Unfortunately, some misuse science. Some of their intentions, are far from benevolent. They see science as a mechanism for political power and control. There is great danger from those who would use science for political control over us.

How do they do this? They instill, and then continuously magnify, fear. Fear is the most effective instrument of totalitarian control.

Chet Richards, physicist,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/science_in_an_age_of_fear.html

Monday 26 March 2012

Memo to Education Scotland: Stop Brainwashing our Children with One-Sided State Propaganda on Climate Change

 Quote 1 'Children should not be overfed with one particular view of this ['climate change'].  It is far too complicated for that.'

Quote 2 ' ...it is brainwashing our children.'

Quote 1 is by Professor Tony Trewavas of Edinburgh University.  Quote 2 is by Martin Livermore, of the UK Scientific Alliance.  Both quoted in this article in the Scottish Daily Mail on 24th March, 2012 (hat-tip: Stuart Crawford, media commentator):


Education Scotland is an agency of the Scottish Government, a government which has produced absurd legislation on climate, and committed to absurd targets on renewable energy, thereby leading the way in sub-scientific foolishness.  The facade of scientific justification is easily exposed, but not by children.  They tend to trust what the adults tell them, and hence have long been a clearly identified target for eco-propagandising by the zealots who are intent on telling others how to live.  The Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London have failed to defend the wider society from such manipulation and shoddy extrapolation from unconfirmed speculations about the importance of CO2 in the climate system, and so it is all the more refreshing to see a member of the Edinburgh Royal Society taking a more informed, a more independent, and indeed a more civilised approach on climate matters.


This is especially encouraging and important given the recent announcement of a concordat amongst the major political parties in Scotland in support of the preposterous 'climate change targets' of the Scottish government.  This announcement has been noted and commented upon at Bishop Hill , where it is deemed 'somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet Union'.





Note added 20 Mar 2019.  Education Scotland being noticed internationally for their shameless promotion of junk science and scare stories in schools:
'Educational materials often don’t help, either. One officially endorsed geography textbook in the United Kingdom suggests that global warming will be worse than famine, plague, or nuclear war, while Education Scotland has recommended The Day After Tomorrow as suitable for climate-change education. This is the film, remember, in which climate change leads to a global freeze and a 50-foot wall of water flooding New York, man-eating wolves escape from the zoo, and – spoiler alert – Queen Elizabeth II’s frozen helicopter falls from the sky.'
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/98628/decades-climate-change-exaggeration-west-have-produced-frightened-children-febrile?page=1

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Earth Day Climate Propaganda: Stuff the Data, Stuff the Science, Stuff the Panda - hey kids, look at that cute Panda!

Ross-Shire Journal
These children from a rural school in Scotland have been encouraged to switch lights off on 31st March, in order to 'support people and wildlife threatened by climate change'.

It is not difficult to spot the political campaigners who are coaching them in this nonsense.  And a regional council is on-board too, claiming that it 'hopes the effort will make people think about the energy they use, where it comes from and the impact that has on the environment and climate change.'
 (Source: Ross-Shire Journal)


Of course, the council and WWF are busy scheming to make that energy more expensive and less reliable thanks to the windfarms that are popping up in their territory to destroy wildlife, industrialise wild places, and discourage visitors and sensible industries from going anywhere near there.  Meanwhile, it is quite disgraceful that wealthy, un-accountable, biased, scaremongering, self-serving schemers like WWF have been allowed such access and influence on those youngsters.

This tiny example can no doubt be replicated in many thousands of locations worldwide, and this gives us a hint as to the extent of the  targeting of children by ruthless campaigners who will no doubt claim that they are protecting 'the world', or at least the Pandas if not the People.

The campaigners may well protect their Pension Plans by such actions, but I fear they may be bringing nought but harm to both People and Pandas, and for that matter, to Progress itself.

Note added 27 March 2012.  Earth Hour is no piece of fluffy symbolism dreamt up by nice but ill-informed people.  Instead
'Earth Hour was brought into this world by corporations
Launched in Sydney, Australia in 2007 there was never anything grassroots or shoestring about it. There’s no history of penniless activists toiling in obscurity, working their fingers to the bone, hoping against hope to attract attention to their cause.

Earth Hour is, instead, the brainchild of two large corporate entities – the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Fairfax Media Limited.'   Donna Laframboise
Note added 28 March 2012.  Donna explains the differences between Earth Hour and Earth Day: In any case, whereas Earth Day was the brainchild of a politician, Earth Hour (as I explain here) was brought into this world by wealthy corporations.http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/03/27/earth-hour-corporations-preaching-morality/

Saturday 17 March 2012

A Climate Book for Children - the cover alone deserves our contempt

Produced and published by what kind of people?  Sadists?  Sociopaths?  Dupes?  Fools?  Profiteers? 


































Pic found on a blog hosted here, the AGU, home of an ethics committee once chaired by Peter Gleick, a man made decidedly un-ethical by his disproportionate alarm about CO2 and climate: http://blogs.agu.org/georneys/2012/01/26/global-warming-is-scary/  'Un-ethical' is also applicable to the cover of the above book.  As are a great many other adjectives conveying dismay, displeasure, distaste, and damnation.

The publishers are Dreamland, an Indian company describing itself thus:
If any reader in India or elsewhere can get this book and send in more details of it, I would be grateful. 

Thursday 15 March 2012

Teaching Point on Climate Data Analysis: for rigour and thoroughness, look to the outsiders, not the ‘authorities’.

Teaching materials, and guidance for teachers, can readily be found which defer to such authorities as the IPCC and the Royal Society and Met Offices and other government agencies around the world.  But, sad to say, none of these are to be trusted these days. 

They have all bitten the apple of political temptation, and the resulting lust for power has deflected them from paying adequate attention to details.  Such as how the hockey stick was constructed (see Montford’s masterpiece, 'The Hockey Stick Illusion', for how this was exposed by climate establishment outsiders as shoddy and indefensible).   The IPCC has also been exposed as an organisation careless of its own integrity (see Laframboise’s jaw-dropper 'The Delinquent Teenager' for chapter and verse).  And Montford has more recently described in a GWPF report the recent descent of the Royal Society from the high ground it might once have had a claim, indeed a responsibility, to occupy.  The UK Met Office has been saddled with an ex-WWF climate zealot as Chairman, and a deference to biased computer models which have made a mockery of its short-term climate predictions, both formal and informal


In New Zealand, amateurs exposed the official temperature records as being so unsatisfactory that no one ‘in authority; would subsequently take responsibility for them.  A recent summary was published on WUWT.

In the States, several commentators are challenging the temperature history adjustments being made by GISS and other agencies.

In Australia, a new report is out which exposes severe quality problems with the official temperature records there.

In each case, the ‘errors’ or the ‘adjustments’, just like the blunders of the IPCC, all happen to favour exaggeration of warming or its effects during the last 100 years or so.  And note that in each of these three cases, my links are to 'outsiders'.

So, teachers, the rug of authority is being pulled from under your feet.  You will fall too when that process speeds up, if you have been conscientiously urging your pupils to trust the IPCC, the Royal Society, the ‘97% of climate scientists’ (another deceptive statistic), and such like.  As Christopher Monckton has recently said in a related context, Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.'

Now it is clear that the truly conscientious teacher must hold the claims of such bodies within metaphorical tongs for his or her pupils to review and compare with other sources.   It is a sad thing that we have come to this.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Sloppy Science in a Nutshell: head of climate analysis says drought is permanent 4 years before record floods

It seems that whenever prominent CO2-driven folks condescend or blunder into making falsifiable statements about the climate system, the system duly responds by revealing them to be false.  Real Science has this beauty, using quotes from the Sidney Morning Herald:

January 4, 2008
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.
March 13, 2012
Changes to the system are almost certainly due to human activity.
The past two years have been Australia’s wettest two-year period since at least 1900

Yet the show goes on.  They have the money, the politicians, big agencies, big finance, big green, and of course virtually all of education from nursery schools upwards. Their scandals are numerous - the list at NoTricksZone is now up at 129 items, and is surely incomplete.  I suspect there are also many thousands more on smaller scales, within and around all the uncounted initiatives on the climate crisis bandwagon. 

But thoughtful teachers everywhere must be asking themselves how long they must go along with this madness.  On the one hand are to be found agitated activists and all the power that effective PR (such as the IPCC) and financial prizes can win, and on the other, are calmer citizens and all the integrity that careful observation and reflection can bring.

 It is clear to me which side has won the financial and political battles.  It is also clear which side has won the moral and intellectual ones.  Which side should teachers best be on?  The educational battles have also been lost, but the war is surely not yet over.  I think it is in the field a war between irresponsible adults who cannot contain or cope with speculations about CO2-driven catastrophe, and responsible ones who are dismayed by over-the-top reactions to something so poorly supported by observation and experiment.

Note added 14 March 2012: Real Science has more examples here of stupid, irresponsible, and subsequently refuted claims by scientist-activists.

Friday 9 March 2012

Climate Week UK - a weak week weaker than ever in 2012?

That time of year again, and here I nearly missed it.  Climate Week, 12-18 March 2012.  It must be getting harder and harder to stir up enthusiasm for it.

It has as ever a list of supporters that would provide a decent resource for any sociologist researching into the spread of climate madness through a society.  Here's how it starts, with a few politicians, one a reformed terrorist, and how it continues with various 'eminent individuals' such as Al Gore and Nicholas Stern, two famous alarmists, and a star of the 10:10 terror film 'No Pressure', Gillian Anderson:

'Political leaders

The Prime Minister, David Cameron
The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg
The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond
The First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones
The First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson
Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness
The Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband

Eminent individuals

Al Gore, former US Vice President
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General
Lord Anthony Giddens, sociologist
Lord Nicholas Stern (author of the Stern report)
Sir Paul McCartney
Michael Palin, presenter
Gillian Anderson, actress'



The whole, far longer, list can be found here.

It does not seem to include CRU, but it does have the Royal Society and the Foundation of Holistic Therapists on board, to name but a few.  On the business front, alternative energy companies and the like are well-represented, the Prince's Mayday Trust is there, as is the UK Rainwater Harvesting Association and the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership.  Climate Week is not just about scaring and misinforming people, not least the very young, but there is money to be made through promotions and image-building events.


One construction company,  possibly in a time warp, is proposing to run public showings of the notorious and ludicrous 'An Inconvenient Truth'.   Another company is encouraging their employees to have good lunches that week:
'Each day during Climate Week, Sunvil Holidays will be providing our staff with a daily buffet of local and British produce.
On Thursday 15 March, all staff are encouraged to bring in their own local/British dish and the office will hold a lunchtime picnic.'

In Devon, students are helping out with a cider and ale festivalWell, who said CO2 was all bad?


Chester Zoo on the other hand is more mainstream - it seems they might be going to shut themselves down for a week: 'We are having a Big Switch Off at Chester Zoo' 
We shall have to hope for good sunny week for any tropical beasties that may be there.  Chilling children is bad enough, but imagine the uproar if animals were to be so mis-treated.


On the education front, what do we see?
One school in Surrey announces 'During lunchtime break,members of the Green Team will be offering a ‘plant your own sweet pea’event.'  Now that does not show much in the way of self-sacrifice, self-criticism, and general flagellation that this great 'crisis of a trace gas' calls forThey might wish to learn from National Star College where 'Students & staff are being asked to focus on switching off lights, computers & electrical items on standby as well as turning down heating.'  That's more like it.  Next year, they might like to try boarding up any north-facing windows, or perhaps just try sitting still in classes while volunteers put ice cubes on their heads to symbolise both the disappearing icecaps and the gross indulgence of past students wanting to be warm all day.  Meanwhile near Glasgow another school is being even more ambitious - their charges are being encouraged to control the very cosmos:
We are holding two competitions within our school. The infant department are completing a climate-related dot-to-dot challenge. The upper school are to design inventions to help reduce climate change. We are excited!  I'd be excited too, if I could somehow convert my dismay into something more positive.

So what will it be like, this 'Climate Week'.  In last year's post on it, I added this footnote when it was all over:
'...hard to get data for an overview, but my impression is that Climate Week has been a low-key, low-profile, low-impact event.  Thank goodness.'

Same again this year? 





Thursday 8 March 2012

Global Warming Alarmists Rally Around Classroom Propaganda

 An article yesterday in Forbes Magazine by James Taylor of the now more famous Heartland Institute:

Global Warming Alarmists Rally Around Classroom Propaganda

 (Hat-tip: Tom Nelson)

 A short article, well worth a read.  He puts in revealing juxtaposition some of the propaganda initiatives in schools deployed by those who want children to be alarmed about airborne CO2:
'Force impressionable young students to watch, at least eight times apiece, an Al Gore global warming propaganda movie? – Check!
Keep showing the propaganda movie even after a court of law found numerous important factual errors in the movie? – Check!
Set up National Teach-Ins with environmental activists and other propagandists, while at the same time freezing out participation from non-alarmists? – Check!
Flood the Internet and school district mailboxes with activist global warming curricula? – Check!'
 beside this quotation from Michael Mann:
 “[T]here was this program to indoctrinate K-9 school children with climate change denial propaganda. To me that is so pernicious, and I am genuinely horrified by it. I’m all too aware that those who will bear the brunt of our emissions today are going to be our children and grandchildren. They’re going to bear the costs of our cheap energy today. So there’s this effort to misinform the very people who will bear the greatest cost of climate change. To me that is so amoral it’s almost hard to put into words.”


He puts in revealing juxtaposition an appeal for a 'rational public debate' by Peter Gleick :
 'In his letter in which he admitted stealing Heartland Institute internal documents, engaging in fraud, committing identity theft, and distributing to the media forged documents designed to cast the Heartland Institute in a false and pernicious light, Fakegate perpetrator Peter Gleick claimed he did so because “a rational public debate is desperately needed” and there are coordinated efforts to “prevent this debate.”
beside this observation that that this self-same man was intent on poisoning public discourse and turning down a debate:
 '...Gleick, on the very same day that he perpetrated his acts of fraud and theft against the Heartland Institute, turned down a Heartland Institute invitation to publicly debate global warming and share his climate concerns at the Heartland Institute’s annual benefit dinner...'

The moral qualities of some those on the 'other side' of this inadequately debated topic are not at all impressive.  The double-speak, the deviousness, the projection, the ruthlessness, and the intolerance are all short of being edifying.  And of course, some of them call for no debates at all since since they would give undesirable publicity and recognition to calm, moderate, and well-informed views on climate,  And, of course, in the few public or publicised debates that have taken place, such views have been so much more impressive, usually winning the day. 

They may win the 'days', but meanwhile the years of climate alarmism accumulate in schools.