such thing as global warming, and even if there is, humans aren’t contributing to it and we’ll all be the better for melting polar icecaps, rising ocean levels, higher temperatures and more extreme weather conditions.

We should be even more embarrassed that Gooch and several other members of the committee bought what the snake-oil peddler with the British accent and his sidekick were selling.

Rep. Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville, went so far as to label Monckton’s spiel a “splendid academic rebuttal” of the consensus scientific wisdom on climate change.

“Splendid” it was, in much the same way some of the more pompous and officious characters in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera are splendid sendups.

Academic rebuttal? Not.

It was just a guy with a slide show (173 of them, each bearing what appeared to be a crest composed of a crown atop a portcullis bracketed by chains), an authoritative voice and a well-practiced patter offering indecipherable graphs and formulas and disingenuous comparisons as “proof” that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in other developed nations and the mainstream media have all got it wrong on global warming.

I was particularly impressed with the way he interpreted the longer life expectancy in developed nations where there are high levels of carbon-dioxide emissions and the high child-mortality rates in undeveloped nations where there are low levels of emissions to mean that the higher emissions help people live longer.

Gee, you mean the better health care, better water treatment and better regulation of the food chain you find in developed nations has nothing to do with longer life spans and fewer child deaths?

Taylor’s presentation, filled with references to “alarmist global warming theory” and “alleged scientific consensus,” wasn’t nearly as entertaining as Monckton’s, but was equally disingenuous.

Whether Gooch and other apologists for the coal and oil industries want to admit it, the serious scientific debate about climate change is over. And wasting valuable committee time listening to non-scientists such as Monckton and Taylor say it isn’t won’t change that fact.

As James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said in a letter delivered to the committee Wednesday, “If such positions are taken seriously by Kentucky authorities, it risks more than embarrassment. It risks delay in serious evaluation of the appropriate response to the problems and the opportunities posed by the threat of climate change. ... Presentations that deny the reality of global climate change and the increasing role of human-made emissions are out of touch with current scientific knowledge.”

Yes, we Kentuckians should be embarrassed by Wednesday’s farcical waste of lawmakers’ time. And no one should be more embarrassed than the Democratic House leaders who awarded Gooch a committee chairmanship.

They — and we — should be thankful that TV writers are on strike at the moment. Otherwise, late-night viewers across the land would be guffawing at us now — and it wouldn’t be because a few of our lawmakers don’t know viscount from a vizzcount.