'I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.'
Ross McKitrick, 2009.
The above quote is just part of the first paragraph of a memorable response by Professor McKitrick to a request for his thoughts about Earth Hour. It can be downloaded as a pdf from here.
The inhumanity of the multinational corporation now known as WWF is becoming better known. Earth Hour was one of its inventions, and about as far away from being a 'grass roots' initiative as you can get.
Here is a satellite picture showing how North Korea endures an 'Earth Hour' all year long:
The chart the kindly chappie is waving in the cartoon was published on WUWT in a very recent post by the maestro data-sleuth, Willis Eschenbach. The 2C is of course widely touted by climate scaremongers as a jump that would be such a shock to what they like to believe is such a delicate Earth climate system that it would be a dreaded 'tipping point'. Eschenbach pointed out that at least for the continent of Europe, a 2C jump has already taken place according to some records over the last 120 years or so:
'We’ve done the 2°C experiment … so where are the climate catastrophes?
Seriously, folks, we’re supposed to be seeing all kinds of bad stuff. But none of it has happened. No cities gone underwater. No increase in heat waves or cold waves. No islands sinking into the ocean. No increase in hurricanes. No millions of climate refugees. The tragedies being pushed by the failed serial doomcasters for the last 30 years simply haven’t come to pass.'
Now that temperature history of course is only for Europe, but it is a pretty big area. The pioneering climatologist Hubert Lamb, for example, thought it could provide insight into global climate variation.
It may also be worth pointing out that according to other records, the Earth climate system experiences an average surface temperature jolt of about 4C or so every year between January and July (and again, of course, between July and January in the other direction). The 20th century average for January being 12.0C, and for July 15.8C according to these folks at NOAA. Those being averages, we can speculate that some years see even larger jumps than 3.8C.
Now none of this is conclusive. First of all, the 2C jump was just in Europe (as so far determined), and secondly the annual cycle means we change gradually from month to month, and do not linger at a particular temperature for long. But they certainly don't suggest we are dealing with a terribly fragile system, ready to 'tip' at a modest provocation of say a 2C change in average surface temperature.
These insights might just encourage Greta and her followers to pause for thought.
Note July is warmer than January even though we are closest to the Sun in January each year. This is because there is a relatively large area of land pointing more directly at the Sun during the northern summer, and land heats up more readily in sunlight than does the ocean. Note added 19 Mar 2019. Poor Greta, what chance did she have when the mighty Climate Alarm Industry plotted to exploit children for destructive political ends before she even started high school: https://climatelitigationwatch.org/genesis-of-a-shakedown-new-records-expose-childrens-marches-as-long-planned-component-of-litigation-campaign/
(hat-tip Climate Science )
And what chance do vulnerable/gullible children in the UK have when the BBC as well as some of their teachers are 'cheer-leading' this shameful silliness of 'striking about climate': https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/how-the-bbc-cheerleads-for-kids-climate-strike/ And: 'The French urologist and book author describes Ms. Thunberg as “a shamefully manipulated victim” who needs to be protected, but says her radical ideas “must be attacked relentlessly”.
Criminal child abuse?
The tragedy of Greta Thunberg, Alexandre comments, is that “the child is all the more manipulable as her parents have made her disability public (which is irresponsible on their part)” and that as a doctor he believes that “revealing the neuropsychiatric state of minor children to the media should be a crime!”
He concludes:
We have known since Hans Asperger’s description of the syndrome in 1941 that Asperger’s children are sometimes brilliant but always fragile; instrumentalizing them is a moral fault.”
Note added 09 Sep 2109. Exploiting Greta - some background on those behind the promotion of Greta as a figurehead: https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/june-2019/gretas-very-corporate-childrens-crusade/ 'Whatever Greta or her parents know or think, her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for people like Global Challenge, We Don’t Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels. For Sweden’s energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being usedto ease the transition to green corporatism. ' Note added 14 Oct 2019. Greta is not the first child to be exploited for propaganda purposes on a a big scale: 'In 1982, Samantha Smith, then ten years old, sent a letter to Yuri Andropov, at that time the new chief goon of the Soviet Union. It read in part:
I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like it if you would. '
The day of children demonstrating about the climate scare took place last Friday. It was sickening evidence of how successfully some people have managed to frighten children, and then recruit them as political pawns.
Tim Ball has a thoughtful article at WUWT about the children's panic, and the propensity to panic in general:
'They are taken in by the false claim that a minute amount of human-produced CO2 is effectively controlling the entire atmospheric system since 1950 and causing environmental collapse through global warming. They don’t know that there is an upper limit to the amount that CO2 can increase temperature. They don’t know that the average level of CO2 over the last 250 million years is 1200 ppm. They don’t know that every projection of temperature by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 was wrong. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, how did so few, fool so many, to such an extent, for so long? Similar situations occur throughout history of people fooling the world, although this is undoubtedly the largest in terms of its acceptance, impact, and cost. It is tempting to point the finger at the IPCC, but the speed with which the story took hold, spread, and deceived so many people requires better explanation. It likely won’t stop it occurring in the future because it speaks to the nature of human beings and our inordinate and pandemic fear that the sky might fall. However, we might stop the current insanity.' Mark Morano has put up many links on the children's climate demonstrations. In one he reports on tweets from the GreenPeace co-founder Patrick Moore:
'Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore condemned the climate school striking kids. “This is a fascist tactic. You are using innocent children for your own ends, and this is child abuse of a psychological nature,” Moore wrote on March 15.
“It’s normally called brainwashing, and you are guilty of participating in it. Mao would be proud,” Moore added.
“You are clearly projecting your own psychosis on the children. Self-loathing is a heavy burden. Why don’t you express it through adults rather than abusing innocents?” Moore asked.'
Geoff Chambers at Climate Scepticism looks for explanations of why the children's demos happened this year, since they could have occurred anytime during the decades of climate panic indoctrination. He starts off on a much earlier panic involving children:
'It started as a quasi-religious movement, led by a few persuasive individuals who created an atmosphere of mass hysteria which infected the uneducated and intellectuals alike; then it became an intergovernmental affair, organised at the supranational level; but due to international rivalries and the failure to agree on objectives, it petered out. Its final manifestation was as a mass movement of children (egged on by adults) which ended in slavery or death by starvation for most of the participants.
I’m talking about the Crusades of course, of which the Children’s Crusade of 1212 was one of the last manifestations. '
Even in staid old Switzerland they are beginning to notice: 'In the interview Köppel called the climate movement a “political mass trance that that is currently rolling over us” and that children have been prompted to skip school and protest an “infantilization” of politics ... Köppel notes that the planet has warmed “only one degree since 1860” and that this increase is nothing unusual in a historical context.'
'But Dr. Kevin Donnelly, a conservative commentator and senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, claimed the movement was the product of “biased” academics and failings in 'education.
“I’ve just been on the Strike 4 Climate webpage, where you’ve got seven or eight-year-old kids barely out of nappies being involved in a strike,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide.
“A lot of these students are barely literate or numerate.
“I think it’s absurd.” '
It is absurd, but it is also shameful and tragic. These kids need help. Paul Homewood has the compassion: 'What on earth are we doing to these youngsters? Do we really want them growing up so indoctrinated and unable to use their own faculties that they cannot even check the facts for themselves? Do we really want them to grow up so neurotic that they are scared of the weather?
Are we happy to see them marching around like a bunch of zombies, full of meaningless slogans about topics that they don’t have the slightest understanding about?
It is a sort of mass hysteria that has unfortunately been all too common during human history. It used to be a matter of burning witches, or human sacrifices by the Aztecs. Now it is demonising CO2.'
The evidence of systematic, widespread eco-scaremongering in schools is now accumulating rapidly with the onset of 'strikes' and 'demonstrations' by children during school hours. Our GWPF report in 2014 called for an official enquiry into the extent of this abuse in schools in the UK, and it is by now surely obvious to all that our suspicions and concerns were well-founded, and that our illustrative examples were no isolated anomalies. Back in 1949, the songwriters of the musical 'South Pacific' were on to this type of problem in a different context (that of racism): You've got to be taught to hate and fear You've got to be taught from year to year It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught
This is highly relevant to the climate-alarm based scaremongering in schools around the world today. This awful phenomenon brings shame on our institutions, and our political leaders, for their generally supine gullibility over decades of absurdly hyped climate alarm. That is bad enough by itself, but the deliberate recruitment, by frightening them, of young children to be vehicles for putting pressure on their parents, and on politicians is particularly disgraceful. Moral outrageis surely the perspective of those of us who find the case for any level of alarm over CO2 to be an unconvincing one. But even those who believe that some alarm is in order can be appalled by the harm being done to children by eco-zealots of one kind or another. The statistician and economist Bjorn Lomborg is one such. Below are some extract from an article he published today with this headline: 'Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises' Extract 1 'Although the students’ passion is admirable, their focus is misguided. This is largely the fault of adults, who must take responsibility for frightening children unnecessarily about climate change. It is little wonder that kids are scared when grown-ups paint such a horrific picture of global warming.' Extract 2 'And some prominent politicians, as well as many activists, have taken the latest reportfrom the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to suggest the world will come to an end in just 12 years.
This normalization of extreme language reflects decades of climate-change alarmism. The most famous clip from Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth showed how a 20-foot rise in sea level would flood Florida, New York, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Shanghai – omitting the fact that this was seven times worse than the worst-case scenario.
A separate report that year described how such alarmism “might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn.’” And in 2007, The Washington Post reported that “for many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today.”
When the language stops being scary, it gets ramped up again. British environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, has suggested that the term “climate change” is no longer adequate and should be replaced by “catastrophic climate breakdown.”
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.'
Journalists are Taking Notice. Here is a headline from the Washington Times online yesterday: 'Motivated or manipulated? Rise of youth climate activism fuels alarm over exploitation' The article draws attention to the deliberate plotting that has been going on to make use of children:
'Kids are fast becoming the face of the climate change movement as teenagers, ‘tweens and even younger children file lawsuits, stage walkouts and lobby lawmakers. But newly released documents have raised questions about whether the students are being motivated or manipulated.
A cache of emails released Wednesday on Climate Litigation Watch showed that top climate activists at the 2012 La Jolla strategy session sought to involve children in a legal and civil offensive against the fossil fuel industry, which would include worldwide marches from the “youth climate movement.”
Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher C. Horner, who obtained the emails via an open-records request with the University of Oregon, said the presentation contained in the email is more evidence that students have been used as props.
“It turns out that the frenzied street theater of children’s marches and schoolkids’ strikes was laid out behind closed doors years ago, at the organizational meeting of what became a climate litigation industry,” Mr. Horner said in an email.'
See the Washington Times link for more details. See also this WUWT piece from yesterday.
Candles in the Gloom.Suggestions on how people can, and ought, to help these children, and adults who have been through the education system in the last 30 years or so will be the focus for more posts on this blog in the near future. But in the meantime here are three good efforts already in place. The first is a video produced by Friends of Science, and is directly aimed at children involved in the climate protests:
(YouTube video, hat-tip: https://cliscep.com/2019/03/08/educating-greta/#comment-34676 ) The second is from the Climate Conversation Group, and is in the form of an open letter, and is a bit more pointed. It begins with these words: '...You currently ignore reason, evidence and science and the global political system is on the brink of a catastrophe. The devastating effects of your ignorance are felt by millions of people around the globe for we are far from reaching a common understanding of the climate. Yet this can change.
Young people make up more than half the global population. Your generation have never known global warming, which has barely occurred since the late 1990s.
Almost nobody is included in the local or global decision-making process. That is the nature of democracy and the reason we elect a representative.
We will no longer tolerate your failure to learn how the world works. We demand you pay attention to science, for there is no evidence of a climate crisis. '
The third, is at that most excellent blog, Climate Scepticism. Richard Drake has sympathetically raised the prospect of 'Educating Greta', the adolescent who has recently been the focus of much publicity on climate alarm. Here's a taster:
'Since 17th February I’ve been thinking about how I would educate Greta. Finally, I think I do have something to say. There are four stages in her possible enlightenment for me now:
The Guenier
The Gates
The Drake
The Ring
As you’ll see these are going to be sketchy and category-based, to get the precocious youngster to think. And I hope the materials I point to in the process may even stimulate the grey cells of other readers.'
Tomorrow we can expect to accumulate more evidence of the impact of those who want children to be frightened to serve their political ambitions. It will be neither a pretty nor an edifying sight. But it is where we are today.
Note added 15 March 2019. Here is a fourth good effort, re-published today at WUWT. Also in the form of an open letter: 'By Brian Dingwall, New Zealand
Hi Kids,
Many of you will be marching today, demonstrating for an issue you believe to be very important.
Many years ago, I was young, well informed, and absolutely convinced I knew enough to make good decisions for the future of the world, and couldn’t understand just how obtuse all the oldies were, how they just didn’t know the stuff I had just learned.'
He goes to make many excellent points, e.g.
'The world has many historic consensuses that have turned out to not be so. So far, I don’t mind sharing with you, I have yet to be persuaded.
My background is in science, with a smattering of economics, and statistics and I well understand the case for catastrophic climate change. I find it unconvincing.
As do a raft of well qualified experts in many fields, even Nobel prize winners, and I urge you to find out who they are, and why they have reservations.
There are two sides to this debate, but only one is well resourced, so you have to work a bit harder to find the arguments of the sceptical scientists.'
