Shut up, he explained.

This would be funny....

...if it weren't so scary and pathetic as an example of (a) the cognitive dissonance of American liberalism and (b) didn't reek of succumbing to the totalitarian temptation.

Bill Nye says:

//The single most important thing we can do now, however, is talk about climate change. My claim is that if we were talking about climate change the way we’re talking about Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore or other important issues, we would be getting these things done. We would be solving this problem together. And, look, it’s hard. You’re going to meet people who don’t want to talk about it. //

And:


//Yeah, you’re leading to my next point. Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic. And so part of the message in this book is to get the deniers out of the picture...//


This is a very Stalinist approach, one might say, to the traditional American virtue of encouraging speech and debate.

Salon, though, thinks it's terrific.

Jane Goodall: no homosexual behavior in wild chimps and...

...homosexuality expressed only among captive populations of a variety of animals.

That surprises me given the many news articles I thought I'd seen about "gay" seagulls and penguins or what-not.



Of course, Goodall has to end her piece with a comment about the goodness of homosexuality in light of overpopulation. It seems to be a first principle among cultured Westerners that the birth of another human baby just brings us that much closer to doom.

Al Gore and Bill Nye "the Science Guy" teach high school students how to be real scientists...

...fabricate your global warming test results and get lots and lots of government funding!

Watts Up With That attempts to replicate an experiment that Al Gore and Bill Nye tout as being "so easy a high school kid can do it" to prove the truth of global warming.  The result is a rigorous analysis of how important it is to modern climate science to force the data to fit the theory:

Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified, and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.


The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL.

But, hey, they've got funding!

By the way, Watts Up With That was also responsible for destroying a bit of pseudo-knowledge that I've always cherished, namely that Venus' intense heat is caused by a "runaway Greenhouse Effect."  Apparently, notwithstanding that kinda-cool explanation, it's not; it's caused by Venus' extreme atmospheric density.

Also, one of the commenters at Watts Up With That notes a similar problem with various "high school science experiments" designed to prove global warming/the greenhouse effect, i.e., they don't work.  You can just imagine the teachers and students either figuring that they didn't do the experiment right, and moving along, or fudging the data in order to get the right result, i.e., replicating the scientific method used by scientists in getting grants since time immemorial.

The commenter observes:

Looks like maybe it is not just Al Gore that is misrepresenting the actual results of these high school experiments, but a whole raft of supposed educators. If so, it implicates our entire educational system. How many thousands of times have students tried and failed to replicate the stated experimental results without these failures ever managing to emerge as a challenge challenge to those results? The scandal here could really be huge.

It probably is because, notwithstanding the lip service paid to replication of results and the willingness to invalidate a theory based on an experiment, humans are humans and human nature respects a "magisterium," particularly in this day and age the magisterium of science.