First you scare ‘em, then you snare ‘em – how the UEA treats 13 and 14 year olds

That epicentre of scarequakes on climate and carbon dioxide, the University of East Anglia (UEA) has been lowering its sights recently to target more than 60 early teenagers in their neighbourhood. (hat-tip: Dave W).  Power Engineering carries the story, as does the print edition of the Norwich Evening News on 9th February (see below).  The impression it gives me is that they want them to be receptive to renewables as a source of energy, and at the same time get them involved in a scary scenario about a planetary emergency to get them on side.

Why would a university stoop to such a thing?  Let us first look at it:

First, you get the youngsters to imagine that fossil fuels have disappeared, that this is really scary, and that they must come up with ideas to save the world.  You pay an outside consultancy to do this, since it is one of their suite of activities for the young, and they no doubt have it down to a fine art.  Now by itself, I can imagine really good teachers, with the right type of pupils, engaging their attention in such a way (with no need of course to pay others to do so).  It is easy to imagine this could lead to lots of ideas and useful discussions.  But what about the rest of it?

Second, you bring in people with a vested interest in renewable energy (in this case Aquaterra ,  Seajacks and a tiny start-up called Wind Elements Ltd) and/or carbon reduction schemes and devices (in this case, Lotus Cars and  the University of East Anglia – the UEA, home of the Low Carbon Innovation Centre , commented on here in 2010, and of course of CRU, perhaps most widely known as the source of the Climategate materials ).  You arrange for the pupils to speed-date their way amongst them.

Third, you alert the press to what you are up to, perhaps invite them to be there.

 Fourth, you invite a children’s hero to attend, in this case a local footballer, perhaps in order to increase the possibility of a positive response from the press, and maybe even encourage more pupils to attend.

Now how does it look?  Can you imagine this happening in the old Soviet Union (‘First, imagine the capitalists have closed down all their businesses in some yet-to-be-liberated land, and you have to save the people there from starvation.  Second, let me introduce Commissar Crulcicski who wishes to tell the class about the new 5 year plan, and the glorious ideals of the Party.  You will each have to talk with him.  You need pay no attention to the comrade reporter from Pravda sitting at the back, but the famous footballer Stakhanovily Matthewski is here to distract deal with any technical questions that may arise.  Let us begin.’)

There’s more.  The no doubt well-intentioned facilitators of the simulation game (Camouflaged Learning) describe it as follows:

‘As the day begins, the students are informed that the Earth’s remaining reserves of fossil fuels have finally been exhausted and, as a result, the fabric of what we consider normal life has immediately started to crumble. No more light, no more heat, no more iPods. No more anything, in fact, meaning something needs to be done- and soon- before the world falls into total chaos.’

The UEA representative at the event is reported as hyping this up just a bit:

‘The students must solve the most catastrophic, significant and terrifying crisis imaginable – a world without power’, she said, ‘…It is essential that they act fast because, unless they’re successful, life as we know it could come to an end.’


If I were of a cynical disposition, I’d call this event ‘Camouflaged Selling – of renewables by the companies, and of alarmism by the university’.  Perish the thought.  Who would do such a thing with such young people?


Footnote

Poor pupils of Norwich.  A similar wheeze was followed by energy giant, EDF, last year at a high school in Norwich when they invited a famous athlete to attend a sustainability day of their devising.  To their credit though, it seems they might have skipped the bit where you first scare the kids:

‘“Days like these are something that pupils will remember for the rest of their lives and it is great that EDF Energy can combine this with a way of getting people together to fight climate change.”
It is hoped that the school’s sustainable efforts will inspire others in the local community to follow in its footsteps and think about what they can do differently in their lives to be greener.
Clive Steed, sustainability manager for EDF Energy said: “We can only tackle climate change effectively by taking action together. As a leading energy company, EDF Energy has an ethical responsibility and the expertise to inspire people to reduce their carbon footprint, which is why we kicked off Green Britain Day.’

 

More on EDF’s marketing-through-kids efforts here: http://www.jointhepod.org/

Education Scotland's Boilerplate Blethers vs Christopher Monckton's Astute Arithmetic

First, the boilerplate blethers on the Education Scotland site:

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the global community in the 21st century. Scientists believe that the world is heating up rapidly and that this will cause changes to our weather and climate.

Scotland is taking a lead on tackling climate change with the Climate Change (Scotland) Act which commits Scotland to the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets. Our country has responded positively to the challenge and is seeking to be a world leader in harnessing renewable technology - creating jobs, helping the economy and demonstrating leadership on the international stage.

However, if we are to meet the targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 then it will require everyone to play their part. This section explains some of the ways that individuals and schools can engage children and young people in hands-on activities to tackle climate change to help them develop new skills and support their development as responsible global citizens.

The above three paragraphs are contemptible contentious in just about every sentence, but I resist the urge to Fisk them here, in favour of merely placing them in close proximity to three from Viscount Monckton: 

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”

Now this Department of Energy and Climate Clowns Change (DECC) is leading the charge for the UK as a whole to ‘to meet the targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050’. Let me give the valiant viscount a further three paragraphs to assess the impact on global warming if DECC succeeds completely in its mission:

The UK accounts for 1.5% of global business-as-usual CO2 emissions. At an officially-estimated cost of $1.2 trillion by 2050, or $834 billion after inter-temporal discounting at the minimum market rate of 5%, the Climate Change Act aims to eradicate 80% of these emissions. So just 1.2% of global emissions would be abated even if the policy were to succeed in full.

Business-as-usual CO2 concentration, as the average of all six IPCC emission scenarios, would be 514 ppmv in 2050. A full and successful reduction of UK emissions by 80% over that period would reduce that concentration to – wait for it – 512.5 ppmv. This dizzying reduction of 1.5 ppmv over 40 years would have the effect of abating 0.008 K of the 1.05 K of warming that the IPCC would otherwise have expected to see by 2050.

The UK policy’s mitigation cost-effectiveness – the cost of abating just 1 Kelvin of warming if every nation pursued the UK’s policy with the same cost-ineffectiveness – works out at $108 trillion per Kelvin abated.

So, I hope that conscientious and conforming schoolteachers everywhere, urged to do their bit by such as Education Scotland, will take a little time to explain to their pupils just what kind of difference their sacrifices of time and energy are expected to make using the projections of the IPCC with regard to CO2 and its impact on global warming.  Then I hope their pupils will regard them with the contempt they deserve for their conformance to fatuous climate-alarm-driven policies.  They might even start doubting such statements such as ‘the world is heating up rapidly’ and ‘climate change is one of the biggest challenges’.  Let us hope so. But let us also hope that their teachers get there ahead of them.

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'.