Consider the Broad Cultural Significance of Kentucky Republican State Senator Brandon Smith’s Cartoonish Comments about Mars and Earth

© 2014 Peter Free

 

10 July 2014

 

 

Where does the Republican Party they get these dopes?

 

Kentucky state senator Brandon Smith reportedly made the following comment in opposing the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed regulation of carbon emissions:

 

 

I won’t get into the debate about climate change but I’ll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here.

 

Nobody will dispute that.

 

Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There’s no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.

 

© 2014 Shadee Ashtari, Republican Calls Climate Change A Hoax Because Earth And Mars Have 'Exactly' Same Temperature, Huffington Post (08 July 2014) (paragraph split)

 

 

In her story about Smith’s statement, journalist Shadee Ashtari commented in rebuttal

 

Somewhat too narrowly in my scientific opinion:

 

 

According to NASA, the average temperature on Earth is 57 degrees Fahrenheit -- 138 degrees above Mars' average of -81 degrees.

 

© 2014 Shadee Ashtari, Republican Calls Climate Change A Hoax Because Earth And Mars Have 'Exactly' Same Temperature, Huffington Post (08 July 2014)

 

 

What Ms. Ashtari did not add is scientifically even more significant

 

As the NASA chart (to which Ashtari linked her comment) implies — the planets’ two atmospheres and their relationships to the mechanisms of life are compositionally and mechanistically completely different:

 

 

Mars has no life that we yet have discovered, apparently little water, and its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.

 

Earth is figuratively buried in (biologically and chemically interacting) life forms, has an atmosphere comprised predominantly of nitrogen and oxygen — and “eagerly” displays a surface deeply laden with voluminous amounts of water.

 

Only an intentionally air-headed ignoramus like Senator Brandon Smith would even consider making claims based on the purported chemical and dynamic similarity between two such dissimilar planets.  Especially in the context of greenhouse gases’ generation and its relationship to climate change.

 

 

The problem is not state Senator Smith’s policy position

 

It is his scientifically and rationally asinine justification for it.

 

One can easily make rationally sound policy arguments against controlling carbon emissions — or indeed against doing anything at all about global warming.

 

The difference, compared with people calculating the other way, rests simply on different value systems and/or arguably valid competing evaluations of risk and harm.

 

 

The moral? — Incorrigible ignorance and the inability to reason are what set many of the Republican Party’s loudest mouths apart from even competent chimpanzees

 

We don’t (yet) let chimps run anything important.

 

That said, humanity in much of the developed world appears to be getting dumber with each passing year.

 

And there are, we can tentatively hypothesize, no evolutionary pressures to cull this swelled population of quasi-human dopes from our midst.