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
Alexander Feht says: February 6, 2011 at 9:24 pm
“Well, they are fatally wrong, and their time is up.”
Are the peasants revolting? Do I detect a mood of going out onto the internet and storming the public spaces and refusing to leave until the old regime are ousted? What next, a sit in at Wikipedia?
The common global warming is an endangered species
Seriously … I think we are going to have to introduce some conservation measures. There used to be places where this species of bird could be found in the hundreds, these days they’ll be dozens of sceptics on the forums waiting for one timid warmer to pop their head out of the bushes and quickly go away.
The government’s got to do something, at this rate the common global warmer could be extinct within a year. I propose introducing some “global warming conservation zone”. The idea is this: we ban all harmful posting of the truth, and set up a breeding program on the BBC (they have an endemic problem “getting it up”)
Oh it’s too painful to go on! But we’ve got to act because this is yet further proof of the harmful effects mannmade global cooling is having on endangered species.
Academic Freedom for me…but not for thee.
One of the most damning things about the AGW theory is the lack of any established conditions for falsification. Anything and everything appears to be evidence in favour. If it snows more that is to be expected, but so is the lack of snow and warmer winters.
If there were nothing else, that, and the demand for unquestioning acceptance (and the howls of protest and labeling of questions as unscientific) would be enough to set off my alarm bells.
Just a hunch. But I guess there is no real surprise at the two directly listed items. (That is unless someone has supplied or is willing to supply conditions for falsification of evolutionary theory. Because, if they exist, I am genuinely unaware of them, and would be most interested in being acquainted with the information.)
Hooking creationism to climate scepticism is a terrible idea. The proponents of the two live in different worlds scientifically.
Teaching climate scepticism does not need to be about teaching that the AGW theory is wrong. It only needs to be that the AGW theory may not be correct and that other explanations are possible. I happen to believe catastrophic CO2 warming is flawed, but I accept that the CO2 warming might in some sense be right. I might be wrong.
Creationists are not interested in that distinction. They don’t want to teach that evolution has flaws and may be incorrect. They want to teach that it is wrong and, effectively, sinful. In that sense they are profoudly anti-science.
Climate sceptics should be careful not to align themselves with the creationists. It makes us looks like cranks. In fact it is a dirty trick of many warmists to deliberately assert, without evidence, that climate sceptics are prone to other dodgy scientific ideas, thereby making even those of us who are through-and-through rationalists look cranky.
I have no ideas of the ways in which the US school system operates, but I find ‘Wired’s’ chosen terminology quite offensive, particularly for a ‘science-themed’ magazine.
Ideological battles should never be fought in the classroom; it is not ethical to use children, teenagers, college or university students as hostages or to allow them to become ‘collateral damage’ in such battles.
If provable scientific nonsense is embedded in a science curriculum or in science teachers’ schemes of work, it must be excised, but I am surprised that teachers could need protection, providing they do their job within their employment guidelines and teach honourably and well. If they step outside professional guidelines or ignore accepted standards of professional conduct, they do so at their own peril.
I do note that the USA’s publicly funded school system is not highly placed in most recognised international educational rankings.
During the early 60’s the arguments over Plate Tectonics was nearly as bad as those today about global warming/climate change/AGW. Thankfully Plate Tectonics eventually won because it explained observations which the status quo explanation of geological events did not.
Today Plate Tectonics is accepted by all geologists as well as non specialists as fact.
Hey, what about equal time for astrology? I was just reading that the Indian (as in subcontinent) supreme court has decreed that astrology is a science — not just some picayune scientific theory. See
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/02/astrology-is-science—in-indi.html
Dave Springer says:
February 6, 2011 at 8:02 pm
What if the approved curriculum is a distortion, or worse yet, a lie?
In teaching any science, it is important to spend some time on possible competing ideas which have not won favour with the scientific community. Flat earthers are too few in numbers to mention, and relativity cranks are too obviously cranks. I think that creationists (and their close relatives in intelligent design) and AGW skeptics are the only sizable groups who are fighting to get their point of view accepted by the public.
Of course there are probably many other science controversies, but they have not captured the public’s imagination to the extent that they have a lobby group. Take continental drift for example. The idea was introduced in 1915, and was strongly opposed by geologists at the time (and aren’t they the main group opposing AGW). By the 1960’s a lot of work by geologists proved the theory correct. So if you were educated in the 1970’s, you would know about continental drift.
Dr Dave: “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. ”
The problem is, any time after the 1960s, there really aren’t any ‘flaws and weaknesses’ in evolution to illustrate. It’s that powerful a theory. Most books that claim to ‘expose the weaknesses of evolution’ use creationist nonsense, doubletalk, and flawed arguments. There are none that draw on real evidence.
Peter S: “That is unless someone has supplied or is willing to supply conditions for falsification of evolutionary theory. Because, if they exist, I am genuinely unaware of them, and would be most interested in being acquainted with the information.”
Actually, this is quite simple. Any of these observations would falsify evolutionary theory:
* a fossil record that was not sequential. The real fossil record is highly sequential, with fossils always being found in basically the same sequence over and over, all across the world. You never see elephants with sauropod dinosaurs, or ostracoderm fish with dolphins, or anything like that. You never see advanced organisms appearing before anything that might have been their ancestor, such as rabbits in the Triassic.
* organisms that were clearly hybrids betwen two radically different forms of life — mermaids, griffins, centaurs
* organisms that radically violated established rules of anatomy — for example, a centaur would be a vertebrate with three pairs of limbs, where all other vertebrates have two, one, or zero pairs of limbs.
* organisms that used a radically different genetic code from all others. Almost all living organisms use the same genetic code. Those that don’t, use a code that is only slightly different.
* organisms that have traits that clearly exist only for the benefit of others. Evolutionary theory says that can’t happen. Every organism exists primarily to reproduce, and any trait which doesn’t somehow help that goal should get weeded out.
What I find most compelling is any “science” that is afraid of the spotlight. I see no difference in any science that is afraid of the light of scepticism and debate, that is based on fear and weak positions. Funny how many here want debate on AGW but claim the “science is settled” in evolution. You don’t know how humorous that really is.
I was going to add something but wolfwalker beat me to it. And did it better.
Kudos.
As a trained biologist with a skeptical attitude to the catastrophic thesis of AGW, nothing insults my intelligence more than this deeply anti-intellectual (but alas all-too-effective) trick of the CAGW crusaders – namely, indiscriminately throwing those who have reached an AGW-critical stance by means of the scientific method (that includes me) into the same trash can with the anti-evolutionary crowd. There is a not-too-fine distinction between the AGW-criticism and the anti-evolutionism:
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, as the evolutionary biologist and Russian Orthodox Christian [!!!] Theodosius Dobzhansky famously asserted in 1973.
By contrast, nothing in the CAGW theory makes sense except in the fairy world of computer models.
I agree with some of the former comments that the best teachers are those that encourage their students to make their own conclusions after supplying everything needed, unfortunately this is not easy and you don’t find that many of those teachers. As far as evolution and global warming are concerned with each other, they shouldn’t be, except I think they should both be left out of basic curriculum. Global Warming is a malpractice of the scientific process, and evolution (or to be more broad, the origins of the earth and species) whereas is uses scientific processes, boils down to more of a philosophical argument and since we can never witness just how the earth was created/formed or how humans were formed from apes I think it would be better taught in its own class that treats is more of a theory and less of “this is how it really happened.”
John Brookes
February 7, 2011 at 3:18 am
The idea was introduced in 1915, and was strongly opposed by geologists at the time
Alfred Wegener was a Meteorologist & Geophysicist who based his ideas of continental drift on field observations of sea-ice movements during his visits to Greenland, where he observed that pressure ridges are similar in form to fold mountains. The idea of continental drift was supported by Aurthur Holmes in his seminal work published in 1944 Principles of Physical Geology
I devoured this book when I was 14 and it placed me firmly on my geoscience career.
No John, the real antagonists in this story where the physicists who argued against large scale lateral movement of the continents through the oceans. This was at a time when the astonishingly young geological age of all the ocean basins was not known.
Today the physicists are still meddling in geoscience, apparently blind to the dominant role of reflectance in the illumination of planetary atmospheres.
Dear Dave
Saddly teachers in the public schools, and elsewhere in fact, do not and often cannot avoid injecting their own bias. For at least two generations now leftest extreme views are taught as normal and acceptable in schools and anyone questioning any portion of that agenda ran a significant risk.
Interesting — in the movie The Matrix Neo’s “real” name (in the virtual world) is Thomas A. Anderson. Maybe Agents will go after Rep. Anderson for bucking the officially sanctioned view of the world. Anderson might even help his landlady carry out the garbage.
Its sad that it should come to this. My quarrel (like most other sceptics, I suspect) is with the fantastical predictions of AGW, not with evolution. That its grouped with this strikes me as evidence of the polarised political aspects of this debate.
Mooloo says:
February 7, 2011 at 1:32 am
wolfwalker says:
February 7, 2011 at 3:45 am
My take is much like yours.
Geological evidence supports the theory of evolution, including the billions of years required to get things started.
Geological evidence also shows that climate appears to have a lower and an upper limit, the icehouse/greenhouse extremes. The earth has actually been in an icehouse phase for the entire Pleistocene. Periodic warmer periods (the interglacials), including the present day, only approach what would be optimum climate conditions. Because CO2 has been present in the atmosphere at varying concentrations at either extreme, it is unlikely to be the dominant factor in driving climate change.
The distinction between Intelligent Design and Creationism is this: Creationists claim that a beaver dam was created by the Christian God. Intelligent Design says it was created by a beaver, applying intelligence and design.
A Darwinist might say that the dam just evolved slowly and gradually due to random fluctuations of water turbulence affectin debris in the stream.
I’ve been involved in the creation/evolution wars for years, most actively on the talk.origins USENET group nearly a decade ago. One thing I noticed a lot from the creationists was that they seemed to have no idea of the history of the debate — namely, how early “natural philosophy” started as a cataloging of “God’s Creation” and gradually evolved (pun not intended) into the mechanistic paradigm of today’s science. Many of them believed that this mechanistic view was specifically created (again, pun not intended) to deny the existence of a God — ignoring the number of scientists who were men of God, but in good faith (man, these things just won’t go away!) followed where the evidence led them.
This is why I believe that not quite teaching, but at least covering, the original creationist philosophy of science , and explaining why and how it morphed into the paradigm we use today in science, would be a good thing. Teach the epistemology of science, one could say.
It should need not be said that the differences between creationists and CAGW skeptics (heck, I’d even say I AM a “denier” of “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change — I don’t see any catastrophes down the road) are vast and many. Creationists are purely religion-based; CAGW skeptics are just again following where the observations lead them — which is all one can ask of scientists.
truthsword says:
February 7, 2011 at 4:06 am
It was humorous to see your post right below wolfwalker’s which makes several sufficient points that support evolution. Biology and much of medicine rely on concepts required by the theory of evolution, it isn’t all about dinosaurs.
The connection between Intelligent Design theory and climate is pretty interesting. CAGW can be seen to be a consequence of an Intelligent Design phenomenon overriding a natural phenomenon. Most of us would agree that the rise of an industrial civilization is a hallmark of intelligent behavior, oriented toward a particular design… developing an economy of abundance. And emission of Carbon Dioxide and other industrial gases is a byproduct of human intelligence and design.
Intelligent Design is a mathematical and logical technique that can distinguish the artificial from the natural. Thus, it should be useful to isolate the CAGW signal (such as it is) from natural climate change. It may be the final link in the chain that ties down the alarmist beast by establishing the exact length of its claws.
Regarding similarities to creationists, it is the CAGW crowd, not the skeptics!
Belief in human caused catastrophes due to cooking our supper is pure religious zealotry. It is acceptance of the dogma and decrees of Gia and her prophet, AlGore. The warmists and alarmists hold to their beliefs and shout them all the louder as evidence against them mounts. They point to their credentials, as do the creationists. They write peer reviewed research, peer reviewed by fellow believers, just like the creationists; they vilify opponents as diabolical, just like the creationists. The list of similarities goes on.
Also, note that teaching creationism is fine as long as the facts are shown. If one points out the difficulties in a Noahic flood geological scenario and admits that multiple miracles would be required, what is the problem? If faith is admitted, then it is good. The skeptic, the faithless, and the faithful will all be satisfied because the truth is told. The fact that prevaricators like Dr. H. Morris are quoted as true is where the problems arise. The same holds for Dr. J. Hanson. We must protect the truth. People will figure it out on their own if we give them the facts.
For the theory of evolution, the null hypothesis would be proved were someone to find fossil rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian. How would the null hypothesis for the AGW theory be proved? Anyone?