Good News About Climate in Schools: Under 14s in England May Get More Protection from Eco-Indoctrination

 A story in The Guardian on line today has this:

'The latest draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 have no mention of climate change under geography teaching and a single reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans impacts on the climate in the chemistry section. There is also no reference to sustainable development, only to the "efficacy of recycling", again as a chemistry subject.'

The report is in The Guardian, and so of course comments from those keen to promote climate alarm are quoted below the above paragraph.  For such people, this is bad news.  But for others like me, and of course like all the children and their teachers, this is good news.   

Under-14s are too young for the physics and maths and the politics of this invented crisis, and for the cruelty of the gloom and doom and destructiveness which can so readily be delivered alongside.

And of course, while this is only a draft for discussion:

'The proposed changes, which are still under consultation by the Department for Education (DfE), were broadly welcomed by other groups, including the Geographical Association which represents more than 6,000 geography teachers, and the Royal Geographical Society.'

 the very fact that such enlightenment is being seriously entertained is a step in the right direction.  

[Hat-tip matthu ( Mar 17, 2013 at 7:07 PM) at Bishop Hill Unthreaded ]

Note added later on 17 March:  Links to the consultation site and to the relevant document are here:

https://www.education.gov.uk/aboutdfe/departmentalinformation/consultations

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/n/national%20curriculum%20consultation%20-%20framework%20document.pdf

[hat-tip Bishop-Hill, and a blog by Joe Smith linked to there]

Note added 19 March.  The original title of this post said 'England & Wales', but I see from the consultation document that only England is relevant here.  I was unable to use strikethrough to amend the title, and so I have reluctantly just deleted '& Wales'.
Note added 10 May.  What was all the fuss about?  According to Pauline Latham, a Conservative MP who writes on her blog 'I have been contacted about the inclusion of climate change in the curriculum. Unfortunately, Early Day Motion 1208 has now lapsed as the Parliamentary Session has ended. I would, however, like to take this opportunity to assure you that the Government is not and does not have any plans to remove climate change from the National Curriculum.

The new draft national curriculum will in fact give pupils a deeper understanding of all climate issues. Climate change is specifically mentioned in the science curriculum, and both climate and weather feature throughout the geography curriculum. Nowhere is this clearer than the science curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds, which states that pupils should learn about the ‘production of carbon dioxide by human activity and the impact on climate’.
This is at least as extensive, and certainly more precise, than the current science curriculum for that age group, which says only that ‘human activity and natural processes can lead to changes in the environment’.'  http://www.paulinelatham.co.uk/content/climate-change-curriculum

For the Classroom Wall: Polar Bears are Doing OK

Polar bears are good for catching the attention of the young who are told the poor bears are all but dead in the water from the melting ice.  

http://polarbearscience.files.wordpress.com

Children are urged variously to do such things as: 

Help save them. Screw up your own life.  Turn your back on generations of hard-won effort and industrial progress.  Feel bad about just about everything,  Just look at what's happening to the polar bears. Turn off lights.  Hassle your parents.  Be afraid of global warming.  Blame humanity for it.

Example here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/04/15/will-polar-bears-be-ok.html
'Sean Hussey and his twin sister, Erin, are only 9 years old, but they already know all about global warming. And they're worried, very worried. Teachers at their Hillsborough, Calif., school have shown them pictures of melting glaciers. Sean fears that polar bears will be left homeless. "I like polar bears a lot," he explains. Erin is also concerned about what she calls "the animal side" of climate change. "There are lots of animals that shouldn't die," she says. "The humans are the ones who are causing it." '

Meanwhile, the polar bears are doing OK.

What does that tell you about the scamsters of climate, class?  Pretty shoddy? Yup - that's about right.

For a sensible view, one based on reality and not the wishful fantasising of malevolent zealots, here are some observations by Matt Ridley.  Extract:

'In other words, the claim that polar bear populations are declining at all, let alone due to climate change, is a manufactured myth, designed for media consumption and with very little basis in fact. That it works all too well is demonstrated by an episode in 2011 involving Sir David Attenborough. In a television series the brilliant television presenter, unwisely diverging from neutral natural history, had asserted that the polar bear is already in trouble. When challenged by Lord Lawson that ‘the polar bear population has not been falling, but rising’, Sir David responded. He was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying ‘Most [polar bear populations] are in decline and just one is increasing – for a number of factors – one being they have stopped hunting…Lord Lawson is denying what the whole scientific community is accepting and working at and it is extraordinary thing for him to do’.

Much as I admire and like both men, I have to say that the evidence suggests that Lord Lawson’s account is closer to the truth. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated in 1966 that there were 10,000 polar bears in the world; in 2006, the same source estimated that the population had risen to 20,000-25,000 bears. Had Sir David examined the text on the PBSG’s website he would have found that all but one of the eight sub-population declines he cited were in fact based on ‘beliefs’ or future projections. As demonstrated by another recent mistake in another television series, this time an exaggerated claim for temperature change in Africa, Sir David is not being well served by his BBC researchers these days.

Zac Unger documents in his recent book Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, how polar bear ‘decline’ is now a large and lucrative industry and in places like Churchill, Manitoba, organisations like Polar Bears International cynically use the imagined plight of the bears to raise money, and push propaganda at young people about changing their lifestyles and those of their parents.'

His writing was inspired by a study made by a polar bear expert Susan Crockford.  It is available for download here at the Global Warming Policy Foundation site.


Her study is entitled '10 Good Reasons Not To Worry About Polar Bears'

That would make a good title for a display on the classroom wall would it not?  The children would be pleased.  Why not help put their troubled minds at rest?

[Hat-tip/inspiration: Booker here:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/9934109/Attenborough-should-check-his-facts-on-polar-bears.html#disqus_thread ]

Note added later on 17 March:  The Heartland Institute in the States has produced an advertising-hoarding that could provide ideas for a wall display although it is perhaps too political for the classroom itself::

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151562704370281&set=a.10150141139700281.328977.140379955280&type=1&theater

And another:  More on polar bears and with more links here:  http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/03/17/seeing-polar-bears/

Note added 25 Oct 2017.  More vindication of the position that polar bears are doing ok:   https://polarbearscience.com/2017/10/24/death-of-the-polar-bear-as-climate-change-icon-validates-mitch-taylors-skepticism/

Note added 26 Oct 2018.  Yet more vindication:
http://notrickszone.com/2018/10/25/new-papers-polar-bears-continue-to-thrive-grow-in-number-shredding-forecasts-of-climate-doom/
From the inestimable Kenneth Richard:
'Ten years ago, polar bears were classified as an endangered species due to model-based assumptions that said the recession of Arctic sea ice would hamper the bears’ seal-hunting capabilities and ultimately lead to starvation and extinction...

'The paleoclimate evidence, which shows that sea ice was thinner and less extensive than today for most of the last 10,000 years, also contradicts the assumptions about modern polar bear endangerment due to thinning ice.  One must ask: How did polar bears survive sea ice free summers in the ancient past if they existentially rely on thick sea ice to hunt prey today?

When the observations don’t agree with the models and assumptions, real scientists are supposed to reconsider their hypotheses.

Climate scientists, on the other hand, too often discard the data that conflict with their modeled assumptions and proceed to call those who question their models and assumptions names (i.e., “deniers”).

This begs the question: Why is climate science so much different than real science?

In the 3 new papers referenced below, extensive observational evidence suggests that polar bear populations are currently healthier than in the past, and their numbers have been stable or growing in recent decades.'

Three ways to get at the young about 'climate change'

The determination by some to turn children into true believers in the Faith of Alarm over Climate and Much Else Besides is revealed in many ways.  Here are three: get the catechisms into school curricula, design school buildings and grounds to show how serious it is, and have museum exhibits which do much the same.

Each has been illustrated by recent blogposts.  I managed to get comments published on two of them..  The first is in response to an article which notes with some enthusiasm an initiative to promote climate alarm in the curricula of American schools.  The second is in response to a rather wide-eyed article in the New York Times about ‘eco-buildings’ used for schools, a prescription which can mean they become both more expensive and less useable, but then a little suffering on the part of the pupils can be informative, as one headmaster believed according to one of the examples in my comment.  I add the third example from an article in which the author is bemused by school pupils at his museum reporting that they’d had quite enough ‘climate change' in their education, thank you.  My comment, polite as it was, was not posted.  But  other critical ones were, and I show extracts from one by ‘TinyCO2’ and one by Barry Woods.

(1) Climate Change Science Poised to Enter Nation's Classrooms

(title of an article by Katherine Bagley, InsideClimate News, Mar 4, 2013)

My comment

‘Given that the so-called major factor of human-linked CO2 emissions has continued to grow while global mean temperature has flatlined for some 16 years, why would any State rush to adopt a curriculum that seems to tell them the two are strongly linked?  Children now at school have not known 'global warming' in their lifetime.  Some will have teachers telling them snow is a thing of the past one year and yet the next few years see that snow appearing all around them.  Others will have been warned about hurricanes becoming fiercer and/or more frequent, and will be bemused when they study data showing otherwise.  Others still will wonder about the polar bears doing relatively well, and the sea level rises refusing to accelerate, or the Arctic sea ice extent being so variable that observers thought it might disappear in the 1920s.  The reality is that CO2 has not demonstrated any confirmed weather effects in recent decades, and those who tried to give it a grand role which it has never displayed in the past are struggling to save face.  Pushing their dogmas on to children is neither a moral nor a responsible way to do it.  Let the children learn that climate changes - always has and always will - and that we have been impressive at getting better at coping with the inevitable variations.  Let the children learn that human activity interacts with the climate system and has clear local effects on climate, and will surely influence global climate.  But teach them that it is a tough problem to ascertain those global effects because they are so small compared to those due to other sources of variation.  Let us not frighten children because some want to raise generations of 'little political activists' driven by fear and a lack of confidence in humanity.’

Note added 5/4/19:  On larger timescales, 'no causal link for CO2 during deglaciation':
https://notrickszone.com/2019/04/04/scientists-find-no-causal-link-between-co2-and-nh-warming-during-last-deglaciation/

(2) Schools, and Syllabuses, Designed With the Environment in Mind 

(title of an article by Andrew C Revkin of the New York Times, Mar 6, 2013)

My comment

‘Here are three not-so-happy instances of teachers using school buildings and grounds to make their eco-points:

(1) Happy Head, Chilly Children, Troubled Teachers, Perplexed Parents, Riled Readers - an example of authoritarian eco-arrogance at work using a school’s central heating to make mysterious points: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/happy-head-chilled-children...
(2) Learning by Metaphor: foolish building, foolish technology, foolish teacher, foolish 'science' – in which an eco-classroom is too unpleasant to be useable: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/learning-by-metaphor-foolis...
(3) Climate Change Scaremongering threatens the physical as well as the mental wellbeing of children: wind turbines in school grounds now complement the scare stories in school rooms : http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/climate-change-scaremongeri... ‘

(3)  Rolling your eyes at climate change education

(title of an article by Adam Blankenbicker, Sci-Ed blog, Mar 4, 2013)

My comment consisted mainly of suggestions for a not-at-all-alarming exhibit on climate at his museum.  It was not published.  A couple of gently critical comments by TinyCo2 and by Barry Woods were however.

TinyCO2 says quite a few things, not all of which I would go along with.  Here are some with which I would:

‘Climate change is conveyed to the public in such a simplified form that it is little more than advertising. Catchy phrases, cartoons, celebrities, exaggerated facts, half truths, these are the ways that governments and media try to sell AGW to the public. The aim is not to explain climate science, it is to get a mandate to force people to cut CO2. There is no debate. You don’t get to use your knowledge of climate to have an opinion. More detailed knowledge doesn’t make the picture clearer, just the opposite. The more you know, the more questions arise. So the science never gets beyond the simple caricature but it appears everywhere. News stories, kids TV, films, interviews, comedy, you name it climate change creeps into the fabric of communication. Each message says CO2 bad, the World will end unless the bad men stop polluting.’

Barry Woods quotes from a psychotherapist, Ro Randall (extract):

‘Should we be working with children about climate change?Climate change community groups often want to work with children. ‘We must get into the schools,’ says someone and there is a nod of agreement. It’s worth thinking about the psychology behind this. Why is this idea so appealing? And why is it so damaging?’

[More can be found about the Ro Randall piece here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/not-just-another-brick-in-wall-hey.html ]

A Case Study of Climate Corruption: tracking the trash to source

Here is a compact case study of how junk information on climate is produced by a vested interest to suit its own ends and taken up by others for theirs.  How easy would it be for this to get into a school textbook?  Is it just a matter of time?

Willis Eschenbach spotted this claim in a book review in the South China Post:

“Guzman ... cites an estimate that the annual global death toll already sparked by climate change is 300,000.”

 Note the alarmism in the book’s cover.  A sure sign of trash to come when the book is about climate.

The reviewer is not totally bowled over, managing this in an otherwise gushing review:

“One possible peeve is that he lashes climate deniers for lacking expertise when he himself is a Berkeley, California, legal scholar. An unkind critic might say that is rich, even hypocritical.”

 Eschenbach describes how he decided to try to track down the source of this claim of 300,000 deaths each year due to ‘climate change’.    

He finds that Guzman refers the claim to Kofi Annan, and follows that through to find that Annan has his own foundation in place, a foundation that produced a report in which the statistic was used:

“Finally, on page 9, we find the following explanation of where they get the three hundred thousand deaths number:

'This estimate is derived by attributing a 40 percent proportion of the increase in the number of weather-related disasters from 1980 to current to climate change.'

Now wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute right there. They are saying that the three hundred thousand is only forty percent of the increase in people killed annually by the weather since 1980?”

As Eschenbach immediately notes, “That’s hogwash”, and he goes on to explain why.

Further into the report, he discovers an organisation notorious for climate alarmism, Munich Re:

“So just what is Kofi Annan’s pet foundation using as their authority for the 40% claim and the other numbers? Further reading brings us to this one (emphasis mine):

'The 40 percent proportion is based on an analysis of data provided by Munich Re on the past trend of weather-related disasters, as compared to geophysical (i.e. non climate change related) disasters over time.⁵ It compares well to a 2009 scientific estimate of the attribution of climate change to droughts.¹¹ It is assumed that the 40 percent increase due to climate change based on frequency of disasters can be applied as an approximation for the number of people seriously affected and deaths.'

Munich Re??? They got their numbers from Munich Re? They’re trusting a dang insurance company? That’s what we find way down at the bottom of the edifice of bogus claims? An insurance company that makes more money if people are very, very afraid.”

Eschenbach is rightly shocked.  He goes on to summarise:

"• Munich Re pulled some hugely improbable climate death numbers out of their corporate fundamental orifice, numbers that are clearly designed to help them sell insurance. They have no relationship to reality.

• These bogus numbers were then swallowed hook, line and sinker, and regurgitated in a report issued by Kofi Annan’s pet foundation.

• The report was then quoted by Kofi Annan.

• Kofi Annan was then quoted by Guzman

• Guzman was then quoted by the South China Morning Post.

And there we have the impeccable pedigree and provenance of the claim of 300,000 dead from climate change every year … garbage top to bottom.”

Well done Willis Eschenbach.  He has exposed a piece of irresponsible nonsense that may yet appear in school textbooks in years to come.  Teachers may like to emulate Eschenbach by tracking back from the most scary claims about climate in their current textbooks.  Or give these as project tasks to their more able pupils.  They might learn something about climate corruption that could help protect them from further propaganda.

Meantime, we can all be on the look-out for that 300k surfacing again.

Note added 5 March 2013.  Ben Pile was on to this sort of nonsense, and how pernicious it can be, way back in 2009:  http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/06/the-age-of-the-age-of-stupid.html

Correcting the Climate Curriculum for Schools: accentuate the positive on CO2

The facile labelling of rising CO2 levels as an imminent threat to our wellbeing is the basis of a great deal of scaremongering, including in materials aimed at children.  The swing to alarmism has been dramatic and will be corrected in due course as the climate system continues to behave as if the rising CO2 does not matter very much.  Just as you might expect for a trace gas which is a minor contributor to the atmospheric heat engine as it occupies itself with transferring heat to the poles each day.

Here is a new campaign which does indeed look on the bright side as far as CO2 is concerned - the Carbon Positive Campaign (hat-tip Greenie Watch).

I must say this appeals to me as a powerful counter to the relentless alarmism that has contaminated our mass media, our political affairs, and indeed educational materials and events for children. 

The campaign comes from here: http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/02/12/carbon-positive-campaign/, and I will reproduce that post below.  As and when an outstanding curriculum on climate for schools is constructed, it will in my view include elements of this.

The Carbon Positive Campaign

Please join the fun, exciting, life-affirming, environment benefiting, life-creating campaign for carbon dioxide!

The Carbon Positive Campaign!

Within 50 years, in the time of our children and grand-children, we will have improved the environment and created a lush, green, productive, life-filled planet Earth with all of the beneficial green plant food carbon dioxide we are re-adding and giving back to the environment.

The carbon that is currently trapped in hydrocarbon fuels used to be life!  It used to be carbon circulating in the global biospheric process of life, and sustained a lush, green planet, that could support huge creatures like dinosaurs in the past.  Today, that carbon-based life has been trapped underground and has formed hydrocarbon fuels that humans can access.  Humans get to use that old carbon, which has turned into hydrocarbon fuel, for benefiting our standard of life and relieving poverty on a global scale, and enriching human livelihood in general with the energy it provides.  That hydrocarbon fuel has supported a tremendous and enriching transformation and development of human society in the last hundred years.

For the last few millions years, the carbon dioxide concentration in the air was getting so low that plant life was almost ready to stop being able to perform photosynthesis!  This would have spelled the extinction of almost all life on the planet, and this extinction would have been global and possibly permanent!  It was a very close call.  Luckily, by the grace of God, evolution, Gaia, or whatever you would like to believe – even convenient and lucky happenstance – humans came along at just the right geological time-period to return that trapped life, carbon, back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide where it can then turn back into plants and sustain new and more life.  Isn’t it amazing?

It is the most wonderful win-win situation that nature could have provided for us.  We get cheap, beneficial, life-enriching energy, and the environment gets back its own source of fuel.  It is exactly like how animals and humans breathe out carbon dioxide, and then plants turn around and breathe it in as food, and then produce oxygen for us to breath again.  The circle of life.  Except now, we’ve industrialized that process and are returning much more food back to the environment where it is supposed to be, and where it can do some good in creating new life.  We’re giving back the breathe of life by using hydrocarbons and giving carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, and this new carbon dioxide can now go back into real, living life, in the present and future.

We can use this wealth supplied by hydrocarbons and the time it gives us to develop new, future-oriented sources of power such as advanced nuclear, fusion, and whatever power generation technology science might invent, because eventually hydrocarbon fuels may become too limited to provide the energy requirements we desire.  And when we get to that point, we will be able to always look back and think of all the good that we did for the environment by reinvigorating it with its own carbon dioxide – carbon that had been trapped away from its use in creating and being life.

Please help spread the word of this fantastic news and fantastic science!

The author of this is Joseph Postma, and he provides some background on his thinking in the About section of his blog.  Here is an extract:

 'I got interested in the climate science debate because I used to believe in anthropogenic global warming and climate change.  I naturally enjoy debate and independent learning and so I wanted to understand the science of global warming, so that I could communicate and debate against “deniers” more knowledgeably.  However, I experienced one of the greatest shocks and re-evaluations of my world-view when I discovered that the science which underlies global warming and anthropogenic climate change isn’t good science at all, but it is better described merely as the appearance of doing science.  Ultimately, I have scientifically concluded that global warming is an invented scheme for political control via manufactured politics using manufactured science, blaming everything on carbon dioxide which is actually the greenest and most environmentally-friendly gas there is.  My research on climate (pseudo) science has actually uncovered a very humorous irony: the true “deniers” and “flat earthers” in the climate change debate are the people who believe in the greenhouse effect!  They’re the people who deny that the climate changes naturally without humans, and that it changes at rates and magnitudes far greater than we are experiencing in modern times!  This has all been proven scientifically and all of the science actually proves that modern changes are rather benign and unimportant, but the alarmist and greenie ideologues continue to deny the science, and they have billions of dollars of charity money from oil companies and environmental organizations to continue to publicize their political reinterpretation (i.e. invention) of the actual scientific results.'