Denying Climate Change During a Tornado Watch

Yesterday afternoon, for the sake of the four devoted readers of this blog, I decided to brave the 60 mph winds and torrential downpour, ignore the tornado warnings, and head down to the Mayflower Hotel to see what the was happening at Federalist Society's national convention. The convention is a three-day affair dedicated to what you might call "wing law." It's filled with strict constructionists and libertarians all espousing radical theories of law and economics, plus luminaries: Yesterday's rock star was Sen. John McCain, whose speech you can read about here. The day was capped off by a black-tie gala headlined by none other than Justices Scalia and Alito.

I didn't get to go to any of the headline events (Alito sold out far in advance). I did, however, attend a session on climate change litigation and the supreme court case, Massachusetts v. EPA,  that's coming up for oral arguments on the 29th.

Federalist Society events are usually major sausage fests--if you see a woman, she's generally a member of the "communications profession" or somebody's wife. But the climate panel was actually moderated by a woman judge. Of course, to earn a place at that table, a woman has to be to the right of Attila the Hun. Fifth Circuit appellate judge Edith Jones fit the bill.

During oral arguments in a sexual harassment lawsuit once, Jones said of the victim, "Well, they didn't rape her, did they? And when her lawyer said that a man had pinched the woman's breast, Jones replied, "Well, he apologized."

Jones set the tone for the panel by scoffing at the notion that the earth was getting warmer. Then Lee Casey, an attorney from Baker & Hosteler, got up and told the group that he was a "global warming skeptic," because the fact that there was a scientific "consensus" on climate change meant that competing views were just being censured, and that Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was just "a little too convenient." His observed that environmentalists had referred to naysayers as Holocaust deniers and Al Gore had called them "flat earthers"--clearly all signs that the minority view in the academy was just too threatening to the environmentalists' "orthodoxy."

The discussion of the global warming lawsuits, which are based on a novel "public nuisance" claim, seemed secondary to bashing climate science. After listening to these guys, I though the Holocaust-denier analogy sounded about right. I also wondered if global warming were caused only by cow farts and not the burning of their big corporate clients' fossil fuels, whether any of them would be up there making these speeches at all. Anyway, you didn't need Al Gore to tell you that something weird was up with the weather yesterday. All you had to do was go outside.