Helping teachers challenge climate-scare propaganda

Graphic: http://thepeoplescube.com/

Helping school teachers cope with the onslaught of climate-scare propaganda is an important task.  It seems very unlikely that that propaganda will go away for many more years to come - there being too many vested interests benefitting from it.  So it is a question of mitigation.

Paul Driessen reports on an initiative aimed at helping with this:

'It’s time to challenge the steady diet of bias, false information and alarmism on climate change that students are fed in and outside of their classrooms. Science and public policy analyst Dr. David Wojick has launched an important new project to do exactly that.

From kindergarten onward, our young people are repeatedly told that they, our wildlife and our planet face unprecedented cataclysms from manmade climate change, resulting from our fossil fuel use. The science is settled, they are constantly hoodwinked, and little or no discussion is allowed in classrooms.'

Dr Wojick has so far compiled a list of nearly 200 video clips of talks or other material by people who have not lost their minds over the CO2 panic, and whose expositions could help youngsters realise, at the very least, that there are strong scientific, social, economic, and political grounds for calling halt to the madness.  For example, here is his list of videos featuring Prof Lindzen:   https://ccdedu.blogspot.com/2019/05/videos-by-richard-lindzen.html

He has also been working on what he calls 'gatebreakers', and has produced these three:

1) Are hurricanes getting worse or not?  

2) Are we coming out of the Little Ice Age?

3) Is the sun causing global warming?

These are brief posts apparently aimed at encouraging people to pause before presuming the Panic Position on a topic is immune from rational criticism.  He also provides, in sister posts, links to topic searches on Google Scholar to back this up.  These are in spirit a bit like the '10-minute trainers' I have posted on this blog. 

He is seeking funding for developing this project further.  Donations can be made on this crowdfunding link:   https://www.gofundme.com/climate-change-debate-education

Looks very worthwhile to me, and I hope he has great success with it.  Here is an extract from his appeal for funds:

'Help me build a skeptical climate education portal

Students and teachers need skeptical science and we plan to deliver it.

There are many on-line sources of alarmist climate change education materials (see my listing of 33 ) but none for the realistic skeptical view. A recent poll says that many teachers want to teach about the real climate debate, not just alarmist side. But skeptical teaching materials are scarce, so we propose to build a climate change debate education website, with your help.

On the content side we are collecting classroom material that is suitable for high school or lower grades, which means it has to be relatively non-technical and non-political (no bashing). I myself have five lesson plans to put in, on solar activity, the little ice age, ocean circulation, etc. Our team plans to write more.'

RIP Christopher Booker, your climate writings will inform and help teachers & pupils for many years to come

The GWPF has reported the passing of the journalist Christopher Booker

'Everyone at the GWPF was saddened to hear of the passing of our friend and colleague Christopher Booker, one of the doughtiest campaigners against global warming hysteria and vested interests in the climate debates. 

Booker’s Sunday Telegraph columns never failed to question orthodoxies and to ask awkward questions about global warming dogmatism.

He wrote two highly successful reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The first, in 2011, looked at the BBC’s biased coverage of climate change, while the more recent paper on groupthink has been one of GWPF’s most successful.

An archive of Booker’s enormous contribution to climate sceptical thought and critical analysis over the last ten years can be found on the GWPF website. 

Christopher will be fondly remembered by all at the GWPF for his erudition, bravery, integrity and his endless good humour.'



My thoughts

His books 'Scared to Death: from BSE to Global Warming, why scares are costing us the Earth' (co-authored with Richard North) and 'The Real Global Warming Disaster' deserve to be in every high school library, along with his GWPF publications listed at a link above, in anticipation of the day when senior pupils will do projects trying to make sense of the CO2-driven lunacy.  They will benefit from his lucid writing, his ability to spot foolish and ill-informed actions and beliefs, and his detailed tracking of who did what and where and when, all backed up by references.  As well as helping them get their projects done, he will also provide reassurance that not everyone engaged by the hyperbole around rising CO2 was credulous, or venal, or malevolent, or self-centred, or destructive of society and progress during these past few decades of the madness.

Not Safe For School (NSFS): the mentalities of CO2 alarm 'scientists'

  Here, thanks to Josh (hat-tip WUWT), is a graphic giving insight into what mentalities drive some climate scaremongers in 'science' (some are sincerely alarmed, but that may exclude many who are mainly doing it to make money from carbon trading, renewables subsidies, research grants, and so on, as well as those on the far-left who are doing it for political gain, and those on ego-trips):

cartoonsbyjosh.com

Here is a recent example of 'panic' and 'ego' at work, an essay by James Dyke on the Conversation:
'Climate change: ‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist'
Extract:

“But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”

He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”

This essay, and another of the genre by Mark Maslin, are discussed at CliScep:   https://cliscep.com/2019/05/25/the-conversation-or-does-my-brain-look-big-in-this/  'Both of them are packed full of interesting facts. Unfortunately none of the facts are about the climate. Most of them are about Dyke and Maslin.'


We Can Do Better Than That

https://sd.keepcalms.com/

This is surely the ideal: cool, calm, and collected study of what we know and what we might do.  Here is a recent example, an essay by Ian Aitken published on WUWT:

'Climate Change Are We Experiencing a Climate Emergency?'

Extract:

'We know that climate change is happening – but the fact that climate change is happening (as it has for billions of years) does not in itself constitute an ‘emergency’ (or even necessarily a serious problem); global warming and climate change are not intrinsically bad things – few would want to return to the pre-industrial climates of the Little Ice Age. As the IPCC stated in their last Assessment Report, ‘Climate change may be beneficial for moderate climate change’. We are experiencing moderate climate change and it has indeed apparently been net-beneficial. '

But such reasonableness, such willingness to check with reality, is not a feature of climate alarm propaganda such as the deceits of the polar bear scare that had such an effect on poor Greta.  Who knows the extent of such scaremongering in schools - in Greta's case it may just have been one teacher acting on his or her initiative to share their personal fears with their pupils, but in some it will be an integral part of curricula.  The number of children in the recent wave of school 'strikes' who say they see no future for themselves because of 'climate change' is very saddening.  How they might be helped out of this wretched, and unwarranted view will be a focus of further posts here this year.