Fact-Checking the Smithsonian’s Koch-Funded Climate Change Exhibition

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http://hyperallergic.com/219544/fact-checking-the-smithsonians-koch-funded-climate-change-exhibition/

by Ryan Little

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Physicist Joe Romm, who was among last month’s demonstrators, expounded further in a post on his blog ClimateProgress last March:

The exhibit’s major intellectual failing is that it does not distinguish between two things. First: the evolution of small populations of tens (to perhaps hundreds) of thousands of humans and pre-humans over hundreds of thousands of years to relatively slow, natural climate changes. And second: the completely different challenge we have today, namely, the ability of modern civilization — nearly 7 billion people, going up to 10 billion — to deal with rapid, human-caused climate change over a period of several decades (and ultimately much longer).

Elsewhere in the hall, various displays note the way humans adapted to climate changes by making tools and learning to communicate with language. Rather than elaborate on new tools, new approaches to agriculture, or new methods of mitigating CO2 levels that might constitute a proactive adaptation to climate change, the exhibition’s finale offers a simulation of how humans might physically evolve in response to a warmer planet over thousands of years. That’s all well and good, except that current projections predict radical climate shifts occurring over the span of a few decades. Mentioning current, urgent climate dilemmas and then skipping ahead by a few thousand years is jarring at best, misleading at worst.

Could this simply be poor curation? Do the exhibition’s flaws have anything to do with David Koch’s $15-million donation? Maybe. Maybe not.

As Jane Mayer noted in the New Yorker, “The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them.” There aren’t any brazen lies in Human Origins, but what could’ve been a very clear exhibition with salient points about contemporary challenges is instead clouded by a few strange choices and stamped with Koch’s approval.

Whether engineered through influence or a serendipitous coincidence, it seems Koch always sees a return on his investments.