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Nick Paumgarten penned an excellent piece on Whole Foods’ CEO (and former Chairman of the Board) John Mackey in the 4 January 2010 New Yorker, Food Fighter: Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. know what’s best for you?

John Mackey … sees himself as a “daddy” to his fifty-four thousand employees, who are known as “team members,” but they may occasionally consider him to be more like a crazy uncle.

Paumgarten’s revealing discussion of Mackey’s science reading provides a window on why they might see him as that “crazy uncle”.

One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming–the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”

First, let’s take the opportunity to highlight the clarity of ignorance that Mackey chose to put on display:

“Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”

Yes, that is why the world’s power and wealth have migrated to Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and tropical islands while Great Britain, New England, Japan, etc have been so impoverished.

Let’s continue with Mackey’s idiocies moving backwards.

to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty

Remembering that Mackey is a strong libertarian, with a belief structure that government’s proper role is to stay out of the way (seemingly, no matter what?), thus “taxes” and “regulation” are automatically evil (unless, it would seem, that those taxes and regulations somehow improve Mackey’s own business prospects?) no matter their end. Forget that it is a bit hard for “the market” to provide for roads, the common defense, food safety, etc …

Moving beyond this philosophical and ideological point, there is the simple falsehood inherent in “lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty”. Not acting to mitigate climate change and enabling climate chaos will have a greater impact on “an increase in poverty” than perhaps any other possible action/inaction from government (perhaps short of a global thermonuclear war). In fact, energy smart actions to mitigate climate change will provide economic benefits (while reduce the costs of climate chaos) and actually reduce the poverty level while improving the overall standard of living (what is the value of cutting cancer implications of fossil fuel pollution?).

hysteria about global warming

Yes, when the world’s Academies of Science come together to call for concerted global action to deal with a threat where there is a tremendous amount of scientific work, work that is reinforcing a scientific Theory, that is “hysteria”.

One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming–the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion

Barry Brooks’ review of the book & its launch ended:

The launch ended with a statement of conviction from the master of ceremonies that this book will become a classic, alongside the other great works of modern science. Well, it may well be held up as an example for the future. An example of just how deluded and misrepresentative the psuedo-sceptical war against science really was in the first decade of the 21st century.

The Objective Standard’s review started favorably, it seems, but hit a roadblock of sorts

Unfortunately, Heaven and Earth utterly fails to deliver on its promise. Rather than clearly presenting the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and specifying the kind and scope of data necessary to evaluate it, Plimer presents the reader with a disorganized hash of poorly-presented data; repeatedly mocks climate models without providing sufficient evidence or argument to warrant such mockery; dismisses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a bogeyman “unrelated to science” (p. 20), without adequately explaining why this is so; and generally presents an incoherent argument against a straw-man version of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis

Here is Ian Enting’s 46-page (single space — pdf) examination of Heaven & Earth’s problems, misrepresentations, and inconsistencies.

In fact, when it comes to Heaven and Earth: The Missing Science, Tim Lambert’s title says it all: The science is missing from Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth.

It seems like Whole Foods’ crazy uncle should have someone helping him vet his reading list.

Hat tip to FireDogLake and Elephant Journal. See also DeSmogBlog.

NOTE:  Mackey / Whole Foods comes from Austin, Texas. Mackey’s ‘crazy uncle’ comments on climate change are far from the only news making lunacy when it comes to climate science (actually, science overall) coming from Texas, where a group of conservatives are seeking to rewrite science textbooks.

Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.

McLeroy and company had also hoped to require science textbooks to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including evolution. Scientists see the phrase, which was first slipped into Texas curriculum standards in the 1980s, as a back door for bringing creationism into science class. But as soon as news broke that the board was considering reviving it, letters began pouring in from scientists around the country, and science professors began turning out en masse to school board hearings. During public testimony, one biologist arrived at the podium in a Victorian-era gown, complete with a flouncy pink bustle, to remind her audience that in the 1800s religious fundamentalists rejected the germ theory of disease; it has since gained near-universal acceptance. All this fuss made the bloc’s allies skittish, and when the matter finally went to the floor last March, it failed by a single vote.

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!”

Why should those expletive-deleted scientists have a say in what goes into science textboooks, anyway?

(Hat tip on this to Joe Romm / Climate Progress.)