Banned in Portland

Banned in Portland

WARNING: This article and by extension this newspaper should not be shown to children in thePortland Public School (PPS) system by order of the Portland School Board.

‘Banned in Portland’ may not yet have the same notoriety as ‘Banned in Boston’ or ‘Banned in Tennessee.’ But we are catching up. Please do not look for a centerfold in this newspaper showing some gorgeous gal, au natural. And don’t look for photos of Oregon politicians guilty of inappropriate sex. This isn’t about SEX. This is about something far more controversial: SCIENCE.

Yes, believe it or not, competent science is again deemed a threat to humanity by daring to doubt the Global Warming paradigm. It is as though we are back in 1925 Tennessee where fundamentalist followers of an old time religion were up in arms about Evolution replacing Creationism. Today the issue is Competent Science versus Catastrophism. Competent Science is that messy business where perpetually skeptical scientists argue the vital details of a very complex subject, in this case, the Earth’s climate. ‘Catastrophism’ is the pretend science of the Prophet Gore and his fanatical followers. It is far simpler. Whatever the question, the answer is that diabolical gas, carbon dioxide. It comes from burning fossil fuels, but not from breathing! It has ruined our climate. But wait, there is still time to save the planet, if we vote for Democrats, enact carbon taxes, and ban troublesome scientists who stubbornly maintain that “It’s not true.”

Mainstream religions have long since made peace with science, recognizing that these two human pursuits can coexist to great mutual benefit, as long as one does not pretend to be the other. Some who study the history of science recognize that religion has been vital to science by teaching the value and necessity of telling the truth.

The fervent pursuit of the whole truth (not just a political or religious truth) led the Puritans of the 17th century to form the first scientific society, the British Royal Society, with the motto “Take no one’s word for it.” Thus began 400 years of magnificent scientific progress, greatly assisted centuries later by Jews looking for an escape from the ghettos of Europe. From Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman, most of the great physicists of the 20th century were Jewish. Among Feynman’s famous lectures was one calling for ‘Utter Honesty,’ a concept now largely forgotten in a scientific world dominated by presidential policy statements, vast amounts of cash, and careerism.

The new ‘Green Religion’ of Gore sadly demands only belief, not competence, good behavior, or honesty. Gore’s followers try to silence heretics. That silencing has been going on for a long time in Oregon. Former Governor Kulongoski forced Oregon’s best State Climatologist George Taylor to retire and replaced him with one of the faithful.   Scientists with advanced degrees are excluded from our schools in favor of Gore disciples like former Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury who lacks even the college education required for teachers.

What will Portland children miss with all this political interference? They will miss science ENTIRELY, not just climate science. Propagandized children never learn that science is much more than a good story told by their elders. They will never learn that science is completely determined by logic and evidence, not by the ‘authority’ and ‘consensus’ preached by Warmers. They will miss the wisdom of our greatest scientists. Albert Einstein’s famous words are surely blasphemous: “One man can prove me wrong.” That is dangerous doubt in a Post-Modern world. Today, it takes a political earthquake to topple politically correct pseudoscience. Students may even miss reading the voluminous UN IPCC climate reports that are the foundation of the climate scam. They dare to express the doubt now banned in Portland. We are back to 1925, with the modern version of Creationism winning once again over science. Pitiful.

Portland students will never learn that the US government’s scientific case for Global Warming rests on “Three Lines of Evidence” that are fatally flawed. For instance the highly touted climate models fail miserably when compared against the ultimate arbiter in science, robust empirical data. And there has been no unusual warming since we embarked on great industrialization after WW2, despite some cooked compilations that claim to show it.

Portland students will be prohibited from learning about the biggest causes of climate change, such as the planet Jupiter. Weighing in at more than twice as much as all the other planets in our solar system combined, Jupiter is able to cause the Sun to wobble about the solar system’s center of mass and the Earth’s orbit to regularly go through a number of Milankovitch Cycles that cause the 100,000 year ice ages. Portland students will surely be surprised when we accelerate our fall into the next ice age, because the 10,000 year Holocene Climate Optimum that nurtured the rise of human civilization has now pretty much run its course.

With the Earth’s closest approach to the Sun presently in the Southern Hemisphere summer (January), we have reached an ice age configuration. But there is no need to rush out and buy a warm parka, because the fall into another ice age occurs over a thousand years due to the heat stored in our oceans. Some will suffer sooner, because it will take only a one degree Celsius drop in average global temperature to eliminate much of the agriculture that sustains Canada today. And once the continental glaciers start to reform, Canadian climatologist Tim Ball tells his students that they will need to move southwest into the USA.

Portland students will completely miss the scientific arguments raging at present over a terrestrial versus an extraterrestrial explanation for recent climate variations. My Russian colleague Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at the Pulkovo Observatory, maintains that “The Sun defines the climate.” He points to sunspot records that date from Galileo to show the excellent correlation between low solar activity and cold periods, such as the Maunder and Dalton Minimums. Now that American solar physicists have detected a substantial fall off in the solar magnetic fields that cause these sunspots and recent solar cycles have become anemic, the Russian predictions seem to be coming true.

Others argue that ocean cycles are sufficient to explain recent warming from the strong El Nino this year to the positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation that is thought responsible for both the warmth of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the similar warmth now. These also explain the unevenness of the warmth, greatest in the Arctic and least (zero) in the Antarctic. The carbon dioxide nonsense does not.

My guess would be that both the solar and ocean explanations will turn out to be viable, just over different time intervals.

If Oregon politicians have their way, PPS students will surely lack the skills to help resolve this or any other scientific questions. They will only learn the ‘Gospel According to Gore’ and what Feynman termed “cargo-cult science.”

To keep Oregon ignorant, please burn this newspaper before a Portland student accidentally learns the truth. Should he or she then decide to become a real scientist, the very backward politicians on the Portland School Board might face a challenge. What a disaster!

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research and has no conflicts of interest on this subject.

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Northwest Connection.)