Climate Alarm Virus Alert: new films starring DiCaprio will spread misinformation to the young

Filmstars often have a great many young fans for whom they can do no wrong.  Those who wish to bombard the young with climate scares can also find them attractive as vehicles for their propaganda, and it seems that a new series of short films starring DeCaprio are to be released with that end in mind.  Here are three extracts from an article in the New York Post by Tom Harris and Bob Carter, two experts in climate studies and in the tricks of the climate-scare trade which they so oppose (I have put one sentence in each extract in bold):

(1)

'In the run-up to the Sept. 23 UN Climate Summit in New York, Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a series of films about the “climate crisis.”

The first is “Carbon,” which tells us the world is threatened by a “carbon monster.” Coal, oil, natural gas and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio says.

But he has identified the wrong monster. It is the climate scare itself that is the real threat to civilization.

DiCaprio is an actor, not a scientist; it’s no real surprise that his film is sensationalistic and error-riddled. Other climate-change fantasists, who do have a scientific background, have far less excuse.

Science is never settled, but the current state of “climate change” science is quite clear: There is essentially zero evidence that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.'

(2)

'Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” He’s right — and DiCaprio’s film is just another vector for spreading the virus.'

(3)

'Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”'

Note added 10 October 2014  A noteworthy video has been made about the contrast between what DiCaprio says and what DiCaprio does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2bkISm0Ys

Good News: teachers with integrity resist climate campaigner corruption in their schools

Children have long been seen as an easy target by zealots intent on using them to help achieve their political ends.  Climate alarm campaigners provide a modern example of this.  But it may be harder than they presume.  Some parents will resist it.  Some pupils will see through it. Some teachers may seek to protect their pupils from the moral harm, mental anguish, and distorted curricula that climate campaigners want to inflict on the young.  All in the name of saving them of course. If you claim to love the environment above all things, you can easily despise children as the 10:10 campaigners revealed in their 'No Pressure' video in which pupils were depicted being brutally murdered by their teacher because their parents had not toed the party line on reducing energy consumption.  This was vivid brutality but mercifully fictional - the campaigners apparently finding it a jolly wheeze to help promote their cause.  But harm comes in many guises from this source.  The harm of telling children

BantheBulb

PushYourParents

that polar bears will die if they don't turn off lights.  The harm of telling children that their parents are helping to destroy the planet and need to be stopped.
 The harm of telling children that industrial progress is going to kill them.  The harm of telling children that carbon dioxide is a pollutant - a gas they produce and emit with every breath.  The harm of telling children that 'climate science is settled' and they have to obey 'authorities' about what it means for their lives.  The general harm of projecting vivid, scary, threatening scenarios to the young, and telling them they are certain to occur unless ... Unless the children do what they tell them to do.  A generation of docile, cowed, submissive children would be ideal for anyone intent on controlling the lives of us all.  No wonder the left is so keen on climate change campaigning.

Well, researchers are finding that some teachers* don't care for it.  On Bishop Hill we learn of lamenting by climate campaign collaborators because:

[Researchers] found that the teachers did not consider it their role to try to solve today's major social or scientific problems. Instead, the science teachers said they preferred to 'maintain the integrity' of the science rather than to explore the social, economic or political implications.

That's good that they wish to protect the integrity of their subjects.  Let us hope they succeed.

We might also hope that many teachers are determined to protect the integrity and well-being of their pupils as well.  Let us hope they succeed.

*Footnote.  But are such teachers in a minority?  For indications of the possible scale of climate-linked indoctrination in schools in the UK, see the report 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'.

Climate Change in Schools: not only the brainwashing is rotten, the buildings are as well

The scary but incredible premise of CO2-driven doom has been exploited by so many for political, religious, emotional, and financial ends that it is not hard to find people seized with fear doing foolish, and in some cases, unpardonable things. The unpardonable includes those adults deliberately setting out to frighten children about their future, feeding them them facile 'science' and even more reprehensibly, urging them to political 'action' even against their own families and friends.* The foolish includes being duped into sundry eco-ventures such as putting windturbines in school grounds, or solar panels on their roofs, or making school buildings that tick the eco-boxes while being unfit for human habitation.**  

Here is one in Devon which has wasted £7 million pounds and disrupted schooling for hundreds of pupils over the past 4 years (hat-tip Phillip Bratby ( on BishopHill Unthreaded , Sep 3, 2014 at 7:14 AM):

BBC

From a BBC website report: 

The £7m "flagship new eco-school" was intended to replace "dilapidated flood-prone" former buildings.

Classes were held in four clusters of pod-like timber-clad buildings, with electricity and hot water from solar panels.

But rainwater was reported to be running down the walls after apparent faults in the structure.

Ordering the school had been a "bold decision" by the county council, said district councillor Jacqi Hodgson.

"It's unfortunate that it had had so many problems and now it has come to this, it is really sad."

For more sources of 'sad' from Hodgson and her fellow Green Party campaigners, see their newsletter.  The usual sheep's clothing of sentimental socialism covering a vehicle for ruthless authoritarianism.  

Such blunders will surely open more eyes to the moral and intellectual emptiness of eco-alarmism and its spin-offs such as incompetent building projects.  Incompetent, but 'green'.  It is all part of a destructive subculture currently in such ascendancy that who knows how long it will take to recover from their physical blunders (such as bio-fuels, windfarms, and crappy buildings), let alone their educational ones producing generations of children made sick and anxious about the future.

Footnotes

* For example, Donna Laframboise has exposed global-scale conniving for that end: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/03/proselytizing-to-toddlers/ (and I enlarged upon it here:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/co2-causes-contempt-for-childhood.html)

 And the possibly widespread extent of it in UK Schools is highlighted in this report: 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'

**Previous posts here on this topic:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/learning-by-metaphor-foolish-building.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/climate-change-scaremongering-threatens.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/happy-head-chilled-children-troubled.html

Links given in them include:

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Acclaimed-eco-school-forced-shut-classrooms-years/story-19789593-detail/story.html#ixzz2fi669r8B

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/10327504/School-closed-after-pupils-bitten-by-mites-in-eco-roof.html

http://notrickszone.com/2011/07/11/flopped-green-passive-school-suffocating-students/

(example from Germany)

Note added 04 August, 2016.   The £7 million eco-junk school is to be demolished: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/visionary-7m-eco-school-to-be-demolished-because-of-leaky-roof/

The Avalanche of Climate Scare Propaganda: what sustains it? Some answers here.

'Three major stories about the Green movement and its ties to major Left-wing foundations and Left-wing journalists have been in the news. '

MediaTrackers uncovered Gamechanger Salon, a secretive group of over 1,000 Leftwing leaders and activists from organizations like AFL-CIO, Change.org, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, and such climate-alarm groups as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, US Climate Action Network, shaping news reporting and government policy. 

The U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee revealed a “Billionaires’ Club” of carefully orchestrated and hidden Leftwing support for environmental organizations totaling over $1.3 billion per year that exploits ties with the Environmental Protection Agency and other parts of the Obama Administration to pass policies Congress, the real representatives of the people, won’t adopt. 

Capital Research Center exposed a concerted effort in the mainstream media here and around the world, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the BBC as well as leading newspapers and magazines, to exclude the views of “climate-change skeptic” scientists from coverage, thus hiding from the public the real and growing debates over climate change among qualified climate scientists. 

The above text, plus more details on each of the three topics has been published here in this article 

Exposing Big Bad Green

by E. Calvin Beisner
August 21, 2014

See: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/08/exposing-big-bad-green


The scale of the these propaganda efforts is breathtaking, as is the extent of the academic, governmental, NGO and business empires which they help sustain.  Despite it all, they are struggling to fool all of the people all of the time.  They are managing some of the people, some of the time, not least children in schools.  

Meanwhile, the climate system continues to defy the would-be alarmers since nothing has happened in it to contradict the notion that our CO2 is having only a weak effect - too weak to confirm reliably using temperatures, ice extents, precipitation patterns, cloud extents, storms, etc etc etc.  See the scholarly works in 'Climate Change Reconsidered II' for support for this view.

Background Briefings for Climate Teachers and Concerned Parents - SEPP's weekly compilation

The flood of materials about climate that comes out every week is liable to swamp anyone trying to keep up. The Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) does a weekly email highlighting scientific papers, blog posts or materials in the mass media. You can scan this to find items of particular interest. For example, this week there is an item about the insertion of climate alarmism into English comprehension tests in the new and controversial 'Common Core' curriculum in the United States ( I have added the italics and bold):

'The eighth grade English test included several short written pieces that students had to read and respond to in order to demonstrate English mastery. One such piece was an article originally published on NASA’s website, “The Summer of 2012 –Too Hot To Handle?” The article discusses the high temperatures and drought during the summer of 2012 and looks at whether ordinary weather fluctuations or CO2-driven global warming are to blame.

After reading the article, students were asked to cite the article to describe the overall effect of increased CO2 emissions on the planet’s atmosphere. While the article included input from climate scientists John Christy, a climate change skeptic, the students’ answers were directed to focus exclusively on claims in favor of CO2-driven climate change.

“A response receiving full credit will describe the effect of increased CO2 emissions by explaining the relationship between higher temperatures and increased CO2 in the atmosphere,” says an annotation provided for teachers afterwards. Several sample answers were included, with top-scoring answers describing CO2′s effects as including rising sea levels and higher surface temperatures.

“The effect of increased CO2 emissions is that the atmosphere becomes a heat source itself… Also the average surface temperature of the entire Earth increases,” reads one answer that was awarded a perfect score.

Common Core standards cover only math and English, and do not concern science standards. Nevertheless, critics of the standards have frequently asserted that the standards will be used to push liberal political causes, and questions like that on the New York exam are unlikely to appease them.'

Source: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/08/new-york-common-core-test-quizzes-kids-on-global-warming/

[In the US, the word 'liberal' has been hi-jacked and now denotes 'left-wing' - and, given left-wingers' determination to control the lives and thoughts of others, that is quite a switch.]

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