CO2 Causes Contempt for Childhood - a climate well-worthy of our alarm

When children less than 6 years old are seen as 'instruments' 'for the achievement of a sustainable society' and that 'we' must make them  'understand deeply, and even shock them out of their unawareness', then something is seriously amiss; somebody somewhere is up to something we should resist.  The quotes are from a UNESCO report recently reported on by Donna Laframboise.

Targeting toddlers under the smokescreen of ‘sustainable development’ has more than just a hint of the peculiar impulses which grip some campaigners convinced that CO2 is a threat to life on earth, and most especially to humans and to polar bears.  Their negativity and exploitation of fear can lead to the absurd as well as to the totalitarian.  Their answer is invariably more state control of what we do and what we think, and where we live, and how we live, and what we might try to do.  Some kind of global rulebook, devised and enforced by an elite is what they want.  Nothing new there – countless religious and political mvoements have sought exactly that for thousands of years.  What is new is the appeal to climate science rather than to one or more deities, or the pseudo-science of Marxism.  Sometimes the outputs of computer programs are brought down as if from on high to be treated as part of the new gospel, interpreted by experts who do not care to have their authority challenged.  There is also nothing new in the targeting of the young, where the big idea is presumably to get at them before they have much chance of resistance.

The report is about a UNESCO conference held in 2007.  The conference-culture it represents is almost caricatured by this extract from the report:

‘This report originates from the international workshop, ‘The Role of Early Childhood Education for a Sustainable Society’, jointly organized in Göteborg, Sweden, by Göteborg University, Chalmers University of Technology and the City of Göteborg, from 2 to 4 May 2007. It was attended by thirty-fi ve participants from sixteen different countries (see ‘List of Participants’). The workshop was a follow-up to the international conference on education for sustainable development, ‘Learning to Change Our World’, held in May 2004, in Göteborg. It was one of four preparatory workshops leading to another international conference on education for sustainable development, to be organized in 2008 or 2009, in the same city. The aim of the four workshops is to discuss promoters and barriers related to learning for sustainability, and to propose recommendations for the upcoming international conference.'

The delegates were described as not really knowing what 'sustainable development' was (and who can blame them!):

 ‘A common question raised in the beginning was ‘What is sustainable development?’ Most of the participants were not familiar with the concept,’

Which makes me think one motivation for this conference was to spread the gospel to them, the innocent delegates, rather than as a meeting place for like-minded people to discuss their work and ideas.  This is reinforced by most of the papers presented - they really are mostly about motherhood and apple pie, about how good it would be if more children could get out in the open-air, enjoy nature, and be kind to one another.  But in amongst this worthy stuff, there are contentious materials that raise the hackles of the sensitive reader, such as this gem:

‘Al Gore’s (2006), An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern (2006) review into the economics of climate change, and the report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), have heightened awareness of how humans are over-stretching the Earth’s life-support systems.’ (page 19) 

Each of the three sources given have been widely discredited as reliable guides.  The 'heightened awareness' of which she speaks is best decoded as 'irresponsible, ill-informed alarmism'.

Laframboise has spotted several other phrases to raise the hackles of the concerned citizen:

• educating for sustainability should begin very early in life. (p. 12)
• Young children can be encouraged to question over-consumption. (p. 13)
• young children have capacities to be active agents of change now… (p. 20, italics in original)
• Through their learning and social activism, the children were able to highlight their concerns… (p. 22)
• even very young children…can be proactive participants…as initiators, provocateurs, researchers and environmental activists. (p. 22)
• learning begins at birth…and even before. (p. 54)
• We must find some effective methods of teaching sustainable development that can make children understand deeply, and even shock them out of their unawareness. (p. 85)

'Anthropogenic Global Warming', all but spent.  
'Sustainable Development', let's try that one again.

Now that the climatology, politics, and economics of climate alarmism have been so widely exposed as having no more than 350ppm of integrity and truth, many more people are challenging the associated doctrines.  So much so that one of the arch-plotters faciltating this particular wave of scaremongering, the UN and its various agencies, have decided to downplay 'climate change' at the next Earth Summit, to be held in Rio de Janeiro this June.  What is the focus to take its place?  Why, none other than 'sustainable development'.  Same old attendees, same old luxuries, same old resolutions, same old intention of controlling the world, not least through the crippling of industrial economies, and the keeping of the developing ones underdeveloped (e.g. by massive transfers of funds to their rulers), while at the same time furthering the aggrandisement of certain elites required to supervise it all.

Here are my takes on what 'sustainable development' might really mean:

sustainable = suppressed, inhibited,backward-looking, most likely centrally-planned and imposed by force

sustainable development = suppressed development, centrally-planned by those who know what is best for us and holding out all the promise of past attempts at central-planning on grand scales


Fred Singer has published a brief history of 'sustainable development', which goes back to the 1960s, and in that piece he provides this quote from a Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars:

' Sustainability sounds like a call for recycling and clean drinking water.   But its proponents are much more ambitious. For them, a sustainable society is one that replaces the market economy with top-down regulation. They present students a frightening story in which the earth is on the brink of disaster and immediate action is needed. This is a tactic aimed at silencing critics, shutting down debate, and mobilizing students who never get the opportunity to hear opposing views.'

We now know that 'students' has a very wide scope.  It includes toddlers at nursery schools!  The UN has a declaration on the rights of the child.  Presumably it does not include the right to be protected from interfering busybodies and debate suppressors on the international conference gravy train.  Melanie Phillips saw the danger just as soon as she saw the first Climategate emails back in 2009: '...what we are dealing with here is the totalitarian personality. One thing is now absolutely clear for all to see about the anthropogenic global warming scam: science this is not.'

Note added 9 Feb 2012:  '“Every early-years teacher in the state and the independent sector has told me how much they wish the Government wouldn’t treat childhood as a race,” says Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood and a signatory to the letter.
“Schools have become sausage factories as it is, and putting little children into the grinder earlier and earlier doesn’t make it any better.”'
Quote from an article on state interference at the pre-school level: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9066921/Knickers-to-the-nappy-curriculum.html

Note added 12 Oct 2017:  Some good news: the USA has given notice of quitting UNESCO in 2018.  Not before time!  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/12/u-s-withdraws-from-unesco-the-u-n-s-cultural-organization-citing-anti-israel-bias/?utm_term=.d79a39b9fdb2

Part of a Cure for Climate Change Alarmism? - a simple chart for the classroom wall

Source

The UK Met Office, much to its discredit, played and continues to play a leading role in the promotion of an irrational level of alarm over human impact on climate.  An alarm out of all proportion to what we have observed so far.  Instead of temperatures rising as if CO2 was a control knob for them, we have had a clear flattening out.  For those teachers who know of children disturbed or still frightened by this alarmism, the above chart may help calm them down.  It is constructed using results just released by the UK Met Office and its partner in climatism, The Hadley Centre.  The temperatures may still rise again, of course - we are looking at modest variations here and they can readily go either way for any number of reasons - but they have not followed the prescriptions of those utterly irresponsible alarmists.  Any hint that those people do not possess anything like the competence (omniscience?) they claimed or implied for themselves, might do wonders for any frightened child.  The repair of the mental damage done by alarmism aimed at the young will no doubt be a long and tricky task, but simple, informative graphics such as the above may well have a role to play.  Notice how the Met Office displays the full set of results (none of this is raw data) at their site:

First of all note the emotive use of colour.  Secondly, note that the two periods with an overall rising trend in the 20th century are of similar size and slope - yet CO2 levels are widely agreed to have been very different between these two periods.  Thirdly, note that despite record levels of CO2 emissions being reported in recent years, the rising trend has clearly faltered - as shown more clearly in the first plot in this post. Fourthly, note the fall in 2011 is hard to see (in fact on my browser the plot is cut off at the year 2000 on the Met Office site).

The Daily Mail article which published the first plot raises the possibility of a pronounced cooling being underway.  The PR folks of the green movement will be assessing this for possible use.  Those who profit from spreading fear may well choose to switch to, or merely just include,  threats of ice instead of fire, and our defence against them will be the same.  So, while it might be that sidelining 'climate change' in favour of 'sustainability' is the new wheeze of choice,  let us watch for such as the WWF and Greenpeace including nightmares about ice ages in their PR materials.  For them the 'issue is not the issue', the 'issue' in the PR is whatever they spot as a good opportunity for their aggrandisement, the real 'issue' for them is winning power.  But their point of contact with the young, and indeed with their teachers and parents, is with the issue in the PR.  The task of more responsible adults is to first of all to shield the young from such alarmism, and, failing that, help them see it for what it is and get a calmer, more balanced picture - including the fact that our great energy resources will allow us to deal well with a wide range of climatic conditions.  We can generate confidence, not fear.  We can trust in data, not speculations.  We can be free humans, not lackeys of fund-raising zealots who have a low opinion of humanity.

For the Climate Classroom Wall: ocean heat content observed and predicted

Note the predicted trend (straight red line) compared with some actual observations. 

Quote 'If the model mean continues to diverge from the observations, how many years are required until the models can be said to have failed?'

This is a good statistical question, but it also serves an honest rhetorical purpose as a comment on this chart.

 (Source: Bob Tisdale              Hat-tip: C3)

Compare it with this material aimed at 'kids' on the NASA site:

'The ocean does an excellent job of absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere. The top few meters of the ocean stores as much heat as Earth's entire atmosphere. So, as the planet warms, it's the ocean that gets most of the extra energy.

But if the ocean gets too warm, then the plants and animals that live in it must adapt--or die.
Algae and plankton are at the bottom of the food chain. Plankton includes many different kinds of tiny animals, plants, or bacteria that just float and drift in the ocean. Other tiny animals such as krill (sort of like little shrimp) eat the plankton. Fish and even whales and seals feed on the krill. In some parts of the ocean, krill populations have dropped by over 80 percent. Why? Krill like to breed in really cold water near sea ice. What would happen if there were no sea ice? What would happen if there were very little plankton or krill? The whole food web could come unraveled.'

Quote 'The whole food web could come unraveled.' 

Do you think by any chance they want to scare the 'kids'?
Q. How can they justify this?
A. Because the model projections look alarming

Might be enough to persuade you to read Bob Tisdale's article linked to above.
Or research into what kind of of temperature rise would mean 'the ocean gets too warm'.

The Devil waits for his own: what Burns might have penned for the Green Lords of today

This being Burns Day, I will mark it with an extract from one of his poems in which he imagines the devil (Beelzebub) looking forward to an aristocrat coming to join him in due course after a long and healthy life.  Burns was addressing some Lords, and one in particular, who objected to some poor highlanders trying to escape their poverty by emigrating to North America in 1786.  He hoped that these folks would find someone like George Washington to help them achieve their aims and escape from those Lords who would prefer to keep them under their control.  He hopes there will be no equivalents of the prominent Lords  (North, Sackville, Howe, Clinton) who fought against Washington’s cause - American independence.

Address Of Beelzebub

Long life, my Lord, an' health be yours, 

Unskaithed by hunger'd Highland boors; 

Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar, 

Wi' dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger, 

May twin auld Scotland o' a life 

She likes - as lambkins like a knife. 

Faith you and Applecross were right 

To keep the Highland hounds in sight: 

I doubt na! they wad bid nae better, 

Than let them ance out owre the water, 

Then up among thae lakes and seas, 

They'll mak what rules and laws they please: 

Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin, 

May set their Highland bluid a-ranklin; 

Some Washington again may head them, 

Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them, 

Till God knows what may be effected 

When by such heads and hearts directed, 

Poor dunghill sons of dirt and mire 

May to Patrician rights aspire! 

Nae sage North now, nor sager Sackville, 

To watch and premier o'er the pack vile,

An' whare will ye get Howes and Clintons 

To bring them to a right repentance 

To cowe the rebel generation, 

An' save the honour o' the nation? 

They, an' be damn'd! what right hae they 

To meat, or sleep, or light o' day? 

Far less - to riches, pow'r, or freedom, 

But what your lordship likes to gie them? 

The rest of the poem, with a plain English version alongside, can be found here.

Well the ‘Lords’ nowadays are the leaders of the big green NGOs such as the WWF, with useful lords attendant such as Pachauri and Gore.  And those they would deny ‘meat, or sleep, or light o’day’ are the world’s poor, most especially those in the developing countries.    Paul Driessen tells their story. 

And, of course, nowadays, as back then, we have good and decent, and real, Lords too.  Not least Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton.  I feel sure Burns would have wanted to support the GWPF and the SPPI!  

Note added 04 June 2013  More Lords distinguishing themselves in this area.  Newly-accessioned Lord Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, and of many other powerful presentations and articles.  Lord Donoughue for sustained Parliamentary Questioning of the Met Office.  Lord Lipsey for calling the bluff and bluster of a prominent Guardian alarmist. 

For the Climate Classroom Wall: anthropogenic sustainability threatens communication catastrophe

http://xkcd.com/1007/

The rising levels of 'sustainable' are presenting a major threat to the global communications system, and could even undermine efforts to destroy industrial civilisation by the propagation of alarm about a beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere.  So many participants in these efforts rely on 'sustainable' as a powerful charm to drive away the evil spirits of adventure, optimism, honesty, and scientific rigour.  But as yet, few of them seem to be aware of this major threat to their campaigns.  97% of linguists agree that this key word is under threat of losing any meaning whatsoever, noting that it is already in a 'vague, woolly, and confusing' state.  A little cabal of UN insiders is, thank goodness, preparing a plot to preserve at least a vestige of substance for this precious word, a word so dear to so many intent on controlling our lives, crushing the spirits of the young, and rubbishing the achievements of the past.  Emissions controls will be agreed to keep usage below the safe limit of 1ppm - a level not seen since the 1980s. It may already be too late for some green sites.  Take a look at this example, merely one among the thousands where this vital word is being deployed with a fearful frequency.

(hat-tip for the cartoon link: Jane Coles, comment on 'Unthreaded' yesterday (Jan 23, 2012 at 10:47 PM) at Bishop Hill)

Update 25 Jan 12: A serious threat to the control of sustainable emissions is looming at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio this June: 'In an attempt to avoid too much confrontation, the conference will focus not on climate change but on sustainable development ...'  (source)  Hat-tip: Climate Change Dispatch
 It would seem that the fuss over AGW has served its purpose and will now be sidelined in favour of 'sustainable development'.  More here on that by Luboš Motl.