And my worries about these students are perhaps even greater. We read:
The professors also note this ban on debate extends to discussion among students in the online forums. Moreover, students who choose to use outside sources for research during their time in the course may select only those that have been peer-reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the email states.
Do the instructors ban the students’ discussions about particular topics in the online forums? What? The activity of the students outside the classroom or the campus is absolutely not the instructors’ business. If a student learns enough and fulfills the requirements in the classroom, he may very well be computing statistics for ATLAS at the LHC in her spare time, and perform human sacrifices in front of God Shiva, too.
Moreover, online discussions are clearly much more vital for the intellectual growth of the modern students than the human sacrifices to God Shiva. To prevent students from discussions conflicts with one of the basic values that the scholarly environment should be all about.
The attitudes of these three women are a textbook example of the reasons why the environmentalism is counted among one of the big totalitarian ideologies of the present. These totalitarian ideologies demand a 100% (total) political agreement with the “leaders” in the classroom – and in 100% (total) of the affected people’s lives out of the classroom, too.
Incidentally, the remark that they only allow papers approved by the IPCC is “cute”, too. And the formulation about “papers peer-reviewed by the IPCC” shows that these ladies don’t know what they’re talking about even from the viewpoint of informed fans of the IPCC. As every person who understands the words a little bit knows, the IPCC has never done anything that could be called peer review. The IPCC is/was only supposed to develop their assessmentsbased on the basis of (previously) peer-reviewed literature. They actually claim to simply adopt and present the collective verdicts by the body of the peer reviewers who did their work before the IPCC worked on those topics. The IPCC officially does no original research and no original reviews – this claim of theirs is really a necessary condition for them to pretend that they’re not acting as a transparently biased Inquisition-like filter distorting the scientific literature. Of course, they are distorting the literature, anyway, but the IPCC fans aren’t supposed to talk about this dirty work.