Science fun facts: Does a climatologist weigh the same as a duck?

Move over Arizona, now you have some serious competition for national laughing-stock. Instead of demanding to see a birth certificate readily available on the mighty interwebs, the South Dakota state legislature passed a bill attempting to bring what they comically refer to as balance to the teaching of climate change in the state’s public schools. I’m just guessing here but maybe they believe that some terribly evil wizard/climatologist in cahoots with the New World Order turned all the state’s children into newts…not to worry, they got better. As another writer noted, the irony of the legislature further politicizing what they deem to be a political, not a scientific issue, appears to be completely lost on the representatives of this intellect-forsaken backwater.

The language of the bill which originally included this paragraph, “That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative;” points out the apparent systemic failure of South Dakota’s public schools, because if the state’s legislature is mostly made up of products of said system. It tells us one of two things, either they have not been teaching science in South Dakota’s schools for a long time, or the entire state legislature desperately needs a remedial science class. Seriously, astrological? Are they fucking kidding? Is thermological even a word? Is this the work of an elected legislative body in 2010, or is this a Papal edict denouncing the heresies of Galileo circa 1610?

This is the equivalent of teaching that idiotic re-branding of creationism known as Intelligent Design in a science class. In other words teaching something that has no basis in science. This law is just another in a long line of tragic setbacks to the cause of science education in America’s schools. What’s next for the children of South Dakota – Witch trials? Textbook burnings? Even with an amended version of the law that removed the most scientifically egregious passages, it remains a codification of the teaching of irrationality in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change…