Silencing science won't prevent global warming

By The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 01/24/2008 09:34:41 PM MST

In an incident reminiscent of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the little town of Chouteau, Mont., is now a laughingstock for its intolerance of ideas accepted by the great majority of the scientific community.

John Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching evolution. But at least Scopes was allowed to explain that theory to his high school science class. That's better treatment than Steve Running received in Chouteau, a hamlet nestled at the foot of the Rockies about 100 miles northeast of Missoula.

On Jan. 10, Chouteau High School was to have hosted two speeches by Running, an ecology professor and climate scientist from the University of Montana who served on the United Nations panel on global climate change that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. The first speech was to be given to about 150 students during a school assembly. The second was to be delivered to a mostly adult audience that evening.

The nighttime speech went on as planned, but Superintendent Kevin St. John canceled Running's talk to his students because of pressure from the school board. He called his action "a reasonable response" to contrarian contentions that global warming is an unproven theory and that Running's speech could be critical of agriculture, the economic lifeblood of the community.

Running was puzzled.

"I think there's a faction of society that is willfully ignorant, that they just don't want to know the facts about this," he said. "The thing that's ironic is that I wasn't even going to talk about global warming to the kids. I was just going to try to give an inspirational speech for young people about the jobs of science. But I guess that's pretty scary stuff."

We're even more puzzled.

Didn't St. John realize that canceling the speech to students to avoid controversy would simply invite even more of it — and derision from the nation at large? Instead of censoring the noted scientist, why didn't the superintendent simply invite a qualified spokesperson from the opposite side of the debate to present the skeptics' view to students?

We're even more puzzled about why efforts to combat climate change are seen as anti-agriculture. — especially in Montana.

Luther Talbert, a Montana State University wheat breeder, says noticeably hotter summers are leading him to develop heat-resistant grain varieties. Other Montana farmers have enrolled their cropland in an innovative program that pays for good conservation practices and reduces carbon emissions. In Colorado, wind energy is proving a boon to farmers.

Running could have carried these positive messages to the youthful audience of budding agribusiness leaders, who might have warmed to the potential benefits of good science. What a shame that his inspiring message was muzzled instead.