What was that I said the other day about climate change denial being the new evolution denial? Denialists are joining forces to say that “dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.” When these people use words like “critical thinking,” what they really mean is that bogus unscientific nonsense should be taught as science. MoJo talked to
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist who directs the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University sums up what’s really going on here: “Wherever there is a battle over evolution now,” he said, “there is a secondary battle to diminish other hot-button issues like Big Bang and, increasingly, climate change. It is all about casting doubt on the veracity of science–to say it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism.”
Meanwhile, this deliberate cognitive dissonance keeps diverging farther and farther from observable reality. Bad news from Siberia:
Arctic seabed stores of methane are now destabilizing and venting vast stores of frozen methane—a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The paper, in the prestigious journal Science, reports the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf—long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane—is instead perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Melting of even a fraction of the clathrates stored in that shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
Past extreme warming periods were associated with increased methane levels as a result of CO2 release. But I suppose the denialists’ next move is to propose a “scientific” theory of the Second Coming will solve the problem.
