Parents Threaten Legal Action over Inconvenient Truth

Apparently some parents in the UK are up in arms about UK Education Secretary Alan Johnson wanting to show Al Gore's global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in classrooms. They're actually threatening a legal challenge to this, saying, "The film goes well beyond the consensus view and is not therefore suitable material to present to children who need to be given clear and balanced, factually accurate information." This story was linked from the Drudge Report, that anti-science haven of climate change denial, where it was paired with this story, for which Drudge gave the tag-line: "Global warming activists urged to focus on Earth Day rallies and ignore snow as it 'piles up outside our windows'..."

It's really time for this nonsense to stop. I mean, are these people respected scientists all of a sudden? Have they spent years researching whether the phenomenon of climate change is real? Are they employed by some prestigious scientific institution? The parents certainly aren't because I guarantee the story would have mentioned it if they were, and Matt Drudge, well, I think you need more than a high school degree to get that kind of work. So what exactly are they going on? Why do they feel they have any authority to contradict climate change? What, they read something in the newspapers and now they're experts? All "experts" like that know is what people who really know things tell them. I'm the same way, obviously; I'm no real expert here. But I DO read some lay scientific magazines, and I follow how good the coverage is in the mainstream media. Here's an interesting study by FAIR showing how worthless the media coverage on this has been:

D. James Baker, administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere at the Department of Commerce under the Clinton administration, has said about human contributions to global warming (Washington Post , 11/12/97) that "there's no better scientific consensus on this on any issue I know—except maybe Newton's second law of dynamics."

And yet:

53 percent of the articles [surveyed] gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result of natural fluctuations... 35 percent emphasized the role of humans while presenting both sides of the debate... [and] 6 percent emphasized doubts about the claim that human-caused global warming exists.

So it's not hard to understand why these parents and people like Drudge don't believe in human-created climate change. What IS hard to understand is why they consider themselves such learned experts that they can threaten to bring legal action against the Secretary of Education. It really and truly astounds me that people can choose not to fear the human effect on climate change and yet do fear the threat posed to the US by radical Islamists. Come on, people; one of these things is a well-grounded scientific consensus bordering on unanimity, and the other is, well... it's not that.

By the way, notice how I haven't used the phrase "global warming" in this post except when quoting others. That's because I don't like what it connotes. People look at that phrase and make the idiotic leap to, "Well, they're saying the problem is that the world is getting hotter, but I can look outside and see that it's snowing more than usual, so the world must not be getting hotter." That's exactly what Drudge did, pointing out that people were meeting to discuss global climate change while it was really cold outside (something he's done frequently, for example when the Congressional hearings on climate change were snowed out last month). Well, here's a news flash: global warming doesn't just make things hotter, it makes things screwy. Some places get hotter, some colder, some wetter, and some dryer. It could even launch us into the next Ice Age. (Do I really need a link here? Do I really need to provide evidence of this? I really hope not.) I think the phrase "global warming" should be scrapped and that we should just use regular ol' "climate change" instead. Anyone can tell that the climate is changing, I mean obviously setting records for heat or cold or most hurricanes in a season are abnormal things indicative of some kind of change. With "climate change" it's less easy for morons to point out that their part of the world isn't necessarily hotter at a particular point in a certain year. Basically it would make idiocy less easy, and that seems like a good goal to me.