There's balance and there's imbalance

Thomas Sowell opined about the problem of students having a one-sided view of issues (particularly "politically correct" issues). I predicted there'd be a problem when I saw the title of the piece, and when I saw "global warming" in the second paragraph, I knew it.

De-programming students

Now, I actually agree with this (I removed an intervening comment)

" Another approach might be to respond to the dogmatic certainty of some young person, perhaps your own offspring, by asking: "Have you ever read a single book on the other side of that issue?"

When the inevitable answer to your question is "No," you can simply point out how illogical it is to be so certain about anything when you have heard only one side of the story-- no matter how often you have heard that one side repeated."

But then he trots out an example.

" Yet most students who have read and heard repeatedly about the catastrophes awaiting us unless we try to stop "global warming" have never read a book, an article or even a single word by any of the hundreds of climate scientists, in countries around the world, who have expressed opposition to that view.

First, a newsflash for Thomas: there are not "hundreds of climate scientists" who have expressed opposition to that view. The survey results I posted for Walter Williams are a clear demonstration of that. Under the broad umbrella of "scientists", particularly those recruited like-it-or-not, true-or-not to Senator Inhofe's Infamous List, maybe you could find hundreds. But not climate scientists.

Next from Thomas: "These students may have been shown Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" in school, but are very unlikely to have been shown the British Channel 4 television special, "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

OK, that's where he loses it. Gore's movie dramatized some things, and the British court case found some supposed errors. Gore's team addressed each one of them. The essential scientific veracity of the movie has been supported by a lot (I won't estimate how many) of actual climate scientists.

Contrast that to "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Otherwise known as Pure Propaganda

Just a bitsy excerpt: "On March 11 the Observer [British newspaper or magazine] published a letter from a group of climate scientists responding to Durkin’s film:

“This programme misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge on global warming, claiming climate scientists are presenting lies. This is an outrageous statement...

“We defend the right of people to be sceptical, but for C4 [British TV channel] to imply that the thousands of scientists and published peer-reviewed papers, summarised in the recent international science assessment, are misguided or lying lacks scientific credibility and simply beggars belief.” (Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council, Brian Hoskins, University of Reading, Jo Haigh, Imperial College London, Myles Allen, University of Oxford, Peter Cox, University of Exeter, Colin Prentice, QUEST Programme, letter to the Observer, Sunday March 11, 2007;
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ letters/story/0,,2031117,00.html

So the thing is: if you actually had students analyze the content of AIT and TGGWS, it might be VERY educational -- because they'd develop the ability to discriminate between a media presentation that has verifiable information, compared to a media misrepresentation that distorts truth and provides fabrications, exaggerations, and misinterpretations.

Dang, I wish I could teach that class.