The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government last week has been described as “sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered.
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
The Financial Times, a major international business newspaper, the main competitor to the Wall Street Journal, has just published an article, highlighting the insignificance of the impact Obama’s National Climate Assessment has had, on American public opinion.
According to the FT,
“Americans have been receiving such warnings for a decade. None has managed to rouse the country from its seeming indifference.”
“… the authors seem to have forgotten that weather is not the same thing as the climate.”.
“Former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman wrote recently of having watched a debate at which “all the Republican candidates chuckled at a question on climate change – as if they had been asked about their belief in the Tooth Fairy””
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/31320b68-d6ae-11e3-b251-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz31OwBG0TQ
(Note – you only get one viewing of this link, due to FT content policy. If you try to click this link a second time, the site will likely demand you buy a subscription)
The Wall street Journal summed it up this way:
Obama’s Climate Bomb
He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.
Supervising the Earth’s climate—or at least believing humanity can achieve such miracles—may be the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama. So it shouldn’t surprise that after reforming health care and raising taxes, the White House is now getting the global-warming band back together, though it is still merely playing the old classics of unscientific panic.
On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304885404579548453104239932
I don’t trust Washington on climate change. Or pretty much anything else, including the Common Core standards.
I will accept Pamela’s reassurance that Common Core currently takes no position on global warming, climate disruption, or whatever. However, I have a great deal of confidence that Washington will in the future co-opt Common Core when it is deemed necessary to promote and promulgate various political/social agendas. That what Washington does. Always!
Good grief, one only has to glance at EPA’s politicized agenda to see how this operates.
Interesting conversation about penmanship by country. I spoke with an educator in Italy. Children learn cursive Italian from the beginning, not a block letter style first as they do here. You are right about the Japanese. They learn English lettering as well as their own multiple forms of lettering and from a very young age. We have a convergance here in terms of the underlying issue.
We are far behind the rest of the world in terms of laboring long into the intermediate grades with English block lettering, not even bothering to systematically teach other lettering systems from other countries, let alone our very own connected cursive.
“It is a set of expectations in reading, writing, and math that says to colleges and hiring companies, we are doing our part in the public school elementary and secondary system to give you students and employees with college and career ready skills.”
And what do the kids get out of it?
Some of us think ‘education’ should be something more than turning kids into brainwashed corporate drones. Particularly in a world where the whole concept of a ‘job’ is disappearing, and future generations are going to have to get used to working for themselves as most of our ancestors did.
No one trusts Washington on climate change?
Maybe elsewhere among the barbarians but in the People’s Republic of Boulder the climate faith is vibrant and its Exalted High Priest is revered by the enlightened. The CO2-centric animism displaced Buddhism and New Ageism as the most popular religion. Lately it also absorbed a belief in the Devil Incarnate, in the Unholy Duality of the Koch brothers.
SAMURAI says:
May 11, 2014 at 11:12 am
The Obama administration will go down in the history books as being one of the most corrupt, dishonest, scandal-ridden, anti-constitutional, personal-freedom/privacy infringing, …
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Not as long as they write the history books.
cn
So Mark, are you saying you don’t want a student to be able to critically read an informational text? To be able to tell the difference between fact and opinion, and the difference between supported fact and unsupported “fact”? These are all found in the CCSS. Shall we just continue to read Hatchet, Where The Red Fern Grows, and when still allowed, Old Yeller and Tom Sawyer, and talk about plots, themes, and characters?
Are you saying we should continue to teach persuasive writing (an emotional style of writing), while ignoring argumentative writing (a well reasoned and cited discussion of the strengths and weaknesses on both sides of an issue)? The more rigorous form of argumentative writing is the goal in the CCSS.
Or maybe you want students to continue to solve math problems that take just a few minutes up to an hour to complete start to finish involving two trains, or one that is from real life and takes days to examine, explore, develop, and solve? Being able to work through longer real life math problems are in the CCSS.
What’s in it for the kids? I thought our job was to produce employable or self-employable productive contributing citizens of the United States. I suppose we could have just a baby sitting service with classroom parties.
Okey dokey!
Jim, did I say anything at all about kids lying? What has that got to do with anything in what I asked? You know the difference between survey and raw data. Come on.
Robin says:
May 11, 2014 at 1:27 pm
Robin,
Thanks for the link!
I’ll ‘drink more deeply from your fount’ as I have time.
Mac
Ed Mertin says:
May 11, 2014 at 1:39 pm
Eddie, Eddie, Eddie,
What are you mixing with that neo-com kool aid?!
Or was it just a recurrent ’60s ‘blotter’ flashback?
Your comments provide mirth for many…please, please continue to tell us about WWII (Oops, WWIII instead of two… :-/) that ‘Romney caused’! Enlighten us with your alternate reality……
And Have A neo-com ‘Back To The Future’ Day!
Mac
the devastating attraction of authority is the illusion that one may evade personal responsibility for anything and receive absolution.
and so the excuse ‘i was just doing my job’ springs forth.
and after much rehearsal at evading personal responsibility by obedience to some authority, the coward accepts his state as unremarkable, normal – everybody does it.
and so the excuse ‘if i didn’t do it, somebody else would have’
and when a cruel and merciless world doesn’t exonerate evil by evasion or evil by deed, the final weak plea is always ‘i thought i could save a few’.
and so it goes.
yes, i trust my memory. my experience, my mind.
Even if Pamela Gray was wrong I would still line up behind her in any battle. Its the irish thing 🙂
The report makes it clear that the public is aware of the climate debate, and weary of the constant supply of climate hysterics’ doom-laden assertions.
****
No one trusts Washington on climate change
By Christopher Caldwell (The Weekly Standard )
In the age of the Iraq war and Obamacare, the government is hardly a trustworthy body
The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government this week has been described as “sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered. The report goes into astonishing detail about what severe climate change would mean – and what it means already to specific villages, mountains and beaches. . . .
[snip . . that is a very interesting article but our policy is that we prefer you to post a link rather than the entire article as we may encounter copyright and other legal issues. Thanks . . mod]
Pamela Gray says:
May 11, 2014 at 10:02 pm
It is not the program. It looks fine on paper. It is the hijacking which is already in the works.
My attitude? The kids that want to get educated will. There is no point in forcing the rest.
Just because the criminals in Washington have legalized their crimes doesn’t mean they are not still criminals. The criminals controlling the government are in love with government power. They have structured the entire economy to enhance government power. The climate change issue is just an excuse for the government to have more power over the economy. There’s no chance anything Obama has proposed will change the climate. They want everybody to be working at slave level wages so people will have to bow down to government power to obtain medical services or even food. Actually the government doesn’t even need more power, but that doesn’t stop the criminals from wanting more power. The criminals don’t know what else to do with their power except try to get more.
Pamela Gray says:
This is not a research project. What is important is the feedback from the kids and their perceptions of the AGW concept and the pressure put upon them to answer ‘correctly’. Allowing the federal government any involvement in these matters is a big mistake. Even when it is claimed the feds do not dictate only coordinate the input. As a small population rural community the input of the large population metro areas, which mirror Washington DC, had too much effect upon the results. Our well meaning state and local officials, believing, as we here all do, that some standards are needed, but not delving into the detail and worried about the politics of the issue, approved programs that are diametrically opposed to that in which we believe. I am old enough to know that I do not have all of the answers but as someone frequently in the classroom with the kids I do know that the present product is not good. It goes back to the main problem with government, they have the Midas touch in reverse. When they touch something it turns to shit. I am sure that the majority of the metro area folks feel fine with the program. Just look at the data as to how they vote.
Well, that was interesting. Someone, and Pamela may be the right person, needs to write up an article on exactly what common core is, and how the core is separate from the materials.
I am old enough to have gone through school and university at a time before they were dumbed down and populated by political/social activists. What I see now in the US and UK (where I am originally from) honestly worries me.
Apparently, it worries others too. Otherwise, why are the captains of industry pushing the GOP to give in on immigration in return for more H1B visas? They should be more interested in producing more producing skilled workers domestically than importing them, but apparently have given up on the idea.
Common Core, in its definition is fine. A lot of the support material is not. There is a difference between the two. Be careful to understand the distinction, and don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
Btw, I think that there are three forms of “writing” in the western world: block, cursive and printed.
Pamela, I have no data or surveys, but are you telling me that there is not a strong Liberal bias in schools. Have the young adults who would appear from polls to support the CAGW meme arrived at their convictions because of careful weighing of the scientific data? Wouldn’t you say that all but 100% acceptance of the meme by all university departments – science, humanities, etc, all scientific societies, most media … is not a product of their education. If they have been sold a bill of goods after their education, that still is a product of their education. I think your rose colored glasses have enriched the redness of your hair (actually I’ve had several red-haired girl friends in my life so this is no slight).
All print is done in block letters, which stand alone, in contrast to cursive, where the letterforms are connected, so that entire words can be written without lifting the writing instrument from the writing surface.
The advantage of cursive is speed; the occasional disadvantage is illegibility, where the writer does not have good penmanship.
Block letters form the basis for moveable type, an innovation credited to J. Gutenberg, the advantages being legibility, and economy.
I learned to read about age 3-4, but didn’t learn cursive until the 2nd grade, which I began at age 6.
Some forms request that you print your name, in addition to writing it – otherwise known as your signature.
No one trusts Washington on anything!
It is against federal law for the federal government to mandate curriculum textbooks or content in those textbooks.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The fed coerces things at the state level in myriad ways.
Some of us think ‘education’ should be something more than turning kids into brainwashed corporate drones.
Except that’s about what the public school system was intended to do. To keep us in our place so we would be of better service to the ruling elites. No, I no longer have that reference but I assure you it is legit (Dewey, as I recall), and any objective viewing of our long failing school system should make it clear that it is succeeding. Others (Gatto is a good start) have made the arguments better than I, so I will leave it to them – assuming you want to.
Personally, I have opted to ensure my child can read, think, and reason independently, thus, he no longer attends public school.
Philip says:
May 12, 2014 at 7:48 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/11/ft-no-one-trusts-washington-on-climate-change/#comment-1634225
“[cutting to the chase…]
Btw, I think that there are three forms of “writing” in the western world: block, cursive and printed.”
==================================
No, the three forms of writing are fiction, nonfiction, and climate science ;o)
Here’s an amusing poster of an eagle with his head cocked skeptically sideways, over the caption, “Really?–you STILL trust the government?”
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y254/RogerKni/Politics%20%20Finance/skepticaleagle_zps9d625f0b.jpeg
But apparently this document’s early draft was leaked and discussed here a year ago, according to a commenter. I have a vague recollection of that.
May 13, 2014: 47 degrees this morning. Make me want to slap Al Gore. He must be near because it snows everyplace he goes.