Part of the explanation for the remarkable spread of climate alarmism into schools may be due to the abundance of books taking the alarmist position as being beyond much doubt - an abundance perhaps also due in part to malevolent authors attracted by the idea of writing sensationalist material. I plan to complile lists of climate related books, or sections of books, on climate for children, and to supplement this with critical reviews of them whenever time or existing reviews are found.
(1) Hat-tip:'justmeint', who commented on a post here in June (29/6/11) and gave a link to a post by an Art Horn, an extract of which follows.
'I worked as an on air meteorologist for 25 years, mostly with NBC stations. Now I am self-employed. Recently I was presenting my program about how weather works to a middle school. During a break between groups I had a chance to look around the library where I was presenting my program. I thought it would be interesting and revealing to see what kind of books about energy and climate the library was providing to the students. It didn’t take long to find the answer.'
He goes on to conclude:
'The point is that this is another of an apparently endless series of books made for middle school students that condemns how we live and how we make energy. If this one school library is a microcosm of other school libraries around the country than these same messages are being pounded into the heads of our youth day after day, year after year with virtually no opinion from anyone other than environmentally driven eco-authors whose mission is to re-invent energy production with no idea of how to do it. By the time these students are old enough to question the assumptions and errors in these books it might be too late to reverse the direction the radical environmental movement has taken us.'
Here, thanks to another very helpful correspondent in an email today, is a start:
(2) Here is a list of climate books aimed at children:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/environmental-books/global-warming-books.htm#children
(3) Here is another such list:
http://globalwarmingkids.net/books/index.html
(4) The UK's Royal Meteorological Society does seem to have gone over to the dark, the alarmist side of the climate controversy, and the gushing and uncritical nature of these book reviews when climate alarmism is referred to is by itself evidence of that: http://www.metlink.org/weather-climate-resources-teenagers/book-reviews.html I'd be interested in publishing more objective views of these books here.
#1990
A partial review of '50 Simple Things' is included in the this article: 'In 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth, kids are told, “When your parents were kids, hardly anyone ever worried about saving the environment. . . . They developed some bad habits. They made as much garbage as they wanted; they wasted energy whenever they wanted; they used up the Earth’s treasures, just for fun.”
This treatment disparages parents; others suggest that parents are stupid. In a discussion of the ozone issue, children are told, “We don’t think adults would keep on making these [CFC] gases if they realized they were harming all life on Earth.”
Should the environment be a wedge between parents and children? And should children be taught that people carrying out productive activities are evil?'
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ecokids-new-automatons-on-the-block#axzz2SmwDsjgv
#1995 United States
'A quick glance at the materials aimed at children and their educators reveals one very apparent trend: a call to activism. The bestseller 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth, published by The EarthWorks Group, urges kids to write to their U.S. Senators, the President, and world leaders, or join an environmental group. Suggested groups include the Natural Resources Defense Council, famous for perpetuating hysteria over Alar-treated apples in the late 1980s, and Greenpeace, an organization that even its admirers say built its reputation on publicity stunts and playing “fast and loose” with scientific facts.
The textbook Your Health, published by Prentice-Hall, encourages children to “consider joining an environmental group.” Its suggestions for further contacts include Greenpeace, Zero Population Growth, Planned Parenthood, and Earth First! (a group that has solicited terminally ill people to undertake life-threatening eco-terrorist activities). And Kid Heroes of the Environment, another publication of The EarthWorks Group, praises children for conducting petition drives, organizing letter-writing campaigns to political leaders, and boycotting businesses.
The Alley Foundation, a “non-political, non-profit organization dedicated to the environmental education of our youth,” distributes a book called “Cry Out.” It tells the children, “Unless you take action NOW, the beautiful forests where you go hiking, the beaches where you swim in clean water, the clear morning when you take a breath of sweet-smelling air could all become things of the past.”
What’s so wrong about these calls to activism? Nothing, really, if children are taught solid facts about environmental science and if they understand the trade-offs involved in adopting alternative courses of action. Yet this hardly seems the case. Children are often taught by people lacking training in environmental subjects.
Consider that the United Nations Environment Programme markets its publication, “Environmental Education for Our Common Future,” to teachers “whatever subject they teach.”[1] Or that school systems across the nation, often at the requirement of government mandates, are incorporating environmental education into traditional subjects such as mathematics, history, languages, and civics. Children are learning from teachers who can barely distinguish myth from fact in the environmental arena.'
Source: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/ecokids-new-automatons-on-the-block/comment-page-1/#comment-52105
#1996 United States 'Facts, Not Fear'
#1999 Canada 'Facts, Not Fear'
#2006 United Nations 'Tore and the Town on Thin Ice'
'A new United Nations children’s book promotes fears of catastrophic manmade global warming – and is replete with exaggerations and inaccuracies, according to a U.S. Senate report.
The book, "Tore and the Town on Thin Ice,” is published by the United Nations Environment Programme and blames "rich countries” for creating a climate catastrophe.'
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/11/13/174132.shtml
#2007 From an Amazon.com review: "Amongst other errors, the graph in this book showing the link between global temperature and Co2, has the lines mislabelled. The correct graph (and you can find it using their own references in the back of the book) shows CO2 increases lagging temperature by some 600 years. As the lines in the graph in this book are wrongly labelled, it looks like temperature rises follow CO2 increases, and the text supports this point." (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Earth-Guide-Global-Warming/dp/0439024943)
As if helping bring the shoddy but slick 'An Inconvenient Truth' to the world was not bad enough, David produces book with an even more blatant con in it: the mislabelled chart. Chapter and verse on this here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/other/david_book.pdf#2008 United States. This book looks promising:
Deb & Seby's Real Deal on Global Warming
#2008 'Global Warming: The Threat of Earth's Changing Climate' by Laurence Pringle. Amazon review comment 'The purpose of this book is to scare children about global warming. On the back cover: "Global Warming Can Lead to Global Disaster" is not intended to do anything else. Author Pringle would have been equally accurate to write: "Global Cooling Can Lead to Global Disaster".
#2010 United States
This absurd remark in the sample page is not encouraging:
'Yet climate change is a phenomenon with which we humans have little experience, at least in historic times,'
I would reword that to 'climate change is a phenomenon with which we humans have a great deal of experience throughout our recorded history. Our geologists and others have found evidence of climate change throughout the history of the atmosphere itself.'
#2011 United States
Farm Bureau upset that science kit for students contains left-wing book with misinformation about modern farming
#2011 United States
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
A few notes from a global warming hoax book at our local elementary school library
It was a recommended book at his school library.
Notes:
Page 17: It says "Co2 and Temperature. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. Milk and cookies. Macaroni and cheese. You get the picture."
Page 19: "If the polar ice caps could speak, they'd sound just like the Wicked Witch of the West".
Page 37: "In the year 2000, there were more natural disasters than in any other single year up to that time..."
Page 47: "We must all make sure there is never a place called Global Warming National Park".
Page 55: "...scientists are predicting that [polar bears] will be extinct within 100 years".
Page 99: "Become a Global Warming Activist"
#2011 UNEP: a selection of downloadable pamphlets for children:
http://www.scribd.com/collections/2592523/Childrens-series
e.g.
'Ting and the Possible Futures (French)
This science fiction story brings to life the frightening but real possibilities of an out-of-control climate crisis. It also introduces the positive, creative and very doable steps we ca...'
#2011 'The Magic School Bus' 'When it comes to fear tactics and the not-so-veiled political agenda of today’s liberal environmentalists, we only have to look to educational propaganda such as that forwarded by Scholastic.com and their book/video, “The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge” to see that propagandizing children is still taking place.
The Magic School Bus educational set and its distribution company were first brought to my attention by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance. His assessment of the Magic School Bus Climate Challenge book/video was that it was a combination of an unwarranted guilt trip and unsubstantiated fear mongering.'
The Magic School Bus educational set and its distribution company were first brought to my attention by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance. His assessment of the Magic School Bus Climate Challenge book/video was that it was a combination of an unwarranted guilt trip and unsubstantiated fear mongering.'
http://salinapost.com/2011/08/04/man-made-global-warming-convert-the-children-change-the-world/
#2012 United States The Magic School Bus is still running along: http://www.purdueexponent.org/features/article_1dacf449-82e6-5c63-967e-ae572c8af66f.html
'Ms. Frizzle and her class took the audience in the Stewart Center’s Loeb Playhouse on a whirlwind educational field trip to explore the mysteries of global warming Sunday afternoon.
The show featured an all new adventure for “the Friz” and her class. After they discovered the textbook they had used to plan their play on global climate was outdated, the class boarded the Magic School Bus. They journeyed to the North Pole and the Equator – and even shrunk down to microscopic size in order to understand the cause and effect of global warming.
#2012 United States Here's an interesting theory: 'So maybe kids aren't really disconnected from nature as much as they really just want to read better books featuring the natural environment that aren't constantly trying to teach them a lesson about recycling or climate change.'
Source: http://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/blogs/study-new-kids-books-lack-connection-to-nature
#2012 Australia 'Global Explorations'
Thinly disguised propaganda
How do you feel knowing that your children are being indoctrinated in this manner when they go to school?
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2012/02/disgraceful-climate-indoctrination-in-australian-schools/comment-page-1/#comment-15721
#2012 Seen in an Abu Dhabi airport bookshop.
The cover alone condemns the book as junk.
#2012 'Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters' by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush
Extract: 'A key element of the Green’s endless indoctrination schemes has been to reach children, the most vulnerable among us and for this reason our schools have been turned into Green prisons where their version of the Earth is pumped into the minds of children here and around the world.
Their primary teaching tool is fear. Fear that the oceans will rise and wipe out entire cities. Fear that the rainforests are disappearing. Fear that entire species are being destroyed by the hand of man. Fear that the use of any kind of fuel, coal, natural gas, and oil is despoiling the planet.
I have reviewed books for some fifty years at this point and I could not put a number on the books for children that hammer home these and other terrifying themes. One crossed my desk the other day, “Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters” by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush. It has been called “the perfect children’s introduction to environmental issues” by Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!
“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine!
Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.
“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”
It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.
This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.
The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.
They are a corruption of geophysical and biological science. They have nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with distorting children’s understanding of the real world.
It does not matter that the Ms. Kondonassis thinks she is serving humanity. The great lie of communism is that it will create a collectivist utopia. In reality it has always depended on terror to maintain itself and it has failed wherever it has been tried. Environmentalism is its latest permutation.'
#2012 EU. A list of booklets aimed at children by the EU (!): http://europa.eu/teachers-corner/0_9/index_en.htm
#2012 UK 'How the World Works', a children's book published in 2010. Written by an ex-WWF employee so one would expect malice, scaremongering, loaded perspectives, and diatribes against humanity. It would seem they are all there.
A reviewer at Australian Climate Madness did not care for it at all:
'And as you can see from the images, it's all dressed up in cheerful, kid-friendly artwork, with plenty of pull tabs and pop-ups so the message is cleverly concealed. Apart from the global warming propaganda, almost every page admonishes the reader and humanity in general for the evil it has done to the planet.
Because it's a kids book, and the message must be straightforward, there's no room for subtlety or shades of grey - it's a blunt assessment that humanity is damaging the planet and we must change our ways, or else.
Gone are the days when children could grow up enjoying the wonders of the planet and the universe for their own sakes without being badgered or berated. Now even pop-up books designed for the very youngest in our society are packed with enviro-propaganda to make them feel guilty about the way in which humanity (and by inference the young readers of the book) have defiled Gaia. Tragic.'
#2013 Guiness Book of World Records 'Jiminy Cricket' on Bishop Hill has spotted a blatant piece of propagandising buried within this book, a book popular with youngsters. It contains a section on climate change which mentions no 'records' at all and is merely a piece of special pleading. It includes the hockey-stick plot and should be condemned for that alone. Commenter Brent Hargreaves notes
'Jiminy, they're infiltrating kids' comics as well as the Guinness Book. At Christmas I was saddened to find green propaganda even in my nephew's 2013 Dandy Annual.'
#2013 Germany. State-supported extremism aimed at 14 year-olds. Hat-tip No Tricks Zone
The book is targeted at children 14 years old and up'
Comment by P. Gosselin 'It probably would be funny were it not to be read and believed by Germany’s children. It’s a meisterwerk of propaganda, aimed at shaping the the minds of children.
This is not a cynical joke written solely by some fringe scientists – rather it was written in cooperation with the German federal government. The book is totally absent of any balance.'
http://notrickszone.com/2013/02/06/climate-science-turns-comic-john-schellnhuber-now-depicted-as-planet-saving-comic-hero-in-germany/#comments
