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Environment/Energy · Media

Heartland’s James M. Taylor Talking Climate on PBS Newshour

Heartland Senior Fellow for Environment Policy James M. Taylor was interviewed for part of a story on PBS Newshour last night about the teaching of climate change in Americas’s public schools. It was biased heavily toward the views of climate alarmists, which was hardly a surprise. But since The Heartland Institute has been gaining attention for our plans to craft climate curriculum, the PBS producers reached out to us for “balance.”

Below are James’ quick thoughts on the piece, and the video of the story. These folks really need to attend Heartland’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (and so should you!). The idea that sound climate science backs up the alarmist narrative is a stubborn myth.

Skepticism is essential to science itself. It is deeply disturbing that many public school teachers bemoan such skepticism in their students rather than celebrate such intuitive adherence to scientific principles.

The heart of the alleged global warming crisis is predictions of future warming from computer models that have consistently predicted too much warming in the past. Importantly, scientific data have shown that the two most important assumptions of such computer models – that modest warming due to carbon dioxide will be substantially exacerbated by changes in cloud formation and atmospheric humidity – are not occurring in the real world.

When real-world data and evidence contradict a scientific theory, the proper scientific response is to proceed with caution rather than vilify those who present the real-world data and evidence.

All that would have been nice to see in this PBS Newshour story last night about the teaching of climate change in America’s public schools. Alas,

Watch Teachers Endure Balancing Act Over Climate Change Curriculum on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

 

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— Jim Lakely

Jim is the the director of communications at The Heartland Institute. Prior to joining Heartland, he was an ink-stained newspaperman for 16 years with many stops in "old media." Jim covered Congress and The White House during the George W. Bush administration for The Washington Times, and worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. He has appeared on the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, and many local and national talk radio shows to talk politics and policy.

  • http://CoSy.com/ Bob Armstrong

    Seeing that highschool
    nonscience teacher on PBS reveals how government K-12 manages to produce
    such innumerate masses .  It’s not clear she could teach Newton’s laws
    or Kelvin temperature. In any case , she wasn’t .

    Both sides argue in the data clouds , unconnected with the fundamental physics .  Simply calculating the temperature of a gray ball in our orbit explains 97% of our temperature . It seems impossible to find on the web even the next step which would be the calculation of the temperature of a colored ball . Even that crude approximation would almost surely get the unexplained variance down to a few degrees ,  less than 1% .

    That’s how physics , of which “climate science” is merely an applied branch , works . You quantitatively eliminate all the known , provable effects , then argue about the remaining unexplained error .

    I see nowhere in the public discussion  a student can find a succinct and quantitative explanation of the unambiguously understood 99% of our temperature and the basic tools for understanding the remainder .