March 23, 2007

Anti-Moonbattery At Colorado School, 6th Graders Decide Global Warming Not Man-made

So, Al Gore is not smarter than a 6th grader.

A visit from the profit prophet of doom Al Gore is no doubt in order--didn't these students get the "debate is over" memo?
Humans don’t cause global warming, a jury of sixth graders at Trail Ridge Middle School concluded Thursday after hearing opposing arguments from their peers.

“They’re pretty young for this kind of thinking. They did great,” paleontology teacher Ken Poppe said after the 40-minute “trial” in his classroom.

With Earth’s warming accepted as a tenet, pre-teen “lawyers” and “scientists” debated whether humans have caused it.

Eleven jurors listened intently as prosecutors and defendants flashed contradictory graphs tracking global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels, polar ice cap statistics, volcanic activity and sea surface temperatures — all of which were found Wednesday in the school’s computer lab.
. . .
Ken Poppe said he let students choose which side of the debate to argue. Poppe personally believes global warming is cyclical and not affected by humans, while his Colorado State University student aide David Richards believes the opposite. Both, however, said they presented both sides equally to the students leading up to Thursday’s debate.

“What I think is not the issue. It’s what the students dig up and how they present the case,” Poppe said.

Only one parent questioned Poppe’s decision to hold a global warming debate. That mother expected him to present Al Gore’s global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth” as indisputable facts, Poppe said. After he explained his neutrality in the classroom, the mom allowed her child to participate in the debate, he said.

“You don’t understand someone’s position until you can argue it to their satisfaction,” Poppe said, quoting a famous physicist. “I don’t believe in Darwinism either, but I can argue it as well as any Darwinist.”
Not a Darwinist? Maybe he is one of those kooky "creationists"--making his double-plus ungood thought crime against the global warming religion consensus all the more sinister.

And what is with giving the students a choice? There is no choice on global warming! The Goreacle said so!

NewsBusters applaudes the students, but notes that the MSM will ignore the story, due to the nature of the debate's outcome:
So much for consensus.

Of course, the most important aspect of this event is likely how the media ignored it. Sure, this is just one middle school in a city outside of Boulder, Colorado, with a total population of 83,000.

However, given the huge attention being paid to global warming, and the Congressional testimony of soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore just days prior, isn’t it rather safe to assume that if the verdict had gone for the AGW believers, this would have been covered as a puff piece by many media outlets?

Can’t you envision Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer getting all gooey over how darling these kids were, and how amazingly clever for their age? And doesn’t this just show how important and dire this issue is, and how clearly settled the debate if a group of sixth-graders can see the truth that the skeptics can't?

Of course, none of that happened because the outcome didn’t fit with the media’s view.

As a result, precious few will know that global warming is indeed being debated -- even by children -- and not everyone is as convinced as the alarmists in the media and their prophet, Al Gore, continue to arrogantly assert.
The leftist moonbats are angry that Poppe, a creationist and "incompetent scumbag" is corrupting the kids' education with "crackpottery".

1 Comments:

Blogger Luke Rhinehart said...

A lesser man than myself might point out the irony in dismissing the broad scientific consensus on Global Warming and then approvingly gush about the consensus of a group of 6th graders.

That said, I would be one million times more impressed with the results of the classroom consensus (though one million times zero is still...) if it turned out that the teacher actually did believe in human-caused global warming and the students still didn't.

Look, if one wants to have a serious disagreement about matters in the hard sciences one should simply learn the basic science and start submitting articles and participating in the technical literature. Politically-motivated positions like the one that's so vaguely attributed to scientists ("they want Global Warming to be real so they can, uh, gain respect and er, power") are unlikely to survive for a week for a good reason. It happens to be the same reason that non-oil-company-sponsored criticism of the mainstream scientific position ranges from the "Doesn't even understand the question" of Limbaugh* to the "Kind of gets the question but will only speak to people who don't" of Crichton. Namely, you're exposed to serious standards and a peer-review mechanism that enforces those standards while largely controlling for ideology.

Do you think that HIV causes AIDS? If you had HIV would you seek the mainstream treatment for it? I presume you would, and yet there's about as much controversy in science about that question as there is about global warming. That is to say, a small handful of scientists have dissented. So do you doubt it? I'm sure you don't but asking yourself "why not" might well be instructive.

Awaiting your response,
Confused in Colorado



*Limbaugh often seems to deny that Global Warming itself even exists in his discussions about increased ice in the arctic. The simple recordable fact of a gradual temperature increase on a global scale isn't controversial in the least, as I applaud you for seeming to get.

Sun Mar 25, 09:42:00 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home

|