From Wired Magazine, an example of how skeptical views on climate change have now become mainstream enough to earn a level of protection when educators want to explore both sides of the issue. It is unfortunate that Wired magazine chose to label the idea as “anti-science”.
They write:
House Bill 302, as it’s called, states that public school teachers who want to teach “scientific weaknesses” about “controversial scientific topics” including evolution, climate change, human cloning and — ambiguously — “other scientific topics” may do so without fear of reprimand. The legislation was introduced to the New Mexico House of Representatives on Feb. 1 by Republican Rep. Thomas A. Anderson.
Supporters of science education say this and other bills are designed to spook teachers who want to teach legitimate science and protect other teachers who may already be customizing their curricula with anti-science lesson plans.
“These bills say, ‘Oh we’re just protecting the rights of teachers,’ which on the face of it isn’t wrong. But they draw big red circles around topics like evolution and climate change as topics to be wary about,” said Joshua Rosenau, a policy and projects director at the National Center for Science Education. “It suggests this kind of science is controversial, and would protect teachers who want to teach anti-evolution and climate-change-denying lessons in classrooms.”
The bill is one of five already introduced to state legislatures this year. While more than 30 such bills have been introduced since 2004, only Louisiana adopted one as law in 2008.
full story here
The whole history of science is about the once settled science becoming the unsettled science. Most science isn’t 100% certain there is nothing wrong with pointing that out.
I think it will end up protecting the teachers who are NOW teaching the AGW propaganda as truth when the public realizes it is not true, CYA both ways.
I thought the First Amendment covered this — oh wait, Obama and the left don’t do “amendments” or that Constitution.
As a parent and grandparent I think K-12 public school teachers need to stick to the approved curriculum and keep their personal beliefs to themselves. I say that because the public who involuntarily funds these schools has a right to know what their children are being taught and be assured that individual teachers don’t start teaching/preaching/proselytizing their personal beliefs. This should only apply to classes required by law for graduation. Once there’s an opportunity to decline a class, choose another teacher, or choose a different school then it’s a different story. In any event the curriculum should be available for inspection in advance of the class and that should be what is taught – no surprises.
Evolution and the Greenhouse Gas theory of Climate Change have nothing in common. Biology makes sense in the light of evolution. The natural history of climate change makes no sense in terms of GHG’s.
This is none of Congress’ business. They were not elected as members of the school board. Congress should stop involving itself with education, abolish the Department of Education, and work on balancing the budget. STAT.
Interestingly, they have identified, specifically two areas of scientific thought (evolution and AGW) that do not follow scientific method, precisely because they are neither provable or unprovable. In fact, the two areas of scientific thought have a lot of things in common – essentially being that people make observation, which are then incorporated into the Theory, but no-one is allowed to question the underlying paradigm, without being labelled as “unscientific” or some other slanderous insinuation.
“climate-change-denying” this is what they say if you have seen evidence that man made global warming is a fraudulent belief system of nihilistic tree hugging dooms day cults. And high levels of co2 are not a danger to either our planet or to life on it,
I’m not getting into the creationist/evolution thing that’s a different argument.
I’ve just unsubscribed from Wired Magazine!
I don’t know why this is called anti-science, but when the Federal government openly funds 95 ‘climate education programs’ it doesn’t even raise eyebrows:
http://climatequotes.com/2011/01/29/nearly-100-climate-education-programs-funded-by-nasa-noaa-nsf-epa/
We’re talking tens of millions of dollars.
Soon Warmists will be declared a protective species. Unfortunately academia will still pay them to be idiots, think Holdren and Ehrlich, protected in their cocoons against a life time of catastrophic hoaxes and silliness. . Because the cause of academia to destroy America seems to be way more important than science, history, truth, or the environment itself.
As long as the scientific weakness is not one that has been proven irrelevant over and over again, no problem with this bill. There should be a provision setting forth standards of proof for what can be taught as science in school. Having a falsifiable theory is pretty important.
Creationism has some major scientific flaws as a scientific theory. The 6,000 year old Earth is not a scientifically valid thing to be teaching as a weakness. The problems in climate science with proxies, data gathering, sensitivity, feedbacks, clouds, etc. are valid problems to examine. I don’t know that evolution is unscientific as a previous poster suggests. I do agree that AGW is unscientific. There are properties of CO2 that suggest that it would slow the release of radiation. Whether or not this has consequences is far from proven. Evolution is pretty much a forgone conclusion, and the major arguments against it have been knocked down. Unless there is a new one? I haven’t heard about it.
I was taught the theory of evolution in public school starting in grade school. My church never adhered to a literal interpretation of the Bible so I had no conflicts. In my Sophomore year of college I took comparative vertebrate morphology and became all the more convinced that the theory of evolution explained everything. In my early 30s I encountered a book that didn’t propose Creationism or “intelligent design”, it simply illustrated the flaws and weaknesses in the evolution theory. It’s not quite as iron clad as many of us believe. I was taught evolution theory in the 1960s – a little over 100 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
Contrast that to the nonsense of AGW which has only been in the public consciousness for a couple of decades. This is a THEORY, not a scientific fact. It infuriates me that it is being taught to our youth as though it is immutable fact. It wouldn’t bother me if some teacher said to his or her classroom that one of the weaknesses of evolution is the scale of time. It’s nearly impossible to fathom the development of a structure such as the human eye from primordial soup in a mere billion years. Accordingly, none of the educrats should panic if some teacher of sound mind blows holes through the specious theory of AGW.
How can a person know to hate with all your being creationism/natural selection or natural climate variability vs SUV driven climate hell unless they take the time to study both sides of the issues? And who can consider themselves worthy of an opinion on either topic until they have read and understood the positions both sides of the issue present?
So, let me see if I’ve got this straight…
Teaching kids to question by sowing doubt is “anti-science”…?
Epic fail.
Most of the proponents of global warming are on the take. They know they spread misinformation to ensure their personal well-being. No wonder they passionately hate skeptics for threatening this ill-gotten well-being.
Some fiery fanatics of green religion may really imagine that their critics are akin to the anti-evolutionary creationist crowd. Well, they are fatally wrong, and their time is up.
Think of it as of an evolution in action.
The notion of drafting laws one way or the other on these sorts of topics is not just a waste of time, it also winds up that they are selectively enforced and do more harm than good.
Teachers that openly discuss their belief systems as part of promoting meaningful discussion are vital to proper education and graduates who can think for themselves. Teachers who use their position to promote their belief system or compel students to participate in it are the worst of the worst. It is they who this type of law wind up protecting.
Lighten up folks. It’s not the U.S. It’s New Mexico’s House of Representatives, trapped between the energy vortex’s (vortice?) created in Sedona Az to the west and counter spinning Texas School Boards vortex’s to the east. Dust devils in the middle. I’m sorry Wired had nothing better to do than that push this story where only NM can vote. It’s been years since I’ve been to Wired — evidently the decline has continued.
Creationism has been co opted by the religious right just has AGW has been by the left. The benign and very acceptable view that there is a God and perhaps intelligent design or purpose, has been turned into some silly fairy tale cartoon ‘archeology’ by many. This is all relatively new and has caught many by surprise. Those schooled at religious institutions, and I have my doctorate from such, am astounded that evolution is even an issue, much less carbon dating, isotopes, environmental science, paleontology, linguistics, archeology, astronomy, genealogy, biology, nuclear science, even pottery, etc. The leaders of these sects, such as the Baptists and the Assembly of God, need to step forward and tell their ministers that God is a bit bigger than their silly cartoon imaginations.
I strongly object, both to being labelled as equivalent to a creationist for questioning CAGW -CO2 theory, but also to having creationists (or “intelligent designers”) trying to claim equivalence between their religiously based cause, and the scientific arguments of climate sceptics.
The two cases could not be more different. There are multiple lines of evidence for evolution, all yielding precisely the same ‘tree of life”, and despite there having been literally millions of chances for the theory to be falsified (every time a fossil is dug up, it could be in the wrong strata) it never has been. What is more, the theory has strong predictive value, without which a realistic understanding of the natural world is simply impossible.
CAGW, on the other hand, has yet to survive a single falsification test – indeed, it is the null hypothesis which looks far more robust at the moment. Not one verified prediction, not one major test withstood, and all based on computer models which don’t even begin to simulate the natural world. Belief in this hypothesis, as iof it were an established, unquestionable fact, has far more in common with belief in a 7 day creation than with any kind of science.
The two cases could not be more different.
In my experience, by far the best educators have been those that encourage young minds to ‘question everything’, including those foundations of science that seem forever set in concrete. Lazy teachers with lazy minds teach, you guessed it, a lazy attitude and sloppy reasoning.
Hey, don’t bunch creationists with AGW sceptics….
If for no other reason than that the government is not threatening to destroy our economies and freedoms in the name of evolution but they are in the name of cAGW.
The key point, which posters seem to be skating round, is that students should be introduced to ALL points of view and be given a value-free grounding on the strengths and weaknesses of each. Teachers/lecturers inform us that they are educated people. Certainly they are,(mostly), well qualified. The difference between being well-qualified and educated is that the educated person can argue both sides of an argument with equal force, then make a personal choice based on those arguments. There are not that many educated people around in state education either side of the Pond – socialist (liberal) systems do not value either individual moral and ethical integrity or the idea that there may be an alternative to the Party line.
What would Winston Smith have to say about this I wonder.
Science only progresses via debate: by having established views challenged. Having seen the disgraceful way a pseudo-scientific concept such as global warming became mainstream and deluded so many people into believing this “science” couldn’t be challenged, I think there is no question that scientific free speech is under attack – indeed science is under attack like it never has been before.
In free and open debate, Real science wins out every time because only real science has the facts to support it. That is why climate “science” couldn’t allow a free debate, that is why they attempted to clamp down on anyone daring to debate the real science.
And if the price of free and open discussion in science is to allow people to discuss creationism (so long as they are also given the scientific facts – not “scientific” opinion – but facts) then I will support people learning about creationism if that is the price for free and open debate in science.
I think Wired has probably got it right actually. I’d be willing to bet one fancy dinner with someone that the framers of this bill are animated mostly by opposition to teaching evolution as science. They just entrained a whole lot of other issues that they think might want more air-time to try to boost support for their main objective.
This is a pernicious anti-science bill that no sceptic should want to be associated with.