As Mark Twain might say, our students are being taught a lot of facts that just ain’t so – by a lot of academics who know all kinds of things for sure that just ain’t so. The recent science and climate marches underscore both this and the dangers of having such ignorance determine economic and energy policy. Topping my current list of wildly misinformed, malpracticing academics is a University of Michigan history professor who claims plant-fertilizing, life-giving carbon dioxide is more deadly than sarin gas!
Perhaps even more dangerous, this ignorance is compounded by rampant intolerance toward other views, and even violence toward anyone who tries to present contrarian perspectives on climate change, sustainability, personal responsibility and other topics, on college campuses or other public forums. For example, just yesterday, CFACT was denied previously given permission to participate in the “People’s Climate March,” when the CFACT team turned up with large posters that contradicted the “planet is being destroyed” meme. Once again, the “people” is only the far left, and freedom of speech is only for people of the far left.
My article this week explores the nature and scope of this problem – what George Mason University professor Walter Williams calls a “spreading cancer.”
Recent science and climate marches demonstrated how misinformed, indoctrinated, politicized and anti-Trump these activists are – and how indifferent about condemning millions in industrialized nations and billions in developing countries to green energy poverty. Amid it all, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole helped illustrate how the marchers became so ignorant, insensitive and intolerant.
It’s always amazed me how frequently academics, journalists, politicians and students confuse poisonous carbon monoxide (CO) with plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (CO2). But Professor Cole’s April 17 article in The Nation presents unfathomable ignorance from the intellectual class that is “educating” our young people, while displaying and teaching intolerance toward countervailing facts and viewpoints.
Bashar al Assad’s sarin gas attack “consumed the world’s attention,” Prof. Cole intones, but President Trump is committed to releasing hundreds of thousands of tons a day “of a far more deadly gas – carbon dioxide.” Even CO2 that is washed out of the atmosphere “typically goes straight into the oceans,” he continues, “where it turns them acidic,” threatening a “mass die-off of marine life.”
Cole’s polemical nonsense is too extensive to address in full. But these two claims require rebuttal.
