Random Variable

I no longer take comfort that teaching in the UK is nowhere near as bad as the American education depicted in HBO’s The Wire. In Episode 3, the first day of school ends with someone’s face being sliced with a flick knife. The teacher, an ex-cop, distraught prepares a talk to comfort the kids the following day, but they, however, seem to have already forgotten the event. As Adam R writes on The Weblog, “It’s great that it’s good, but is it good that it’s real?”

Is there any clearer indicator that the American education system is in dire need of a reboot?

I’ve uploaded a segment from BBC Newsnight broadcasted on September 20th 2006 on climate change denialism. George Monbiot investigates the links between organisations currently spreading misinformation about climate change and those who spread misinformation about tobacco in the nineties.

Paxman then interviews Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and John Mitchell, the Chief Scientist at the UK Meteorological Office and a member of the UN IPCC Working Group 1. I don’t Ebell quite understands that British media, particularly the BBC isn’t as susceptible to libertarian-inspired pseudoscience as US media clearly is. Myron’s argument soon falls apart after Paxman asks him the simple question “Are you a scientist?”

Paxman: Mr Ebell, you are not a scientist. It is clear that many people on your side of the fence are misrepresenting the arguments. You yourself described the government’s chief scientific advisor in this country of “knowing nothing about climate science”. He is at least a scientist. Now, do you see the problem that respectable scientists have with the sort of points made by organizations such as yours?

Partial transcipt courtesy of The Myron Ebell Climate.