A friend from Kentucky recently sent me this local newspaper column about the soon-to-be-opened Creation Museum in Covington, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio). This museum aims to counteract the secular lies about how old the Earth really is, and to show that only the Bible has a…
Mechanical engineer and kids-show host Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke to about 1,500 Columbus-area students this Monday. I attended his talk, and found that the peppy, brilliant man who preached the fun of science during my childhood had come bearing a hopeful message of the earth’s future.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has helped to make climate change an enormous hot-button issue, and as the “future owners of the planet”, we college students hear about it a lot. Five separate school organizations have hosted five separate on-campus showings of An Inconvenient Truth in the past three months. The intent to inform and warn has gotten a little out of control.
With the media coverage of climate change in addition to this campus onslaught, most students get it. The close-minded may stick to their guns, but those moveable students understand. Yes, climate change occurs, yes, it will have grave consequences, yes, something desperately needs to change. Now what? The constant reiteration of Gore’s warning leaves all too many jaded and bored with the message.
Bill Nye, in his classically playful-yet-educational way, reframed the issues at the heart of global warming. He dispensed no Gore-like nay saying, he made no threats of the doom to come. Instead, he said this:
“People talk about how we have to ‘Save Planet Earth!’ But the Earth will be fine. The cockroaches will keep living; life on the planet will go on. It’s the humans I worry about.”
So, no forthcoming apocalypse after …
A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren't actually the things they represent. If…
I listen extra closely whenever an organization dedicated to skeptical inquiry investigates a claim that is characterized as bogus by a loud minority. A new detailed report on global warming was published in the May/June issue of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. Here's the primary conclusion: This paper will offer compelling evidence from…
I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful. By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at…