Here is the actual bill...I personally love the part about Erik the Red.
State of South Dakota
EIGHTY-FIFTH SESSION
LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY, 2010
363R0643 HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 1009
A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.
WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide; and
WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place; and
WHEREAS, historical climatological data shows without question the earth has gone through trends where the climate was much warmer than in our present age. The Climatic Optimum and Little Climatic Optimum are two examples. During the Little Climatic Optimum, Erik the Red settled Greenland where they farmed and raised dairy cattle. Today, ninety percent of Greenland is covered by massive ice sheets, in many places more than two miles thick; and
WHEREAS, the polar ice cap is subject to shifting warm water currents and the break-up of ice by high wind events. Many oceanographers believe this to be the major cause of melting polar ice, not atmospheric warming; and
WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as "the gas of life"; and
WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will produce many beneficial effects on the natural plant and animal environments of the earth":
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:
(1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and
(3) That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.
scary
ReplyDelete"Many oceanographers believe this to be the major cause of melting polar ice, not atmospheric warming"
ReplyDeleteriiiiiiiiight. and why would those polar ice caps be melting, pray tell?
what the fuck? I want to smack them all upside the head with the last IPCC report. Which is thousands of pages long, so it'll sting pretty good.
ReplyDeleteAlso, did you see how they claim that "astrological dynamics" can affect world weather patterns?
ReplyDeleteI'm a Leo...hear me ROAR (and cause global warming)?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if that's what they meant, but then again, they definitely just made up several words so they didn't know either.
Is the bit about 31,000 American scientists signing a petition that disputed climate change true? And if so, why did they do that? Did they get paid off by Exxon Mobile or something?
ReplyDeleteYeah, such a petition exists.
ReplyDeleteIt's not such a hot shot as everybody (on the other side) thinks it is, though. It has over 31,000 signatures, but the way it's quoted, people think that means 31,000 scientists - say, 31,000 people with PhDs. Not so. A quick glance through the petition's website (http://www.petitionproject.org/) shows that their "qualifications" are anybody with a BS or above. So, any of us could sign it as "scientists." There are some PhDs, some in climate science or something close, but there are far more people that are not climate scientists and do not have graduate degrees. Doing a google search of random names is pretty fun, since most of them come up showing that a good number of people that have signed have nothing really to do with science at all. There appears to be no check in who is signing the petition, either, which isn't surprising.
Also, it's been going on for 10 years, although most citations of it make it seem like it popped up last month or something. 31,000 signatures over 10 years is not that impressive. To put it in perspective, over 40,000 PhDs have been earned every year in the US alone for the past few years. That's over all disciplines, so only a fraction are science, but still. That means over 400,000 PhDs have been awarded in the past decade, give or take. Way more if you consider people earning PhDs elsewhere and then moving here. Way, way, way more if you consider people with any degree BS or higher...you get the point.
I haven't seen anything about who funds the petition, but I also don't really care that much. There's most likely some energy companies or their like funding parts of it, but I'm still not impressed. But, on an interesting aside, one of the co-founders of the petition was Frederick Seitz, who died recently, but was previously paid millions of dollars by R.J. Reynolds to produce scientific data showing that smoking doesn't harm you. So he's kind of a fucktard anyway.
FINALLY, like Rose mentioned somewhere else, people love this petition since they think it shows a lack of "scientific consensus," which is just wrong. The number of peer-reviewed articles suggesting anthropogenic changes in short-term climate variables far, far, far outweigh any showing that we have nothing to do with it. That's all the consensus I need for now.
In summary: fuck people of any persuasion who pretend they understand science to further their political aims.