Oh Mothers, Tell Your Children: don't trust museums on climate change

Picture: The Guardian

Mothers, and fathers concerned about your children getting a fair and balanced view of climate variation, please read this article by John Tierney from which the following is an extract:

'A few years ago, I went to the museum and gave a quiz to a class of high-school students who had just toured it. I asked about two long-term trends in the United States: Was air pollution getting better or worse, and was the amount of forestland increasing or decreasing? None of the students—nor their teacher—got both questions right. Most had no idea that air pollution has been declining for decades while the amount of forestland has been increasing.

You can’t blame them, given what they’d just seen at the Hall of Biodiversity. The message is unrelentingly gloomy, and sometimes just outdated or wrong. There’s an image of a forest supposedly decimated by acid rain, which was a much-proclaimed eco-catastrophe three decades ago—until an extensive federal study concluded that there was ‘”no evidence of widespread forest damage.” There are warnings of resource shortages and admonitions to “reduce, reuse, recycle—and rethink.” One exhibit panel claims that “global warming has already resulted in more frequent and severe coastal storms as hurricanes,” which is contradicted by both data and theory. There has been no upward trend in hurricanes over the past half century (the last decade has been especially calm), and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictsthat “future changes in storms are likely to be small.” A video shows much of Florida and Long Island disappearing under the rising ocean—representing a sea-level rise far beyond what IPCC projects.

The hype was even worse when the museum presented a special show on climate change in 2008. The exhibition, which toured other science museums in the United States and abroad, displayed a model of lower Manhattan under 16 feet of water, while the rest of the world was ravaged by storms, droughts, fires, and plagues. In a review of the exhibition for the New York Times, Edward Rothstein criticized it for being concerned less with science than with frightening visitors. “What we need from a museum is not proselytizing but a more reflective analysis,” he wrote, complaining that the exhibition “made me feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation.” '

So, the message is that parents need to be ready to protect their children from museum exhibits about climate.  The reality is that the world has been improving in just about every environmental measure you might think of.  Furthermore, evidence continues to accumulate about the gross hype and scaremongering in some scientific circles on climate: the reality of the benign warming trend is ignored, the fantasy of incompetent computer models is preferred.   A quick check of the blogosphere right now, supplies these examples within seconds: (1), (2) , (3), (4) and (5). 

Several posts have raised concerns about museums on this blog in previous years:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/three-ways-to-get-at-young-about.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-wisdom-open-letters-and.html

(scroll down to '2015 Open Reply to US Museums ')

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-sites-aimed-at-children-or.html

(use Ctrl-f to find at least 3 'museum' mentions)

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-curricula-school-curricula.html

(use Ctrl-f to find at least 3 'museum' mentions)

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/president-obamas-last-resort-new.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/scaring-children-about-climate-some.html

The basic message is: children are at risk of being seriously misled by museums about climate and other environmental matters.