It was later (much later) revealed as a hoax, and only since then has our understanding of evolution improved, people who understand the science have stopped searching for the mythical 'missing link' - a being that has the perfect half-half traits of man and ape, but rather, on branches of evolution from the original ancestor of man that eventually led to the modern homo sapiens.
A key feature of a good con is that the con artist or artists manage to scam a bigger and/or more powerful target (otherwise there is often little benefit to the con). Since the aim was scientific recognition, the con artists only had to convince the society of scientists to accept their evidence, and given that their evidence was exactly what everyone expected, that wasn't very hard.
We have moved on from the days of the evolution con, and now scientific consensus is no longer reached by hefty men in plaid waistcoats being impressed with the presentation of the exact evidence they expect to see. Scientists are now very eager to test and retest anything that could be contentious, and it is only through multiple tests, each designed more rigorously than the last (due to criticisms that would undoubtedly arise), followed by painful analysis and debate, do scientists reach tentative statements about our existence and the world around us.
So it is perhaps amazing that we have fallen for the same type of con as the scientists of yore did. It suggests that the rest of the world is lagging behind in its understanding of scientific method, and we're as gullible and easily influenced by prejudice and expectation as the hefty 'men of science' of 1912.
Climate change is the poster-child of dissension between public and scientific opinion, and it shares many similarities with the usual con. A facade of legitimacy is created by giving airtime and finance to any scientist (whether they are connected to the field or reputable is questionable at best), the relatively few in the profession is swaying the opinion of the many that are not, rather than the opposite, and there is a huge difference in 'belief' versus scientific evidence.
There is also the interesting correlation of who we listen to and what is important to us, have a look at the maps to the right hand side in the following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_change
To help decipher it, lets look only at Australia in comparison with Russia (the trend exists all over the map with very few anomalies, and these usually in countries where climate change is most observable physically). The first picture shows results of surveying how much reporting has been done on climate change (reporting in this case means media attention, that is, including the controversy that is drummed up about it). In this picture, it is obvious that Australia (the darker grey) pays a lot more media attention to climate change, while Russia doesn't as much.
The second image, which shows whether respondents believed in humans causing climate change, shows a huge change of shading in Australia, although the gauge still remains above half-way. This means many people do not believe in man-made climate change. In Russia the shading is about the same as Australia.
What is most hilarious (and sad) however, is the last map, showing who thought of climate change as a serious personal threat. Russians responded less dramatically, while Australians suddenly swung towards the darker side. America and Canada both follow this trend, while some places like Greenland and Norway buck this trend). It is also easy to see that the horn of Africa is pretty much unanimously in agreement that man-made climate change is real, and the media concentration there on this issue is moderate. Those who feel its effects most directly buck the trend in media manipulation.
Australians, if the map is credible, are then pretty likely to respond that climate change is a serious personal risk and yet be 'fluffy' about whether it is man-made. If we translate to normal, average Aussie talk, it means this: "I want the government to do something about climate change because it's affecting the way I live my life, but I don't want to be blamed for or pay for the fact climate change is a big risk for me because it may not be my fault." While in less media-concentrated places the response is this: "I want the government to do something about climate change because it may affect my life, I acknowledge my part in climate change."
So we as Australians are pretty selfish and melodramatic. We want other people to do something about climate change (usually scientists), but we don't want to believe (the scientists) that we are causing it, and we really don't want to pay anything for it (well, we believe we didn't cause it, so someone else should foot the bill). It's easy to see that we're heavily influenced by the media, which is flogging the controversy for all it's worth with no moral regard for what the world needs. The heavy media presence on climate reporting and the lack of understanding from journalists on scientific methods giving equal weight to both 'sides' (despite one side vastly outnumbering the other in the scientific community) means we are seeing the debate as just that, and many people believe in the authority figures that agree with them (see: Piltdown Man above).
On the other hand, we are also being encouraged to be melodramatic. The media needs stories it can fall back on during slow news days, and climate change has been churning out news since the 80's. To make the controversy actually relevant, they make the story sensational, bring in personal scandals and treat the scientists like political celebrities. After all, if people didn't believe climate change issues affected them at all then they wouldn't be interested in watching 'scientists' argue with each other using big charts and graphs on TV.
The media is also very unreliable these days. Facts and figures that are poorly understood are blown up to their sensational extremes in tabloids and morning 'news' shows (on any given day there will be a false or skewed statistic being paraded about during breakfast TV or on radios and paper media, I guarantee you). These fictitious figures are then used by politicians to argue their point (see a circular logic starting here?). Anytime a politician brings up a newspaper headline or poll data from the media in Question Time, I cringe. Newspaper headlines are designed to be melodramatic, but when our politicians adopt that stance and feed back into the fear-mongering and sensationalising (because it sells), it takes our nation on a very weed-strewn path in the democratic landscape.
By now most people probably know I'm talking about the Hon. Tony Abbott, opposition leader and Christian family-man, and climate-change denier. I won't actually go into his track record on denying climate change, or the fact that he attacks Gillard constantly about her 'lie' on the Carbon Tax when he has also backflipped and somersaulted over the whole climate change issue amongst other things. This is about his plans for climate change, because a good argument should take the most charitable view possible about an opponent's policies and actions, rather than focus on singular mistakes (learn something here, fear-mongers).
Direct Action. We've heard those words paraded about by Liberals and their supporters (and even Labour supporters who don't like the Carbon Tax) as the bee's knees solution to climate change. It sounds great, instead of a complicated ETS and tax filtering money through gods know how many bureaucratic levels, the money will instead be used on policies that 'directly' cuts our Carbon footprint. Sounds good, works not so good (a thousand grammar teachers cry out for mercy).
Lets examine it (charitably, remember), but avoid some of the things the media has focused on, because they are more interested in things like budget concerns and how much one package is compared to the other, not the practicality behind them (or the science, but we know the media isn't interested in actual science, they think the audience have too short an attention span). So dismissing the economic modelling that has already been bamboozling economists (most of them say it's rubbish, unrealistic and unsustainable at the costs given), and looking only at the ways Carbon emissions will be reduced, we still get a pretty grim (and sometimes hilarious) results.
Firstly, Mr Abbott wants to plant trees. He will hire a green army of thousands strong, and make them go out and do 'good works' for the planet. He has obviously not read many scientific journals or tried to grow a forest, or he might have realised what even many kids can tell him now: plantation forests take years and years to grow, deforestation just within Australia outpaces plantation growth, and planting forests require good, arable land.
There have been experiments in planting forests, but modern, impatient methods (genetically modified, fast-growing trees, using any land available without restoration etc) have done much to reduce the overall effect of reforestation to combat climate change. Plantation trees tend to suffer in groups from natural blights like insects and disease, as they don't have the years of natural selection to provide specimens that could survive such an event. Soil quality in intensively-farmed or previous industrial/mining areas is extremely poor, and the Australian desert is no place for trees. As it is, an average of 70-75% of forests die after being planted in unsuitable environments (land not contested for use in agriculture and tourism). Their death causes an emission of CO2 that can outweigh the benefit of the surviving trees and sometimes even the old forests.
Temperate forests are also poorer Carbon 'sponges' compared to their tropical counterparts (NCAR, Boulder, US), and most of Australia isn't tropical (in fact, most of Australia isn't good for growing trees, because most of Australia also isn't good for growing food or people).
So Mr Abbott's proposal will be to spend a lot of money hiring a green army to plant and maintain trees that will likely end up in areas unsuitable for their growth. No doubt the heads of the 'green army' will be blamed for this idiocy, similar to how underlings in the Chinese government were blamed for Mao's stupid movements. He also had an 'army' that went out and did his 'good works' for the environment - a 'red guard' that killed all the 'pests' including sparrows, causing the biggest locust feast and related human starvation event since biblical times in the year that followed. They also went around destroying cultural artefacts and bashing intellectuals (for oppressing the little people), until the government blamed them for Mao's policy and sent them all to the farms to learn to be people again.
Another of Abbott's plans is to pump Carbon into the soil. This is a highly contentious policy, largely because there is little scientific basis suggesting it would actually work. There is in fact evidence that the Carbon pumped underground escape, and where it doesn't, it may acidify the soil if 'locking' actually occurs (CO2 meets H2O, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what that makes). In the policy outline, costs were calculated based on farmers receiving $8-12 per tonne of Carbon injected into their land, which is much too little, even by the body that the Liberals used to look into their Direct Action plan (they considered a starting price around $25). So farmers struggling with the changing climate could look forward to no extra expenditures on their operations (due to whatever passed on energy/fuel costs they get from the corporate Carbon Tax), and $8-12 per tonne of Carbon injected into their agricultural lands.
Since there is very little scientific evidence that this would work, and quite a bit of common sense suggesting that it would be disastrous for the soil, that would mean farmers are being compensated at very minimal rates for pollutants to be dumped into their food-growing lands. There is no extra compensation mentioned for when this operation kills the land and contaminates the water table. The Direct Action plan isn't about long-term effects though, it's about a magical silver bullet that cuts our emissions by a certain target on a certain year (it doesn't matter if CO2 emissions skyrocket after that as plans begin to fail, the promise has been met).
And what about industry? Abbott is closing down some of the dirty fuel stations (like in Gillard's current scheme), and they would turn it into a 'green' fuel station (no mention of exactly how this is done, except by pumping money into the polluting company, Gillard's current scheme involves a tender process for how to shut down and turn the stations into green fuel stations, this guarantees that Australia gets the best 'deal' for closing down and converting power stations). There was also a couple of lines describing a 'fluffy' direct action on building in 'green' methods. Some kind of meeting/discussion will take place amongst some important sounding bodies who oversee building planning and methods. No funding or actual direct action was mentioned.
The most direct (taxpayer to policy) action being applied is probably Abbott's little 'green bank' (it won't in fact be 'little', it will probably take up a large chunk of the money to be poured into this plan). The idea is this: the economy will suffer too much if we ask big companies to pay for their pollution, so we will give them an incentive package instead to reduce emissions.
Now... I'm not sure how Mr Abbott divides his faith, but it seems certain at this point that he has a lot of faith in the moral and civic attitudes of big polluters. Since big polluters have resisted any change to their operations thus far (beyond government regulation, and even that is shaky), giving them more money as an 'incentive' to stop polluting doesn't seem like a great idea. Even if we take the most charitable stance, that a regulatory body will be set up to police these grants to ensure money has gone the right way (a similar force in Labour policy has been deemed 'draconian' by Abbott though, so maybe he doesn't plan to oversee the money once it leaves government hands), there are still lots of problems.
Firstly, companies that already operate on or towards a 'carbon neutral' strategy will gain nothing. Instead of their competitors having to pay for their CO2 emissions and thus levelling the playing field, their opposites - the big polluters - will instead get free money from the government to help them change. It would mean companies would at best begin to delay their switch to green energy and cut Carbon emissions until their government grant has been cleared. A bit further on, we will have companies who pump more CO2 out in order to match whatever minimum polluting criteria must be met before grants will be given for cuts.
At worse scenarios, we will have polluting shell companies being set up purely to take the government grant, and shut down again to 'turn green'. This would cause a huge imbalance in the stock market, monopoly would be common to those companies that operate with no moral/ethical standards (big polluters), as investors would be more likely to invest in a company that was about to get a free government grant. There would then be no incentive to become a permanently 'green' company, a company wanting to get a constant flow of taxpayer money from the government (or even large tax cuts directly on them) would ensure that once one section went green, another section can pump out more CO2 so they can apply for the grant all over again (after staying on it for as many years as they can, dawdling in changes so they keep getting cash).
It is evident that a politician (from the Greek word 'polis', meaning 'city'), whom we elect to make policies on our behalf, should be responsible for the good of the broader citizenry and try to be as knowledgeable as they can be on a subject that affects our wellbeing. It is perhaps too much to ask for our politicians to be completely rational people, sensible and thoughtful people, but it is not too much to ask them to admit it when they don't understand something. Mao was an ignorant leader whose influence was too great with the people for academics to dare stand up to him (they tried anyway, and a generation of children went about bashing their parents and teachers as a result under Mao's direction).
Australia doesn't want or need a leader who verbally bashes scientists, economists, environmentalists, ethicists and other professionals when they don't agree with his agenda. Ignorance has suddenly become a powerful tool to bring Abbott closer to the little people, he understands science and economics as well as they do (very little), so he understands them better (or so he tells us). The problem then is that we're listening to the 'majority', but not the 'academic/professional majority'. So in fact we're believing more of the stuff people with little knowledge are saying (because it agrees with our expectations), and less of the stuff people with more knowledge are saying (because it challenges our way of life). It's not okay in daily life to do this, we wouldn't want our surgeons having a conscience vote from non-professionals on whether or not you should have surgery for a life-threatening illness. Yet we think it's fine when politics is involved.
We believe in controversy, when it is widely accepted science, with new studies sometimes coming out that question the status quo, without understanding that this is exactly how science works, it doesn't mean all previous studies were false. We trust in politicians who use ignorance as a banner, and follow suit as they dismiss professional opinion and the academic sphere in favour of what suits their rhetoric. There is a 'con' in the controversy, and it isn't being played by the vast majority of scientists, because they don't have the most to gain. There is nothing direct either about Direct Action, except in directly giving taxpayer money to major polluters in the hopes that they can police themselves into polluting less.
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