Inside the mind of global warming alarmists

Barbara Oakley, a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and an engineering professor at Oakland University, offers an interesting perspective on the recent revelation that much of the science used to prop up the global warming theory has been manufactured by so-called scientists.

From a recent Oakley column:

The breathtaking dishonesty and incompetence of climatology's intellectual leadership clearly reveals that a discipline can become dominated by a small group of ideologically-motivated intellectual gatekeepers. So much so that these gatekeepers can cut off the ability of dissenters to publish in a peer-reviewed journal. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal, of course, is the sine qua non of grants, which in turn leads to careers in academia. No publications — no career.

Narrow intellectual gatekeeping is omnipresent in academia. Want to know why the government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on math and science programs that never seem to improve the test scores of American students? Part of the reason for this is that today's K-12 educators—unlike educators in other high-scoring countries of the world — refuse to acknowledge evidence that memorization plays an important role in mastering mathematics. Any proposed program that supports memorization is deemed to be against "creativity" by today's intellectual gatekeepers in K-12 education, including those behind the Math and Science Partnerships. As one NSF program director told me: “We hear about success stories with practice and repetition-based programs like Kumon Mathematics. But I'll be frank with you—you’ll never get anything like that funded. We don't believe in it." Instead the intellectual leadership in education encourages enormously expensive pimping programs that put America even further behind the international learning curve.

Read the full column, "Take This Paradigm and Shove It," at Oakley's blog on the Psychology Today Web site.