Green Weenie of the Week: The Portland School Board

The school board of Portland, Oregon, has passed a resolution banning any books that express any skepticism about climate change alarmism:

The Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution this week that bans textbooks and other teaching materials that deny climate change exists or cast doubt on whether humans are to blame.

It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux said during board testimony Tuesday. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”

Bill Bigelow, editor of the ReThinking Schools online magazine and co-author of a textbook on environmental education, worked with several environmental groups to present the resolution, the Tribune reported.

“A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” Mr. Bigelow said. “We don’t want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry.”

He took particular issue with teaching materials that used iffy language when discussing climate change, like “might,” “may” and “could.”

I’ve highlighted this last sentence because it means that Portland schools cannot use the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on climate science, because those reports use the words “might,” “may,” and “could” throughout, along with the term “uncertain” or “uncertainty” (both of which appear hundreds of times in the IPCC reports on climate science).

This, for example, from the summary of the 2013 IPCC climate science report:

The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability; alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more. (Emphasis added.)

Oh dear. There’s those prohibited words, right there in the “consensus science” document. Better not let Portland school kids see this. They might become “confused.” Heh. Who’s anti-science now?

P.S. It may not matter much, since Portland is rapidly becoming a city without children. (This is one reason I don’t worry about the Left in the long run: they aren’t procreating. Thank goodness.)

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