Success in determining what children shall be taught, by parents, of all people, has got the global warming industry organizing to purge local schools of heretical thought. Specifically, the robust ‘skeptical’ case against the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming must not be permitted when the subject is broached in the classroom.
Left unmentioned is one seemingly meaningful reason, that the global warming industry — those, we must recall, who seek authority, individual expense and economic sacrifice — have after three decades and scores of billions of dollars been unable to make their case. Possibly teaching (or “indoctrinating”, you choose) their “ism” as fact is unwarranted.
Now comes historian and leading climate alarmist Naomi Oreskes of the University of California-San Diego, with a thousand deathless words in today’s Los Angeles Times grounded in her recent appearance for jury duty. Her beef is that we should accept authority, particularly her authority. Science, she concludes, is not a prosecution that must make its case, but a jury that decides what is and what isn’t, for us.
Cue Scopes “monkey trial” reference, where the defense sought to establish that laws forbidding the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional. Today, in its modern day equivalent, the climate industry seeks to prohibit teaching of the robust skeptical case against their faith, a theory grounded in computer models, a love of research grants and scarcity, while being continuously mocked by observations.
Leading Scopes protagonist, longtime Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, “led a Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin’s theory of evolution from American classrooms”. The comparisons of a Cross of Green to his own famous outburst should not go unnoticed.
Notwithstanding this belated stance that they need not make their case — as Bill Murray said in “Ghostbusters”, back off man, I’m a scientist! — the alarmists still have prosecutorial analogy or two stuck to their heels. In Scopes, the prosecution opened its case by pointing to the authority of the book of Genesis. For the alarmists, the be all and end all is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ‘Assessment Report’, or what journalist Donna Laframboise calls in her book exposing that group’s corruption, the “climate Bible”.
Oreskes waves her hands ceaselessly insisting we must genuflect. The voters have said no, we need not. It continues to gall the global warming industry that this matters. Which itself tells us most of what we need to know about the global warmists.
I recall MIT’s Richard Lindzen remarking about this resort to political concepts, such as “consensus”, to get past their being unable to present a persuasive argument. “With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign.”
What Oreskes et al. want isn’t science, they want authority. She seizes it in this LA Times paean to respecting one’s betters. So, the loudest scientists are judge and jury. Priceless.
I’m curious, who appointed “science”, and science historians, to that post? Is it really, as it seems, a self-appointed position? Is it instead an elected position? How far does that authority extend: is it to making the laws that they seek, which is what this is about, which of course proves too much?
If not, then they agree: they’ve spoken, now it’s up to others who have other roles, which roles are not theirs. Those other people, the public, school boards, parents, elected officials, will give it the consideration it warrants, all things considered. Not merely pronouncements and the tired Holocaust denier and “tobacco scientist!” ad hominem designed to distract from the fact that these people have a theory which they’ve been given billions of taxpayer dollars expressly for the purpose of establishing their theory and they cannot do it.
They are still left with computer model projections which can project whatever you build into them. And looking out the window for the past fifteen years proves these models are wrong. Which is a conclusion self-appointed policy czars cannot, in this country, strip from individuals.
Thank you. Now go away.