On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a story about how school teachers are dealing with climate change. They’re up against some hurdles given that it’s a complicated science, many schools lack up-to-date materials, and in places like Oklahoma where many parents are employed by the fossil fuel industry, there might just be pushback from parents.
And deniers are still working hard to make sure this pushback exists. On Monday, WUWT (and Townhall and CanadaFreePress) published a post from CFACT’s Paul Driessen supposedly announcing the launch of “an important new project” to “challenge the steady diet of bias, false information and alarmism on climate change that students are fed in and outside of their classrooms.”
What is this exciting new project, you ask? Why, it’s a continuation of a project first exposed back in 2012, and that CFACT was promoting in March of 2018 (although at the time it was already a year old). We know it’s the same stale project because it’s being led by the same kook (David Wojick) who hasn’t even bothered to create a new GoFundMe, instead keeping the 2017 ask for $35,000 going.
As of 7/8 he’s raised $8,875, though all the big-ticket donations came early on. The largest was $2,500 from Virginia Scientists for Energy & Environment, a group led by notorious denier Fred Singer. The group’s website now appears to be defunct (unless they’re trying a new strategy of selling men’s underwear to Asia…), so it’s unclear if the grant will still go through once Wojick finally ends the GoFundMe…
Driessen explains that Wojick’s “recently launched” project will be a counter to the NOAA/NSF/DOE-funded “Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network” and its collection of educational resources. As far as a basic scan for online credibility goes, CLEAN’s website checks out. Funded by official sources, clearly disclosed in a footer, the collection points to information at sources like weather.gov, or a KQED youtube video.
Now let’s take a look at the materials Wojick is developing to see if teachers might find them credible. Climate Change Debate Education, as it’s apparently known, is hosted on the domain of choice for wigged out crackpots: blogspot dot com. (We were going to make a “what, was Geocities too complicated?” joke, but as it turns out, Geocities died earlier this year! Still, it could be worse, as Wojick’s STEM education center website has pages that have been under construction since at least 2010, and the page for the site’s web designer still has a banner encouraging users to download Netscape!)
As for the content on the bare-bones site, the three most recent posts are each a few paragraphs long. They’re all inexplicably posted twice, once with and once without a link out to Google scholar search about the topic. Those are followed by four posts that are nothing more than a list of links to YouTube videos featuring William Happer, Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, and Richard Lindzen.
Yikes. Now what about Wojick himself? Is he a credible source, widely influential or highly respected? Well, poking around his blog, we can see that all of 123 people have clicked on his blogger bio since 2013, and that he also apparently spent 2013 to 2016 running a blog on, and we’re not making this up: Horse Cognition (and other critters).
If that’s not debilitating enough to Wojick’s credibility, on Saturday CFACT published a piece by Wojick claiming “President Trump to be arguably the wittiest president in American history,” on par with Lincoln and Truman.
Impossible to say who teachers might find more credible: something funded by official science groups, or the guy who apparently thinks Mr. Ed and Bojack Horseman are for realsies.
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