Filed under: Capitalism, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Politics, Religion, United Nations | Tags: Conference on Sustainable Development, Hold Back Human Progress, World Wildlife Fund
Are you familiar with the World Wildlife Fund? Huge, wealthy worldwide organization, preserving wildlife, caring for the environment, doing good environmental works. If you visit their website and look at their board of directors, it’s an impressive list of the prominent and very well-to-do.
The other face of the World Wildlife Fund is as an extremist green campaigning group. In their just-issued Living Planet Report for 2012, they state that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world’s wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race’s energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.
The hard greens demand that the enormous numbers of wind farms, tidal barriers and solar arrays required under their plans should be built while at the same time severely rationing supplies of concrete, steel, copper and glass. The document is endorsed by the European Space Agency (ESA) an organization which would cease to exist were the document’s recommendations to be fully carried out. They’re important. Nobody said they had to make sense.
Ben Pile, the convenor of the Oxford Salon, said simply: “The real enemy is humanity itself.”
At Rio+20 next month, the world’s elites will meet in Brazil with the aim of holding back human progress.
Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that the demands of a growing population were taking more from the planet than could be replaced by natural processes. The second, related idea was that there exist natural ‘limits to growth’. These two reinventions of Malthusianism became the basis of a new form of global politics, which has sought to contain human industrial and economic development ever since.
Organizations like the WWF draw their supporters for emotional reasons. Love of baby animals, love of large and noble species like African elephants, pandas, rhinoceros, giraffes; beautiful photography can be very moving.
Fears of out-of-control population growth led Malthus and then Paul Erlich, author of the 1968 prophecy The Population Bomb to fear that we would run out of food, and humanity would starve. Fortunately Norman Borlaug came along with the Green Revolution, and put that worry aside.
The Club of Rome, a talk-shop for diplomats, noted politicians and researchers fostered the development of all sorts of organizations and conferences and commissions designed to save the world. An entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organizations has emerged to advocate closer integration of human productive life with environmental care and to observe “the limits to growth.” Most notable is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Well, all the predictions of doom didn’t happen. Average life-expectancy has increased by 10 years, the number of infants dying before the age of five has fallen from 134 per thousand to 58 per thousand. Human population has nearly doubled, and we are healthier, wealthier (even in spite of the recent downturns) and global GDP has risen threefold. We’ve learned to grow more food on less land, cured diseases, and made amazing progress, but those who joined the church of the doomed have established “sustainable development’ as an imperative of global politics. The first ‘Earth Summit’ was held in Rio leading to Agenda 21 and ‘the blueprint for a sustainable planet.’
If you are perpetually worried about very big things, with other, um, planetary leaders, you are moving in rarefied circles.The conferences are held in the world’s finest resorts, the finest people attend, the finest food and drink is served, and you discuss the finest subjects. It seems quite proper to be discussing surrendering national autonomy, solving the problem of world poverty, solving the problems on inequality.
What if you think we do pretty well with progress, that an emphasis on sustainability is not particularly useful, and that in general the planet is in pretty good shape? Doesn’t matter. These NGOs, world leaders, celebrities, and environmentalists have moved to a higher level where no such dissent is allowed. These meetings are already far beyond democratic control. The slogan is “global problems need global solutions.”
It is simply another political drive for power, this time on running the world. The participants, drunk on the association with the most important people and the most important ideas, think big thoughts. Easy. All the real dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and the real enemy is humanity itself.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Global Warming | Tags: Exterminating Humanity, Irrationally Green, Up With Dictators
Finnish writer Pentti Linkola is an ecological radical. He demands that the human population of the world reduce its size to around 500 million, abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth. He compares the Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat.
“What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”
He believes that the apocalyptic climactic changes that will soon effect us here in humanity land but he chooses to be brutally honest and says that we’ve already missed our chance to curb the damage to the world, so we must begin the elimination of human and technological excesses now.
“A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but through the use of violence.”
“Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”
“We will have to…learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.”
“Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.”
“If the present amount of Earth’s population is preserved and is reduced only by the means of birth control, then:
Birthgiving must be licensed. To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licenses can be allowed to families of quality.
Energy production must be drastically reduced. Electricity is allowed only for the most necessary lighting and communications.
This man is clearly a lot more worried about global warming than I am, but there are those who go even further. Back to the Pleistocene! He sees America as the root of the problem:
The United States symbolizes the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.
He has called for “some trans-national body like the U.N. ” to reduce the population via nuclear weapons or with bacteriological and chemical attacks.” Ecologists of this stripe have so glorified “nature” that they become freedom-hating authoritarians, who want control over their fellow humans. They cannot grasp that humans are a natural product of nature and a part of it. They have no interest in meeting the challenges of life on earth, but want government central planning and humans obediently to fall in line.
So he’s a nutcase, but he is not alone. I wonder how many of them inhabit the corridors of the EPA He celebrates, on his website, the Earth Liberation Front, the German Ecofascist Movement, Thomas Malthus and the Unabomber Manifesto. And he has a following.— hopefully very small. But these apocalyptic authoritarians keep popping up, you can probably name several of them.
There are, however, a number of authors who argue openly that democracy itself is the true obstacle and needs to be abandoned. We need to be aware of the nature of the opposition.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Education, Global Warming, Politics | Tags: Food Stamps, Graduate Degrees, Higher Education
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of people with a graduate degree who were on food stamps or were receiving another kind of federal aid more than doubled, reaching 360,000.
In 2007, 9776 people with PhDs were receiving some kind of aid. In 2010 that number had more than tripled to 33,655. For people with Master’s degrees, the number spiked from 101,683 to 293,029. Austin Nichols of the Urban Institute crunched those numbers for The Chronicle using census data.
Walter Russell Mead surveys the situation:
And we have nothing but admiration for the love of knowledge that leads young people to want to study these fields in greater depth.
But that respect and affection shouldn’t blind us to the sad reality that much of the American academy today works as a Ponzi scheme. PhD programs in many fields are churning out grads for whom no jobs will ever be found. They have to produce excess grads because if they cut back enrollment, the programs would be too small to justify the continued employment of their current staff. …
Worse, if we decided to cut the number of programs so that the number of job openings matched the number of PhD graduates each year, the number of job openings would crash. Currently, suppose that 200 professors of medieval history retire or otherwise leave the field each year; that would mean we need 200 new PhDs each year to replace them.
The jobs of the current practitioners depend on recruiting a steady stream of new hopefuls into the profession, even though many of those new hopefuls won’t get jobs themselves. This is pretty much how Ponzi schemes work, and besides being unfair to the young, it undercuts the integrity of the teacher-student relationship and it puts the whole scholarly enterprise under a dark ethical cloud.
The Baby Boom started all this. Colleges and Universities expanded like crazy to cope with the army of new students. The first 18 year-olds started college in 1963, and the numbers increased exponentially until the peak year of 1977, and dropped off precipitously in the baby bust. These same years saw students avoiding the Vietnam War by staying in school for advanced degrees. We have had a temporary boom in the need for PhDs as anyone who could think up a grant proposal linking their specialty to global warming became deeply involved in some kind of (profitable) climate research. There is a higher education bubble, and it is collapsing. Mead adds:
This is beginning to break down. Governments — federal, state and local — have less money for higher ed, and the student loan burden is becoming insupportable.
The current system will change. It imposes unsustainable costs of society at large even as it leads tens of thousands of aspiring professors down the primrose path to the food stamp line.
Like this:
Filed under: Election 2012, Global Warming, Islam, Middle East, Military, Politics, The United States | Tags: Afghanistan, Electoral Politics, The American Military
Uncle Jimbo, from Blackfive, takes exception to President Obama’s ‘strategy’ in Afghanistan. He wouldn’t have gone for the idea that the troops were fighting on Obama’s behalf either. The administration’s plans to ‘dialogue’ with the Taliban seem to be some vague part of the ‘strategy,’ whatever that is. It seems to be about— getting out before the election. There’s certainly a lot of rather large problems that must succumb to electoral politics.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: A Cold Climate is Bad, Carbon Emissions are Good, The Medieval Warm Period
I was going to ignore Earth Day because I think it is profoundly silly, and I don’t want to encourage the perpetually discontented doom-mongers.
Carbon Dioxide is a natural product that is one of the building blocks of life. Increased CO2 levels are constructive and highly beneficial to both mankind and the natural world. I don’t know the location of the picture above, though it looks like a nuclear plant. Pictures like this are always used to subtly say ‘look, evil industry is polluting the planet,” but what is coming out of the smokestacks is most likely steam— water vapor.
Back in the 1970s, the earth experienced a short-term cooling trend, and many of the perpetually discontented doom-mongers were alarmed and predicted a coming catastrophe. If it had continued, it would have been a problem, for cold is much harder to deal with than warm.
A little more warming would be nice. It’s barely 50° here, and though it may be spring, our temperatures are way below normal. Yes, this is not climate. But the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 till 1300, when it was much warmer than today, was the finest weather known to man. Wine grapes grew in England, the Vikings farmed in Greenland, and the climate was maybe 2° to 4° warmer than now. Castles and cathedrals were built throughout Europe, which is an indication of good food supplies and greater wealth. In June, 1253, Westminster Abbey alone had 428 construction workers, nearly half of them skilled stone workers and glass blowers.
CO2 is plant food, what all humans and animals breathe out, and plants breathe in CO2 and exhale oxygen. We are at a low point of CO2 in the atmosphere, around .038 ppm. Greenhouses boost CO2 to 1000 ppm, and nurserymen continue to survive, as will we.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: At Enormous Cost, Investigating the Obvious, James Delingpole
High up in my list of favorite writers is James Delingpole, who blogs at The Telegraph. Acerbic, grumpy, takes-no-prisoners, tolerates no nonsense and great fun, always, to read. He posted the above video with this commentary:
The harmless trace gas carbon dioxide, as any halfway literate scientist knows, is plant food – not a pollutant. That’s why in agricultural greenhouses commercial growers often raise CO2 levels to between 700 ppm (parts per million) and 1,000 ppm – which is more than twice current atmospheric CO2 levels of (approx) 392 ppm. They do this because they know CO2 increases plants’ growth rate while simultaneously reducing the amount of water they require. (H/T Bufo)
So really, you might not unreasonably think, any large-scale experiment to discover what kind of effect increased levels of CO2 has on eucalyptus trees would fall into roughly the same category as:
A large-scale experiment in the sea to discover whether or not water is wet.
A large-scale experiment in the Vatican to discover whether or not the Pope has Catholic tendencies.
A large-scale experiment in the woods of Canada and Alaska to discover whether or not bears defecate in arborial environments.
A large-scale experiment at Christmas to discover whether or not Father Christmas is a big, fat, jolly man with a white beard and a red outfit trimmed with white fur.
A large scale experiment conducted in the evening to ascertain as to whether night follows day.
A large scale experiment with ice-cream left outside on a very hot day to discover….
Etc.
It seems though that in Julia Gillard’s Australia the thirst for spending large sums of taxpayers money in order to research the blindingly obvious is still strong.
The remainder of the post is here:
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: CO2 and Climate, Roy W. Spencer PhD, The Misdirection of the EPA
Roy Spencer is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has been the U.S.Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOA flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. This provides the most dependable temperature record of today’s climate. He received his Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981.
He has a wonderful ability to explain complicated science to the layman, and he has a great sense of humor. His books: Climate Confusion and The Great Global Warming Blunder, I recommend highly.
Filed under: Australia, Europe, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology, United Kingdom | Tags: Global Warming Skepticism, Obama Wants More Money, Public Skepticism
The European Union’s climate policy is in freefall. Carbon prices (they do cap-and-trade) have lost nearly 14% of their value (April 2). The already depressed carbon price dropped from €7 to a record low of €6.14 by early afternoon.
The Germans are dumping their subsidies for solar energy. The British government has rejected the bogus economics of climate change, though they are not quite ready to announce it formally.
Europe is coming to the realization that on top of all their other economic problems, they don’t need to be subsidizing expensive solar energy that hikes the power bills for the public while producing little energy.
In Canada, Lawrence Solomon writes in The Financial Post that the world is awash in oil, and in the future, the MIddle East will go back to being an obscure backwater because the world will no longer be dependent on its oil.
The Aussies are not happy with Prime Minister Julia Gaillard’s climate efforts and taxes, and are showing their displeasure at the polls, tossing out their Labour government.
And at the University of East Anglia, a new postgraduate course hopes to bring together researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop “new ways of thinking about environmental change and social transitions.” If you have experience in writing “eco-poetry” the UEA wants to hear from you. UAE is noted as the birthphlace of ClimateGate.
Everywhere, a sensible public is becoming more skeptical of outrageous climate claims, and the climate alarmists come up with new stories of impending doom. Dr. Tim Ball, Canadian climate scientist says that “when asked what’s wrong with global warming —most can only say sea level rise.”
And here at home, in alignment with the rest of the world, the Obama administration has requested $770 million in federal funds to combat the effects of global warming in developing countries, according to a congressional report. This continues administration policy of using foreign aid to combat the effects of global warming in the developing world —despite another year of $1 trillion deficits.
According to the Congressional Research Service the administration has spent a total of $2.5 billion on the Global Climate Change Initiative on anti-global warming efforts in Latin America, Asia and Africa. If approved by Congress the latest request would boost foreign climate change spending to $3.3 billion. The money supposedly goes for adaption, clean energy, and sustainable landscapes.
CRS noted that —like most foreign aid programs — there was a high probability that foreign countries would misuse or wast GCCI funds. They also mentioned that “Congress may want to consider the fact that there is a lack of consensus on whether global warming will happen at all.”
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: Astronauts/Scientists/Engineers, Climate Alarmist James Hansen, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; most alarmed of climate alarmists; advisor to Al Gore; creator of the term “death trains” to describe trains carrying coal from mine to power plant; is the force behind global warming alarmism who created the whole mess when he testified before Congress, on the hottest day of summer in 1988, that he had a computer model that predicted dangerous warming.
The 85th Congress and President Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore space. James Hansen has used his position and NASA’s reputation to advance an agenda that calls for restrictions by government on all major industry and all human activity in the name of controlling the natural warming and cooling of the planet.
Hansen’s capitalizing on his association with NASA has made him a millionaire through income from the alarmist community outside the government. Now nearly 50 former NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers have sent a letter to the current NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, Jr. The full text of the letter:
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
(Attached signatures) Below the fold: (more…)
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Heartwarming, Science/Technology | Tags: Canadian Arctic, Polar bear Populations, Western Huson Bay
All those dire warnings about the population decline of polar bears—nevermind. The bear population along the western shore of Hudson Bay are believed to be among the most threatened. but the most recent study counted 1.013 bears and could be even higher.
The study was released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. This is 66 percent higher than estimates from other forecasters who expected that numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba is considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing in the Arctic.
The survey in 2009 and 2010 late summer flew more than 300 hours and 40,000 km during each year’s survey, and observed 816–1,003 individuals. It is a seasonally ice-free population, so I assume they can see the bears better. This would seem to be a better methodology than say, seeing three drowned polar bears at sea after a storm and then extrapolating that to an entire population as one now discredited and disgraced researcher did. See “Republicans Don’t believe in Science…” below.
Population figures are used to calculate quotas for hunting, an important industry for many northern communities. Hunting is highly regulated, but Inuit communities can sell their quotas to sport hunters who must hunt with Inuit guides. A polar bear hunting trip can cost up to $50,000.
(click to enlarge)
(h/t: Watts Up With That)
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Global Warming, Liberalism, Progressivism, Science/Technology | Tags: Liberal Beliefs, Reproducing Data, Scientific fraud
A paper published on Friday in the American Sociological Review states that just over 34 percent of conservatives had confidence in science as an institution, in 2010, representing a long-term decline from 48 percent in 1974. In 1974, conservatives were more likely than liberals or moderates to express confidence in science.
Well, ho-hum. Climate Gate I, ClimateGate II, (conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating data, falsification of data), FakeGate (Peter Gleick uses false identity, fakes documents), retreat of Himalayan Glaciers, IPCC (at least 16 claims of impending doom in 2007 report were based on work done by GreenPeace activists, not peer-reviewed science), Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean sea level data (came from computer models by people who had never visited the sites in question), Kevin Trenberth,(plagiarism, politicization). And more and more.
Over at Ace of Spades, Arthur K points out a recent story
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications – papers in top journals, from reputable labs- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.
And in the same article:
Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success. In a 2011 paper titled, “Believe it or not,” they analyzed in-house projects that built on “exciting published data” from basic science studies. “Often, key data could not be reproduced,” wrote Khusru Asadullah, vice president and head of target discovery at Bayer HealthCare in Berlin, and colleagues.
Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full-time for up to a year. Bayer dropped the projects.
Bayer and Amgen found that the prestige of a journal was no guarantee a paper would be solid. “The scientific community assumes that the claims in a preclinical study can be taken at face value,” Begley and Lee Ellis of MD Anderson Cancer Center wrote in Nature. It assumes, too, that “the main message of the paper can be relied on … Unfortunately, this is not always the case.”
Conservatives, you see, have a long history of being anti-science. They opposed embryonic stem-cell research when it might have helped Christopher Reeve to walk again, just because of their stupid hang up about embryos — just a clump of cells. And they don’t believe in manmade global warming, when Al Gore’s movie told us all what a danger it is. There’s someone named Chris Mooney, who seems to be an English major who is a true believer in global warming,and writes regularly on how dumb Republicans are, and, unsurprisingly, has a new book out called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science. It may be entertaining.
It seems that Republicans get all their scientific information from something called “Conservapedia,” the right-wing counterpart to Wikipedia, which is anti-science and doubts Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I never heard of it, but lefties seem to be the major contributors.
Liberals remain astonished that anyone could find anything unconstitutional in ObamaCare, and are looking for confirmation that we are indeed unusually stupid. This finding turns up regularly in one academic study after another. A favorite pastime in academe.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion addresses the differences between liberals and conservatives and their moral stereotypes. The authors surveyed two thousand people asking one-third to answer in their own voice, one-third to answer as “a typical liberal” and one-third to answer as “a typical conservative.”
The results were quite striking. Conservatives and moderates were adept at guessing how liberals would answer; but liberals, especially those who considered themselves as “very liberal” were very bad at guessing what conservatives would say about issues of care or fairness. For example, most thought that conservatives would disagree with statements like ‘One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal’ or ‘justice is the most important requirement for a society.’
Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, found that liberals and conservatives alike form their political beliefs according to three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. Yet conservatives also hold to three other values: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. This accounts in part for the liberal failure to understand conservative viewpoints. Conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents. Haidt had been a liberal — but became a centrist after this study.
In an article entitled “Is the Tea Party Racist?“Dr. Timothy Dalrymple explains:
But the problem is not merely ignorance. Liberals are also alienated from core conservative values. Liberals are trained to believe that many of the traditional American ideals and values that conservatives inherit in their families and churches are cruel and intolerant, imperialistic, and implicitly racist, sexist, and classist. They are trained, for instance, not to be motivated by patriotism and American exceptionalism, but by an ideal of world citizenship and parity.
Liberals consistently misinterpret what motivates conservatives because they really cannot see the world from the conservative perspective. Liberals cannot imagine that Tea Partiers are really motivated by concern for their country, and by frustration with a White House hemorrhaging red ink and a government less concerned to represent the interests of the citizenry than to pay off the special interests that fund their campaigns.
“Liberals, Dr. Dalrymple says,” are unable to see a rational and noble motive at the center of the Tea Party movement, so they supply a darker and more convenient motive instead.” The problem is not that liberals dislike the principles promoted at Tea Party rallies: the problem is that liberals dislike the kind of people who go to Tea Party rallies.
So if you have been puzzled by the strange things liberals say, there you go.
Filed under: Education, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology, The United States | Tags: Climate Controversy, National School Standards, No Consensus
The AP reports on a new study that says “Young people are not so ‘green’ after all.”The study amounts to comparing the current generation of young people — the Millennials — with previous generation going back about 40 years. The excerpted comments from professors who participated in the study, suggests that the professors are enthusiastic greens, and don’t quite understand why the kids are not.
Beth Christiansen who heads the environmental program at Adelphi University on Long Island said when she attended Rutgers in the 1980s, it was unusual to find a fellow student who had not hiked or spent time in the woods. “Now a lot of these students have very little experience with the unpaved world.”
Some of her students also volunteer with a group that cleans up trash in the bays that surround the island — one of many examples of young people who are taking environmental issues seriously.
At Babson College in Massachusetts, for instance, there is student housing called the “Green Tower,” where residents focus on conserving resources. It is a growing housing trend on many college campuses.
At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania students are running a biodiesel plant on campus and building “permaculture,” or indefinitely sustainable gardens in their back yards. They’re less likely to write a letter to their member of Congress or to try to change things on a global level, said Richard Niesenbaum, a biology professor at Muhlenberg. They also don’t like to label themselves as “environmentalists.”
By the time they get to college, they have had global warming and environmentalism shoved down their throats for 12 years already. No wonder they aren’t so “green” after all.
Climate change is now the premier battle in our nations’ science education, and several national bodies are set to release a draft of new science standards that include detailed instruction on climate change. “The groups preparing the standards include the National Research Council which is part of the congressionally chartered National Academies. They are working from a document they drew up last year that says climate change is caused in part by manmade events, such as the burning of fossil fuels. The document says rising temperatures could have “large consequences” for the planet. Funny, I just heard a report on the radio that Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, scoffed at reports that the Obama administration was interested in national school standards.
So you have science teacher Loris Chen, who said teachers should introduce students to “the consensus” on climate change. And a teacher at Corte Madera school in Portola Valley, California last year showed Al Gore’s global warming epic “An Inconvenient Truth” to her sixth grade students, and a father filed a formal complaint accusing Ms. Joi of “brainwashing” the students. The school will require parental permission before students see the movie in the future. It’s time to stop showing that piece of flawed propaganda. And there is no consensus in science. And I don’t have much enthusiasm for national standards, simply because they’re so bad at it.
