Outgoing congressperson Steve Stockman has introduced a bill demanding America conduct a study on what Rep. Steve Stockman has named the "Stockman Effect." Despite the 20 guesses in your head as to what something called the "Stockman Effect" could be referring to, many of them involving methampetamine, it's not that. It refers to yet another far-right theory about why manmade changes to the planet's atmosphere cannot possibly be causing
the climate effects we are currently measuring.
The Stockman Effect Act calls upon the director of the National Science Foundation to commission a study on the extent to which changes in the weather can be attributed to natural shifts in the Earth's magnetic fields, noting that, "There is a possibility that the reason Mars lost its atmosphere was because of the loss of its magnetic field."
Despite Steve's declaration of this theory as His Own, this is another one of those pseudo-scientific notions that have floated around far-right email circles for a long while. To the minor credit of everyone involved (very minor, but let's give credit where we can) this one does recognize at least the primitive basics of several scientific notions; yes, the planet's climate can change; yes, it is currently changing; yes, the planet does indeed
have a magnetic field, and one that changes over time and does other
very exciting things that we will refrain from mentioning here lest far-right militia groups be panicked into another round of ammo-hoarding. And there is indeed a theory that the weakening of Mars' own planetary magnetic field led to the erosion of its own atmosphere, which is a sharp, fascinating thought that many, many people like Steve Stockman are going to end up poking an eye out with.
So credit where credit is due, Steve Stockman and his email friends have accepted the science that makes compasses work, despite compasses being poorly described in any of the holy texts and the faith-based awkwardness of the Earth's last major magnetic shift, presuming that's what Steve is talking about here, taking place three quarters of a million years before his supporters say God created the universe. Oh—we've also got them on the record as believing in Mars, a side bonus I plan to use against them in the future.
But the theorized Stockman Effect is still gibberish, though we'll try to parse it out below the fold:
One enormous problem with Steve's self-named theory is the bit where he conflates Mars losing its atmosphere over millions of years to the Earth's climate changing over the last 100-ish. The timescales are, well, different. Steve has had the same problem with his simultaneous (grasping at all the straws?) notion that the Earth's "wobble" is causing planetary climate shifts; yes, the Earth does "wobble" on its axis as it spins, kudos to the staffer who gave him a middle school science textbook, but no, such effects take place over timespans that make that information irrelevant when measuring current, rapid climate shifts. We've almost got them thinking like scientists, we just need to help them figure out this "scale" bit. A penny is not a million dollars; a pinprick is not the same as 70 bullet wounds; a man who is an inch taller than you is not eleventy billion feet taller than you.
On the other hand, if he's talking about polarity shifts rather than overall field decay, any presumed "Stockman Effect" was already considered and dismissed long before Steve Stockman ever got the first of those chain emails.
But scientists say that the long-term changes in the magnetic field make it unlikely that it's causing the rapid warming. Bob McPherron, a professor of space physics at the University of California Los Angeles, said the possible link was "very tenuous" and that most of the science behind it is not well understood. A 2011 NASA publication (published amid fears of an apocalypse in 2012 based on the Mayan calendar) noted that polarity reversals are "the rule, not the exception" and said that fossils from the last reversal 780,000 years ago showed no change to plant or animal life or glacial activity.
So if Stockman is talking about Mars-type changes in the magnetic field on planetary timeframes, he's misunderstanding the science, and if he's talking about relatively rapid magnetic polarity reversals (settle down, militias) we already have a pretty good idea they don't have the effects he's supposing they have. (And no, a reading of the bill is
unhelpful here, since it seems to just conflate the two arbitrarily while demanding science answers for his resulting word-homunculus.)
There are a number of things that we know can cause rapid climate shifts. An asteroid strike would do it. Volcanic activity can do it. Dumping massive quantities of various somethings into the atmosphere can do it. We know the last one of those is happening right now, and we know the climate has measurably changed over the exact same timespan as those atmospheric changes in the roughly expected ways and magnitudes, but we're not allowed to call it conclusive because some of the richest people on the planet are heavily invested in those aforementioned various somethings. So we keep looking for the invisible farting unicorn in some hidden corner of the world that's responsible for all this, because heaven knows it couldn't be us.
That's what should be called the Stockman Effect. That search for the invisible farting unicorn that will allow you to continue denying any part of reality that doesn't mesh with your ideologically mandated notions of how the world works.