Last month, the Texas leg banned ‘critical thinking’ from the public school curriculum. Now, via Andrew Sullivan, there’s this – weep and be ashamed.
Apparently wanting to steer clear of fancy highbrow academic stuff like research or informed assessments, North Carolina has banned using recent science to guide policy making. House Bill 819, which passed today after the governor let the deadline to stop it slip, restricts all sea-level predictions used for policy-making to be based on “historical data,” effectively sending science back to 1900. The law will prevent policy-makers from using a recent study by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) which predicted the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century. Developers were upset about the prediction that might cause reluctance to invest in the area.[Source]
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
It’s funny how people who disrespect science don’t mind using the things that they like that emerge from it. Weapons, medicine for them and their families, the latest gadgets etc.
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You’re quite right WW, they are perfecttly comfortable disdaining the intellects that brought them those things – a bit like Tea Partiers crying “Keep your hands off my Medicare”.
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WOW! What a concept! I bet the Fla Legis looks into this next session — we need this more than NC does. We can call it the King Canute law!
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Hay Pat, maybe we can call it the “1920’s Forever” law. (Or should that be reserved for Tennessee?)
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A good example of conservative values at work; if there’s a conflict between human life and the dollar, guess which wins out. And they might as well shut down that commission, it’s a waste of taxpayer money.
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You left out the lord jeebus – can’t let actual knowledge interfere with faith!
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Jeebus no match for elvis 🙂
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Conservative values, my ass, this is just dumb shit. 😦
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Don’t misunderestimate them…
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I have said from the jump that GOPer’s want to deny that THIS country has moved into the 21st Century…..
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above was me….
I must of cleaned the cookies out again on my home computer
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I had to do that a few weeks ago cuz of a conflict. What a pain. My sympathies james.
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And the beat goes on.
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The “study” was filled with loaded language and more of a political paper in the first place than a truly scientific study. As such, not using it is the right course of action.
In point of fact, all that’s really being done is the study is being reworded and the data used without the politic attached to it.
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What study? The one about sea level? I don’t think there was a ‘study’ used by the Texas lege to ban ‘critical thinking’.
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The NC sea level study is what I was talking about. I also have no idea what you’re talking about in regards to TX. I know of nothing there that has done other than improve critical thinking by removing a large part of the Liberal, anti-American propaganda from the school curriculum.
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My typo – NC not TX.
So, you’re saying the sea level study conducted by a duly appointed scientific commission is wrong and must be political but the counter claim by a group of coastal develpers who want ot build more houses (8 inches vs 3 feet in 100 years) is correct.
Okay. As for TX – so you think critical thinking should be one sided? You think critical thinking has sides? I studied Logic in high school – the stated purpose of teaching us logic was to teach us to use critical thinking.
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Wrong? No, not exactly or, at least, I’m not quite good enough to contradict it unilaterally as I haven’t worked in a field related to that in many years. It was, however, written in a political agenda driven format and used language that was deliberately highly charged and partisan.
As for TX – I’m not really sure what you’re saying and asking.
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The language of the NC bill restricts the data that may be considered in projections, saying only actually sea level measurements – and no other factors – may be considered. For instance, the datum may not project the anticipated effects of things that affect sea leavel rise, like global warming or the melting of polar ice caps. And that, no matter the language of the report, is ignorance and making the numbers come out at a level acceptable to coastal developers.
In other words, it bans use of the latest science and may use only historical data on sea-levels, not any projections of acceleration. And that’s pure denial.
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Projections on shoddy, fraudulent pseudoscience like AGW shouldn’t be used in policy making, Moe. Face it, real scientists have been forcing all but the most fanatical Warmists to rethink their models for a few years now and these projections, with their attendant attempts to assign causation, aren’t worth the paper their written on.
This is ESPECIALLY true of “sea level rise” – quoted because it’s a crap phrase – which is at least as often a lowering of ground level due to erosion or tectonic action as actual rising of the sea.
This much I know from working with NOAA, SWFWMD, and NWFWMD on mapping coastlines, sea grass beds, and wetland coverage and usage in the SE US.
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What’s your job, Jonolan? Sounds interesting. Do you really look like your picture?
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These days my job is as an information security / cyber-warfare consultant. For years though I was a cartographer and cartographic field QA specialist and, a bit later, an project leader and trainer for foreign mapping projects.
😆 The company I worked for was to the mapping industry what Haliburton is to the construction and resource extraction industries, i.e., an economic arm of the State Department.
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We’ll disagree on AGW then. Science, as you well know, is a process and it’s ongoing, no matter the subect matter. Info comes in, previous conclusions are expanded or amended. And over the last 30 years, everything has reinforced the overall projection.
The Pentagon is surely preparing, as is the insurance industry. I’m thinking they ddon’t think it’s junk science.
Also – Swiftmud!! Wowza. I’ve tangled with them a few times – I think an org I volunteer with is currently in a grant process iwth them.
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