Ignorance should be illegal

This morning one of my coworkers brought to my attention that a customer had left us a short “love note” in one of the DVD’s they had returned in the book drop sometime the previous night. The DVD was entitled “An Inconvenient Truth”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Al Gore talks about global warming, and warns of the dangers and implications that the human presence has brought upon nature.


The customer was so moved by the film (apparently) that he/she felt the need to express his/her views. I’m assuming that their “note” was meant to be read by the following patron to check out the video. The note read this:

“This DVD is for people who like Scary Science Fiction stories and/or have Reality Deficit Disorder. Most reputable scientists disagree with Gore. To see a list of thousands of scientists who disagree with Gore go to www.petitionproject .org. or for more information about global warming read Christopher Harner’s book “ the politically incorrect guide to global warming and environmentalism”.

First off, global warming is NOT Science Fiction, but Science Fact. There are numerous papers and studies that uphold this idea of human induced global warming. But none the less, I felt the need to humor the unknown patron and check out the website he/she provided me with.

The webpage proclaimed that “31,486 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhD’s”. This was the message below the website title. The petition was put in place to “demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatologically damage is wrong”.

Well, if you have signatures from all of those “qualified individuals”, why ask non-qualified individuals to sign? What weight will their signatures carry?

I went further and found that the website touted an organization called Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The ONLY evidence they provided was a paper published in a journal by this same organization. Just for some perspective, this same organization claims that “both official reports and the peer reviewed literature afford substantive grounds for doubting that HIV is the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral treatment is unambiguously beneficial”(Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons V:12; N:4).  Any "Medical" organization that does not believe that HIV causes AIDS should not be your "go to" organization for any information, let alone information regarding a topic completely unrelated to their so called "expertise". 



Seriously, it should not be legal for groups like these to poison the minds of Americans.