Pushing Junk Science on Children in the USA

More political context for CO2 alarmism getting into schools in the USA is given in this piece:  http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/pushing_junk_science_on_childr.html      than in my earlier one here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html

Extract:

'Democrat Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland wants public schools to "get young people invested" in "climate change" and "population growth" in order to "[raise] awareness early" and "promote the agenda." That would be the agenda of junk science alarmism.

Thank goodness for clarity, because until now, Americans were unaware that public schools are supposed to breed fanatics for ruling class politics. Not only has Sarbanes advocated global warming indoctrination, but the congressman's remarks also seem to call for schools to push the debunked overpopulation myth popularized by Paul Ehrlich in his 1970 book, The Population Bomb. Rachel Carson's DDT scare, acid rain, anti-nuclear power hysteria, the population bomb, and the global warming hoax -- the world has been asked to prepare for one faux-disaster after another. In the process, American liberals have used schools and universities to fill young minds with grotesque falsehoods.'

Is there any country in which this corruption of the young is not taking place?  Certainly not the UK.

Teachers read this: science has been corrupted by the climate scam

The climate-related machinations of the leadership of the American Physical Society have led to the resignation of one of that society's most distinguished members.  Perhaps those in education who cannot bring themselves to question the rectitude of such as the IPCC,  the Royal Society, and the Met Office, will be given pause for thought by this:

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

==========================================================

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

H/tip: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/

10-minute trainer: Hansen's sea-level daydream vs some data

Japanese quality specialists in industry developed the idea of a '10-minute trainer', by which an instructor or a supervisor would have materials ready to take advantage of any downtime in a process to do some teaching about statistical and other insights or techniques relevant to process improvement.  The idea is to be ready to take advantage of an unscheduled opportunity to do some teaching.  Now in a school of course, teaching is the main process, but sometimes there can be opportunities to go outside of the curriculum.  Perhaps this might apply for the senior years in High School, whenever pupils or teachers have the luxury of being able to spend such time.  I am taking it as read that the curriculum itself is likely to include considerable misinformation about climate, and so these '10-minute trainers' would only be for those willing to be a little radical.  The '10-minutes' is not meant to be taken literally, but rather just to convey a modest amount of time, available with little or no warning.  And perhaps somewhere there are, or will be, examination boards and curricula that would not penalise pupils taking science and data seriously, rather than merely parroting pressure group nonsense and associated political 'correctness'.

We could readily build a set of them for teachers willing to engage classes on the realities of climate and/or of pressure groups and their mentors.  The recent splattergate movie from 10:10 is a reminder of how zealotry, and the ignoring of real data, can so easily lead to ruthless fanaticism. Using simple data sets can be enough to expose, bit by bit, step by step, the emptiness of the fanatics' approach, and at the same time encourage youngsters to discuss, differ, and think for themselves in a civilised manner.

Steven Goddard's blog has some suitable material today which could readily be built-up into a '10-minute trainer', looking at a doom-laden prediction about sea levels around New York city - a prediction made by leading CO2-agitator, James Hansen in 1988 for the year 2008: (http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/correlating-new-york-sea-level-rise-with-co2/):

(1) The predictions (source:http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html) :
'While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." '
(2) The data (source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/50yr.shtml?stnid=8518750&name=The+Battery&state=New+York): a scatterplot of the rate of sea-level rise (in mm per year) against CO2 concentration

And of course, now in 2010, 22 years after Hansen's casual (and causal) talk of sea-level rises bringing flooding to New York in 20 years thanks to the 'greenhouse effect'  [of CO2], we can easily confirm that it has not yet happened - the West Side Highway is not under water due to higher sea-levels.  

(3) Another plot:

(Source: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-rumours-of-manhattans-death-are-exaggerated/)

Now class, what can we learn from this?  What other data from New York or elsewhere do you think would be helpful to improve our discussion of these predictions?  How far would you be willing to extrapolate from a such a scatterplot using higher levels of CO2?  Do you think CO2 levels could ever be a reliable predictor of sea level changes?  What would a naive extrapolation of the plot predict for the rate of sea level rise today given that CO2 levels have risen further over the past few years?  What relevance would rainfall levels or storms have to our discussion?  And so on.

Note Added 5 November 2012  Last year, Hansen claimed he never made the forecast for 20 years out, but rather 40 years and the journalist misheard him.  An update on the WUWT 2009 post has been made, and shows that even adding another 20 years to the alarming forecast, it still does not look at all plausible.
More analysis on Hansen's alarmism here:  http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/james-hansen-1986-within-15-years-temps-will-be-hotter-than-past-100000-years/

Terrorise the children, control the adults: - a behavioural change strategy at work

By those who want to reduce the levels of a trace gas vital for plantlife.

Why?  Superficially, because they believe that computer models designed to show a big effect of CO2 actually mean that CO2 has a big effect.

But deep down, it seems more likely that they just hate humanity.  Weird, or what?

One day, teachers will refuse to teach the junk 'science' of CO2 alarmism, and the junk geography, sociology,  and politics that drive it.  They will react with anger when 'sensitise the children', and 'behavioural change', and 'sustainable biodiversity', and 'carbon footprint', and all the other apparatus of indoctrination is pushed at them to push in their classes.

Teacher alert: eco-blackshirts promote the killing of non-conforming adults and children

Is this where CO2-alarmism leads?

KILL! KILL! KILL THE UNBELIEVERS!

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/30/10-10-no-pressure-film
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FkB4uiizVo

The luvvies in and behind this despicable film are so convinced of the dangers of CO2 in the atmosphere that they wish to kill those who disagree with them, including children. The film ends with gore from an explosion sliding down the screen.  The film begins with a schoolteacher calmly blowing up two pupils in her class who decline to give in to her political requests , leaving blood over all the others in the classroom.

Now this is at a time when there is not a single piece of observational evidence that anything at all unusual is happening to climate.  The increase in a trace gas is so small that it remains a trace gas.  The role of it in the climate system is far from 'settled', with deeply qualified scientists estimating its effect ranging from a small cooling, through negligible to a modest warming.  A handful of scientists and programmers have created computer models of climate which include an additional hypothesis of postive feedback involving water vapour.  Then and only then do we get more scary scenarios of warming.  We also see in the model outputs a remarkable and pronounced hotter zone in the upper troposphere - one that has not been observed.  Ordinarily, the scientific method would say - 'model prediction not confirmed by observation, model not good enough'.  Some models also predict a hot spot over Antarctica - one that should be clearly detectable by now, but it is not there.  None of the models predicted the break in the warming since around 1998 to the present day.  None of the models include the fact that many weather station records show no overall warming at all in the past century.  The models are not good.  They are not fit for prediction. Yet there is nothing else that deserves an alarmed reaction.  Nothing.  The luvvies want to kill and destroy based on the output of computer models of demonstrably poor quality, in a field where there are substantially different theories about the impact of CO2 on climate.  Only those theories which predict a modest to negligible impact have been supported by observations of the real atmosphere.

Hat tip:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/blood-gore-against-global-warming/

Note added 8 Nov 2011.  I regret the term 'eco-blackshirts' in the title.  Although I think such people could readily be recruited, the filmakers themselves did not actually apply real violence to those they deem to be so evil that they, or their children, must be blown up by terrorists acting for the climate cause.  They merely promoted such violence.

Note added 3 Dec 2011.  Prof Jones of UEA, the notorious climate schemer as revealed by CG1 and CG2, put his department into the 10:10 campaign less than a year before the ugly video was released:
'I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness - I've signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it...' (29 October 2009, source: http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1625.txt)
I wonder if they are still part of it?


Note added 18 Jan 2012. More examples of eco-fascism exposed here: http://toryaardvark.com/2012/01/18/green-environmentalist-wants-eco-gulags-for-climate-change-deniers/


Note added 21 Mar 2012.  Essay on eco-fascism here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/03/eco-fascists-don-their-jackboots.php


Note added 10 April 2012.   More writing published in Germany on the links between National Socialism and Green political activists: http://notrickszone.com/2012/04/10/news-magazine-focus-writes-on-the-german-green-movements-very-brown-roots/


Note added 28 April 2012:  Violent imagery used by out-of-control EPA bureaucrat: cruxifixion.

 "The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years."

'A recently surfaced video of an EPA official's rant confirms what many of us already knew about the Obama Administration: they imagine themselves to be the rulers of conquered territories populated by restless barbarians who must be subjugated at any cost, complete with indiscriminate and severe exemplary punishments.'

 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/if_only_the_romans_had_the_epa_to_crucify_the_dissenters.html

Note added 05 May 2012.  Donna Laframboise has noted copies of 'No Pressure' disappearing from YouTube.  She has created a Webcite link to the video, and here is another YouTube copy which is currently working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE3g0i2rz4w&feature=related

Note added 17 April 2014.   The close relationship of eco-fanaticism with National Socialism in Hitler's Germany is illustrated by this quotation: '"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934

See: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/monbiot/ecofascism.html

See: http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

(hat-tip: commenter esmiff, Apr 16, 2014 at http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2014/4/15/climate-control-in-the-scottish-express.html#comments )