A woman wearing a face mask to protect herself from pollutants walks past office buildings shrouded with pollution haze in Beijing, Monday, Dec. 7, 2015. Beijing issued its first-ever red alert for smog on Monday, urging schools to close and invoking restrictions on factories and traffic that will keep half of the city's vehicles off the roads. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
By Jessica Chasmar - The Washington Times
The Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution this week that bans textbooks and other teaching materials that deny climate change exists or cast doubt on whether humans are to blame.
The resolution, introduced by school board member Mike Rosen, also directs the superintendent and staff to develop a plan for offering “curriculum and educational opportunities that address climate change and climate justice” in all Portland public schools, the Portland Tribune reported.
What is 'climate justice'? This is a scary term. Does it mean that the IPCC (read UN) will punish those countries who don't meet certain targets for reductions in pollution? If by signing the Paris protocol we have given the UN authority to punish us, then we have signed away our autonomy and are no longer a sovereign country.
“It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux said during board testimony Tuesday. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”
Bill Bigelow, editor of the ReThinking online magazine and co-author of a textbook on environmental education, worked with several environmental groups to present the resolution, the Tribune reported.
“A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” Mr. Bigelow said. “We don’t want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry.”
He took particular issue with teaching materials that used iffy language when discussing climate change, like “might,” “may” and “could.”
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
The IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has made numerous predictions since 1991 and none of them have worked out. That means there is something wrong with the 'science' of climate change. But the Oregon school board thinks the science is so strong that it is infallible. Yet they feel the need to protect that science from any kind of logical debate. That's brain-washing, pure and simple.
To make matters worse, they don't think a student should have the right to question that science. If science can't stand up to rigorous cross-examination, then it's not worth beans. How long will it be before the absurd Oregon school board expels students for asking questions?
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