US Science Teaching Union Responds to Reason on Climate with Three Lies

The Heartland organisation recently sent out to US schools 25,000 copies of its excellent booklet entitled 'Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change' (follow my link to get your copy and see for yourself).

A leader of the National Science Teachers Association responded with three lies and no cogent criticism. Here are the lies:

"First, scientists don't disagree about climate change or its causes," David Evans, the executive director of NSTA, wrote in a letter to members earlier this week. "Second, labeling propaganda as science does not make it so. Third, science teachers are the critical bastion in the war against reason. And the special interests know it."

Why are they lies?

First, it is a platitude that scientists disagree about climate change and its causes.  The booklet gives chapter and verse on that.

Second the booklet is not 'propaganda labelled as science'.  In fact it is a reasoned counterstroke to exactly that phenomenon, a phenomenon which often proceeds by omission and by hyperbole to make the case for panic over CO2.  

Third, teachers have been docile vehicles for state propaganda for generations.  The socialists in Germany for example, regarded them as no obstacle at all in their promotion of the Third Reich, and they have been no less a pushover when it came to one eco-scare after another in recent decades. 

Jo Nova has more on this sorry rejoinder from the NSTA:  http://joannenova.com.au/2017/04/us-science-teachers-say-trash-books-and-watch-leo-instead/

In particular she notes that the NSTA report no errors in the Heartland booklet, and that is why they resorted to a squeeling distortion of reality as their response.

I hope most readers will download the booklet and pass it on to all the teachers they know.

Note added later. I see from the Heartland site that they plan to send

 out a total of 200,000 copies to schools and colleges. Good news:

'The summary below is taken from the book's concluding chapter. You can read it for free at the PDF link above, or buy a hard copy from the Heartland Store. A collection of reviews is here, and a page with even more information about the book has been created here.

In 2017, The Heartland Institute is mailing some 200,000 copies of the second edition of this book to K-12 and college science teachers across America. Read the cover letter of that mailing here.'

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.