Sacrificing Children for a Better Climate: the Aztecs used knives to kill them quickly; we take longer by depriving them of energy, food, and hope – but we do get more victims in the end.

(1) The Aztec God of Rain: Tlaloc.

'The worship of Tlaloc [the rain god] was among the most ghastly in Mexico... children were constantly sacrificed to him. If we may believe Sahagun, at the feast of the Tlaloque "they sought out a great number of babes at the breast, which they purchased of their mothers. They chose by preference those who had two crowns in their hair and who had been born under a good sign. They pretended that these would form a more agreeable sacrifice to the gods, to the

end that they might obtain rain at the opportune time. . . . They killed a great number of babes each year; and after they had put them to death, they cooked and ate them. ... If the children wept and shed tears abundantly, those who beheld it rejoiced and said that this was a sign of rain very near." ... it is to be suspected that the rite was very far spread, for in the myths of many of the wild Mexican tribes and even in those of the Pueblo tribes north of Mexico the story of the sacrifice of children to the water-gods constantly recurs .... '

Source: http://levigilant.com/Bulfinch_Mythology/bulfinch.englishatheist.org/races/chapter2.htm  For more on Sahagun: http://www.wdl.org/en/item/10096/

Note added 28 Aug 2019  In Peru, only maybe 500 years ago, they sacrificed children when they had too much rain:  'The children may have been sacrificed when sacrificing adults did nothing to ward off the adverse climate events, bioarchaeologist Haagen Klaus told National Geographic.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he said. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-43928277

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49495167

(2)The Eco Demon of Doom: CO2

Great Insights into the Eco-Scourge

Now the modern superstition is that our carbon dioxide emissions do what carbon dioxide has never been known to do before, and that is drive and dominate the climate system, leading to catastrophe.  There are so many people who dislike our industrial civilisation, that this invented horror over a trace gas has been like a gift from the gods.  They can use it to deprive the poor of all the great benefits that fossil fuels can bring.  They can use it to create agriculture that grows not food but fuel for cars, despite fossil fuel being generally cheaper and less damaging to their engines.  When basic food prices rise as a result, more people starve.  The food they need could readily be produced, but they can't afford to buy it.  The demonisation of CO2 also means higher energy prices in the developed world, increasing fuel-poverty and reducing the prospects for economic growth there because heavily-subsidised windfarms, solar farms, and other foolish indulgences, are being imposed by supine governments.  Supine in the face of the high-priests of the climate scare, and the countless opportunists who rally round them in search of political and financial advantage.

There are also tribes of followers of this new cult, almost all wealthy and intolerant of dissent.  For them the superstition science is settled.  Action must be taken.  We saw some of them marching through New York and other places last month.

YouTube

They all looked well-fed and prosperous beneficiaries of industrial societies, and obviously with time to spare.  Some of their leaders were there too, some fabulously wealthy.  A few of them can be seen on the left in a screenshot taken from a new video called 'Why Renewables Equal Death'.

The picture on the right is from the same video.  It shows the burning of dung, the renewable energy source that causes so much air pollution and waste of fertiliser in the developing world.

(3) A Modern Aztec Sacrifice: Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, who has lost his childhood

Photo 

'A 14-year old Colorado boy with an Aztec name travels the world with his younger brother, 11, as a missionary for “global sustainability,” rapping, dancing and speaking for Earth Guardians, a group he directs. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is not descended from Aztecs, the bloody tyranny that ruled central Mexico for several centuries until Cortes and his Native American allies overthrew them in 1521.   But Aztecs have somehow emerged in the sustainability movement as an ideal of eco-friendly civilization.  Never mind that the Aztecs were a predatory empire founded on constant warfare, genocide, human sacrifice, and cannibalism.'  

The above paragraph is taken from the start of a penetrating article by Rachelle Peterson called 'How Radicals Hijacked Environmentalism'.  She goes on to note:

'The new cult of Aztec sustainability was on display at the People’s Climate March of September 21st, where a contingent of  would-be Aztecs drummed and danced their way down Sixth Avenue with a float decorated with sculpted human skulls.'

'Sustainability', she further notes, is now  'a big tent that shelters social and political agendas along with environmental ones. Social justice, managed economies, fair trade, gender neutrality, and racial diversity are just a few of the other movements that find ideological homes under the banner of “sustainability.” Anti-colonialism is only the latest to join these ranks.'

She concludes with a caution:

'Perhaps the real “colonialism” that activists should eye is sustainability itself. The broader the sustainability movement becomes, the more aggressive it becomes in shoehorning parallel social movements into its mold. In that sense, the Aztec imagery is apt.  The Aztecs were one of the New World’s most successful imperial powers and succeeded in dominating all the native peoples of central Mexico for a time.  Strangely enough, however, they proved unsustainable.  Their other indigenous peoples of Mexico jumped at the chance presented by the arrival of a small contingent of well-armed Europeans to put an end to the Aztec empire.  Xiuhtezcatl might at some point take some time out from his advocacy work to study some history.'

Steve Goddard has more illustrations of Aztec practices, ancient and modern, here: 

'Threatening Children With Violent Death'

(4) 'Sustainable Development' = 'Suppressed Development'

The list of harms caused by self-styled 'environmentalists' or 'radicals' or would-be 'guardians'  is very large.  Here is a listing of what may only be part of it: 'The Legacy of the Environmental Movement'.  Here are the sub-headings at that location:
'Prolonged Psychological Fear Based on Unfounded/Distorted Claims'
'Needless Death of over 30 Million Innocent Young Children'
'Loss of a Dependable Electrical Infrastructure'
'Dependency on Foreign Oil and Higher Fuel Prices'
'Starvation'
'The Agents of Fear'
'Development of the "Precautionary Principle" into a Fear Distortion Tool'
'Taking of Property without Just Compensation (Private Lands)'
'Endangered Species Act'
'Tying National Security Up in Knots'
'Eliminating or Weakening Flood Prevention Systems (Dams, Levies)'
'Depriving Workers of Their Livelihood'
'The Law of Unintended Consequences'
'The Destruction of Credible Science by Promoting Junk Science'
'The Destruction of Scientist who disagree with the Environmental Agenda'
'Promoting a Small Utopian World for the Elite through a Population Control Agenda (Isn't this called Genocide?)'
'Sponsor of Terrorism in the Name of the Environment'
'School Indoctrination: Driving Fear into the Hearts of Our Children'

So much harm.  So much enthusiasm for harm.  Superstition can do that.  They call it 'Settled Science' in our time.  It leads to great sacrifice, and great waste. Not least of our children.

Note added 17 October 2014.  Will Happer, the distinguished physicist, drew attention to the Aztec analogy back in 2009: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/physicist-compares-global-warming-craze-to-aztec-human-sacrifices

Note added 17 October 2014. Paul Driessen has more on the activities of the young boy with the Aztec name: http://capitolhilloutsider.com/mindless-green-indoctrination-of-children/

“We’re from the Earth Guardians group, and we’re working on fracking and how it’s going to affect our future and our health. So we wrote this song for all the gas companies that are putting their profits ahead of our future.”

'With that prelude, 12-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his 9-year-old brother Itzcuauhtli launched into an anti-fracking rap song for Evergreen Middle School students whose teacher had invited them to travel 40 miles from their home in “the People’s Republic of Boulder,” Colorado. The song was well rehearsed, spirited, clever – and no doubt assisted by their mother, the founder and executive director of Earth Guardians, and maybe even by Boulder’s former  mayor, an EG advisor.  The boys have been inculcated in Aztec and Hard Green ideology from birth. '

Note added 20 October 2015.  The youngster is still being exploited as a performer by the UN:  http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/10/eco-hip-hop-artist-takes-world-by-storm/

Children of the Global Warming Scare: coming of age with no global warming over their lifetimes

Cartoons by Josh

Children born 18 years ago have lived their lives without any of the 'global warming' with which some people have been intent on scaring them witless.

At school, they would have seen those graphs of relentless rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century.  They might well have seen propagandists such as Al Gore up a stepladder declaiming how one caused the other.  They might have heard of a Dr Hansen who on a hot day in 1988 warned the world of those relentless rises.

They could well have seen the MBH hockey stick plot of temperatures published in 1998,  and widely promoted by campaigners including the IPCC for some years.  It was a contrivance of no scientific merit other than serving the PR needs of those intent on scaring politicians, as well as children, about how rising CO2 was dominating our climate.

Well, the CO2 has continued to rise - at rates well above some of the projections used by such as the aforementioned Dr Hansen.  But here's the thing, the global mean temperature, once so widely display in reports, textbooks, press conferences, leaflets, presentations and videos, has not risen along with it.

WUWT

The temperature rise turned out to be not so relentless after all.    A cause of much rejoicing you might suppose?  Far from it.  Catastrophe-talk has been so advantageous for so many people jumping on the global warming bandwagon, that they will not give up on it so easily,  Merely being contradicted by the data is only something that decent scientists would be troubled by.  As Feynman for example has pointed out, when your theory is contradicted by the data, your theory is wrong.  But decent scientists are few, and self-serving followers of the climate catastrophe cult are many, and they don't really care about the science. Here are some illustrations of that:

'We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.' - Timothy Wirth, former US senator

'No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits . . . Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.'  - Christine Stewart, former environment minister in Canada

Another key insight for eco-activists is this related one:
'It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.'  - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace 

John Christy, one of the world's decent climate scientists has noted this disgraceful and unscientific view out there:  'there is still a strong belief system that greenhouse gases control the climate, and so if that is your belief system, then it doesn’t really matter what the evidence shows.'

It encourages this sort of thing:
'The Communist Party USA’s environmental program “presents a viable plan to carry out on the long march to socialism.”'  - Havel Wolf, Seattle Audubon Society

And this sort of thing:
'Are you interested in reducing your carbon footprint?  How about playing a part in the survival of a virgin rain forest and the numerous species found within? Are you interested in making extra income and helping OURF raise funds in the process? If so, you can get involved in the worldwide effort to combat global warming by participating in the global carbon credit market.'  -  Oppor Tunistic, a fundraiser typical of many.

And even this sort of thing:

Grist

I wonder what she will be angry about eight years from now?  Her parents?  Her lost childhood?  The harm and suffering caused by renewables?  The frequent powercuts?  Rotten teaching?  The nightmares she had about global warming? 










Meanwhile, alarmers are busy promoting more satisfactory totems for their purposes now that global mean air temperature near the surface has so badly let them down.  Lubos looks more deeply into fatuous temperature targets. They are stupid targets but my goodness they served the alarmists well for decades by giving the impression we could decide on planetary temperatures merely by destroying our civilisation.  'Stupid' is too good a word for such people.  Children of the Warming Scare will have been harmed by them.  Perhaps as adults, they will be able to think more for themselves, and begin to develop a calmer, more rational, and more optimistic view of their future.

(Hat-tip for the Josh cartoon: Bishop-Hill)

Climate Scare Stories Cost Lives: teach yourself and your children how to see through them

It’s time to stop the climate scare stories

Guest opinion by Dr. Willie Soon and Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi sensibly refuses to attend yet another climate summit – this one called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in New York for September 23, under the auspices of the United Nations, which profits handsomely from the much-exaggerated climate scare.

Environmentalists have complained at Mr. Modi’s decision not to attend. They say rising atmospheric CO2 will cause droughts, melt Himalayan ice and poison lakes and waterways in the Indian subcontinent.

However, the UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has already had to backtrack on an earlier assertion that all the ice in the Himalayas would be gone within 25 years, and the most comprehensive review of drought trends worldwide shows the global land area under drought has fallen throughout the past 30 years.

Mr. Modi, a spiritual man and thus down-to-earth, knows that a quarter of India’s people still have no electricity. His priority is to turn on the lights all over India. In Bihar, four homes in five are lit by kerosene.

Electric power is the quickest, surest, cheapest way to lift people out of poverty and so to stabilize India’s population, which may soon overtake China’s.

The Indian-born Nobel laureate in economics, Professor Amartya Sen, recently lamented: “There would appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poorer countries. In India, for example, about a third of the people do not have any power connection at all. Making it easier to produce energy with better environmental correlates (and greater efficiency of energy use) may be a contribution not just to environmental planning, but also to making it possible for a great many people to lead a fuller and free life.”

The world’s governing elite, however, no longer cares about poverty. Climate change is its new and questionable focus.

In late August the Asian Development Bank, for instance, based on UN IPCC rising carbon dioxide (CO2) scenarios, predicted that warmer weather would cut rice production, rising seas would engulf Mumbai and other coastal megacities, and rainfall would decline by 10-40% in many Indian provinces.

Droughts and floods have occurred throughout India’s history. In the widespread famine caused by the drought of 1595-1598, “Men ate their own kind. The streets and roads were blocked with corpses, but no assistance can be given for their removal,” a chronicler in Akbar’s court reported.

Every Indian knows that too much (or too little) monsoon rainfall can bring death. That is why the latest computer-generated doom-and-gloom scenario by the Asian Development Bank is not merely unwelcome – it is repugnant. Garbage in, gospel out.

In truth, rice production has risen steadily, sea level is barely rising and even the UN’s climate panel has twice been compelled to admit that there is no evidence of a worldwide change in rainfall.

Subtropical India will not warm by much: advection would take most additional heat poleward. Besides, globally there has been little or no warming for almost two decades. The models did not predict that. The UN’s climate panel, on our advice, has recently all but halved its central estimate of near-term warming.

Sea level is rising no faster than for 150 years. From 2004-2012 the Envisat satellite reported a rise of a tenth of an inch. From 2003-2009 gravity satellites actually showed sea level falling. Results like these have not hitherto been reported in the mainstream news media.

More than 2 centuries of scientific research have failed to make the duration or magnitude of monsoons predictable. Monsoons depend on sea and surface temperature and wind conditions in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans, timing of El Niños in the equatorial Pacific, variations in Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, even wind direction in the equatorial stratosphere.

Earlier this year, the Indian Meteorological Department predicted a 1 in 4 chance that the 2014 monsoon rainfall would be below the long-term average, leading to a year of drought

The prediction was wrong. Widespread floods in northwestern India and Pakistan have killed several hundred people. Many environmentalists and governmental officials are now insisting that rising atmospheric CO2 is the culprit. Yet the one cause of the recent floods that can be altogether ruled out is global warming, for the good and sufficient reason that for 18 years there has not been any warming.

Worse still for CO2 alarmists: 20th and 21st century warming did not occur in the western Himalayas, and paleo-temperature records from for the last millennium confirm no exceptional recent warming in this region, although the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today almost everywhere else.

Regardless of the numerous political manipulations of fact and reality, the scientific problems of forecasting monsoon self-evidently remain unsolved.

In 1906 the forecasts depended on 28 unknowns. By 2007 scientists from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology were using 73. So insisting that just one variable – CO2 concentration – will drive future monsoons is unscientific.

Professor Nandakumar Sarma, vice-chancellor of Manipur University, recently confirmed that “even supercomputers cannot predict what will happen due to climate change within 10-20 years, since there are millions of variable parameters.”

Models said monsoons would become more intense. Instead, they have weakened for 50 years.

As for the floods in the north-west, a study of three major rivers floods in Gujarat by Dr. Alpa Sridhar confirmed that past floods were at least 8 to 10 times worse than recent floods such as that of 1973. CO2-based climate models have been unable to “hindcast” or recreate those floods.

Models also fail to replicate the 60-yr and 200-yr cycles in monsoon rainfall linked to solar cycles detected by studies of ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea.

A new study led by Professor K.M. Hiremath of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics shows the strong, possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity (red curve) and in monsoon rainfall (blue curve) in Figure 1.

The red curve is actually the result of a simulation of the Indian monsoon rainfall for the past 120 years using solar activity as a forcing variable. The sun is visibly a far more likely influence on monsoon patterns than changes in CO2 concentration.

Governments also overlook a key conclusion from the world’s modelers, led by Dr. Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics: “The increase of greenhouse gases in the twentieth century has not significantly contributed to the observed decadal Indian monsoonal rainfall variability.”

Not one climate model predicted the severe Indian drought of 2009, followed by the prolonged rains the next year – up by 40% in most regions. These natural variations are not new. They have happened for tens of thousands of years.

A paper for Climate Dynamics co-authored by Professor Goswami, recently-retired director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, shows why the models relied upon by the UN’s climate panel’s recent assessments predict monsoons inaccurately.

Figure 1. There is a possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity (red curve) and in monsoon rainfall (blue curve).

All 16 models examined had the same fatal flaw: they made rain too easily by artificially elevating air and water masses in the atmosphere.

Models are not ready to predict the climate. Misusing computers to spew out multiple “what-if” scenarios is unscientific.

Most fundamental problems in our immature understanding of climate have remained unresolved for decades. Some cannot be resolved at all. The UN’s climate panel admitted in 2001 what has been known for 50 years: because the climate is a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic object,” reliable long-term climate prediction is impossible.

Misuse of climate models as false prophets is costly in lives as well as treasure.

To condemn the poorest of India’s poor to continuing poverty is to condemn many to an untimely death. Mr. Modi is right to have no more to do with such murderous nonsense. It is time to put an end to climate summits. On the evidence, they are not needed.

______________

Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist at Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Lord Monckton was an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report (2013) of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC.

To news and opinion websites September 22, 2014

Note  The above text is quoted verbatim from WUWT, based on my understanding that this is intended for widespread dissemination.  It certainly deserves to be widely read, not least by teachers and parents. 

Note Here is a useful reprise of a report published in 2010, a report which is a useful document to have to hand to help with the task of 'seeing through' the facile stories of climate alarm campaigners:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/more-than-1000-international-scientists-dissent-over-man-made-global-warming-claims/5403284
I

Climate Cult Marches in New York and elsewhere on 21st September: the ill-informed and the ill-intentioned will call for more destruction

Cornwall Alliance

Climate policies such as the subsidising of renewable energy are destructive. They destroy lives in the developing world by raising the price of food. They destroy development prospects by raising the price of energy.

ConservationBytes

Climate alarm campaigners destroy morale in the young and other vulnerable groups by raising the spectre of imminent doom. They destroy educational ideals by turning classrooms into indoctrination centres. They destroy childhood innocence by demanding 'action' by the young, and using them as their political tools.

Grist

Some campaigners are ill-intentioned because of their hatred of society. The hard left, the deep greens, the bigoted and the malevolent. The climate scare merely gives them a new platform for their poisons.

(hat-tip for pic: Greenie Watch)

GreenieWatch

Some are surely innocents who want to good. They have heard that our CO2 is disrupting the climate and driving us towards disaster, and some may even think the disaster is already underway when they hear claims that droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other harmful phenomena are much worse than they used to be.  They are too easily led.  They are being taken advantage of.

It would be a whole lot healthier if we had marches and protests against what Paul Driessen has called the 'climate change scientist-government-environmentalist-industrialist climate complex'. 

Not a very snappy label, but as he notes,this 'complex' is 'well funded and powerful. But it is also arrogant and dishonest, and its assertions are so far removed from reality that they can no longer survive scrutiny and challenge.'

'The time has come to end its attempt to control our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards, and life spans.'

Amen to that.

Notes added 22 September 2014   A sensible chap call Alex Epstein had his very own counterflow march in New York:

Here is another glimpse into his experiences there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcgH62jiocA

Part 1 of his video clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mojiBJ55G2g&feature 

Here is an example of a child being used as a political weapon on the march in New York:

This pic and many more at: http://grist.org/climate-energy/meet-a-climate-marcher/

Desmo

And another example of this exploitation of kids:







If you really want insight into just about anything at all, get a statistician to take a look at it.  Here are some insights from Matt Briggs who took a look at the march in New York, and tried to engage with some of the marchers: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=13644  Basically, he found a lot of people who did not really know what they were supporting, but came along anyway.

For the hard-left (and billionaires) at the march, see: http://donsurber.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/commies-and-billionaires-march-against.html
and: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/21/f-the-police-communists-radicals-spotted-throughout-climate-march-in-new-york-city-demand-revolution-nothing-less/

A report on the London march, and the mess the marchers left behind them: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/22/Climate-March-London-Piles-of-Placards

Note added 24 September 2014 Report from the San Francisco Oakland rally on 21 Sep (hat-tip WUWT) The hard-left dominated this event.  How sad to see such a spectacle in the land of the free! Lots of picture here: http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2014/09/23/climate-movement-drops-mask-admits-communist-agenda/  For example:

and 'Children were encouraged to hang out in the protest’s kid-friendly zone, where they could draw their own signs promoting “revolution.”'

Inspiration for the Climate Teacher: a call for compassion for the world's poor

As a non-believer, but nevertheless a great admirer of Christianity, I have been puzzled by the number of evangelical Christians who are prominent in the promotion of alarm over our impact on the climate.  Names that come immediately to mind are John Houghton, Bill McKibben, Katharine Hayhoe, and John Cook.  Puzzled because raising alarm with the scope and scale of CAGW is a shockingly irresponsible thing to do when the case for it is so weak and so speculative, and the policy consequences emerging from it are so dreadful for people and the environment all over the world.

But a group called the Cornwall Alliance has reassured me a lot about by publishing a far more compassionate and in my opinion, far better founded perspective on climate variation and climate policies.  It is called 'Protect the Poor: Ten Reasons to Oppose Harmful Climate Change Policies'.

Here are the core elements of it:

1. As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify it catastrophically.
2. Earth’s temperature naturally warms and cools cyclically throughout time, and warmer periods are typically more conducive to human thriving than colder periods.
3. While human addition of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), to the atmosphere may slightly raise atmospheric temperatures, observational studies indicate that the climate system responds more in ways that suppress than in ways that amplify CO2’s effect on temperature, implying a relatively small and benign rather than large and dangerous warming effect.
4. Empirical studies indicate that natural cycles outweigh human influences in producing the cycles of global warming and cooling, not only in the distant past but also recently.
5. Computer climate models, over 95% of which point toward greater warming than has been observed during the period of rapid CO2 increase, do not justify belief that human influences have come to outweigh natural influences, or fears that human-caused warming will be large and dangerous.
6. Rising atmospheric CO2 benefits all life on Earth by improving plant growth and crop yields, making food more abundant and affordable, helping the poor most of all.
7. Abundant, affordable, reliable energy, most of it now and in the foreseeable future provided by burning fossil fuels, which are the primary source of CO2 emissions, is indispensable to lifting and keeping people out of poverty.
8. Mandatory reductions in CO2 emissions, pursued to prevent dangerous global warming, would have little or no discernible impact on global temperatures, but would greatly increase the price of energy and therefore of everything else. Such policies would put more people at greater risk than the warming they are intended to prevent, because they would slow, stop, or even reverse the economic growth that enables people to adapt to all climates. They would also harm the poor more than the wealthy, and would harm them more than the small amount of warming they might prevent.
9. In developed countries, the poor spend a higher percentage of their income on energy than others, so rising energy prices, driven by mandated shifts from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to diffuse, expensive, intermittent “Green” energy, will in effect be regressive taxes—taxing the poor at higher rates than the rich.
10. In developing countries, billions of the poor desperately need to replace dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, pollution from which causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and about 4 million premature deaths every year, mostly among women and young children. To demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and depend on expensive wind, solar, and other “Green” fuels to meet that need is to condemn them to more generations of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first point above is a bit too mystical for my tastes, but it is gentle and positive, and I imagine people of many other faiths could go along with it. The other 9 points deserve to be studied by anyone who teaches climate topics to schoolchildren, with a view to finding ways to get these key insights across to them.

The statement continues with direct appeals to Christians to take actions, and this is less suited to general teaching except perhaps for discussion with senior pupils. 

Here, on the other hand, is another Christian leader urging his flock to join the march in New York next week, a march intended to produce even more destructive and dreadful policies ostensibly based on overblown fears about our carbon dioxide: http://blog.archny.org/index.php/peoples-climate-march/comment-page-1/

So, it is not all good!

Climate Chumps and Climate Cheats – '97%' is the tell-tale to find them

The sails on some boats have short lengths of wool attached to them to show the manner in which the air is flowing past. They are called tell-tales, and let the sailor know if the sail needs trimming.

The '97%' statistic can act as a tell-tale to let you know the manner of person you are dealing with when it is deployed to promote alarm over our impact on climate. I make the crude division of those who deploy it that way into climate chumps or climate cheats. The former have merely been deceived themselves, the latter want to deceive others.  

The basic deceit being that something like 97% of climate scientists or 97% of climate science papers support an alarmist view of climate change and our contribution to it.  Who could argue with such numbers?  Well, many people can and have.  When the sources of such claims have been checked out, they are found to be so unimpressive that it is grossly irresponsible for anyone to rely on them. At best, they indicate support for banalities such as 'climate changes', 'there was global warming in the 20th Century', 'CO2 is a greenhouse gas', 'humans contribute a warming effect by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere'.  None of these is intrinsically alarming.  For example, they are all perfectly consistent with the assertion that there is no problem.

The climate chumps relay the '97%' in conversation, in blog comments, and so on, but they do so in complete ignorance of the shoddy nature of the various derivations of this stinky statistic. Lots of ordinary members of the public might fall into this category. They may know next to nothing about the climate system, but they have heard the relentless propaganda in school, on tv, or in their newspapers for years and maybe the 97% number just struck them as impressive. They need your gentle help to get a clearer view.

The climate cheats know, or ought to know, that the '97%' is a stinker of a statistic, but nevertheless, they make a big deal out of it, even seeing it as a clincher in PR-work and other carefully produced materials. They include specialist journalists, bloggers, politicians, and civil servants. They ought to check the origins of prominent statistics used in their arguments. They deserve your sharp criticism for deploying something so shoddy and deceptive.

So, when you see the 97% being deployed in ways that are meant to impress and convince you that you should believe in climate catastrophe, or 'dangerous global warming' as President Obama put it, regard it as a tell-tale that you are reading/listening/watching either a chump or a cheat. A couple of questions, or maybe just a little more of your attention, should help you decide which label is the right one. If it is being used in this way in school materials which you or your children are exposed to, then make a formal complaint about them.

Andrew Montford has recently written a GWPF report (link is to the pdf file) on one of the most prominent and recent sources of '97%' - the notorious Cook et al. paper of 2013 - and he summarises some of the criticisms made about it by academics: 

e.g. Mike Hulme:

The [Cook et al.] article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed.

It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately

poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister

should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and

‘wrong’ to that adopted in [an earlier study]: dividing publishing climate scientists

into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living

(or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t

they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?

e.g. Richard Tol

Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and

contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test

shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results

cannot be reproduced or tested.

e.g. Jose Duarte

. . .completely invalid and untrustworthy (and by customary scientific standards,

completely unpublishable.) I had no idea this was happening. This is garbage,

and a crisis. It needs to stop, and [such] papers need to be retracted immediately,

especially Cook, et al (2013).

Montford quietly concludes 'The figure of 97% is entirely discredited, whatever the nature of the

consensus.'

For an introduction to criticisms of Cook et al. and other sources of '97%', see my earlier post:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/occams-broom-and-stink-of-97-of-climate.html

Update 27 March 2015:  A useful summary of the Cook et al.  nonsense is given by Richard Tol here: http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

Update 18 May 2015. Ross McKitrick undermines the '97%' nonsense even further by pointing to ignorance on the part of many of those classed in surveys as 'climate scientists':  http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much

Update 19 February 2019
The tell-tale is still needed, still working, but this post has a neat rejoinder :  http://www.cfact.org/2019/02/17/32717/

Climate Teachers, Concerned Parents – here is a new scientific society worthy of your support to raise standards in climate science, and improve public outreach.

The somewhat strangely named 'Open Atmospheric Society', or OAS for short, has been officially launched and offers associate membership which is open to all to apply for, regardless of academic qualifications. There is a full membership category for those with professional qualifications in relevant fields.

Here is how their Home page begins:

'Welcome

Welcome to The Open Atmospheric Society, known as “The OAS”.

We give you a voice where other societies may not.

The OAS is an international membership society for the purpose of studying, discussing, and publishing about topics in atmospheric related earth sciences, including but not limited to meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and climatology. It is open to anyone with an interest at the associate level, but student and full memberships also are offered.

The purpose of the society is to foster quality atmospheric science and atmospheric science communications through outreach, member education, member publishing, and electronic media.'

Why is this being posted here on Climate Lessons?

Joining the new society as an associate or as a full member, will provide it with financial and moral support. The benefits to society in general will include an online journal freely available to the public, press releases for each publication, statements and positions regarding atmospheric science as it relates to current news, and video production assistance for authors to explain papers. If the directors and other participants in this new venture maintain the high standards they have set for themselves, all of these things could provide a timely and much-needed counter-balance to the loaded-science and dogma-dominated media coverage of climate science that we have had to endure for decades. This could help create a calmer, more rational debate in the public square and within political circles, and in due course lead to higher quality textbooks and other materials for schools currently being bombarded with politically-biased and often scaremongering works of various kinds on climate.

Associate membership is open to all with an interest in the subject matter and in supporting the goals of the society.  It costs 45 US dollars for one year.

Full membership is open to professionally qualified people in relevant subjects, and costs 85 US dollars for one year.

Membership application forms can be found here: http://theoas.wildapricot.org/

Here is the welcome that awaits you there: 
'We welcome professionals, educators, students, and the general public/laymen who have an interest in open atmospheric science. There is a membership level to meet everyone's situation.'

Climate Alarm Virus Alert: new films starring DiCaprio will spread misinformation to the young

Filmstars often have a great many young fans for whom they can do no wrong.  Those who wish to bombard the young with climate scares can also find them attractive as vehicles for their propaganda, and it seems that a new series of short films starring DeCaprio are to be released with that end in mind.  Here are three extracts from an article in the New York Post by Tom Harris and Bob Carter, two experts in climate studies and in the tricks of the climate-scare trade which they so oppose (I have put one sentence in each extract in bold):

(1)

'In the run-up to the Sept. 23 UN Climate Summit in New York, Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a series of films about the “climate crisis.”

The first is “Carbon,” which tells us the world is threatened by a “carbon monster.” Coal, oil, natural gas and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio says.

But he has identified the wrong monster. It is the climate scare itself that is the real threat to civilization.

DiCaprio is an actor, not a scientist; it’s no real surprise that his film is sensationalistic and error-riddled. Other climate-change fantasists, who do have a scientific background, have far less excuse.

Science is never settled, but the current state of “climate change” science is quite clear: There is essentially zero evidence that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.'

(2)

'Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” He’s right — and DiCaprio’s film is just another vector for spreading the virus.'

(3)

'Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”'

Note added 10 October 2014  A noteworthy video has been made about the contrast between what DiCaprio says and what DiCaprio does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2bkISm0Ys

Good News: teachers with integrity resist climate campaigner corruption in their schools

Children have long been seen as an easy target by zealots intent on using them to help achieve their political ends.  Climate alarm campaigners provide a modern example of this.  But it may be harder than they presume.  Some parents will resist it.  Some pupils will see through it. Some teachers may seek to protect their pupils from the moral harm, mental anguish, and distorted curricula that climate campaigners want to inflict on the young.  All in the name of saving them of course. If you claim to love the environment above all things, you can easily despise children as the 10:10 campaigners revealed in their 'No Pressure' video in which pupils were depicted being brutally murdered by their teacher because their parents had not toed the party line on reducing energy consumption.  This was vivid brutality but mercifully fictional - the campaigners apparently finding it a jolly wheeze to help promote their cause.  But harm comes in many guises from this source.  The harm of telling children

BantheBulb

PushYourParents

that polar bears will die if they don't turn off lights.  The harm of telling children that their parents are helping to destroy the planet and need to be stopped.
 The harm of telling children that industrial progress is going to kill them.  The harm of telling children that carbon dioxide is a pollutant - a gas they produce and emit with every breath.  The harm of telling children that 'climate science is settled' and they have to obey 'authorities' about what it means for their lives.  The general harm of projecting vivid, scary, threatening scenarios to the young, and telling them they are certain to occur unless ... Unless the children do what they tell them to do.  A generation of docile, cowed, submissive children would be ideal for anyone intent on controlling the lives of us all.  No wonder the left is so keen on climate change campaigning.

Well, researchers are finding that some teachers* don't care for it.  On Bishop Hill we learn of lamenting by climate campaign collaborators because:

[Researchers] found that the teachers did not consider it their role to try to solve today's major social or scientific problems. Instead, the science teachers said they preferred to 'maintain the integrity' of the science rather than to explore the social, economic or political implications.

That's good that they wish to protect the integrity of their subjects.  Let us hope they succeed.

We might also hope that many teachers are determined to protect the integrity and well-being of their pupils as well.  Let us hope they succeed.

*Footnote.  But are such teachers in a minority?  For indications of the possible scale of climate-linked indoctrination in schools in the UK, see the report 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'.

Climate Change in Schools: not only the brainwashing is rotten, the buildings are as well

The scary but incredible premise of CO2-driven doom has been exploited by so many for political, religious, emotional, and financial ends that it is not hard to find people seized with fear doing foolish, and in some cases, unpardonable things. The unpardonable includes those adults deliberately setting out to frighten children about their future, feeding them them facile 'science' and even more reprehensibly, urging them to political 'action' even against their own families and friends.* The foolish includes being duped into sundry eco-ventures such as putting windturbines in school grounds, or solar panels on their roofs, or making school buildings that tick the eco-boxes while being unfit for human habitation.**  

Here is one in Devon which has wasted £7 million pounds and disrupted schooling for hundreds of pupils over the past 4 years (hat-tip Phillip Bratby ( on BishopHill Unthreaded , Sep 3, 2014 at 7:14 AM):

BBC

From a BBC website report: 

The £7m "flagship new eco-school" was intended to replace "dilapidated flood-prone" former buildings.

Classes were held in four clusters of pod-like timber-clad buildings, with electricity and hot water from solar panels.

But rainwater was reported to be running down the walls after apparent faults in the structure.

Ordering the school had been a "bold decision" by the county council, said district councillor Jacqi Hodgson.

"It's unfortunate that it had had so many problems and now it has come to this, it is really sad."

For more sources of 'sad' from Hodgson and her fellow Green Party campaigners, see their newsletter.  The usual sheep's clothing of sentimental socialism covering a vehicle for ruthless authoritarianism.  

Such blunders will surely open more eyes to the moral and intellectual emptiness of eco-alarmism and its spin-offs such as incompetent building projects.  Incompetent, but 'green'.  It is all part of a destructive subculture currently in such ascendancy that who knows how long it will take to recover from their physical blunders (such as bio-fuels, windfarms, and crappy buildings), let alone their educational ones producing generations of children made sick and anxious about the future.

Footnotes

* For example, Donna Laframboise has exposed global-scale conniving for that end: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/03/proselytizing-to-toddlers/ (and I enlarged upon it here:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/co2-causes-contempt-for-childhood.html)

 And the possibly widespread extent of it in UK Schools is highlighted in this report: 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'

**Previous posts here on this topic:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/learning-by-metaphor-foolish-building.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/climate-change-scaremongering-threatens.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/happy-head-chilled-children-troubled.html

Links given in them include:

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Acclaimed-eco-school-forced-shut-classrooms-years/story-19789593-detail/story.html#ixzz2fi669r8B

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/10327504/School-closed-after-pupils-bitten-by-mites-in-eco-roof.html

http://notrickszone.com/2011/07/11/flopped-green-passive-school-suffocating-students/

(example from Germany)

Note added 04 August, 2016.   The £7 million eco-junk school is to be demolished: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/visionary-7m-eco-school-to-be-demolished-because-of-leaky-roof/