Marches of Madness in May: child victims of climate-scaremongering to take to the streets

A new-to-me 'youth shock brigade' called iMatter has been formed to encourage young victims of climate-scaremongering to take to the streets on or around the 8th of May this year (hat-tip: Tom Nelson).  In their own, somewhat inelegant, words:

'WE are a generation inspired by the need itself to step up and be the change we want to see. iMatter began as a simple video, created by a 13 year old, that covered the problems, consequences and solutions of climate change in like a minute. And now it's a global campaign meant to unite the voices of a generation on the most urgent issue of our time. The non profit project of Earth Island Institute, called Kids vs Global Warming, has pulled together a bunch of amazing partners to give youth a platform to raise their voices so loud they cannot be ignored.'

I think they'd all be better off paying more attention in their English classes, and generally enjoying themselves as perhaps the most fortunate generation ever to appear on the planet so far.  The huge technological improvements of the past few hundred years have given them so much, and they could set out to build upon that and contribute to the ongoing improvements in just about anything you care to mention.  Instead they are being told to be scared about the future, to cut down on energy use, and generally be disrespectful about all that has been achieved to date.  They are frightened victims of an indoctrination campaign, which includes facile nonsense such as this:


' It's not much of a secret that our planet is messed up. We're facing a long list of problems, and most of them are caused by by one simple thing: the burning of fossil fuels.

The most urgent problem is climate change, caused by our out of control addiction to fossil fuels. When we burn fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas, we emit all this extra carbon dioxide, CO2, into the atmosphere, which messes up the balance of the atmosphere.

Scientists that dedicate their entire lives to studying this, have made it clear: to avert the worst effects of climate change, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere need to be at 350 parts per million (ppm). Right now we are at 391ppm. If we keep burning at the rate we are now, we will be at 500ppm by 2050. This would make earth a completely different planet, uninhabitable for most species. We can't let that happen.'


Let us lightly Fisk this paragraph by paragraph:

Paragraph 1.  In most respects, things are improving.  As for ‘most’ of our problems being caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the reverse is the case.  Most of our solutions are due to the burning of fossil fuels: widely affordable food supplies, housing, transport, heavy-lifting, and electricity.

Paragraph 2.  The urgency of climate change is yet to be made manifest in the climate itself, where rates of change and recent conditions have displayed nothing at all out of the ordinary.  If anything, the 20th and 21st centuries have been relatively benign and more favourable to life than the previous few which suffered The Little Ice Age.

Paragraph 3.  The remarkable growth of ambient CO2 levels in the 20^th and 21^st centuries has had no clear impact on any weather phenomena, not least temperatures as these plots illustrate (see charts for raw data sources):

Remember that during these time periods, CO2 levels have shown a marked growth during the last half of the 20th century.  Can you see anything remarkable about the temperatures shown above in the last half of the 20th century?  Anything at all?  Anything to justify frightening the children with?  And, if I have any true believers in the Church of AGW still reading this far, I challenge you to find any weather-linked variable that shows any extraordinary behaviour over, say, the last 60 years: it is not hurricanes, nor ice, nor precipitation, nor droughts, nor floods, nor famines, nor even sea-levels.  So just what is all the fuss about?


Of course anything in and around the earth’s atmosphere will affect it in some way, and so variation in CO2 levels will have some impact.  We know that air near the ground mainly heats up by conduction, and that heating is enhanced by infra-red capturing molecules such as H2O and CO2 and which therefore may speed up the onset of the convection which helps cool the earth by moving heat upwards where it can be more readily lost to space.  It may also have a detectable effect of slowing the cooling of the ground during dry and cloudless nights, but this too has proven elusive to confirm.  Leading climate scientists admit that there may be an overall 'warming effect' from increasing CO2, but that it is likely to be of the order of 1C per doubling of CO2 levels - an effect that would be hard to confirm reliably since we know that changes of this magnitude have occurred over relevant timescales in the past, and that these must be attributed to other causes, the identity and interactions of which are still not firmly established.

The collective madness of the past 30 years or so centred around airborne CO2 is a remarkable, and a depressing, event.  That it will take some time to flush it out of our collective consciousness is due in no small part to those who have chosen to recruit children to support their cause based on climate alarmism, whether it be from political or financial motivations, or both.  What it cannot be motivated by is climate data.

Two further examples of 'youth shock brigades' here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/03/canadian-climate-campaigners-how-to.html

An insight for every school textbook on climate: '...we concluded that the global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political movement.'

Schools everywhere have been exposed to, or even immersed in, the ill-founded alarm over CO2 in the atmosphere.  It will take some time to get it out of school textbooks and out of the 'off-the-shelf', 'ready-to-go' section of political spin for sundry opportunists in politics and finance.  The paper quoted below can but help with this progress.

'Research to date on Forecasting for the Manmade Global Warming Alarm
Testimony to Subcommittee on Energy and Environment Committee on Science, Space and Technology – March 31, 2011 (Rev)

Professor J. Scott Armstrong, University of Pennsylvania, with Kesten C. Green, University of South Australia, and Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Abstract
The validity of the manmade global warming alarm requires the support of scientific forecasts of (1) a substantive long-term rise in global mean temperatures in the absence of regulations, (2) serious net harmful effects due to global warming, and (3) cost-effective regulations that would produce net beneficial effects versus alternatives such as doing nothing.

Without scientific forecasts for all three aspects of the alarm, there is no scientific basis to enact regulations. In effect, it is a three-legged stool. Despite repeated appeals to global warming alarmists, we have been unable to find scientific forecasts for any of the three legs.

We drew upon scientific (evidence-based) forecasting principles to audit the forecasting procedures used to forecast global mean temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) –leg “1” of the stool. This audit found that the procedures violated 81% of the 89 relevant forecasting principles.

We also did an audit of the forecasting procedures used for two papers that were designed to support proposed regulation related to protecting polar bears – leg “3” of the stool. On average, these procedures violated 85% of the 90 relevant principles.

The warming alarmists have not demonstrated the predictive validity of their procedures. Instead, their argument for predictive validity is based on their claim that nearly all scientists agree with the forecasts. Such an appeal to “voting” is contrary to the scientific method. It is also incorrect.

We conducted a validation test of the IPCC forecasts based on the assumption that there would be no interventions. This test found that the errors for IPCC model long-term forecasts (91 to 100 years in the future) were 12.6 times larger than those from an evidence-based “no change” model.

Based on our analyses, we concluded that the global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political movement.'


Source (pdf): http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/29687.pdf

Classroom Conundrums of Contradictory Climate Confusions: what are you going to tell them about the effects of climate change?

The sloppy science that led to the IPCC and to the construction and amplification of the CO2-scare is in such a poor state that those folks who study impacts are having a hard time of it.  Such people form the majority of the IPCC participants, only a few dozen of which are at all engaged with what drives climate change.

Steve Goddard has just published an updated list, thanks to a poster called Jimbo, of apparently contradictory conclusions.  Also published by Pierre Gosselin.  For example:

Amazon dry season greener
Amazon dry season browner

Avalanches may increase
Avalanches may decrease – wet snow more though

Bird migrations longer
Bird migrations shorter
Bird migrations out of fashion

Boreal forest fires may increase
Boreal forest fires may continue decreasing

Chinese locusts swarm when warmer
Chinese locusts swarm when cooler

Columbia spotted frogs decline
Columbia spotted frogs thrive in warming world

Coral island atolls to sink
Coral island atolls to rise

These, and the other links provided, are all to peer-reviewed literature ('but is it peer-reviewed?' was one of the spin options used by crisis-CO2 campaigners when challenged, but it is heard less often now that the IPCC has been exposed as relying very heavily on distinctly non-peer-reviewed literature).

It might be easier to tell your class that not only has climate science been degraded and poisoned by the IPCC activists, but much of the rest of the IPCC, the stuff on consequences, is in a bit of a mess too.

An earlier verion of the list was noted here in February: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011_02_10_archive.html

Under the Cloak of ‘Climate Change’: childhoods sacrificed for political gain

 'When asked to choose the 3 biggest threats to the world from a list of 9, the most common answer is terrorism, chosen by more than half (59%), followed by climate change (49%).'

Extract from the results of a BBC survey of some 329 schools, with 24,000 respondents aged 11 to 16 years, published 24 March, 2011 (hat-tip: Bishop Hill ).

So, if the survey has been well-conducted( see footnotes 1 & 2) approximately half of secondary-school children in the UK regard 'climate change' as one of the biggest threats facing the world.  How can that be, given that nothing at all unusual has happened to any weather phenomena, including air temperatures, rainfall, storminess etc, and nor to commonly associated phenomena such as polar ice extents?  The answer, of course, is clear enough: very successful lobbying and publicising of the results of computer models programmed to give CO2 a large effect as a driver of climate using positive feedbacks.  Given that CO2 levels have been rising, and are confidently expected to rise further, there is clearly the makings of a good scare story here.  However, neither the atmosphere itself nor many leading climate scientists, have been sufficiently convinced by these stories to, in the case of the atmosphere, display unusual behaviour, and in the case of the scientists, display alarm.  Yet many others are alarmed, or find it convenient to act as if they are for the sake of political and other advantages.  Finance houses, political parties, environmentalists, and development organisations have all seen substantial boosts to their incomes and/or their influence thanks to the widespread publicity given to such as the IPCC.  Many well-intentioned individuals and groups have no doubt been persuaded to 'do something' by all of this, and are even trying to get schoolchildren involved in political actions.

One such group is Norwich Education and Action for Development (NEAD), whose Windmill Project was reported upon this week in the Norwich Evening News (see cutting).  Hat-tip: Dave W.

The headline, and the activities described look innocent enough.  Since our climate has always changed and is no doubt still changing, children should be taught about it as part of their nature or geography or science studies.   Who would not want that?  The changes however are quite slow and hard to detect amidst the within-year variation, and so it is unlikely that this topic ought to be a major part of any curriculum for such a young age group.  The problem though is that they may be being misled about climate risks, and that these in turn may be scaring them, and leading them into political roles which seem utterly unsuited to their tender years.  On the NEAD site, one can find phrases such as this one:

'Most importantly, children are offered information about some of the solutions to problems related to climate change. This will give children the power to make informed decisions and allow them to move towards behavioural and attitudinal change.'

Primary school children have been visited by this group in the past.  Although their teaching materials are not available to non-members on their site, my concerns that they may be the usual alarmist stuff are not allayed by listening to this song sung and partly composed by children at a NEAD event  at a school in October last year:

'The Norfolk Flood Blues'

It is quite hard to make out all the words, but it seems to begin with stamping of feet in time to the music, while chanting
'Rain Flood Rain Flood Rain Flood Rain Flood ...'

Later on, I think I heard these phrases (please email corrections or confirmations about these!): 
'Water in my home, Water in my bed'
'It's destroying everything'
'I feel doomed.  I feel scared.'

Pictures of the children and some of the adults involved in this can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nead_dec/sets/72157625120574255/detail/

I looked up the UK Met Office site to see what weather records I could find for East Anglia, the region in which Norwich lies.  Records were available for Lowestoft, a coastal town less than 20 miles from Norwich.  I extracted monthly rainfall, monthly sunshine hours, and monthly mean maximum and mean minimum temperature values for the 30 years 1980 to 2010, and used these to produce the plots shown below.  Can you see any grounds for alarm in them?

 

 The pupils will have some difficulty in discerning ‘climate change’ in such a display, dominated as it is by within-year variation.  Throughout this period, CO2 levels grew, along with increasingly agitated pleas and warnings from people who ought to have known better, such as James Hansen who in 1986 was warning of mean global temperature rises of several degrees by the year 2010.  Since the computer models suggest the temperature rises will be greater away from the equatorial regions towards the poles, a naive observer might well have expected more action in the Lowestoft data by now.  Could it be that the models are also useless for predicting such things?

Mercifully, the NEAD people do not seem deranged like those who produced the film ‘No Pressure’, whereby children of non-compliant parents were portrayed as being violently destroyed,  ‘pour encourager les autres’.  I suspect that NEAD attracts many good people, but people who have been misled by the IPCC, and by others.  There are further grounds for concern about NEAD: first, is it really a charity, second, is it at risk of crossing the line re political indoctrination in schools, and third, will campaigning around climate change really help the world's poor in the long run?

The 'Fake Charities' group keeps a database of charities which it has investigated, using this guideline:

“We define a Fake Charity as any organisation registered as a UK charity that derives more than 10% of its income—and/or more than £1 million—from the government, while also lobbying the government. ”

Unfortunately, NEAD fits their bill, as evidenced by information in their most recent annual report:
(1) more than 90% of their funding comes from the Department for International Development (see page 17 of the report)
(2) they seek to influence policy, e.g. on page 7:

‘We will also call for ACTIONS to be taken to affect policy-making agendas, encourage pupils’ political and social engagement, increase involvement with and understanding about new and marginal communities, and to demonstrate understanding of our interconnectedness and the importance of our values and perceptions.'

They are also treading on thin ice as far as the Education Acts are concerned.  These specifically make political indoctrination an offence, and they provided the basis for a legal action taken against a thinly-disguised political DVD on climate featuring the American politician Al Gore. 

Standing on actual or virtual platforms to broadcast your concern for others and demand ‘action’ does not provide any magic to prevent you, in the end, making everyone worse off, not least the very people you wished to help in the first place.  You still have a responsibility to do research and check, check, and check again with good data as opposed to good intentions, or the projections of feeble models of the climate.  I think development groups in general, and NEAD in particular, would do well to steer clear of the clamour around 'climate change due to humanity'.  They may well see some short-term advantage in it, but that will change very rapidly indeed when sufficiently many people have seen through the weak science and strong PR that underpins it.  Such as the people who contribute to this site on the topic of 'eco-imperialism'.

That would help adults work on real problems, including those of world development, and perhaps give more children a chance to enjoy their childhood without being pushed prematurely, and without anything like adequate justification, into either anxiety or political action.               

Footnote 1 (added 26th March).  The survey was not a random sampling of any kind.  From the report:
'School Report invited the 804 schools, signed up to the project in the relevant period to take part, 329 did so. There was no maximum or minimum limit to the number of children at each school that could take part. The average participation rate was 73 but figures ranged from 1 to 7841. There is no claim that those responding to the School Report Survey are representative of all 11-16 year olds because of self-selecting nature of the schools that take part and the sample of children therein. However there is some evidence that the schools taking part in School Report are broadly representative of schools across the UK and that those taking part in the Survey are representative of that group2.' 
Footnote 2 (added 27th March).  That as many as 50% of secondary-age children have this melodramatic view of climate variation has not been established by this survey, in view of the self-selection involved (by schools, and by pupils within them).  It only shows that some children in some schools have this view, although the authors of the report indicate that they find it plausible that the national figure could be somewhat similar.
Footnote 3 (added 28th March).  An opinion poll reported on today (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/03/25/old-men-in-midlands-are-the-biggest-climate-sceptics-115875-23013783/): 'A poll for this week’s Climate Week also found 45% of the younger generation think climate change is man-made but only 26% of people close to retiring age agree.'.