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Via A Blog Around the Clock, the Anchorage Daily News reports on a polar bear study proposed by the Alaska legislature:

The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon — researchers just have to fill in the science part.

Start at the end, keep going until you reach the beginning, then stop.

You know, you could save money and frustration if you dropped the “good scientists” part.

A $2 million program funded with little debate by the Legislature last month calls for using state money to fund an “academic based” conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming. Legislators hope to undermine the public perception of a widespread consensus among polar bear researchers that warming global temperatures and melting Arctic ice threaten the polar bears’ survival.

Republican legislative leaders say a federal decision to declare the polar bears “threatened” by climate change would have troubling effects on Arctic oil development and the state’s economic future.

…

The $2 million is also to be used for a national public relations campaign to promote the findings of the conference.

And you could save money by just skipping over the “conference” part. A good PR firm can print up some nice brochures for a lot less than $2 million.

But the point is not to seek some non-biased measure of scientific truth. The point, said [House Speaker John] Harris, is to provide a forum for scientists whose views back Alaska’s interests.

“You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers,” Harris said.

Methinks Mr. Harris got through his science classes in school by getting a copy of the Teacher’s Edition of the textbook and looking up the answers in the back. He seems to believe that’s the scientific method.

Mark Vonnegut wrote the introduction to Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumous collection of short pieces by his father, Kurt Vonnegut. One of the things Mark says is this:

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

The introduction is all I’ve read so far, so excuse me — gonna engage in some subversion. Gonna change the world a little bit.