Targeting Children for the Cause of Acute Climate Alarm over CO2 - will the zealots ever stop?

Two new pieces in the Yale Climate Media Forum were announced yesterday.

Parenting in an Age of Climate Change:Communicating the Tough Truths to Children
by Allison Guerette & John Wihbey

Climate Change Included in Science Teaching Guidelines
by Lisa Palmer








(The editor, Bud Ward, is not a neutral observer of the climate change fiasco. For example, he is one of the jurors for something called the Schneider Award, and they unanimously gave it to James Hansen last year.  I wonder if it is awarded to whoever was deemed to be the best at creating Schneiderian Scenarios - 'scary', 'simplified', 'dramatic' - with which to engage our attention?  Hansen would surely be a frequent contender if so.)

There is a lot to be studied in these two articles, and I hope to get back to them next week.  In the meantime, Tom Nelson has picked up on one point, and I have spotted another.  Here they are:

 (1) Inoculating children against ideas disturbing to the zealotry

Tom Nelson 
 Good question: How can left-wing teachers "inoculate" children so that they don't believe it when their parents tell them that CO2 doesn't cause bad weather?

From 'Parenting in an Age of Climate Change: Communicating the Tough Truths to Children | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media':

"In a 2010 address to the National Science Teachers Association, Lynne Cherry, author and director of the Young Voices on Climate Change films, put forward the following prescription for dealing with climate change issues and the sometimes-pernicious influence of media:

How we can respond to the current onslaught against climate change in the media? We can “inoculate” kids by having them not just learning about climate science but actually going outdoors and doing climate science."

(2) On a 'steadily-rolling disaster' calling into question 'the very way we live'
The text in quotes is taken from the second paragraph of the article by Guerette & Wihbey linked to earlier.  I have submitted a comment on it.  If past experience is anything to go by, it will not appear*.  So here it is, with italics and emboldening added:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

April 24, 2013 at 3:23 am

 

Quote “Climate change offers a unique parenting challenge: a steadily-rolling disaster to which we all contribute, punctuated by periodic events and mounting scientific evidence. It calls into question the very way we live and the world we will leave for our children.”

Well, the absence of warming over most of the past two decades does not look to me like a ‘steadily-rolling disaster’, nor does the drop in hurricane activity, nor does the absence of anything extraordinary happening anywhere in weather, ice extents, or sea levels and temperatures.

We most assuredly will face climate-linked challenges in the years to come – we always have and we always will. But I rather think we would be better prepared to deal with them by doing more of the most successful ‘way to live’ the world has ever seen.

I think you would all do better to leave the children out of this squabble, and try your best to protect their childhood from political interference.

*Note added 25 April 2013  Hurray I was wrong! The comment has appeared, and a response to it.  Hope springs eternal.  Pushed for time at the moment but will try to get a reply in before the end of today, after which I will have no chance to do so for several days.

Note added later on 25 April.  Here is my reply:

'Thank you for responding, Leiran.  I followed the link you gave, but I found nothing there to disabuse me of my ‘facts’. I saw the charts showing changes, but since climate always changes I would expect to see such charts. If we could contrive this by some magic, at just about any period in our atmosphere's history, we would find such charts.  Depending on the space and time scale you choose to focus on, we are typically warming or cooling, seeing ice extents vary, and so on, over days, decades, and centuries. On the grander scale of millions of years, we can see that generally the planet has been warmer than now, and  that over thousands of years, that we are in an overall cooling trend within our relatively warm phase, the Holocene interglacial, of the current ice age.

I do not see an indication of a ‘dramatic global temperature increase’ following the industrial revolution.  I do see a gentle one since the end of the Little Ice Age, say from about 1850 onwards.  And within that, I see nothing to convince me that the remarkable rise in ambient CO2 levels since the 1970s has had any discernible effect – the rises in the first part of the 20th century being somewhat similar in rate and size as those which occurred later under higher CO2 levels.  Nor, in my innocence, would I expect CO2 to have a major influence.  It is a trace gas whose contribution to the brief delaying of heat loss from the Earth’s surface to space is very modest compared with the contributions of airborne water in all its phases.  It also does not seem to contribute much at all to the great heat engine of the climate system – the daily transfer of heat from the tropics towards the poles, a system which dominates our weather and in which water plays a very important role. 

I first started on a serious study of the climate system in the mid 1970s, and after a gap of some decades, I am getting back to it now.  So please be assured my remarks are not casual, nor are they intended to be provocative.  I have not been convinced that there is sufficient reason to be alarmed about CO2, and I have looked on with bemusement at the strange mix of severely damaging policy proposals and actions passed with great assurance by some while the climate really does go on behaving pretty much as if the additional CO2 doesn’t really matter very much.  Just like Prof Lindzen expected it to.  Let me commend this report of a talk by him from 1989 to you: http://www.fortfreedom.org/s46.htm

My bemusement turns to horror, dismay and sometimes anger when I see the same sort of assurance bringing scare stories to the young about climate threats attributed to mankind’s influence.   That seems to me to be an abandonment of a basic adult responsibility to protect children from terrifying beliefs about their world when the grounds for such beliefs are so flimsy. '

Note added 5 May: the reply did not get past the moderator!  But a good couple of comments from Barry Woods did - see comments below.
Note added 8 May: I just tried again to post a comment, using only the first two paragraphs of the one above in case a shorter comment has more chance of success.