Case in point: Columbia University, the site of many highly publicized pro-Hamas riots, is now offering a degree in Climate Finance.

I wasn't aware that climate needed financing, but here we are. The university's website says this about the program:

The Columbia Climate School’s mission is to further knowledge and educate leaders to achieve equitable and just solutions to the changing climate and related sustainability challenges.

That's about as content-free a statement as we've seen in a while - at least, since Kamala Harris left office.

Here's the problem: Matters involving global climate, a vast, chaotic mass of interlocking systems and influences, is a matter of scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry must be data-driven, dispassionate, and tentative, subject to changing conclusions in light of new evidence. This program is none of those things. It's a political program, pure and simple.

Climate/energy website Master Resource scribe Robert Bradley Jr. has some interesting thoughts on the matter.

This all sounds reasonable, but where is the “first, check your premises” caveat? Greater speed to the wrong destination is not a virtue, as the late founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Fred Smith, stated. Path dependency and “the tyranny of the status quo” in climate research and understanding can ruin a student’s time and subsequent career path.

(Director of Columbia Climate School’s Masters in Climate Finance) Lisa Sachs repeated refusal to address intellectual diversity and the need for balanced debate on open climate questions speak for themselves. It is climate propaganda at Columbia U.

Of course, it's climate propaganda; most climate discussion in higher education is precisely that. And Mr. Bradley has some useful suggestions - that Columbia will ignore.

There is no substitute for a climate degree program to not have a critic of the narrative of alarm and forced energy transition. One or more such professors can both teach courses and be a resource for students who are taking activist/alarmist courses. The “power of opposites” is very effective learning.

A second recommendation is to have debates for students between CO2/climate optimists and pessimists. In person or on Zoom. This is not nearly as good as having opposing professors, but it is necessary to reduce the present bias.

Third, key books should be texts for climate courses, as well as ‘skeptic’ articles and websites (Climate Etc., WUWT, MasterResource ….). The websites of Alex Epstein, Robert Bryce, and Bjorn Lomborg are useful, as is Roger Pielke Jr.‘s Substack. The Modernizing the EPA project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is research-worthy, as is the global warming work of CEI over the years and decades. Finally, many energy issues regarding the ‘transition’ are covered by the Institute for Energy Research.

These are great suggestions - or would be, if Columbia was interested in the only diversity that really matters, that being intellectual diversity.

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It's been a while since most of the nation's institutions of higher learning had any interest in intellectual diversity. "Critical thinking" as a skill has given way to "You'll think what we tell you to think and you'll like it," which is anathema to the very idea of higher education. We aren't teaching these young skulls full of mush how to think analytically anymore, and the existence of a horse squeeze degree like this is a great example of that.

Is there some danger in allowing these dissenting views? Is there some danger in having these kids exposed to the idea that the Earth and its systems are vast beyond our ability to easily understand and that the climate of this planet is huge, and chaotic, with many systems and influences that we understand very little, or not at all? Is there some danger in having these kids exposed to the idea that throughout most of this planet's history, it's been warmer than it is now, that the climate, yes, has changed throughout the planet's life, with or without humans being present?

Is there some danger in informing these kids what the end result of much of the climate scolds agenda would be - the surrender of most, if not all, of our modern, comfortable, technological lifestyle, with no measurable impact on the earth's climate?

We know the answer, of course. Yes, there is a danger in exposing young people to all these things: Climate scolds will lose their monopolistic grip on higher education, and they will lose the influence they have over many Western politicians and governments - the influence of control. 

It always comes down to control. Every time.