Help the Children of the CO2 Scaremongering Scam

A big effort is called for to help all the victims of the CO2 scaremongering of recent decades, scaremongering which has reached nursery, primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education and of course can be found embedded in much of the mass media - not least the BBC.

I am hoping to see more and more books, articles, videos, and maybe even tv programmes one day, that will help with this work.  Here is the most recent example I have come across:  It is an article in the online Quadrant magazine:

A Handy Primer for Deluded Warmists

We all have them, friends who believe the planet is on a CO2-fuelled collision course with a catastrophe that can only be averted by directing large sums to rent-seeking wind farmers and the like. If you know someone like that, here's a simple, handy guide to the climate scam

Well worth a read: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2017/03/handy-primer-deluded-warmists/
Hat-tip: Greenie Watch
Note added 08 April 2017.  Here are some examples of folk who need help: http://grist.org/article/depressed-about-climate-change-theres-a-9-step-program-for-that/

Read this Classic Post before talking about Earth Hour with your family and friends

Earth Hour: A Dissent by Ross McKitrick 

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour. Here is my response. 

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world's poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that's how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonises electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don't want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in "nature" meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks. I like visiting nature but I don't want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilisation with all its trade-offs is something to be ashamed of.


Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph

Source: http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/earthhour.pdf

This could become an annual post here:  http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/children-asking-about-earth-hour-give.html

The New York Times goes full Duranty on CO2 Scaremongering

What makes a newspaper take it upon itself to foist propaganda on to children?

This recent article in the New York Times contains lesson-plan instructions on how to indoctrinate youngsters in Climate Alarm Orthodoxy:

A Lesson Plan About Climate Change and the People Already Harmed by It

It hardly needs Fisking, the bias is so blatant, the intention so obvious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/learning/lesson-plans/a-lesson-plan-about-climate-change-and-the-people-already-harmed-by-it.html

When will it ever end?

As a partial antidote, here is word of a calm, scholarly appraisal of recent climate variation: https://cliscep.com/2017/03/22/a-calm-overview-of-recent-climate-variation/

Note added 23 March.  Very pleased to see this post taken up by Climate Depot, and by Greenie Watch (albeit without attribution there), both high readership sites.  Welcome all who come here from there!  At Greenie Watch, John J Ray has a comment on the NYT article from Lubus Motl: "In the 1980s, we thought that some of our Communist-era education was biased and manipulative. But it has never reached more than 1% of what these two individuals propose - which is a full Orwell 1984. It's just incredible if Trump is paying teachers who are actually willing to do things like that. They should hear "You're Fired" within minutes"
Later: welcome also to visitors from Theo Spark, Long Room, and Climate Realists

An End to Brainwashing of Children by the EPA?

Senator James Inhofe adds to the pressure on the EPA, as reported on the NewsMax site:

'The Republican Oklahoma senator, and supporter of current Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, made the comments to anchor Poppy Harlow during an appearance on CNN's "New Day."

"We are going to take all this stuff that comes out of the EPA that is brainwashing our kids, that is propaganda, things that aren't true, allegations," Inhofe said, though at the time he did not point to any specific examples.

Inhofe, a frequent climate change skeptic, made similar comments to conservative talk show host Eric Metaxas after the senator said that one of his grandchildren asked why he was a climate change denier, according to Newsweek.

"You know, our kids are being brainwashed? I never forget because I was the first one back in 2002 to tell the truth about the global warming stuff and all of that," Inhofe said.

"And my own granddaughter came home one day and said, … 'Popi, why is it you don't understand global warming?' I did some checking, and Eric, the stuff that they teach our kids nowadays, you have to un-brainwash them when they get out." '

Let's wish him well on this mission.  And it is just not just kids who need to be 'un-brainwashed', but the adults who have been through the educational system at all levels in recent decades, from nursery through to university.  Some pastoral care could help them a lot, reducing anxiety, reducing stress, and encouraging a more optimistic and reality-grounded outlook with regard to climate variation.

Tell Your Children: 'sustainable development' means 'suppressed development'. Resist it.

One of the wretchedly successful eco-themes of the past few decades is the notion of 'sustainable development'., and it has been boosted by the CO2 Scare.  It may be even more insidious since it is superficially so appealing, and it has received widespread promotion or even adoption in universities, schools, and in businesses and governments.  Yet it is, like the CO2 Scare itself, a destructive, ill-thought-out, over-hyped, over-emoted piece of propagandising which boils down to wanting to deliberately damage, weaken, or even destroy our advanced civilisation, and deny something like to the developing world.

Paul Driessen, author of the excellent study 'Green Power, Black Death', has just published a new essay on WUWT pointing out many absurdities and harms associated with 'sustainability'.  An extract is given below, but see the original for a great deal more.  Anyone concerned with protecting children from the excesses of eco-fanatics ought to read it.  Some may choose to specialise in this area.  I hope.

"As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are directing attention to “sustainable development.”

Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards.

The most common definition is that we may meet the needs of current generations only to the extent that doing so will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources, and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for future generations.

At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.

In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic cables replacing copper wires.

No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture these technological wonders.

Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. As we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so on. We did it because we innovated – invented something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required different raw materials.

Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have 25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?

Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies, lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who desperately want to improve their lives?

Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A 1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Earth’s most abundant element) carries thousands of times more information than an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing demand for copper.

In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels. Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels – and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas. Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap into, just a couple decades ago.

Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social, economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are frequently anything but."

Additional reading here on Climate Lessons:  http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/sacrificing-children-for-better-climate.html