Memo to Education Scotland: Stop Brainwashing our Children with One-Sided State Propaganda on Climate Change

 Quote 1 'Children should not be overfed with one particular view of this ['climate change'].  It is far too complicated for that.'

Quote 2 ' ...it is brainwashing our children.'

Quote 1 is by Professor Tony Trewavas of Edinburgh University.  Quote 2 is by Martin Livermore, of the UK Scientific Alliance.  Both quoted in this article in the Scottish Daily Mail on 24th March, 2012 (hat-tip: Stuart Crawford, media commentator):

Education Scotland is an agency of the Scottish Government, a government which has produced absurd legislation on climate, and committed to absurd targets on renewable energy, thereby leading the way in sub-scientific foolishness.  The facade of scientific justification is easily exposed, but not by children.  They tend to trust what the adults tell them, and hence have long been a clearly identified target for eco-propagandising by the zealots who are intent on telling others how to live.  The Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London have failed to defend the wider society from such manipulation and shoddy extrapolation from unconfirmed speculations about the importance of CO2 in the climate system, and so it is all the more refreshing to see a member of the Edinburgh Royal Society taking a more informed, a more independent, and indeed a more civilised approach on climate matters.

This is especially encouraging and important given the recent announcement of a concordat amongst the major political parties in Scotland in support of the preposterous 'climate change targets' of the Scottish government.  This announcement has been noted and commented upon at Bishop Hill , where it is deemed 'somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet Union'.





Note added 20 Mar 2019.  Education Scotland being noticed internationally for their shameless promotion of junk science and scare stories in schools:
'Educational materials often don’t help, either. One officially endorsed geography textbook in the United Kingdom suggests that global warming will be worse than famine, plague, or nuclear war, while Education Scotland has recommended The Day After Tomorrow as suitable for climate-change education. This is the film, remember, in which climate change leads to a global freeze and a 50-foot wall of water flooding New York, man-eating wolves escape from the zoo, and – spoiler alert – Queen Elizabeth II’s frozen helicopter falls from the sky.'
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/98628/decades-climate-change-exaggeration-west-have-produced-frightened-children-febrile?page=1

Earth Day Climate Propaganda: Stuff the Data, Stuff the Science, Stuff the Panda - hey kids, look at that cute Panda!

Ross-Shire Journal

These children from a rural school in Scotland have been encouraged to switch lights off on 31st March, in order to 'support people and wildlife threatened by climate change'.

It is not difficult to spot the political campaigners who are coaching them in this nonsense.  And a regional council is on-board too, claiming that it 'hopes the effort will make people think about the energy they use, where it comes from and the impact that has on the environment and climate change.'
 (Source: Ross-Shire Journal)


Of course, the council and WWF are busy scheming to make that energy more expensive and less reliable thanks to the windfarms that are popping up in their territory to destroy wildlife, industrialise wild places, and discourage visitors and sensible industries from going anywhere near there.  Meanwhile, it is quite disgraceful that wealthy, un-accountable, biased, scaremongering, self-serving schemers like WWF have been allowed such access and influence on those youngsters.

This tiny example can no doubt be replicated in many thousands of locations worldwide, and this gives us a hint as to the extent of the  targeting of children by ruthless campaigners who will no doubt claim that they are protecting 'the world', or at least the Pandas if not the People.

The campaigners may well protect their Pension Plans by such actions, but I fear they may be bringing nought but harm to both People and Pandas, and for that matter, to Progress itself.

Note added 27 March 2012.  Earth Hour is no piece of fluffy symbolism dreamt up by nice but ill-informed people.  Instead
'Earth Hour was brought into this world by corporations
Launched in Sydney, Australia in 2007 there was never anything grassroots or shoestring about it. There’s no history of penniless activists toiling in obscurity, working their fingers to the bone, hoping against hope to attract attention to their cause.
Earth Hour is, instead, the brainchild of two large corporate entities – the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Fairfax Media Limited.'   Donna Laframboise
Note added 28 March 2012.  Donna explains the differences between Earth Hour and Earth Day: In any case, whereas Earth Day was the brainchild of a politician, Earth Hour (as I explain here) was brought into this world by wealthy corporations.http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/03/27/earth-hour-corporations-preaching-morality/

A Climate Book for Children - the cover alone deserves our contempt

Produced and published by what kind of people?  Sadists?  Sociopaths?  Dupes?  Fools?  Profiteers? 

Pic found on a blog hosted here, the AGU, home of an ethics committee once chaired by Peter Gleick, a man made decidedly un-ethical by his disproportionate alarm about CO2 and climate: http://blogs.agu.org/georneys/2012/01/26/global-warming-is-scary/  'Un-ethical' is also applicable to the cover of the above book.  As are a great many other adjectives conveying dismay, displeasure, distaste, and damnation.

The publishers are Dreamland, an Indian company describing itself thus:

If any reader in India or elsewhere can get this book and send in more details of it, I would be grateful. 

Teaching Point on Climate Data Analysis: for rigour and thoroughness, look to the outsiders, not the ‘authorities’.

Teaching materials, and guidance for teachers, can readily be found which defer to such authorities as the IPCC and the Royal Society and Met Offices and other government agencies around the world.  But, sad to say, none of these are to be trusted these days. 

They have all bitten the apple of political temptation, and the resulting lust for power has deflected them from paying adequate attention to details.  Such as how the hockey stick was constructed (see Montford’s masterpiece, 'The Hockey Stick Illusion', for how this was exposed by climate establishment outsiders as shoddy and indefensible).   The IPCC has also been exposed as an organisation careless of its own integrity (see Laframboise’s jaw-dropper 'The Delinquent Teenager' for chapter and verse).  And Montford has more recently described in a GWPF report the recent descent of the Royal Society from the high ground it might once have had a claim, indeed a responsibility, to occupy.  The UK Met Office has been saddled with an ex-WWF climate zealot as Chairman, and a deference to biased computer models which have made a mockery of its short-term climate predictions, both formal and informal. 

In New Zealand, amateurs exposed the official temperature records as being so unsatisfactory that no one ‘in authority; would subsequently take responsibility for them.  A recent summary was published on WUWT.

In the States, several commentators are challenging the temperature history adjustments being made by GISS and other agencies.

In Australia, a new report is out which exposes severe quality problems with the official temperature records there.

In each case, the ‘errors’ or the ‘adjustments’, just like the blunders of the IPCC, all happen to favour exaggeration of warming or its effects during the last 100 years or so.  And note that in each of these three cases, my links are to 'outsiders'.

So, teachers, the rug of authority is being pulled from under your feet.  You will fall too when that process speeds up, if you have been conscientiously urging your pupils to trust the IPCC, the Royal Society, the ‘97% of climate scientists’ (another deceptive statistic), and such like.  As Christopher Monckton has recently said in a related context, ‘Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.'

Now it is clear that the truly conscientious teacher must hold the claims of such bodies within metaphorical tongs for his or her pupils to review and compare with other sources.   It is a sad thing that we have come to this.

Sloppy Science in a Nutshell: head of climate analysis says drought is permanent 4 years before record floods

It seems that whenever prominent CO2-driven folks condescend or blunder into making falsifiable statements about the climate system, the system duly responds by revealing them to be false.  Real Science has this beauty, using quotes from the Sidney Morning Herald:

January 4, 2008
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.
March 13, 2012
Changes to the system are almost certainly due to human activity.
The past two years have been Australia’s wettest two-year period since at least 1900

Yet the show goes on.  They have the money, the politicians, big agencies, big finance, big green, and of course virtually all of education from nursery schools upwards. Their scandals are numerous - the list at NoTricksZone is now up at 129 items, and is surely incomplete.  I suspect there are also many thousands more on smaller scales, within and around all the uncounted initiatives on the climate crisis bandwagon. 

But thoughtful teachers everywhere must be asking themselves how long they must go along with this madness.  On the one hand are to be found agitated activists and all the power that effective PR (such as the IPCC) and financial prizes can win, and on the other, are calmer citizens and all the integrity that careful observation and reflection can bring.

 It is clear to me which side has won the financial and political battles.  It is also clear which side has won the moral and intellectual ones.  Which side should teachers best be on?  The educational battles have also been lost, but the war is surely not yet over.  I think it is in the field a war between irresponsible adults who cannot contain or cope with speculations about CO2-driven catastrophe, and responsible ones who are dismayed by over-the-top reactions to something so poorly supported by observation and experiment.

Note added 14 March 2012: Real Science has more examples here of stupid, irresponsible, and subsequently refuted claims by scientist-activists.