Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University
In a recent Commentary posted to the Statesman.com here, Camille Parmesan and the AAAS want to force feed global warming to school children and are pressuring school districts not to adopt any science text books suggesting the causes of climate change are still up for debate writing,
“From the scientific perspective, there are simply no longer “two sides” to the climate-change story: The debate is over. The jury is in, and humans are the culprit.”
And “the textbooks in question are purportedly teaching science, not political theory. They need to get the scientific facts straight.”
Ironically Camille Parmesan has prevented independent replication of her own dubious climate research on butterfly extinctions and failed to publish her new observations that populations that she once claimed had been extirpated by global warming and led to her placement on the IPCC, have now returned. This has been documented here
http://landscapesandcycles.net/climate-doom–parmesan-s-butterfly-effect.html
Parmesan also blamed global warming and extreme weather for population extinctions in a logged area. Although it was the logging that simply changed the micro-climate, to blame CO2 and global climate change, she failed to report that just 5 feet away in natural unlogged habitat that she had observed robust thriving butterflies doing better than ever as discussed here:
http://landscapesandcycles.net/American_Meterological_Society_half-truth.html
She also hijacked conservation efforts that resulted in the northward expansion of populations in Great Britain and falsely argued the observed expansion was again caused by global warming, as discussed here
http://landscapesandcycles.net/hijacking-conservation-success-in-the-uk.html
This bad science and additional deceptive “science” was also discussed half way through my video presentation “Part 3 Recovering Whales, Ocean Acidification, and Climate Horror Stories”
Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooaZLoJXhu4
People need to contact their local school boards.
Science textbooks should not be instruments to teach one-sided propaganda. Textbooks should encourage debate. Textbooks must encourage critical examination of all hypotheses. Textbooks should embrace Einstein’s advice “To never stop questioning.”
This tactic of trying to eliminate climate debate from the textbooks guarantees children will be indoctrinated with only Parmesan’s erroneous version of climate change under the guise of “science”. It is similar to Michael Mann’s campaign to label skeptics “anti-science”. The facts are indeed clear. It is Parmesan and the AAAS that are using politics to pressure school boards to force feed school children that CO2-caused global warming is now some sort of scientific law, when in fact both Parmesan’s research and the CO2 hypothesis are increasingly not supported by the evidence.
Eat cheese, Parmesan!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Durn… I was going to try to tie in the stinky nature of it too.
You mean how it grates on reality?
I lay the total blame at the feet of publishers whose word was once, “the voice of science, truth and responsibility” that were seduced by a wall of scientific deceit, trickery, aided an abetted by corruption in the form of politically applied grant monies and the willingness of professional organisations to take an ignoble part in the spread of that corruption and in turn the institutionalisation of that insidious propaganda, foisted on the most vulnerable by way of the education curriculum.
This happened on our watch, and it is our duty to clean up the mess. We took our eyes off the ball and did not question or insist upon good governance in the field of science and the scientific method. Time to sweep and clean the temple of learning, if only to protect the future well being, and critical thinking capacity of our students.
To. late Ken, education has been co-opted by ideologues.
A reason to end the state monopoly on education & permit vouchers allowing parental choice of private schools.
Hmm, last comment hit the moderation wall.?
I never knew money (Climastrology funding) could corrupt so absolutely. Why don’t some people have shame anymore?
Soylent Green
The other sick irony was Dr. Peter Gleick getting appointed Chair of the prestigious American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics after which he then forges documents accusing the Heartland Institute of trying to sabotage science education.
Corruption is not irony.
The use of language in terms other than the norm is not lying.
Gleick, he lied.
Of course… anyone who endorses the NIPCC is trying to sabotage controlled education.
Is there any way that the US legal system can be used to require that Camille Parmesan prove her statements in a Court of Law before they should be accepted as valid for an educational curriculum?
I tried to get her most blatantly false paper retracted as discussed here http://landscapesandcycles.net/American_Meterological_Society_half-truth.html
But because she has been such a leading figure promoting global warminghorror stories and because that the same bogus story I wanted retracted has already been introduced into high school and college text books, her flagrant deception was allowed by BAMS.
I have seen references to her bogus work in 2 textbooks but neglected to write down the names and editions. (I merely slammed the books down in disgust) However I am now searching to find which books had used her falsehoods. I think a public outcry against bad science my get those textbooks enough bad publicity that the publishers would either pull the books or prevent further untruths from being published. People should check college and high school text books for her work and hopefully we can bring such bad science to light.
Jim, I’ve run into exactly that sort of dishonest editorial caviling many times when trying to publish papers critical of AGW. Fortunately, not every time. It’s very frustrating and distressing to be silenced like that. You have my sympathies.
Who the hell would want to employ someone like Parmesan. I thought it was a cheese LOL
High school science classes shouldn’t even be bringing the subject up. It’s not a basic science concept, but an applied one. High school science needs to focus on basic science concepts. People should learn spectroscopy and thermodynamics before applying those concepts to the specific problem of climate, or ay other specific question.
What kind of organization calls itself AAAS, or PNAS?
I suppose members of AAAS are called AAASes – or is it even worse?
Heads of Departments at PNAS must be PNAS Heads, for God’s sake!
We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs! We must do something immediately! Harrumph! Harrumph!
– Willam J. Le Petomane, Governor
Camille Parmesan is very proud to be a Nobel prize Laurate, but to her credit she admits that the prize was not awarded only her, but also the IPCC.
Fake climate research sure produces a lot of Nobel Prize winners, some 1200.
http://accessnews.us/videos/nobel-prize-winner-camille-parmesan
The peace prize really is Orwellian just look at some winners here:
Obama, Arafat, Rabin, Perez, IPCC, EU, Kissinger, Gore, Moniz (for inventing frontal lobotomy, swedish socialists love that and forced sterilisation), Myrdal (swedish sterilisation-eugenics program that ended 2012). So why am I bringing up peace prize winners?
I just want to show the difference between politics an science. It is never as obvious as in the Nobel Prize. Most scince prizes make some kind of sense, while the political prices almost never do. The political prices are awarded monsters sometime. Like this Moniz guy who invented frontal lobotomy; the medical scientists where (naturally) abhorred by the idea of lobotomy so there was no way the procedure could win a medical prize, but politicians loved it. If people are rebellious, just punch a knife into their brain and destroy them, wonderful. IPCC didnt get a science prize, bacause what they do is not science, their work serves political purposes. So does this Camille Parmesan.
On the Nobel Prize Camille Parmesan needs to get cracking and correct some website statements.
I’m currently corresponding with the Press Office at Plymouth University about the claim that she is a Nobel Prize winner. They have just removed statements of such from their website this week at my behest.
The press officer tells me she has a certificate (which he hasn’t seen) saying she is a ‘co recipient’ of the prize and has contacted the IPCC media office for clarification. I sent him a copy of the IPCC protocol and a photo of their certificate which states ‘x… is a contributor’.
Watch tips and notes for updates.
Good work David!
She wouldn’t do that. It would be ‘unmannly’ of her.
It doesn’t matter what the IPCC hands out, it is the Nobel Foundation that determines the status of Nobel Prize winners.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/
I believe they have already made it clear that contributers to institutions awared a nobel prize are not allowed to refer to themselves as Nobel Laureates.
500 million people are members of the EU, and fund it with taxes, but I think it is unreasonable to claim that the EU hosts 500 million Nobel Laurates…
This means I’m a contributor to a Nobel Peace Prize winning organization? Cool.
Contact the Nobel Prize Committee, or whomever. If you’ll recall, they issued a statement in the case of Michael Mann, denying that Mann was a recipient of the Prize. Perhaps they will feel prompted to do so in Parmesan’s case.
Well if they don’t, I am claiming my Nobel Laureate status since as a taxpayer I am an important contributer to the IPCC reports.
Just curious, I thought an academic who knowingly claimed an award that they didn’t receive (and didn’t correct the record) was guilty of academic fraud, which should be grounds for termination from any academic position. Nowdays it’s ok as long as they revise their CVs an press releases?
Tasmania, Australia has been the venue for pushing similar indoctrination:
7 Nov: The Conversation: Our kids need to learn about climate change
By Libby Tudball, Senior Lecturer, Monash University
The conclusions published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week provide a wake-up call about the importance of teaching kids about sustainability. The IPCC’s dire warnings are based on new evidence just released on the impact of climate change…
How to get kids involved
How to do this was a big question discussed in Hobart this week by over 350 participants in the Australian Association for Environmental Education conference…
Teachers, school leaders, academics, local council program leaders, members of NGOs and youth organisations discussed action plans including school gardening and food growing, healthy eating, buying locally sourced products and implementing energy awareness programs…
Greens leader Christine Milne added her voice at the conference, urging more government support for education programs focused on sustainability..
What do we need to do now?
Environmental degradation, climate change, species extinction, rising sea levels, excessive or unequal consumption, resource depletion and lack of wellness in our world are local and global problems, so students need to learn what is going on. But we seem to have lost even a veneer of political commitment to sustainability at the federal level….
http://theconversation.com/our-kids-need-to-learn-about-climate-change-33833
Twitter: Australian Association for Environmental Education
https://twitter.com/hashtag/AAEE2014?src=hash
And so it goes. Liberal extremists are not nice, play by their own rules and lie when the first two fail.
Dear Geography Lady, sorry late to this thread, I too appreciate your truth teaching. I have had an interesting year as an outdoor education teacher 2013 school year, I was privy to an assortment of supplemental documents generated by the NYS DEP concerning water purity issues and global warming / climate change causation of increased turbidity in public water supplies. Some of the presentations I sat through were alarming, not because of scare stories of doom from CO2 ( of which there was some of that) but sheer error being presented as fact. One glaring tome was the insistence that rain was falling more frequently with greater intensity causing increased turbidity in our reservoirs. Punctuated by more frequent occurrence of more extreme drought conditions…. wish I could post graphs and charts here …. in any case my take on this was dubious at best. The overall yearly average of precipitation here in the Catskill Region of New York State has remained remarkably stable for the last hundred years of records. If I am wrong on this point please correct me those of you who have better data to asses. Anyway that was not as bad as sitting through a presentation where we were told that forest fires are an increased risk due to climate change in our region which historically did not have them!!! I was floored. The North East Woodlands absolutely had a forest fire cycle! I argued the point and was greeted with distain then a retreat from the topic. The real issue regarding eastern forest fires is multi-fold. One is vast forests have returned from denuded landscapes of the 1800’s when trees were cut for lumber, farmland and fuel. Now we have forests that have not burned properly for about 100 years. This is a tinder box reality here now. Bad forest management and fire suppression has created this increased risk, not climate change. The battle for truth is everyday in this arena. We don’t have to be employed by a learning institution to share truth! Keep on it Geo Lady!
this is the closest station I could find to the Catskills and there doesn’t seem to be any signif monthly change in precipitation .the past 100 yrs
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=305426&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_boxtclim_mon_yr2013.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=PRECIPRAW&minyear=1893&maxyear=2013
Suggestion for those wishing to write one-liners: read the comments before posting your ‘joke’. The more obvious the attempt at puns, the chances are that it has been written before.
You know there is another irony. I forget the name, but an investigator in England, when belief in witches was the norm, put in a valiant effort to use empirical evidence to prove that witches existed. It was not enough for him to merely believe that witches existed, for if they did exist it would be evident.
The point: a person who believed in witches had more integrity and respect for objective gathering of evidence than so-called ‘climate scientists’ of an apparently enlightened society.
It happened before. For decades zoologists clung to the nobel prize winner Lorenz’s theory on aggression. On the great man’s demise they went back to their field notes and film footage and realised they had self censored what they had originally observed. A new theory was born, the selfish gene theory and aggression, both inter and intra species was confirmed.
It will happen in climatology too. It will be the way for the new generation of scientists to establish themselves and get their turn at the funding spigot.
Remember when the consensus was the earth was flat,? Remember when the consensus was the aether so light would have something to propagate in? Remember when the consensus was after 35mph one would burst into flames from the friction? Remember when all that was left for physics to figure out was that pesky “black body” problem then everything would be all sewn up?
Remember when people thought CO2 was warming the planet and to question it was anti-science?
We have the cynicism of youth to help us. Over the last 5 years or so my son has had science teachers who flat out would fail any assignment that didn’t agree with AGW and he’s had teachers who bluntly stated that human caused global warming was “a joke”.
My son and his friends figure out quickly which type of teacher they have and prepare papers accordingly. Like those trying to earn a living they need to get passing grades but laugh at the bogus nature of AGW.
There is hope.
Physics textbooks used in our high schools are already of dismal quality and if we listen to nut jobs like Camille Parmesan they will get even worse.
If you want to improve physics textbooks support John Hubisz at North Carolina State University:
http://eagnews.org/linda-ronstadt-is-a-crystal-vast-factual-errors-exist-in-school-textbooks/
Camille has many strikes against her.
Strike 1. Bad California butterfly science.
Strike 2. Bad Great Britain butterfly science.
Strike 3. Won’t share data and methods for independent replication
Strike 4. Won’t correct when new information comes to light.
Strike 5. Falsely claims to be a Nobel laureate just like Mike Mann
Strike 6. Gets depressed because some of us don’t fall for her bulls***.
And yet, seen as a great climate scientist by her peers.
I don’t get the butterfly thing and global warming in the UK. Maybe it’s down to other factors too.
Let’s turn the HEAT UP!
It is PI=3 all over again.
http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/localgov/second%20level%20pages/indiana_pi_story.htm
Why don’t we just ignore the laws of nature, and indeed nature’s God altogether. No problem there… after all, consensus is mightier than the scientific method.
Dear Camille,
To quote a famous politician with words you may recognize, Elections Have Consequences.
And Texas elections ain’t been going your way. Just ask your pal Wendy about that.
So let me see if I see this right. Steele complains about Dr Parmesan’s work, and his references are, oh my, his own blogs. Why no peer reviewed rebuttals? Well, there are none.
So, let’s see, it’s because of the global scientific conspiracy or it’s because it’s the Steele conspiracy. You make the choice.
Kilgore Trout would be ashamed of you.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/04/john-coleman-fires-back-on-the-ipcc-synthesis-report/#comment-1779179
It is not for lack of trying. It’s just the way Climastrology is.
Because the “official” and nepotic peer review process has been compromised like MI5 was by the Cambridge Five. For now, this forum will serve quite well…
Yours is the sort of specious argument, trafamadore, that typifies people unable to judge a scientific argument on its substantive merits.
I’m sorry…the term “bad science” needs to be replaced with a much more accurate term….”bad scientist”.
Science is a process, and philosophically can be neither good nor bad. Since most climate change propaganda is produced by non scientific processes, calling it science, even bad science, is IMHO a mistake.
The trouble is the ‘good scientists ‘ have played the three wise monkeys , hearing nothing , seeing nothing , and worst saying nothing over the ‘bad science ‘ of people like ‘the Team ‘ and Parmesan. By this they created a situation that when ‘the cause ‘ falls its likely to take much else with it , there is actual good environmental science but it will get labelled under the same category has the type of rubbish Parmesan and co push out to support AGW , and for that we may all pay the price.