Starship Asterisk*

South Dakota wants to require schools to teach children that climate change has astrological causes. Not to mention thermological and cosmological. All those logicals and so little logic!

South Dakota HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 1009

Gee Chris,
Doesn't this belong in the Astronomically Bad Jokes thread?
It is in dire need of proof-reading and correction
Perhaps it was written by their local 4 th grade class

How many times can they rehash "It's just a theory, not a proven fact!" before someone goes postal?

BMAONE23 wrote:It is in dire need of proof-reading and correction
Perhaps it was written by their local 4th grade class

Unfortunately, the text is demonstrative of verbiage on bills written at the state level, at least in Oklahoma. And to think, these are the people we choose to lead us, many of whom are lawyers. At the national level, the verbiage is little better, but then, they have staff writers.

Whenever I'm reading a document full of verbiage I like to try to parse it down to its essentials -- substitute a simple word for a compex phrase, that sort of thing. This one, parsed to the bare bones, says that teachers should be careful how they teach. Only lawyers have sufficient training to say something that simple incomprehensibly.

Rob

If that was all they were saying, I might be able to overlook the grammar and idiotic mistakes (astrological ), but they are saying CO₂ is not a anthropogenic pollutant and is in fact beneficial. They also state other things as fact that are not any less theory than the AGW they are protesting. I'm not convinced one way or the other about mankind's influence on global warming, but the things the alarmist are calling for are things we should be doing anyway; reducing pollution, searching for renewable alternative energy sources, halting widespread destruction of natural habitats, and, in general, being better stewards of this Earth on which we have to live. I don't see what the problem is.

True, the WHERAS clauses contain silly statements, but that's not a problem. Those bits are just the stated excuse for writing the bill. Only the BE IT RESOLVED parts are important, since they become the law. And those parts are essentially statements of the blatantly obvious. Yes, we could quibble about them, and yes, somebody needs to do a little proof-reading, but they don't say anything objectionable, do they?

I will certainly agree that the apparent purpose of this bill is to denigrate science, particularly science as it is applied to global warming, but the bill has been emasculated (no doubt in committee) so it doesn't really manage to do any harm. Decades from now it will resurface (assuming it's passed at all) in some political science class and everyone will have a chuckle about the rubes who wrote it, and that will be that. (Perhaps it's my distance from these particular rubes -- though we have our own, no doubt -- that allows me to have this relaxed response to the bill.)

Rob

I do realize that there is a delicate balancing point for atmospheric CO2, but they are correct in stating that CO2 is beneficial to plant growth. Just remove it all and see how long plant life survives. Then as goes the plante so goes all other lifeforms.
I too have seen the admittedly fatally flawed experiments concerning raising CO2 levels in a bottle and thereby raising the biosphere's internal temperature. I say fatally flawed because the level of CO2 rise isn't checked at the PPM level. they are in fact producing elevated temperatures by raising CO2 levels to parts per hundred or possibly(likely) parts per ten.

There are two issues. One is simply a matter of policy, and IMO it is bad policy when states start attempting to micromanage curriculum in this way. They are clearly singling out a very narrow subject (one that is only barely taught in public schools to begin with) for overtly political reasons. An additional clue is that the names attached to the bill overwhelmingly represent one party. You'd have to be pretty naive to believe that this bill is really about education.

However, the main reason I started this discussion was because of the appallingly bad wording- the use of "astrology" and the use of terms that make no sense- "thermology" (a kind of medical imaging) and "cosmology" (the study of the structure and formation of the Universe). The fact that a legislator could write something this bad, and that so many others would then attach their names to it, certainly makes me think that this group of people are the last ones that should be dictating educational standards!

I think human-induced climate change is a difficult issue for many because, like Darwinian evolution, it is perceived to directly threaten ideological beliefs. I've heard other legislators complain that it's "impossible for humans to destroy the Earth, only God can do that." We all know the lengths many politicians go to muffle certain elements of science in education. I wonder, if they had stronger critical thinking skills and a deeper science background, would they would either rethink their position or just become more proficient in attacking science...

How many folks do you know that, on one hand, drive cars and use the internet and go to modern hospitals, while on the other claim science must be wrong when it contradicts fundamental elements of their belief system?