Education environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 27: Because The Water Hyacinths…Had Clogged The River
The Washington Post weighs in on “Denialgate.” Pearl-clutching:
Legislation to fight global warming has disappeared from Washington’s policy agenda, but the battle over climate science continues to escalate.
The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group.
“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in a post on his Huffington Post blog.
Gleick’s admission “is the latest in an escalating spiral of polarizing warfare between self-described ‘Climate Hawks’ and so-called Climate Deniers,” which leaves the majority of scientists and the public “caught in the crossfire,” American University professor Matthew C. Nisbet, who studies the issues, wrote in a blog entry.
What Gleick deserves is pretty far removed from what he’s gonna get. Sent February 21:
Heartland Institute’s claim of victimhood in the wake of the release of its confidential documents is absurd. They are heavily funded by some of the most powerful corporations in the world, with an agenda built around the wholesale propagation of falsehoods in the public sphere. When a single individual (the justifiably infuriated climatologist Peter Gleick) carries out a specifically-targeted sting operation (a “retail” falsehood, if you will) that exposes a massive infrastructure of mendacity, he deserves the thanks of the nation, not a fusillade of obloquy.
Given that climate change deniers routinely distort the truth in grotesque and massively harmful ways, why should Gleick’s fib give us the vapors? Heartland’s “educational” programs undercut the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry.” Gleick’s actions, conversely, reflect a deep and abiding patriotism that our third President, a man whose love of scientific truth matched his love of country, would surely recognize and applaud.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots media irresponsibility Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 26: Won’t Somebody Please Have Pity?
The Kansas City Star reprints the LA Times editorial on Climate Denial In The Classroom.
Fortunately, if we’re about to enter a battle over classroom instruction on climate change, it won’t go on for decades, because the impacts of global warming are already patently obvious. Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. Despite an intense campaign to discredit his work, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, has been validated repeatedly. Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each – drought-fueled wildfires in Texas, Hurricane Irene, and Mississippi River flooding were among the 14 cases.
These are facts, not philosophical or religious dogma. Another fact: Sophisticated climate models show that things are going to get a lot worse. It’s bad enough that we’re gambling our children’s futures by doing so little to fight this problem; let’s not ask their teachers to lie to them about it too.
Now that Peter Gleick has emerged as the whistleblower in the Heartland case, let’s watch the poor bastard get pilloried, shall we? Sent February 21:
When the Heartland Institute claims the mantle of victimhood in the “denialgate” scandal, they are continuing a pattern of cynical manipulation of the media and public opinion. There is no doubt that Heartland’s role in muddying the debate on climate change is a crucial one; the organization has been active in promoting conservative causes across the policy spectrum, and has long done so through the dissemination of half-truths, strategic omissions, and (when necessary) outright lying. Their faux-outrage at finally being caught with their mendacious pants down as laughable as their attempts to undercut necessary action on climate change are deplorable.
Dr. Peter Gleick’s act of courage in blowing the whistle on these heavily-funded hoodlums will, of course, not go unpunished. We can anticipate hearing the morality of his actions debated endlessly in the media, while Heartland Institute’s mendacity and duplicity are ignored and minimized. While the world grows steadily hotter.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists Heartland Institute
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 25: These People Make Me Want To Bring Back Public Shaming
It’s good to read these words in the Los Angeles Times:
The culture wars have been fought in the classroom for decades, waged over such issues as school prayer, the teaching of evolution and whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include the phrase “under God.” But the conflict usually pits backers of religious instruction against secularists. The latest skirmish, by contrast, is centered on a scientific issue that has nothing to do with religious teaching: climate change.
Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute in Chicago, one of many nonprofits that spread disinformation about climate science in hopes of stalling government action to combat global warming, reveal that the organization is working on a curriculum for public schools that casts doubt on the work of climatologists worldwide. Heartland officials say one of the documents was a fake, but the curriculum plans were reportedly discussed in more than one. According to the New York Times, the curriculum would claim, among other things, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”
That is a lie so big that, to quote from “Mein Kampf,” it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” On one side of the “controversy” are credentialed climatologists around the globe who publish in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals and agree that the planet is warming and that humans are to blame; on the other are fossil-fuel-industry-funded “experts” who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines disputing established truths. These are quickly debunked, but not before their findings have been reported by conservative blogs and news outlets, which somehow never get around to mentioning it when these studies are proved to be badly flawed.
Heartland is a repository of, essentially, species traitors. Sent February 20:
The likely consequences of global climate change go far beyond inconvenience or annoyance. In fact, the probability of unprecedented disaster is so great that one wonders what’s happening in the minds of denialists like the ones at the Heartland Institute.
Are they caught in a loop of wishful thinking, where the reassuring words of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists outweigh the hundreds of other scientific associations which acknowledge the magnitude of the emergency? Are they end-of-times Armageddonists, anticipating a rich harvest of souls from a planetary cataclysm they’re actively enabling? Are they secret disaster capitalists, seeking ways to profit from a climate emergency that will disrupt billions of lives and cause untold misery over the coming centuries?
While resolving these speculations may be impossible, there is one question with a clear and definite answer. Should the Heartland Institute’s climate-change curricula find a place in America’s schools? No, no, no.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialism Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 23: Phlogiston!
The New Jersey Star-Ledger goes further on the Heartland papers:
The nation’s leading skeptics of climate change science were dealt a blow this week when hundreds of private internal documents — detailing donors, spending and the group’s anti-science strategy — were leaked to the public.
The documents betrayed the inner workings of the Heartland Institute, the most vocal of U.S. climate change “deniers” who, despite decades of scientific data proving that the Earth’s climate is warming, promote skepticism and doubt.
The leak is the smoking gun that climate scientists have been waiting for — and should be a warning to anyone who buys into the idea that “global warming is just a theory.”
You’re being played.
The Heartland Institute’s key strategy has been to create doubt in the American public by saying that climate change is a controversial, unproven theory.
Fuckers. Sent February 18:
“Teach the controversy” sounds like an excellent idea, doesn’t it? To understand scientific methodology, we should examine areas where scientists disagree; rigorously examining competing theories is surely the best way for students to learn how actual science works…the argument is an alluring one, and the climate-change denialists at the Heartland Institute are betting that America’s school systems will be seduced.
But sometimes there is no controversy to teach. Nobody’s pressuring schools to teach both geocentric and heliocentric cosmologies, and the medieval theory of “humours” has no place in medical training (for which we can all be grateful).
There is no scientific disagreement on the basic facts of planetary climate change: it’s happening, it’s a serious problem, and humans have a huge role in causing it. The Heartland Institute’s cynical strategy is to create an artificial controversy, thereby safeguarding the profit margins of their corporate sponsors for a few more years.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists epistemology Heartland Institute
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 22: More Ultra-Hard Sapir-Whorfianism
More on Heartland Institute, this time from the Boston Globe:
Because Heartland was not specific about what was fake and what was real, The Associated Press attempted to verify independently key parts of separate budget and fundraising documents that were leaked. The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect.
David Wojick, a Virginia-based federal database contractor, said in an email that the document was accurate about his project to put curriculum materials in schools that promote climate skepticism.
“My goal is to help them teach one of the greatest scientific debates in history,” Wojick said. “This means teaching both sides of the science, more science, not less.”
Googling “david wojik” +epistemologist gets you the self-description in the first sentence of my letter. I am proud of the final sentence in the second graf. Sent February 17:
The Heartland Institute’s point man for climate-change denial in public-school curricula is David Wojik, who has described himself as a “philosopher, engineer and logician.” Note the absence of any training in climate science! Wojik’s doctoral work focused on the history and philosophy of science — surely worthy areas of study, but ones which he’s well paid to misapply in distorting the nature of research on global warming.
While all but a statistically insignificant minority of climatologists agree on the human causes of climate change, many details are yet unresolved: which are the primary forcing agents? How do different feedback loops interact? By highlighting areas of disagreement while ignoring a worldwide scientific consensus, Wojik and his sponsors wrap greed-driven denialism in a cloak of spurious intellectual rectitude.
While Wojik’s employers are no doubt pleased with his work, the laws of chemistry and physics are unaffected by even the glibbest epistemological sophistry.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Karl Rove reality-based community Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 21: Post-Modernist Science Education: Applying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis To Atmospheric Chemistry.
More on the Heartland Institute leak, from the New York Times:
Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars.
Related in OpinionThe documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” one document said.
While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
You know what? I’m sick of people saying “alarmist” like it’s an insult. The news is pretty fucking alarming, all the damn time. If you’re not alarmed (hell, if you’re not absolutely terrified) you’re just not paying attention. Sorry to harsh your mellow, but that’s what’s happening.
Anyway, I like the phrase “nihilistic political solipsism.” Sent February 16:
In the helter-skelter 24-hour news cycle that shapes American politics, the words of officials from the previous administration might as well be written in hieroglyphics; the first decade of our century is already ancient history. But the recent leak of documents from the Heartland Institute describing their plans to foster climate-change denial in our nation’s classrooms call to mind Karl Rove’s comments to journalist Ron Suskind. Expressing contempt for the “reality-based community,” Rove went on to say, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
But this is a dangerous game. Old-style Soviet historical revisionism is only effective when the facts are all in the past; the Heartland Institute is attempting to revise the future by applying their nihilistic political solipsism to actual real-world problems requiring reality-based solutions. The physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect won’t be fooled by banners and photo ops.
Warren Senders