Dumb and Dumber

Not to be outdone by Utah, South Dakota has passed its own climate resolution.

They raise the ante – where Utah cherry-picked twelve years of data, South Dakotans are happy with only 8. Even better, their pattern matching heuristic violates bathtub dynamics:

WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide

They have taken the skeptic claim, that there’s little warming in the tropical troposphere, and bumped it up a notch:

WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place

Nope, no trend here:

Satellite tropospheric temperature (RSS, TLT)

Skipping over a red herring about Erik the Red,

WHEREAS, the polar ice cap is subject to shifting warm water currents and the break-up of ice by high wind events. Many oceanographers believe this to be the major cause of melting polar ice, not atmospheric warming

Now, where could the energy for those warm water currents and high wind events be coming from?

Next we get the Oregon Petition (you can fact check the signatories yourself using google). Finally, we come to the point:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, …, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:
(1)    That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2)    That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative

Shouldn’t knowing what a theory is and knowing the difference between astrology and astronomy, thermology and thermodynamics be prerequisites for making science education policy?

You can’t make this stuff up. I guess I’ll have to quit telling North Dakotan jokes now.