Wyoming Is First State To Reject Science Standards Over Climate Change 661
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Time Magazine reports that Wyoming, the nation's top coal-producing state, has become the first state to reject new K-12 science standards proposed by national education groups mainly because of global warming components. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are a set of science standards developed by leading scientists and science educators from 26 states and built on a framework developed by the National Academy of Sciences. The Wyoming science standards revision committee made up entirely of Wyoming educators unanimously recommended adoption of these standards to the state Board of Education not once but twice and twelve states have already adopted the standards since they were released in April 2013. But opponents argue the standards incorrectly assert that man-made emissions are the main cause of global warming and shouldn't be taught in a state that ranks first among all states in coal production, fifth in natural gas production and eighth in crude oil production deriving much of its school funding from the energy industry.
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards. 'I think Wyoming can do far better.' Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a 'war on coal' and has said that he's skeptical about man-made climate change. Supporters of the NGSS say science standards for Wyoming schools haven't been updated since 2003 and are six years overdue. 'If you want the best science education for your children and grandchildren and you don't want any group to speak for you, then make yourselves heard loud and clear,' says Cate Cabot. 'Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.'"
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards. 'I think Wyoming can do far better.' Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a 'war on coal' and has said that he's skeptical about man-made climate change. Supporters of the NGSS say science standards for Wyoming schools haven't been updated since 2003 and are six years overdue. 'If you want the best science education for your children and grandchildren and you don't want any group to speak for you, then make yourselves heard loud and clear,' says Cate Cabot. 'Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.'"
Global Warming Standards? (Score:2, Insightful)
Standards? Politically-specified truth? In science?
Good luck, USA. The rest of the world has already seen through the scam...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
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FWIW, I grew up in a small town where my father, uncles, and friend's parents worked in a local mill. Three quarters all the jobs in this town were at that mill, in addition to almost all the good paying ones; and hell, they had a softball league and gave us each a turkey at Thanksgiving.
For reference's sake, try to get something in a German s
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Sure there is. Not everyone covers their ears and starts shouting, afraid of the truth.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Interesting)
Couple years ago the University of Wyoming took down a large sculpture on campus well before its planned exhebition run was done because the oil industry felt it was insulting. I'm pretty sure "don't bite the hand that feeds you" was an exact quote from a state official demanding it be taken down immediately.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no "theory of climate change" to reject. There are dozens of different hypotheses, and people advancing political action switch what they call that theory according to what argument they want to make. To deconstruct this:
(1) Human activity has raised the level of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere beyond what it would otherwise be. [Uncontroversial]
(2) Mean global temperatures have increased over the 20th century. [mostly accepted]
(3) Human activity has contributed to some degree to that increase. [mostly accepted]
(4) Human activity is the primary cause of temperature increase over the 20th century. [unproven]
(5) Human activity will result in temperature increases in the 21st century that are larger than those experienced in the 20th century. [unproven, speculative]
(6) Temperature increase in the 21st century will have devastating consequences for humans. [highly speculative, controversial]
(7) Government intervention now can reduce temperature increases in the 21st century significantly. [highly speculative, completely implausible]
So, the only thing that scientists agree on are (1-3). The rest is unproven, speculative, and often implausible. But without (4-7), observations (1-3) simply aren't worth teaching in school. And activists and politicians promoting government action like to pretend that agreement on (1-3) implies agreement on (4-7).
And in terms of politics, I used to be a solid Democrat. But digging into the science behind climate change (and then some other issues where Democrats like to talk about science) has made me an independent, because Democrats are abusing science for political purposes. They like to pick some half-ass scientific result that fits their agenda, try to use it to get people riled up to vote for them or transfer billions into the coffers of their corporate buddies, and accuse anybody who disagrees with their political agenda as "unscientific". Just like you did.
Let's be clear: like most scientists, I agree with what is actually the agreed upon theory of climate change, namely points (1-3). But that's all science supports right now; the rest is speculation and politics.
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Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Funny)
Economics. How scientific. /s
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But the whole thing is: these models were and are pretty much correct. Simply, rates cannot go below zero (they can, and this is called a tax on capital and is apparently politically impossible in the US, so they can't). Many people forgot to consider what happens if rates hit the zero lower bound.
But people who did wonder about that found exactly what is happening now.
Beware people who will not trust models to their limits: they might be worried about the validity of the model, but in many cases are afrai
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
The science is more widely accepted by the folks who have the time to pay attention, but for the most part, it's a propaganda scheme that headlines enough opposition theory to leave the average billpayer some room for doubt.
Funding opposition studies is just a business expense for large companies engaged in controversial industry.
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are you really an idiot? Comparing a social science subject to a hard science subject in terms of scientific rigor?
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Interesting)
I think hes making the basic point that the hivemind can be wrong, and "everyone thinks this" is not always the best argument for something. Heck, hundreds of millions also thought communism was the way forward, that doesnt make it right.
Its not as simple as "theres data", either, because the data existing, being interpreted properly, and being known are entirely different things.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Its too bad you learned from these new standards which pride itself on the band-wagon approach to science where the most popular theory is heralded as the correct theory and any other competing theories are dismissed out of hand.
"It might be bad for the coal industry" is not a competing theory on the cause of the present climate change.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but as David Hume would point out. The preponderance of evidence of apples falling from trees doesn't *prove* that gravity is real, just that its incredibly unlikely that its not.
We're at that point with man made climate change. We know that if CO2 doesn't trap IR heat, nearly 140 years of physics needs to be turfed, we know that we've put in a certain amount of CO2 that outstrips by a huge margin any natural source, and that x amount of CO2 will introduce Y amount of energy into the climate system. We can do rudimentary models that show a general trend and lately we've been doing more complex models track a more specific trend with astonishing accuracy when applied to historical data.
The odds of human induced climate change being wrong are so low that its simply not up for debate anymore in the sciences, just as evolution or gravity isn't because that would be silly.
The fact that outside of the sciences a lot of people seem to think theres scientific controversy isn't really important here.
Science isn't a democracy, its a dictatorship of evidence. And the evidence is in. AGW is real.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
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How would they balance each other out? The climate on earth has been seesawing wildly between freezing cold and baking heat since the earth had a climate. There is no "natural balance".
While clearly we and every other living creature are having an effect on the climate, the question always has been "how much of an effect". In any case within a century or so we'll have moved to pretty much entirely renewable sources, most likely making inroads on solar satellites as well, so er, everyone calm down I guess.
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He hasn't been proved wrong yet.
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We have three classes of CO2 sources. The natural seasonal variations in the carbon cycle do, yes, dwarf human and volcanic emissions, and yet the last have still been able to drastically alter the climate historically. Compared to volcanism, humans are still a couple of orders of magnitude away from the largest periods of volcanic activity in the Earth's history, but those periods lasted millions of years, and "a couple orders of magnitude away" means that in 1000 years at the current rate we will have equ
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah that idea was fundamentally discredited a long time ago dude. Sorry.
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
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One of the big problems here is that everyone feels the need to have a strong opinion on this, and often use websites-- which are terribly poor sources. I could find as many sources that contridict that, that say that the solar system is geocentric, etc etc.
Notably, a website with a non-neutral name like that is going to tend to be a particularly poor source; it very obviously has a bias and skin in the game, so regardless of whether it is posting true things or not it cant be considered credible.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. These aren't Neural networks , and they aren't "trained". They are a simulation of understood physics that thus-far matches the historical data and is so far actually predicting things quite well (Although some of the earlier models where a bit conservative due to not accounting for permafrost).
What you are calling "training" , in science is called "Hind-casting" and its a standard method of testing scientific theories where we can't feasibly do experiments (other than the usual CO2 in lab type stuff from the 1870s when we first started talking about climate change from CO2).
If you disregard it, you have to throw away *so much* science. Why would you want to do that? Its a tried and tested methodology responsible for a huge amount of what we know about the natural sciences.
Regardless, as the IPCC has pointed out. The models have actually been quite accurate in predictions so far.
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect a lot of AGW denialists are also Evolution deniers, and it's worth noting that a lot of the testing process for Evolution involves 'hind-casting' rather than forecasting. Every time we point to the fossil record, after all, we are looking behind, not forward. The same is true for Cosmology, and it's worth noting that growth in "Big Bang denialism" also seems to be happening, with a high (although far from universal) correlation. I'm wating for some people to start denouncing Contenental Drift as a liberal plot.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they don't say that. The IPCC presents a set of weighted possibilities based on statistical analysis of the results of a few thousand research projects. These range from "Things could get a bit hairy for agriculture and fisheries" (Which is already happening) to "Shit goes completely haywire, were screwed.". The IPCC reports tend to lean towards the low end severity however increasingly climate researchers have been critical if the IPCC for under reporting just how serious some of the models predictions are.
Physics actually can answer it to some degree , although perhaps not in the detail we like. The equasions are not hard. You look at solar inputs over time, then look at CO2 (and methane, etc) and you can say "This will trap x amount of infra red energy". This part can be calculated quite accurately since is an entirely deterministic calculation.
Then you look at a range of possibilities from "All this heat is converted to kinetic energy (storms/cyclones/etc)" to "All this heat turns into heat (greenhouse effect)". Remember , conservation of energy, the heat has to do *something*.
Of course I'm simplifying it a little bit here and not including run-away effects from permafrost which sadly appear to be starting already according to many arctic field researchers (Ie permafrost areas where methane has started to bubble up) which potentially can turn the whole thing psychotic on us, but thats the basics of it.
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No, "natural causes" is not a competing theory of climate change.
Without details about what "natural causes" you're talking about it isn't even a theory.
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No, "we don't know what the fuck is going on" is not the "null hypothesis".
Here comes the science... (Score:5, Informative)
But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method
Luckily for us, there's an organisation dedicated to reviewing the best data that scientific studies have to offer, with contributions from thousands of practising scientists all over the world collected over more than 25 years. Let's see what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say:
Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
...
Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (see [data citations]). This evidence for human influence has grown since [the previous IPCC Assessment Report]. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
...
Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
— IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
Just to be clear, those quotations are directly from the highlighted key points in the sections about attributing the detected changes in the climate and what will happen in the future. The emphasis was retained from the original publication.
I'll leave you with one more quote, from a slightly less heavyweight source but no less valid:
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
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Rather than asking this, why not just do a search for it? If you are using Google for searching, go into incognito mode so that you don't get results that "you like".
This particular question has been covered numerous times, and very very well.
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Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
atmospheric CO2 450,000BC to present [wordpress.com]
atmospheric CO2 1000AD to present [ccsu.edu]
the first graph shows that the CO2 level has hovered between 200 and 300ppm for 500k years. so our current co2 concentration ~400ppm is unprecedented in the history of mankind! The graph also shows that global temperature is highly correlated with CO2 concentration.
the second graph shows that for most of the past millennium the CO2 level has been hovering at 290 ppm, which is consistent with the past. But in the past 100 years it steadily shot upwards! My conclusion is that this is strong evidence that CO2 increases are due to the large scale burning of fossil fuels that began with the industrial revolution and kept going until today. my further conclusion is that if we reduce our CO2 emissions we can bring the CO2 concentrations back to historical levels.
this is my conclusion; you may look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusion. But the important thing is to teach our children the critical thinking skills to evaluate this data. If you white wash science classes then you lose the chance to develop these skills.
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http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html [umich.edu]
along with seasonal co2 levels
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ [noaa.gov]
the first url shows where active forests are mostly the northern hemisphere. the second shows how winter co2 spikes globally as measured as far away from humanity as you can get. deforestation without replanting is unsustainable since the industrial revolution global forest have been 50% cleared. this is in 200 years of deforestation, another 200 and
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the chance the current temperature rise is just natural variation (i.e. noise) ?
0.1% http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/Anthro.climate.dynamics.13.3.14.pdf [mcgill.ca]
Next question?
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
Well current temperatures have fallen below the 95% confidence band of the climate models predictions, so most reasonable scientists would say the hypothesis has been falsified on that basis; now that doesn't prove that GW is or isn't happening, it just proves the climate models are full of shit. Now that is not a surprise to anyone who has any formal training in Fortran and has looked at the source code. Even the input data is a horrific mess, little of it meets it's own data and formatting definitions.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know why you got modded down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Neil Tyson vs. Bill O'Reilly
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing, as you post on Slashdot, I'm going to assume you troubleshoot problems. Maybe it's network infrastructure, maybe it's software, maybe it's server administration. I don't know. But, do you really consider a problem "fixed" if you don't know the cause? If errors are getting thrown everywhere, do you apply band-aid fixes that "seem to work" but you don't know why? I do know those guys. You know what? They're fucking terrible at their jobs. Real troubleshooting is learning the root cause and fixing it. Even if you can't fix the root error directly, if you don't have a real understanding of it, you never know if your band-aids are gong to work.
When someone says "well who cares if it's man-made" or "it's really the alarmists that are the problem" or whatever, it's just another attempt to sow doubt on a model that is just as predictive as Evolution. It matters what caused it, because that influences how you fix it - for instance, if it's man-made, moving off coal power plants to solar, nuclear, wind, etc, is a huge help. So get a clue, stop sticking your head in the sand and changing the subject, and realize that man-made climate change is radically different than natural variation. Idiot.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? So, Anonymous Coward knows better than NASA and NOAA and the UN Panel on Cliamate Change?
while I get your point, what you are missing is that we have a real distrust of the government in general. If you replace NASA NOAA and UN panel with NSA CIA and TSA, people would respond differently.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? So, Anonymous Coward knows better than NASA and NOAA and the UN Panel on Cliamate Change?
while I get your point, what you are missing is that we have a real distrust of the government in general. If you replace NASA NOAA and UN panel with NSA CIA and TSA, people would respond differently.
I saw what you did there. [wikipedia.org]
You're comparing scientists and engineers who publish in the open literature with spooks and security guards who keep secrets.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Interesting)
What connection is there between the US government and the IPCC?
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Proper science (like in a science that has a validated, reasonable precise model of reality) is not indoctrination. The dismal science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org] on the other hand...
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What is being taught about climate change is not proper science. It is indoctrination.
maybe it's both? "she blinded me with science" and all that.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Who needs a computer model when you can see the polar ice melting. Yes, its really melting - go see it for yourself it you don't believe it. Strike up a friendship with somebody in Iceland if you disagree and ask them what they are seeing.
2) Who cares, the house is on fire. Let's not waste time arguing about how it got started.
3) We only have one earth so there will be no control group or second chance. You don't need to be a medical doctor to know that a self inflicted gunshot wound is a bad idea. You don't need to be a climate scientist to see that the global climate is changing and that the logical explanation is mankind's burning of fossil fuel. The time for skepticism has passed.
4) The data has been readily available and its being ignored. Our innocent descendants need to be protected from the selfishness of our generation and the previous two or three. Even if global warming is a hoax, is it fair that our generation uses more than its fair share of the planet's resources so a few super rich multinational corporations can get super richer?
5-9) See #2
The vast majority of free thinkers who have reviewed the data agree that man is having an unprecedented impact on the atmosphere and the ocean. For better or worse we are reshaping the climate and there will winners and losers. The losers are innocent people and wildlife who cannot adapt to the changes and our descendants left with a planet stripped of its resources.
If we want to be selfish and immoral - fine - let's just don't be a hypocrites about it. As we all pump gas into our cars and adjust our thermostats we should recognize there are consequences of our actions.
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Informative)
North polar ice is indeed diminishing. South polar ice is increasing. You phrase this as if to suggest both are melting. It is a lie. Start with an obvious lie and nothing else in your post can be taken seriously.
"Increasing" or "decreasing" mean nothing without some kind of quantity. For instance, the greenland ice sheet (arctic) is melting at a rate of 367 Gt/year between 2008 and 2012 [wikipedia.org] which dwarfs antarctica's meager increase of 33Gt/year [wikipedia.org].
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like those predictions made by the top economists at Lehman Brothers etc? La creme de la creme?
Now seriously. Value is dealt with by some individuals called actuaries not economists. Supply & demand is bogus as is most of any Econ101 based on "free market" theories. There's a nice, well documented book "Debunking Economics" by Steve Keen that makes this point more eloquently that I could ever try.
As for psychology, I would rather compare economics as a science with psychiatry, especially at the level where it was some 50 years ago. They didn't have any understanding of how the human brain works, but they kept prescribing electric shocks, cold showers and lobotomies. Is the patient apathetic? Let's apply some "stimulus" (high voltage preferred). Is he too agitated now? Let's "tapper off" (cold shower) and give him some "austerity" (lobotomy). Wow, see, now he's not banging his head into the walls anymore, we CURED him! Rinse and repeat! What a great science we have here!
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Indeed - though I wonder why, if they feel that the science side is too one-sided (not sure how that works out, as long as it's science), they wouldn't simply counter with a new program in social studies / economics. Surely they can convince the kids that, yes, coal is a horrible pollutant - but considering it employs their daddy, uncle, aunt, Bob, John and Mary, and brings in $xB to the
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You misunderstand the scope of the problem. The issue is that there is a very real risk that we might be headed towards a global extinction event. Which no amount of money is worth enough to compensate for.
Further, it is a "risk" because it is a future event. But at this point it is also a very highly probable one. And you talk about religion, which is probably one of the root of the problem: too many people refuse to consider the risk because religion.
There is further a lot of uncertainty about whether we
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You misunderstand the scope of the problem. The issue is that there is a very real risk that we might be headed towards a global extinction event.
For some species, possibly, although species are going extinct all the time for various reasons and there is little we can do about most of them. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is not at risk of extinction in even the direst of CO2-based climate projections.
If you think "it's clear that solar and wind are our future" then you have either a poor understanding of the energy needs of our current civilization, or you have a very long view of "our future." Certainly solar/wind and deep geothermal are in "our" future, bu
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Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just leave this here.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Last time we had the kind of temperatures we are heading for, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Normally, organisms have millions of years to adapt to these kind of changes. This is how we are headed to an extinction event.
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Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
How in the world will we head for an extinction level event?
Obviously we aren't headed for a global extinction event. We are already in the global extinction event.
You do realize that this planet has seen CO2 levels 10 times what we have today (even 20 times higher) and not once did an extinction event play out due to CO2 increases.
Because the PETM didn't happen on your alternate earth?
In fact, at one point in our past, the planet had roughly 2000 PPM CO2 (5 times today's levels) and we were in the midst of an ice-age.
Boring zombie argument #49. http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm [skepticalscience.com]
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I wish the future were atomics, but politics are what they are...
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Wyoming is an extremely conservative state. It comes from being mostly rural; the state has only about 582,000 people and its population density is the second-lowest of all US states. Per Wikipedia, it also receives more tax dollars per-capita than any state but Alaska, and its per-capita tax aid is more than double the US average, /and/ its taxes are among the lowest of all states because they can suck Uncle Sam's teat to make up the difference.
From the above, it's pretty evident that like most conservat
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Nice misinformation here. The situation _is_ catastrophic. We _are_ in big trouble. Do not mistake the insane German policies [1] for a model of how things happen when you want to curb CO_2. The climatologists know very well how bad the situation is. Simply, it is so bad that they realise at this point people are not willing to listen to the truth, so they _minimise_ the risks.
[1] We would like solar, but really, we need energy, and since our crazy greens won't allow nuclear, we go for coal.
Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:4, Insightful)
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
You fucking idiot. You 'useful idiot', more like.
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.
Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
You fucking idiot. You 'useful idiot', more like.
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.
You're getting your misattributions wrong. The phrase "useful idiots" wasn't misattributed to Stalin, it was misattributed to Lenin. That is easily verified now that the reference book, They Never Said It, is on Google books. http://books.google.com/books?... [google.com] Of course there's always Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Come on, be fair. He can always serve as a bad example.
Re:Motivated rejection of science (Score:5, Informative)
Starting to depart a bit from the topic, but 'useful idiot' is not an invention of America's Glenn Beck. It dates at least back to Russia in the 1940's, and then developed generally as a term to generally characterize 'fellow traveler' socialists who were not themselves communists but were willing dupes of communists.
Not everything in this universe is an invention of American left or right wingers.
That said, I find the GP's attitude of "no such thing as catastrophic man-made global warming" coupled with his sarcasm to be as unhelpful as your ahistorical claim. He may well be right that there is no such thing; if climate sensitivity is on the low end of current IPCC estimates, then a reasonable person could argue that means the results will not be catastrophic in a global sense, and attribution will make any specific weather disaster tough to pin on anthropogenic climate change. But to blithely assert that it therefore doesn't exist? I'll definitely pass on that assertion.
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Stupidity rules (Score:5, Interesting)
Or is it the money that rules?
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Money rules the stupid.
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Nah, Wyoming saw how stupid Kansas is and are now trying to take the crown. They have a ways to go, but this is an excellent start.
Why the hell... (Score:5, Insightful)
...should a lawyer get to determine the science curriculum? Shouldn't it be, you know, people who are educated in science that decide the science curriculum? (yes, that was rhetorical, I know damn well what the answer is)
I think Wyoming can do far better.
I agree!
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...should a lawyer get to determine the science curriculum?
Perhaps we should get a musician to determine the law curriculum and a scientist to determine the arts curriculum. It makes just as much sense.
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...should a lawyer get to determine the science curriculum?
Perhaps we should get a musician to determine the law curriculum and a scientist to determine the arts curriculum. It makes just as much sense.
No, it makes much more sense. Musicians often have to deal with the law and most scientists like art. Lawyers however appear to have less respect for the law than anyone else.
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The "scientific method" is a way to verify what is true. The set of observations Humanity has accumulated across the millennia and the theories that explain how these observations mesh together _is_ Science.
And it is very much something you have to learn to build upon and further your understanding. Science education is no oxymoron, you simply misunderstand what is Science.
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Taking courses in science done by somebody else is history, not science. Science is doing it yourself.
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Tell ya what, there is a new book out that shows race has a genetic factor.
A new book "shows" something? A book written by a "science writer, not a scientist himself.".
Got a reference to the peer reviewed science?
They don't agree with us! Burn them! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They don't agree with us! Burn them! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, in particular, language like the word "believe" being used for scientific theories.
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As someone who is certain about his own observations about climate change- the real problem is playing the blame game. Assumptions about cause have obscured the effect to the point that we can no longer deal with the effect politically because everybody is too busy pointing fingers about the cause.
With the melting of the tundra 10 years ago, we hit a tipping point, it became too late to stop climate change. It is now a positive feedback loop. You could remove every human being from the planet, and global
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Why do you denialists just ignore data? There has been no stagnation, you denialist.
*grabs popcorn* (Score:4, Informative)
Re: *grabs popcorn* (Score:2)
Of the 4 routes out of my area, all of them require driving 100+ miles before you reach another major town (as defined as having more than 1 gas station and a post office that opens atleast an hour a day).
Your claim is not exactly a shocking revelation.
Re: (Score:3)
What you get (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep .. that's what you get when you let corporations pay for the politicians bills. .. which they are not. .. rather .. it never existed. All an illusion.
They are owned by industry and will never side with the People they are supposedly there to represent
Democracy is dead in the US
the progression (Score:4, Funny)
it's not happening.
if it is happening, it's a good thing.
ok, it's happening, but it's not man-made.
ok, it's not good, but it's still not man-made.
jesus would fix it if we had prayer in school.
Money (Score:2)
Wyoming has the best politicians money can afford. It won't matter as kids get information from all over, so they will see this through this pretty quickly.
Not the only problem... (Score:3)
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards.
It's may be "one of a number of problems", but for some reason it's also the only "problem" mentioned.
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The other problems they had probably weren't interesting to reporters.
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The article does mention one other problematic issue - it is this unsettled scientific question called "evolution". Seriously, read TFA.
Job creation for other countries (Score:2)
ummm... (Score:2)
Obligatory stereotype spoiler alert (Score:2)
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Anyone that can make it through an undergraduate text on atmospheric science and be convinced about the propaganda in the undergraduate text on atmospheric science.
Wow, who knew?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Deniers are too stupid to read -- prove me wron (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Warming is happening.
2. CO2 concentration is atypically high.
3. CO2 concentration is atypically high due to man-made emissions.
4. CO2 concentration has some upward effect on global temperature.
However, he also holds these beliefs:
1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.
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I would say your skeptic friend is very astute (I am not a climate change skeptic). His point #6 is the salient one and probably immutable. So just as the climatologists can say with high probability that the climate will change as we pump CO2 into the air, the political scientists can say with high probability that the world governments (or anyone else) aren't going to do anything to slow it down significantly. Both may be inconvenient truths but inconvenience doesn't reduce the probability of being acc
Re:Deniers are too stupid to read -- prove me wron (Score:5, Insightful)
Curiously, your friend believes "The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.", but is certain that "There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming."
This seems like wishful thinking. If we really don't have a good handle on the severity of global warming then it is just as likely that the impacts will be much greater than anticipated.
Regarding the costs of mitigating, all published economists agree that it is cheaper to mitigate than to accept the impacts of climate change, and the sooner we start mitigating the cheaper it will be.
Re:Deniers are too stupid to read -- prove me wron (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
Argument from disbelief.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
If he believes that (1) is true how can he know that (2) is true.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
Argument from disbelief again.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
But 1 and 2 are contradictory
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
The real point - he doesn't want to do something, so it's impossible to do anything, so there is nothing that need to be done.
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.
The final proof that he is arguing backwards from what he wants to happen (or not happen) to what he wants to be true.
Deniers! Start from the science! Don't start from your personal feelings and work back to the science, that's not how it's done.
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Not really. More argument from example. He likes to point out how virtually every climate model has fallen down, badly, during the current warming pause.
He believes #2 for the same reason he admits that CO2 likely has a warming effect. Scientists can both explain theoretically and demonstrate the mechanisms by which they occur.
Re:Deniers are too stupid to read -- prove me wron (Score:5, Informative)
The question isn't whether "CO2 causes warming" but whether a change from 290 to 330 ppm in the troposphere can be the cause of a measurable change in the heat content of troposphere.
Well, we blew past 330 ppm in the 1960's and are now at 400 ppm. That causes a direct forcing (not including feedbacks) of 5.35*ln(400/280)W/m^2 or about 1.9 W/m^2. For comparison, the output from the sun fluctuates by as much as 1 W/m^2 every 11 years. CO2 is now causing a forcing that is double the increase in solar forcing - but the CO2 forcing is constant while the solar forcing only peaks once every 11 years.
I'm curious whether your undergraduate text explains why increased CO2 concentration in the stratosphere causes the stratosphere to loose heat.
Here is what the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry says: "Greenhouse gases (CO2, O3, CFC) absorb infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth and trap the heat in the troposphere. If this absorption is really strong, the greenhouse gas blocks most of the outgoing infra-red radiation close to the Earth's surface. This means that only a small amount of outgoing infra-red radiation reaches carbon dioxide in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere. On the other hand, carbon dioxide emits heat radiation, which is lost from the stratosphere into space. In the stratosphere, this emission of heat becomes larger than the energy received from below by absorption and, as a result, there is a net energy loss from the stratosphere and a resulting cooling." - http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/e... [atmosphere.mpg.de]
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Re: It Is Not Politics (Score:3)
You got one thing right. The state is evil. And by state I mean the government itself, not Wyoming per se.
If, in order to solve this problem, the liberty and freedom of the people in Wyoming to run their own lives and government needs to be sacrificed, then I will never agree with your "solution" to this problem.
If we must give our liberty in order to survive, then count me as your enemy. What good is life without liberty?
Oh and your all powerful government you require to solve this problem, if it's at
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This bullshit again? What do you call the adaptation of climate models over time to better fit recorded data again? I suggest you pay attention yourself instead of regurgitating shit vomited up by some intern in a political office. I'd say you already know more about the topic than that court jester who kicked off the "testing part is missing" as a talking point based on some half remembered high school science
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"The testing part is missing; the repeatable testability by independent parties of an hypothesis."
Say what? All of the scientists/science teams studying this issue are independent parties testing the hypothesis - that's what science is and how it works. It is a process of continual repeatable testing of the hypothesis.
What is your concept of this "missing outside party"? A new "super science" that mysteriously needs to be created to address this one issue because, as you admit, it is politically inconvenient for Wyoming?
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Wyoming may not be "politically correct" on the issue, but they are correct that "global warming" being caused primarily by man-made emissions isn't settled science. (And no, computer scientists are not the correct scientists. ;) )
You have *no* idea of what you're talking about. Computer scientists don't run climate models, climate researchers do.
The rest of your post is full of baloney that is readily refuted, but it's a tedious and probably hopeless job so I'll just pick on one statement: "The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concedes for the first time that global temperatures have not risen since 1998."
This is outright dishonest. 1998 was, at the time, the hottest year ever in the instrumental record by a *long* shot. It r