It shouldn't be possible for one parent to change the course of an entire district's curriculum, simply because they have a religious objection to the presentation of facts. This is a bad precedent.

Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary.

"Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.

Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.

...

His angry e-mail (along with complaints from a few other parents) stopped the film from being shown to Hardiman's daughter.

The teacher in that science class, Kay Walls, says that after Hardiman's e-mail she was told by her principal that she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present "controversial" materials in class.

This is pretty amazing. Science that is supported by every national academy of every country in the world (that has one) is "controversial" because a tiny cohort of idiots in the school district doesn't believe in it. And why doesn't they believe in it? Because of a bizarre interpretation of a book written 2000 years ago which represents the mere documentation of a multi-generational game of telephone. This book is deciding policy now two thousand years later. That's something else.

Anyway, the reassuring thing about this article is how the other parents' in the school district are not being intimidated, and without naming it, recognize the denialism.

What the school board had really intended to do, Larson and school board members insisted, was not to stop schools from teaching the science of global warming, but merely to follow long-standing school board rules that require students to be exposed to "other perspectives" when they view a film like "An Inconvenient Truth."

...

In public comments at the board meeting, several riled-up Federal Way residents argued that "An Inconvenient Truth" was, indeed, scientifically true and that saying otherwise is "deliberate obfuscation."

These residents derisively compared the search for "balance" in the global-warming issue to decades of phony claims by cigarette companies about the lack of "proof" that smoking is harmful to human health.

Before the board meeting started Tuesday night, several residents buttonholed Larson and asked him if there should be a "balanced" presentation of the Nazi Holocaust, because there are many who deny that it occurred.

"The Holocaust happened," Larson said. "We have evidence and photos. The difference between the Holocaust and the global warming is we don't have photos of what will happen 50 years from now."

Ding ding ding! Give that man a cookie! People are starting to figure it out. Denial of carcinogenicity of cigarettes, denial of the holocaust, denial of global warming, denial of evolution, they are all forms of denialism and fundamentally unscientific, illogical, and contemptible. It warms my heart to see a bunch of people seeing denialism for what it is, and the many faces it assumes as people, without evidence, facts or data, try to convince others into believing what is simply not true. Yes the school board in this case were a bunch of pansies, and I hope they get voted out for their cowardice and "balance" policy, which is the saddest part of the story.

His daughter's science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.

"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " Walls said.

It was written 37 years ago.

Oh, and that "cooling earth" crap that everybody cites as an example of why not to listen to scientists? Well, it was something the media made up it was never scientific consensus.

Labels: denialism