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