Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Green Movement Jumps The Shark

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Walter Russell Mead:

Between Rajenda Pachauri and Peter Gleick, the international green movement has displayed a penchant for colorful personalities. But the root cause of the green meltdown is not the flawed personalities and eccentric ethical standards some greens display. The problem has been that the greens tried to stick the world with a monstrous and unworkable climate control system through the flawed medium of a global treaty. This project is so expensive, so poorly conceived and, in fact, so naive and unthinking, that greens increasingly felt their only hope to get their agenda adopted involved scare tactics.

Like Dean Acheson addressing the communist menace, they were “clearer than truth.” They stretched evidence, invented catastrophes — vanishing glaciers, disappearing polar bears, waves of force five hurricanes sweeping up the coast, the end of snow — to sell their unsalable dream. Not all greens were this irresponsible, but many prominent spokespersons and journalists working with the movement were; ultimately the mix of an unworkable policy agenda and a climate of hype and hysteria holed the green ship below the waterline.

Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous. What makes it all sad rather than funny is that underneath the hype, the misstatements, the vicious character attacks on anyone who dissented from the orthodoxy of the day, and the dumbest policy ideas since the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to outlaw war, there really are some issues here that require thoughtful study and response.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get it from people who are reflexively anti-human socialists, such as John Holdren.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Climate Fraud

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Ross Kaminsky called it:

If those climate alarmists who went after me (for what I said explicitly in my note was “my speculation”) had any honor, they would not just apologize, but feel some guilt for being associated with the religion of climate change whose high priests could sink to identity theft because they feel “frustration” at not being able to get the rest of the country to join their rent-seeking, anti-human cult.

In the meantime, I take some satisfaction in believing, though I’ll never know for sure, that my article gave Mr. Gleick some incentive to confess, before the FBI agent came to his door. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to spend the money on a new (non-Epson) scanner.

Note also the comments from Judith Curry, who has been one of the few people in the climate community actually acting like a scientist.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Johann Hari of climate “science.”

Kind of funny the sort of people they’ll hand out “Genius Awards” to.

[Update a couple minutes later]

But it was only a first offense: Gleick has apparently been removed from the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics. Gee, I’d have thought he’d be a poster boy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Don’t know much about science books.

[Update a while later]

In apologizing, Gleick blames his victims:

Once you begin to believe that the success of the Cause justifies deceit and theft, how long until you begin making excuses for other crimes committed on behalf of the Cause? I do not accuse Peter Gleick and his fellow fanatics of any Stalinist ambitions, but when we see them engaged in Stalinist methods — publishing forged documents to smear their critics – aren’t we justified in suspecting that they are not otherwise honest?

Actually, I suspect that some of them harbor Stalinist ambitions (e.g., Holdren). What a piece of work this guy is.

Education, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Weird

From Social Upheaval

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…is great art made:

It is with the velocity of a giant squid and the sprawl of its erogenous arms that with water-wheels the leverage in any musculoskeletal appendage can move into positions within the time it would take the engine of filaments to accelerate the psychic mass of bodily understanding and construction for such a displacement to continue in different venues and as multiple in purpose as the simple machine of our vessel will allow toward the disappearance of a nexus like in infinite mirror games but with the ability to count each movement of the progression as it acts in mechanical, yet organic, jerking behind the dreamlike animals with their pink illusions that roll their wet bodies into our delicate systems

Yes, those college degrees were totally worth the money. Though I suspect that pharmaceuticals may have played a role.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Disastrous State Of Higher Education

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This isn’t really news, but it’s depressing anyway, indicative of a massive failure of government policy and misincentives:

What the study found is not the least bit surprising. Students who learned little in college (as evidenced by scoring in the bottom quintile on the College Learning Assessment) were three times as likely to be unemployed as students who scored in the top quintile, twice as likely to be living at home, and somewhat more likely to have run up credit card debts.

Those findings throw cold water on the smiley face idea that going to college is necessarily a good “investment.” Even some of the top graduates were unemployed and living with their parents and a much higher number of low-performing graduates were. Unfortunately, the study did not seek to find out how many of those graduates were “underemployed” in jobs that high schoolers can do. (Perhaps no further evidence on that is necessary, though, in view of this study.)

Another particularly interesting finding from “Documenting Uncertain Times” is that employers pay little attention to what students majored in and how good their academic records were. The authors write, “That nearly two-thirds of these recent graduates’ employers did not require them to submit transcripts speaks to the perceived limited value and trust employers currently place in this traditional record of achievement in higher education.” If, as I have argued for years, many employers are simply using the presence of a college degree as a screening device, that behavior makes perfect sense.

A company that, for example, needs to hire someone to handle a car-rental desk might insist on a college degree as evidence of trainability, but not think it worth the added cost of checking to see how he or she did in college. Whatever education might have been absorbed is irrelevant; all that matters is the credential itself.

A credential becoming worth less and less. This all started when it became difficult for employers to test job applicants. As noted there, if we can’t get government out of the student loan business, which is a large part of the problem, we need to force the schools to put some skin in the loan game themselves, because as the situation is currently, they’re not punished for their failure to educate, but rewarded.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Climate Change And Evolution

24 Comments

So it’s come to this:

after hearing an increasing number of anecdotes about K-12 teachers being challenged about how they taught climate science to their students, she says she began to see “parallels” between the two debates –namely, an ideological drive from pressure groups to “teach the controversy” where no scientific controversy exists. To get expertise in this area, NCSE hired climate and environmental education expert Mark McCaffrey as its new climate coordinator and appointed Pacific Institute hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick to its board of directors.

“There’s a climate of confusion in this country around climate science,” says McCaffrey, and NCSE’s goal will be to ensure that “teachers have the tools they need if they get pushback and feel intimidated.” Recent surveys, such as one done among K-12 teachers in September by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), suggest that attacks on climate education are far from rare. NSTA found that over half of the respondents reported having encountered global warming scepticism from parents, and 26% had encountered it from administrators. And a December survey from the National Earth Science Teachers’ Association found that 36% of its 555 K-12 teachers who currently teach climate science had been “influenced” to “teach the controversy.”

One of these things is not like the other. And Gleick sounds like a real piece of work.