Unfortunately, some misuse science. Some of their intentions, are far from benevolent. They see science as a mechanism for political power and control. There is great danger from those who would use science for political control over us.

How do they do this? They instill, and then continuously magnify, fear. Fear is the most effective instrument of totalitarian control.

Chet Richards, physicist,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/science_in_an_age_of_fear.html

Saturday, 5 December 2015

Britain's schools are force-feeding pupils politically correct dogma about sexuality, climate change and British history

The title is from a typically lively and hard-hitting article by James Delingpole, concerning the extent of brainwashing in British schools.

Brainwashing techniques included removing previous sources of support for an individual, and for children this generally means parents and close family members.  By rubbishing them through rubbishing our history, blaming them for global warming, and causing utter confusion about sexuality, the children are made more vulnerable to the imposition of the preferred dogmas.  The addition of scaremongering brings another technique into play, that of fear - fear of the future, fear of what happen if these preferred dogmas are not adopted.

"Nowhere, perhaps, is the march of the Mind Police more evident than in the way virtually the whole curriculum has been hijacked by environmental issues.

A popular revision guide for GCSE English gives this example of a ‘boring’ sentence that may receive ‘zero marks’: ‘Global warming is a bad thing.’ And this as a ‘much better sentence’: ‘Global warming is a very serious and worrying issue.’
Even foreign languages are not immune. A Heinemann textbook for A-level French invited pupils to study an open letter by a French environmentalist warning schoolchildren that on global warming ‘scientists are unanimous’, and ‘never in the history of humanity have the dangers been so great’.
Then there’s the Climate Cops initiative in schools — sponsored by energy supplier npower — in which children were given police officer-style notebooks so that they could ‘book’ themselves, their friends or family members if they saw them wasting energy or performing ‘climate unfriendly’ acts."

He ends with these words:

"Some people might think I am overstating the case. But there is a deadly serious point to all this, and I passionately believe that the way our children are being inculcated should give us all pause for thought.
If every child leaves school believing that Britain’s imperial history is evil, that open-ended human rights must be extended to everyone, including the wicked and the criminal, and that the world is getting catastrophically hotter, then eventually everyone in Britain will hold those views.
And, crucially, anyone who dares to challenge them will be a social outcast. If that happens, with every passing year a country with a long and proud history of liberalism will, ironically enough, become a bastion of intolerance."

The disgraceful promotion of climate scaremongering in our schools seems to be but a part of a far wider campaign to wreck our society.  Well done James Delingpole for giving us so many powerful examples of this.

Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Good News! Another Blog to Resist Entrenched CO2-Alarmism

A small group of solo-bloggers on climate topics in or from the UK has launched a new blog called 'Climate Scepticism':







Yours truly played a minor role in this, mainly just encouraging the others and promising to do more in the future.  Theirs was the original idea, and theirs the energy that got it launched.

Earlier this year (27 April post), I said I was going to post less often here, but that I would maintain the blog - especially the reference Pages - when I came across relevant material.  I also mentioned a couple of posts I had mind to publish soon.  I have not done those yet, but instead I have put up a few easier-to-do reactions to or reports on other people's work.  I still hope to do the promised posts, and others from time to time.

This new blog suits me, and the others behind it, in that by sharing the work, we hope to keep it lively and frequently updated so that it becomes a popular place to visit.  How dull, after all, is a blog where new posts are few and far between.

From the 'About' page of the new blog, some further explanation:

'The climate sceptic blogosphere is becoming crowded to the point that it’s difficult to keep up. Several of us (all British or UK based so far), are getting weary of the effort of grinding out several articles a month simply in order to remain visible. It’s not that we haven’t got something to say – rather that we’d like to take the time to say it as audibly and as clearly as possible.


Our thinking in launching this new blog (called – very originally – Climate Scepticism) is that a joint site, with more frequent and more varied articles, would be more visible and possibly more useful. 
We don’t aim to compete with Bishop Hill or WattsUpWithThat on the news-gathering front, but to assemble a number of disparate voices in a joint venture. There’s no “party line” or rulebook, and certainly no 97% consensus about anything.'

I hope that those who drop-in on Climate Lessons will find Climate Scepticism a congenial and informative and lively blog to visit, and that they will consider posting comments there to help keep the ball rolling.  Guest posts are also welcome - one has appeared there already.

If you are a blogger yourself, please also consider adding http://cliscep.com/ to your list of links.

Friday, 16 October 2015

Researching the Scares and the Spins: what made one man change his mind about rising CO2 being a crisis

The harm being caused by so many people's naive acceptance of the crisis-PR put out by the IPPC, sundry 'academics', and no end of financially-interested NGOs, is dreadful.  Their spins have dominated the press and airwaves and school and university curricula for decades.  It is likely that most of the general public have never actually read or listened to the counter-arguments. When major institutions such as the BBC and the Royal Society have been corrupted by their leaderships to promote climate alarm as unassailable dogma, who can blame that public for knowing no better?

One man has recently written about his journey from 'true-believer' to having a calmer and more balanced view of CO2 and climate (hat-tip: WUWT).  He is David Siegel:

'Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.'
Here are his 10 points:
2Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural. The earth is warming, but not quickly, not much, and not lately.
3There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4New research shows fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, better than CO2 levels.
5CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
7Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
9No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people, who eat them.
10The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface.'



His blog contains a great deal of material to back up his claims, and he is also intent on campaigning to 'educate influential liberals'.  The term 'liberal' in the United States is used these days to denote 'leftwing', and that may well include the majority of schoolteachers and academics.  Here on this blog we hope that in due course there will be massive efforts to help repair the damage that has been done to the minds and spirits of wave after wave of schoolchildren from recent decades.  David Siegel's campaign may well be a crucial early step towards such a pastoral effort actually taking place.

PS Paul Matthews has compiled a list of relatively prominent people who have 'recovered their senses' about climate:  https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/converts-to-scepticism/

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

Climate Scaremongering Antidote: resisting the demonisation of CO2

While the search for a cure-all for CO2 alarmism continues, we shall, in the meantime, have to make do with piecemeal treatments to help young people cope with the deluge of woefully inadequate information relating to climate.

The problem is sometimes the information is wrong, but perhaps more common is a severe lack of balance.

The fact that the gentle overall warming of the last 150 years or so is generally very beneficial is not acknowledged,  whatever combination of factors has caused it.  Nor is the positive impact of higher ambient CO2 levels on agricultural productivity often recognised.

When your goal is to scare people to get their attention, I guess you don't want to dilute your messaging.  But we who don't care for their tactics nor their cause, need to be ready to respond to them, or at least help reduce the harm they must cause.

A new report from the GWPF provides parents and teachers with help to do that by providing an excellent background briefing on the benefits of CO2.

Image: GWPF

From their press release:

'... former IPCC delegate Dr Indur Goklany calls for a reassessment of carbon dioxide, which he says has many benefits for the natural world and for humankind.

Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.'

There is also an excellent foreword from the extremely distinguished physicist, Freeman Dyson, who concludes (my italics, bolding and layout):

'Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. 

First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. 

Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. 

I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonising carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence. Goklany and I do not claim to be infallible. Like the climate-model experts, we have also evolved recently from the culture of the cave-children. Like them, we have inherited our own set of prejudices and blindnesses. Truth emerges when different groups of explorers listen to each other’s stories and correct each other’s mistakes.'
 
The report can be downloaded free of charge from this link:  http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits1.pdf

PS
For those who may want to keep up to date on this topic, or to find out more from the scientific literature about it, this site is invaluable: CO2 Science.

Note added 15 Oct 2015.  The reformed ex-Greenpeace leader, Patrick Moore gave the GWPF Annual Lecture last night arguing we should 'celebrate CO2'.  Details via this link: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/10/15/should-we-celebrate-co2-cartoon-notes-by-josh.html

Friday, 28 August 2015

Can It Be This Easy? Helping young people learn about climate reality

Screenshot from the video
'Watch the double take students do when confronted with the straight facts that there has been no dramatic global warming as they’ve been led to believe.
The good news?  Students got it.  Some were upset. Virtually all were surprised. The only thing they needed was access to the truth.
You’ll be heartened to see these bright youngsters casting aside the politically-correct hype they’ve been fed and forming valid conclusions based on sound scientific data.'
Source: http://www.cfact.org/2015/08/20/watch-students-wake-up-about-warming/

Here is the video from CFACT


Note added later on 28 Aug. I think it likely that the young people in the video are amongst the brightest of recent high school leavers, and probably typical in their condition of being very poorly informed about climate change.  An official, well-designed sample-survey of senior high school pupils is long overdue to estimate the scale of the damage being inflicted upon them by climate scaremongers.

Second note on 28 Aug.  Here is a copy of the temperature plot shown in the video.  Why not print out your own copy and try it out on your friends and acquaintances, especially if they happen to be parents of high school pupils?