Essay by Eric Worrall
I wonder if there is a case for challenging compulsory climate studies on the grounds that belief in catastrophic climate change is a state religion?
‘Face it head on’: Connecticut makes climate change studies compulsory
Enshrining the curriculum in law insulates the subject from budget cuts and culture wars related to the climate crisis
Sat 17 Dec 2022 19.00 AEDT
Starting next July, Connecticut will become one of the first states in America to mandate climate change studies across its public schools as part of its science curriculum.
The new law passed earlier this year comes as part of the state’s attempts to address concerns over the short duration – and in some cases, absence – of climate change studies in classrooms. The requirement follows in the footsteps of New Jersey, which in 2020 became the first state to mandate K-12 climate change education across its school districts.
Currently, nearly 90% of public schools across Connecticut include climate change studies in their curriculums. However, by mandating it as part of state law from grades five to 12, climate education will effectively become protected from budget cuts and climate-denying political views at a time when education in the US has become a serious culture war battleground.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/17/climate-change-studies-connecticut
There is legal precedent for considering belief in catastrophic climate change might be a religion.
In 2009, a judge in Britain ruled in favour of plaintiff Tim Nicholson in an unfair dismissal case. The Judge found that Tim’s climate beliefs were entitled to the same legal protection as a person of religious faith. Tim was suing his employer for dismissing him on the grounds of his beliefs in catastrophic climate change. “… In a significant decision today , a judge found Nicholson’s views on the environment were so deeply held that they were entitled to the same protection as religious convictions, and ruled that an employment tribunal should hear his claim that he was sacked because of his beliefs. …”.
Although Tim’s case occurred in Britain, sometimes US courts reference legal precedent from other nations with similar legal systems, when those foreign legal systems are viewed by US courts as a legitimate source of jurisprudence.
How would a judicial ruling that CAGW is a religion help children in Connecticut?
There is another precedent which might be useful. In the early noughties, there was a push in Kansas to teach Intelligent Design alongside or instead of the theory of evolution in biology classes. In 2005 Bobby Henderson created the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and used this alleged religion to demand equal access to Intelligent Design course syllabuses, on the grounds that teaching just one religious perspective in Intelligent Design courses violates the separation of church and state.
A judicial ruling that CAGW is a state religion might similarly be used by climate skeptics to demand equal access to the syllabus of climate religious studies courses in states like Connecticut.
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Will they teach skepticism?
Skepticism is an element of the scientific method. So, no.
Will they provide any evidence that CO2 is causing the globe to warm?
Answer: No, because there is no evidence showing CO2 is causing the globe to warm.
Will they provide unsubstantiated assumptions and assertions that CO2 is causing the globe to warm?
Answer: Yes, they will, because that’s all they have. Someone ought to point that out to the various school boards.
Promoting unsubstantiated assumptions and assertions about CO2 as being facts, is not teaching science.
They’ll have students examine the entrails of ancient tree rings to know the precise temperature and humidity thousands of years ago and from that the students can prophesize when a tipping point will happen when the Earth will become a boiling inferno. The students will then freak out- go home- and preach to their parents to install solar panels on the roof and buy an electric car- and if the parents don’t- then the students will inform the authorities. The schools will have large posters with images of Mickey Mann and other “heroes and saviors of the climate change revolution” in every hallway and classroom.
I find it incredible that Connecticut beat Massachusetts in a matter of woke theology!
Well at least we can say that we’re not as bad as New Jersey.
well, MA still has the Vatican of Wokeness- Hah-vid
Yes Communism in the raw Chairman Mao style.
It actually sounds exciting that they would teach climate change – the rub of course is that they would be teaching it scientifically / honestly!
Exciting? Scientifically?
In a safe space no doubt…
Which climates that are constantly but incrementally changing will be taught about?
There are hundreds of unique climates around the globe, all possessing their own
cycles, influences and behaviors.
Lump them all together as a problem for the very stability of planetary existence, and you’re on the same ground as asserting that a particular race in toto is a problem for sustainable life on this planet.
I thought that line of discrimination was verboten.
Climate Chane means what humans are supposedly doing by having a civilization, not any of that other funny business you mentioned.
I’m attempting to come at the preposterous “one-approach” climate change education proposition by posing an equally preposterous notion of singling out one race of humans as a global problem that kids should be taught about.
Do you accept that there are hundreds of unique climates operating around the world?
I was not implying that your information was wrong but rather that to “them” it is irrelevant and would not be considered any kind of valid objection.
It would be one thing if they have a course called “climate science” without calling it “climate change” which presumes there is an existential threat of climate disaster due to human use of fossil fuels. The benefits of fossil fuels will also need to be taught. They can start by reading recent books by Alex Epstein and other climate skeptics. Show them what life was like for most people centuries ago.
Not a teacher, are you? State mandates tell you what to “teach” and how to “teach” it. The operative word is “teach”, meaning indoctrinate, almost always with leftist ideology. Also, keep in mind that, especially at the elementary level, when kids are most susceptible to indoctrination, most teachers are poorly trained in science themselves, so they simple teach what the state tells them. Little is done working with the scientific method as the teachers, themselves, don’t know science nor its methods. Much is said about teaching students to think, but the only “thinking” that is permitted is what the state dictates. Stated simply, “We is in deep shit.”
If I had children in a public school now I would tell them to learn how to tell the teachers everything they want to hear, get top grades, but question everything on your own time.
Did you intentionally omit that little word “NOT”?
There is no doubt in my mind that CAGW is a religion of sorts, in which the creation is worshipped over the Creator (even if the basic tenants are in conflict with this idea). I can understand the many reasons people have fallen out of faith but in general, people are wired for belief in something bigger than themselves.
As the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum ” and CAGW is filling the void space left by traditional religion. It is a new religion. If the State endorses CAGW, the Church and State are not separated.
And they’re soon going to make it a state religion if they can get away with it. This has all the earmarks of being a cult. We thought so, but they’re now proving it by their very actions.
Maybe some clever kids will figure out that it is all a hoax.
https://breadonthewater.co.za/2022/12/15/an-evaluation-of-the-greenhouse-effect-by-carbon-dioxide/
CAGW is secularists’ new religion.
Since SCOTUS rulings now prohibit religion from being overtly taught at public schools, the subject of CAGW should also be banned…
CAGW is utterly destroying our kids’ education and is inflicting great psychological harm.
Many kids have effectively given up on life and raising families as they fear CAGW will utterly destroy the earth making it uninhabitable, which is one of the reasons teenage suicide has skyrocketed and birth rates are plummeting.
For all intents and purposes, CAGW is already a disconfirmed hypothesis and is similar to teaching the earth is flat…
Ironically, energy and social policies based on the disconfirmed CAGW hypothesis are destroying our economy and will cause much more harm than any of CO2’s small forcing effect will have in the future.
Moreover, an excellent case can be made that higher CO2 levels will be a huge net benefit to all life on earth..
Woke Leftists’ new mantra:
Freedom of speech is Slavery.
War on oil is Peace.
Ignorance on everything is Strength…
God help us all…
The reply to Eric’s suggestion will be that they are mandating the study of climate science, and that isn’t a religion, its an important and legitimate branch of science. The problem isn’t that climate science will be taught, its what view of it will be taught in the classes on the subject.
You cannot prevent schools from misrepresenting a science by banning teaching of the science itself.
Parents need to get control of school boards. The only way to prevent or reverse ideological indoctrination taking the place of education. Cf the concept of decolonizing the math curriculum. Actually when you look at the unscientific nonsense that is being taught about sex and gender, critical race theory…etc, what’s being taught about climate is just one in a long series of these things.
The problem with sex and gender teaching, for instance, is not that human biology and development is being made a mandatory subject. Its what is being taught as biology. The solution is not to ban teaching it. Same thing here.
Sexuality – hardware
Gender – software glitch
It’s actually the other way around. Sexual orientation is the “software” question. Gender is plumbing.
The word gender derives from the propagation of the race (genus). The desire to redefine the functional meaning of gender is apparently motivated by the attempt to beg the question—to assume that it is a given that sexual orientation is genetically determined.
If sexual orientation were a question of genetics, then logically there should be sets of gene configurations that correspond to sets of sexual behaviors. I am not aware of any evidence for that hypothesis.
The motivation for establishing behaviors as being genetically determined is to remove from consideration (and especially from polite discourse) the idea that individuals make free choices with respect to sexual orientation. If a person doesn’t choose, he or she cannot be culpable for any such action. Furthermore, if a person doesn’t choose and “was made that way”, then the argument is made that a behavior that is inherent to the person cannot be immoral.
The question of whether there are genders other than male and female is therefore a dishonest semantic political game.
Even if it were proven to be the case that sexual orientation is determined by ones genes, that in and of itself would not answer any moral or theological question.
That we theorize that alcoholism may be a genetically-transmitted trait, does not require us to accept and encourage alcoholics to go ahead and get drunk.
That we know that certain diseases are genetically determined—sickle cell anemia for example—does not inform us that the disease which is “natural” is therefore a positive good to be encouraged and embraced.
The question of whether sexual orientation is a choice or not is an open one. Also our value judgements about whether some choices are better than others is also a subjective one, unrelated to science.
From a moral theology point of view, the question of free choice is relevant only to the question of guilt. A person does not bear any guilt for having cancer, but cancer is still an intrinsic evil destructive of life.
Whether sexual behaviors outside of heterosexual marriage are morally licit or not is not a question for science but rather of religion or philosophy.
It is a question of politics whether people are to be allowed to hold an opinion on that question that is freely taken and/or informed by a couple of millennia of religious tradition.
It appears that the political question has for the most part been answered and in the negative. As it is with opinions about sexual morality, so it is with opinions about Climate Change ™
You must be my age or older Rich. What words meant in the 20th century is not what they mean today. Today the dictionary says you can use the word ‘literally’ in a figurative sense. The word ‘terrific’ means something good. The word ‘democracy’ now means socialism. ‘Warming’ means cooling and ‘woman’ means nothing. It’s all over. Dictionaries must now only be digital so they can keep up with the weekly redefinition of standard English language.
Yes, sadly true. But in a world where everything is subjective I am still able to make “my truth” align with the wisdom of ages. Up until now at least, they can’t enforce thoughts in our heads.
Gender:
Male XY
Female YY
You have jumped from sex to sexual orientation.
Sex is a process – the exchange of genetic material.
I was taught these distinctions, and learned them, in Advanced Placement Biology, in senior year in secondary school. It is possible, of course, that biologists have also been infected with wokeism, and have allowed the definitions to blur. I hope not.
I am writing this from California, whcih, I believe, has 38 official genders.
RE_Jim, at best the biologists have been silenced from fear of offending the activist crowd. Unfortunately I’ve been seeing this mindset starting to infiltrate even the hard sciences.
‘Parents need to get control of school boards.’
True, but where the study of ‘climate change’ has been mandated, they also really need to get their hands on the curriculum, since any portion thereof that isn’t demonstrably true can then be challenged in court. They should be doing this for CRT and genders studies, as well.
What age will these students be?
Before they are taught climate change they should be taught sufficient science to understand how the climate works.
Children should be taught how to tell the difference between evidence and unsubstantiated assumptions and assertions.
If they learn that, they won’t be fooled by climate alarmist hyperbole. They will scoff at it, like skeptics do.
Catechism classes often start in kindergarten or at least by first grade
That could backfire badly if they preach doom and disaster as they will. The more intelligent will go into it more deeply and realise they’ve been sold a turkey.
Climate anxiety….
Let’s hope the indoctrinators include notable events that they have predicted, like…
An ice free Arctic in 2013, the end of snow in 2000 etc etc
Yes, the kids need to be shown the Climate Alarmist “Hall of Shame”, of all the failed climate change predictions they have made over the decades.
that would make a nice web site
There’s this one, among others…
https://extinctionclock.org/
nice, thanks
Nice one, well worth the read. have you ever noticed that those alarmists quoting their unsubstantiated views are either politicians, media spokespersons, or female? Worth taking any notice of?
Worth taking notice of? Yes – to the degree that they can influence people and policies.
Interesting…..
I’ll assume that we all understand/know that the best way to understand something yourself, is to (try to) explain it to someone else.
and that kids, as per The Emperor’s Clothes, are a fairly demanding audience,
It gets worse because by the time (coming soon) many of them are to some degree Autistic – those problems simply skyrocket. Autistics don’t mind – they’ve got nothing (else) to lose so they simply ‘go for it’
This could backfire on these well-intentioned Connecticut folks really rather badly.
Kids don’t especially go to school to learn ‘information’ or ‘science’ – they learn from each other, and their teachers, a whole lot more than what the teachers think
They go there to get Knowledge – and Information is NOT= Knowledge
Therein I’d suggest and the ‘raison-d’etre’ for this edict, the school governors simply don’t realise or know that. The lights are on but nobody’s home.
Kids pick up on that instinctively – in fact we all do unless we’re (effectively) drunk
THAT is The Problem here – a little bit of downwelling radiation actually does do something – it illuminates what’s going wrong in this western world
The kids will see it, they know when they’re being lied to.
Alternatively, send every school librarian in Connecticut a copy of Andy’s Climate at a Glance.
Many state laws, such as what people and businesses can and cannot do on Sunday and what people can or cannot wear in public, exist or have existed. These law are based on religious beliefs. One more law based on a widely help religious view seems unlikely to be ruled against by the courts.
Furthermore, it is a rule of jurisprudence that, except for controversies between different parts of government where constitutionality is raised, the court will avoid questions of constitutionality if it can find any other basis upon which to rule. In additions, it is the rule to assume that anything the legislature passes it has the power to pass, even if unconstitutional “on its face”. It takes a really strong case to stand a chance of overcoming that. Supreme Courts tend to wait until a case arises that lets them rule the way the want to rule before acting on any issue.
LOL! A lot of them are now and a lot more will be playing in the snow by the end of the week!
They just better be bundled up! As Joe Bastardi has been promising blizzard like conditions running from Nebraska, down through the Ohio Valley, and over to the Appalachians are coming this week before Christmas. Vehicular travel will be dangerous and many flights will be cancelled.
The snow is coming behind the polar air and windchills will be severe.
Looks like many of us that have not had a white Christmas for some time, are going to get one this year.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkPAl6RXoAEaeE8?format=png&name=medium
I feel sad that this has happened to the state I was born and grew up in, during the 50s and 60s. They used to teach how to think, not what to think.
The Western world is infested with the new indoctrination
Kids are kind of rebellious. Maybe they will see the light after trekking through the snow while people are trying to scare them about Global Warming. Something doesn’t compute here!
Bruce, I too was born and raised in CT during the 50’s and 60’s. Hamden was my home. My father was a biology teacher and high school football coach. Perhaps that is why I learned to search for reasons why things happen rather than just accept that they did.
Fortunately for me I came to the conclusion that warmer is better and moved to Florida.
As we both know, Connecticut has been controlled by liberals for decades. I do not see this as any thing other than indoctrination not education.
We moved to Hamden in ’63, on Whitney Ave., and I attended Spring Glen Elementary, Sleeping Giant Jr. High, and Hamden High, before going to private school in ’69. Being so close to New Haven was great, and an easy bus ride. We here in NH are a hearty lot, and don’t mind the cold so much, or even snow.
Small world. I attended Sleeping Giant Jr High and graduated from Hamden High in 1969. My dad was AD at that time. Glenwwod Drive-in and Pepe’s.
Pepe’s – the best pizza in the world!
It just occurred to me, you would have been 2 years ahead of me, but my older brother Allen would have been in the same grade as you.Talk about a small world.
The publication of a revised, augmented and updated edition of “The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” is urgently needed!
good revenue stream for the climate industrial complex selling “ textbooks “
I would like to see their reading list.
Well, they no longer teach reading, writing and arithmetic so this crap is par for the course.
Apparently grammar also went out the window, now that a singular man or woman can refer to him or herself as “they” – or ask to be referred to as such!
CAGW does fit Eric Hoffer’s definition of a Mass Movement, which is mostly indistinguishable from a religion.
The True Believers want it taught according to their particular creed, and using a particular catechism.
From the article: “climate-denying political views”
I know they are talking about skeptics when they say “climate-denying” but I would contend that it is the alarmists who are the deniers by denying the climate is a natural phenomenon.
There is every evidence to believe climate is a natural phenomenon and no evidence to believe that CO2 has anything to do with control of the climate, so those denying the natural world, the climate alarmists, are the real deniers.
And they want to inculcate this way of thinking into our youth. Brainwash them while they are young. Stalin thought that was the best policy.
Teachers today are more concerned with how students feel rather than what they know
It’s entirely possible to teach “Climate Change” without even mentioning CO2, particularly since CO2 is such a small part of true climate change. The focus could be on the Pleistocene record, including temperatures and glacial advances and retreats. It could include Milankovitch cycles, Ice core records, the Laurentide Ice Sheet over North America, sea levels, the Scientific Method, and more. It would be great scientific knowledge for students to have. It might even add how atmospheric CO2 lagged temperature changes in this record, making it a result of the temperature change, not the cause.
I would argue this should become an important part of science. Importantly, it could include the only recent actual temperature records, including recording sites, urban heat islands, the difference between the thermometer data and “homogenized global temperature”. A class trip to a nearby site would be quite interesting for the students.
Missing from this would be, quoting the article: “It’s critical that when we’re talking to kids at that upper elementary, middle school, high school level, we’re ensuring that we are coming from an equity-based perspective.” That, of course, ain’t science.
‘It’s entirely possible to teach “Climate Change” without even mentioning CO2…’
Possible, but extremely unlikely. The entire motive is to indoctrinate children into accepting socialism, i.e., the government’s primacy over every aspect of their lives.
Maybe they’ll show Tony Heller videos and assign homework from the WUWT’s best sellers book list.
The kids will need to stay in bed in winter with what’s coming for mum and dad-
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eu-agrees-co2-tax-on-heating-and-transport-fuels-softened-by-new-social-climate-fund/
Econutzis really hate kids so look forward to getting blown up in the re-education camps if you get the answers wrong munchkins.
As a retired science teacher, I find this kind of mandate disturbing.. State mandate after state mandate and then, when kids rank at the bottom in math and reading, teachers are called incompetent. Teaching kids basic science facts and concepts and having them do science projects to collect and evaluate data is what they need. When they can evaluate and critically analyze data, they will see for themselves that the “climate change” hysteria is religion and not science. Today, nearly 20 years after retiring, I still run into students who tell me how they still remember how much they learned from their projects and actually “doing” science.
Expanding the scope and intensity of the re-education camps in the USA.