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The Darwin Lobby Expands Its Mission of Suppressing Free Thought to Include “Climate Change”

Our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education are branching out. Having previously specialized in suppressing academic freedom on the topic of evolution, the NCSE will seek opportunities to enforce a rigid orthodoxy on climate change.

Speaking with the New Scientist, NCSE executive director Eugenie Scott explained the scope of the problem her group is up against:

We have heard that students will get up and walk out of the class when teachers start talking about climate change, or that parents will complain. Teachers don’t want to fight with parents, and it is easy for them to think that it’s just too much trouble to teach about climate change.

Obviously, in a free country, those students should be forcibly put back in their seats and made to listen, their parents told to shut up and stop complaining.

Of course, there is the usual resorting to the trope about science “denial” with its verbal echo intended to summon associations with Holocaust denial, about as contemptible and dishonest a tactic as we’ve seen from the Darwinists. Says the NCSE:

The social controversy over climate change is in part due to climate change denial. In order to defend and support the teaching of climate change, it is important to understand — and be able to rebut — arguments about climate science, and to understand why people choose to attack such well-tested science. “Climate Change Denial” provides the essential tools, and also describes how climate change denial is already threatening the integrity of science education.

In the past, we’ve had some fun in making jest of the NCSE. But this should be a wakeup call, not least for freethinkers on the climate issue, folks who don’t all uniformly grasp why they should care about the Darwin debate. The NCSE is showing how pervasive and consequential their dogmatic view of science really is. Those who think the evolution debate is just about evolution had better think again. In fact it’s about the freedom of scientific discussion and inquiry.
Apart from that, look how weird this. The NCSE has literally identified the thesis of catastrophic, human-induced climate change with “climate science.” It’s pretty bizarre when a very narrow, and in fact very controversial thesis is identified with a sub-discipline of natural science.

How controversial? Last week’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“No Need to Panic About Global Warming“), signed by 16 prominent scientists, is a sign of things to come. If we had to guess, we’d suspect the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models have grossly exaggerated the positive-feedbacks in the climate system, and systematically ignored the negative feedbacks. This is more a result of bias and ignorance than outright fraud (though there’s some of the latter as well).

Fortunately, the theoretical predictions have strong empirical implications, since we can measure the current global climate year to year. So the misrepresentations can’t survive indefinitely.

The often cited “consensus” on this subject, which never existed, is getting shakier every day. In fact, if the NCSE had any prudence, it would have avoided this subject. Instead, they’re on a campaign to silence teachers and school districts who “deny climate science,” comparing this controversy with the evolution controversy.

How will it look when the IPCC line on climate change collapses? Let’s hope the resulting skepticism bleeds over from one subject to the other.