Teaching Children About Climate Change: do you promote horrible imaginings or wonderful reality?

There seems to be quite a few of these articles agonising about how to teach children about climate change without scaring them witless.  None of them consider the best way of all: stick to reality, stick to good science, and teach that the alarmism is really, really, really overblown.

Teach them that the climate system is quite robust on any timescale of concern to us, and that CO2 has never been a big player in the past, and does not seem to be a big player now.  Teach them that rising CO2 has helped green the planet, and increase food production, and at the same time the climate system is behaving just as it might if the additional CO2 had only a very minor effect.  Teach them that the gentle warming we have seen is good for life in general, and humans in particular.  Teach them that so much has been getting better in the environment and in human welfare that this is probably the best time ever to be young since the potential is there for continued improvement.  Teach them that affordable energy is a liberator, and that abundant relatively affordable energy is available through fossil fuels and nuclear.

Teach them that things have been getting dramatically better over the past 50 years and that this can easily continue.  Teach them to not take eco-scare stories at face value ever again.  Teach them how wrong these stories have all been.

Here is the article that led to this little post:   https://menafn.com/1100448023/Homeschooling-during-coronavirus-five-ways-to-teach-children-about-climate-change

See for yourself that it is defeatist - it has conceded the argument to the climate alarmists, and is more about coping with the imagined mess that these people believe in and promote.

Greta Thunberg is a poor role model for children on climate and on politics

A disturbed youngster, a school drop-out, a low-information climate pundit, misled by climate misinformation fed to her by a teacher, and who wishes to wreck advanced societies and cripple the prospects of developing ones.  She needs help from compassionate people, and the exploitation of her by climate zealots should cease immediately to give her a better chance of a calmer life.

In Australia, though, someone posted a fake curriculum item calling for pupils to emulate her.  This was in New South Wales, where they have some previous in agitprop for children:

'The NSW school system was heavily criticised last year during the so-called Climate Strike for allowing climate activists to indoctrinate impressionable young children.

Thousands of school children truanted school to take part in the Climate Strike street protests.

One father pulled his son out of a state primary school in Bilambil, northern NSW, at the time after he was asked to 'dress like a hippy' by his teacher.

Matt Karlos, 38, took his 10-year-old son Max out, saying the teachers were making the kids terrified for the future and scaring them with climate change.

'The ideologies were in his face all the time,' Mr Karlos said.

In September, Alan Jones accused teachers of brainwashing vulnerable children. 

The former 2GB radio host pointed to a report which claimed children under the age of 10 were experiencing anxiety from the climate change debate.

'Young people are going to be concerned, they believe their teachers, they actually think that they're at school and what they're being told is true,' he said. 

'The notion of using children in all of this is scandalous and the politics of climate change has become poisonous.'

One small mercy here is that the NSW Education Department has taken down the offending material

'A spokesman from the NSW Education Department said they would investigate how the Thunberg lesson plans made it onto the official website.

'This web page was published without approval. We will have the web page taken down and reviewed,' he said. '

Note added later on 17 June  James Delingpole has spotted an interesting thing about the NSW Education Department's response:
'However, the NSW Education Department clearly wasn’t that concerned about feeding primary school children naked green propaganda, for the lesson plans were up on its website for nine months. It only took them down after concerns were raised by the newspaper.'

That newspaper is the Australian 'Daily Telegraph'