Children Scared by the Climate Panic have been ' carefully taught to hate and fear'

The evidence of systematic, widespread eco-scaremongering in schools is now accumulating rapidly with the onset of 'strikes' and 'demonstrations' by children during school hours.  Our GWPF report in 2014 called for an official enquiry into the extent of this abuse in schools in the UK, and it is by now surely obvious to all that our suspicions and concerns were well-founded, and that our illustrative examples were no isolated anomalies.  

Back in 1949, the songwriters of the musical 'South Pacific' were on to this type of problem in a different context (that of racism):

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

This is highly relevant to the climate-alarm based scaremongering in schools around the world today.  This awful phenomenon brings shame on our institutions, and our political leaders, for their generally supine gullibility over decades of absurdly hyped climate alarm.  That is bad enough by itself, but the deliberate recruitment, by frightening them, of young children to be vehicles for putting pressure on their parents, and on politicians is particularly disgraceful.  
Moral outrage is surely the perspective of those of us who find the case for any level of alarm over CO2 to be an unconvincing one.  But even those who believe that some alarm is in order can be appalled by the harm being done to children by eco-zealots of one kind or another.  The statistician and economist Bjorn Lomborg is one such.  Below are some extract from an article he published today with this headline:

'Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises'

Extract 1
'Although the students’ passion is admirable, their focus is misguided. This is largely the fault of adults, who must take responsibility for frightening children unnecessarily about climate change. It is little wonder that kids are scared when grown-ups paint such a horrific picture of global warming.'

Extract 2
'And some prominent politicians, as well as many activists, have taken the latest reportfrom the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to suggest the world will come to an end in just 12 years.

This normalization of extreme language reflects decades of climate-change alarmism. The most famous clip from Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth showed how a 20-foot rise in sea level would flood Florida, New York, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Shanghai – omitting the fact that this was seven times worse than the worst-case scenario.

A separate report that year described how such alarmism “might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn.’” And in 2007, The Washington Post reported that “for many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today.”

When the language stops being scary, it gets ramped up again. British environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, has suggested that the term “climate change” is no longer adequate and should be replaced by “catastrophic climate breakdown.”

Educational materials often don’t help, either. One officially endorsed geography textbook in the United Kingdom suggests that global warming will be worse than famine, plague, or nuclear war, while Education Scotland has recommended The Day After Tomorrow as suitable for climate-change education. This is the film, remember, in which climate change leads to a global freeze and a 50-foot wall of water flooding New York, man-eating wolves escape from the zoo, and – spoiler alert – Queen Elizabeth II’s frozen helicopter falls from the sky.'

Journalists are Taking Notice.  
Here is a headline from the Washington Times online yesterday:

'Motivated or manipulated? Rise of youth climate activism fuels alarm over exploitation'
The article draws attention to the deliberate plotting that has been going on to make use of children:

'Kids are fast becoming the face of the climate change movement as teenagers, ‘tweens and even younger children file lawsuits, stage walkouts and lobby lawmakers. But newly released documents have raised questions about whether the students are being motivated or manipulated.

A cache of emails released Wednesday on Climate Litigation Watch showed that top climate activists at the 2012 La Jolla strategy session sought to involve children in a legal and civil offensive against the fossil fuel industry, which would include worldwide marches from the “youth climate movement.”

Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher C. Horner, who obtained the emails via an open-records request with the University of Oregon, said the presentation contained in the email is more evidence that students have been used as props.

“It turns out that the frenzied street theater of children’s marches and schoolkids’ strikes was laid out behind closed doors years ago, at the organizational meeting of what became a climate litigation industry,” Mr. Horner said in an email.'

See the Washington Times link for more details.  See also this WUWT piece from yesterday.

Candles in the Gloom.Suggestions on how people can, and ought, to help these children, and adults who have been through the education system in the last 30 years or so will be the focus for more posts on this blog in the near future.  But in the meantime here are three good efforts already in place.  The first is a video produced by Friends of Science, and is directly aimed at children involved in the climate protests:

(YouTube video, hat-tip: https://cliscep.com/2019/03/08/educating-greta/#comment-34676 )

The second is from the Climate Conversation Group, and is in the form of an open letter, and is a bit more pointed.  It begins with these words:

'...You currently ignore reason, evidence and science and the global political system is on the brink of a catastrophe. The devastating effects of your ignorance are felt by millions of people around the globe for we are far from reaching a common understanding of the climate. Yet this can change.

Young people make up more than half the global population. Your generation have never known global warming, which has barely occurred since the late 1990s.

Almost nobody is included in the local or global decision-making process. That is the nature of democracy and the reason we elect a representative.

We will no longer tolerate your failure to learn how the world works. We demand you pay attention to science, for there is no evidence of a climate crisis. '

The third, is at that most excellent blog, Climate Scepticism.  Richard Drake has sympathetically raised the prospect of 'Educating Greta', the adolescent who has recently been the focus of much publicity on climate alarm.  Here's a taster:

'Since 17th February I’ve been thinking about how I would educate Greta. Finally, I think I do have something to say. There are four stages in her possible enlightenment for me now:

1. The Guenier
2. The Gates
3. The Drake
4. The Ring

As you’ll see these are going to be sketchy and category-based, to get the precocious youngster to think. And I hope the materials I point to in the process may even stimulate the grey cells of other readers.'

Tomorrow we can expect to accumulate more evidence of the impact of those who want children to be frightened to serve their political ambitions.  It will be neither a pretty nor an edifying sight.  But it is where we are today.


Note added 15 March 2019.  Here is a fourth good effort, re-published today at WUWT.  Also in the form of an open letter:

'By Brian Dingwall, New Zealand

Hi Kids,

Many of you will be marching today, demonstrating for an issue you believe to be very important.

Many years ago, I was young, well informed, and absolutely convinced I knew enough to make good decisions for the future of the world, and couldn’t understand just how obtuse all the oldies were, how they just didn’t know the stuff I had just learned.'

He goes to make many excellent points, e.g.

'The world has many historic consensuses that have turned out to not be so. So far, I don’t mind sharing with you, I have yet to be persuaded.

My background is in science, with a smattering of economics, and statistics and I well understand the case for catastrophic climate change. I find it unconvincing.

As do a raft of well qualified experts in many fields, even Nobel prize winners, and I urge you to find out who they are, and why they have reservations.

There are two sides to this debate, but only one is well resourced, so you have to work a bit harder to find the arguments of the sceptical scientists.'

The cruel arrogance of Unicef traumatising little children in a school.

The Press and Journal has the story:

Parents slam ‘cruel’ disaster drill in Inverness after children are left traumatised

‘Furious parents claim their children were left traumatised following a disaster exercise at an Inverness primary school.

The backlash has forced international charity Unicef – which organised the simulation project and chose Lochardil Primary as one of only two UK schools to take part – to review how it runs the scheme.

During the event, primarily for primary six and seven pupils, organisers told children a month’s worth of rainfall had struck the Highland capital overnight – but the emergency services couldn’t come straight away, so they had to look after themselves and each other.

Photo: The Press & Journal

Classroom furniture was overturned and cordons put in place around the school, with a police officer in attendance and a teacher role playing they had sustained a broken arm.

Parents have hit out after they say they were handed no prior warning in relation to last Friday’s event and questioned the motive, claiming it went to unnecessary lengths for little or no gain.'

Totally Out of Order

One parent of a child at the school is reported as saying: 'There was no need for them not to tell the children that this was a drill. '

Another parent: 'I am really annoyed about the whole thing. I was very confused as to how it could go ahead without parents being told something.  I thought it was quite cruel and all it did was create a quite traumatic and negative experience.  It was totally out of order.'

I hope the parents sue them, and the education authority running that school.

Some Background Notes 

There can be little doubt that 'climate alarmism' motivated this disgraceful event.  Unicef ( and Unesco for that matter), have been building up to this for years now.  On this blog alone, there are several references to their arrogant, aggressive attitudes to using children as political levers for climate alarm campaigns.  

Here's two of the earliest ones:

Exhibit 1: Unicef in 2011

By what stretch of a tortured imagination, can it be found desirable to abandon the basic adult responsibility of protecting the young from being terrified of their future?  The fact that this abandonment is based ultimately on computer models that can be tweaked to produce anything the owners of them want to see [apart from verisimilitude] is even more jaw-dropping.

Here it is happening in Africa.  Read this extract from a press release by UNICEF dated 31 October 2011:

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/11/alarming-children-constructing-climate.html

Exhibit 2: Unicef in 2012

UN Climate Conference: Scare Wits out of Youths. Make Them Neurotic Transformative Climate Doomsday Agents. 

Denmark.  A blogpost describes the extent of politicisation of climate scaremongering in the UN and elsewhere.  Some attention is given to a resource manual produced by UNICEF: '

'Stephanie Hodge, education program specialist for UNICEF, said: “Our current climate change education is “antiquated” and in dire need of renovation. We should be asking What is global citizenship? Climate change education is really about a process of change, about starting transformation through education.” I.e.: it’s also about a restructuring of the children’s brains - brainwashing for the NWO. To help bring about this change and transformation, UNICEF, with help from its sister agency, UNESCO, has come up with a new curriculum guide, entitled, Climate Change and transformation, Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction in the Education Sector: Resource Manual.
The UNICEF Resource Manual opens with this paragraph: “I am the present and the future. A victim of climate change, I live in a region that is constantly affected by disasters. Hurricanes and floods are my reality.”  — Walter, a 12-year-old boy from Belize.

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/p/climate-curricula-school-curricula.html

And the most recent one:

Exhibit 3: Unicef in 2018

‘'This Friday, December 14th, during the Climate Change Conference COP24 in Katowice, young Polish delegates will take part in a discussion panel entitled “No climate for young generation…”, organized by UNICEF Poland and The UNEP/GRID-Warsaw Centre.'

and

‘

The intellectual and/or moral poverty of climate alarm campaigners has been easy to illustrate for years.  This latest COP parade adds to the pile.  As more and more adults are able to tackle, refute, and object to the specious and hyperbolic claims of those seek to raise alarm over our impact on climate variation, it makes sense for campaigners to increase their already substantial attention on children - not only to brainwash them for future use, but also to use them now as levers on political power. 

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2018/12/cop24-climate-alarm-pr-idea-lets-try.html

Note added 23 Feb 2019.  More newspapers have also reported on this event:
https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/News/Parents-hit-out-over-Inverness-schools-disaster-exercise-21022019.htm
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/scottish-news/3914377/lochardil-primary-inverness-school-fake-disaster-parents/
https://www.highland-news.co.uk/News/Parents-hit-out-over-Inverness-schools-disaster-exercise-21022019.htm
Note added 20 Mar 2019.  The sinister aspects of this event are made more apparent by studying Sowell's steps in brainwashing:

'1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defences, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs - a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form."'

Input: Relentless Climate Scaremongering in Schools. Output: Scared Children Skipping School and Calling for Help.

Will No-one Think of the Children?

There is a great deal to be concerned about in the exhibitions of infants and young children being used to carry climate placards last Friday, and of older children presumably choosing to carry them aided and abetted by teachers, parent, and others. It is not difficult to find photographs in the news media to illustrate adults posing with infants, and adults urging on older children to perform for the mass media, some carrying placards provided by political groups such as the 'Socialist Workers'.  

Some of the participants will have done it for a bit of a laugh – after all, it is different and it is attention-getting. Some are too young to know what is being done to them. But how can they best be helped if their teachers, in particular, are happy to see them used as placard carriers in school time? Some participants are adults who have been through the education system in recent decades, and these are perhaps the biggest immediate concern since they may be the hardest to help.    The youngsters may still be impressionable enough to be reached (somehow) in due course by calmer, more rational, more informed, and more scientific perspectives on climate variation and what we know about it. But who will help the adults with minds made up, and how will they do it?

In our booklet, Climate Control , Andrew Montford and I called, in 2014, for an official inquiry into the extent of climate alarm scaremongering in UK schools. We suspected this scaremongering was widespread since we had evidence of it in many areas of the curriculum. The events of last Friday suggest we were right to be suspicious, and that the need is still there for an inquiry to help establish just how bad it is. 

Astro-Turfing at Work?

There is another, less obvious reason for concern, and that is the existence of organisations intent on manipulation of children for political ends. As ever with ideologically-driven agitation, ‘the issue is not the issue’. Climate alarm is merely a hot topic that serves sundry purposes. The manipulators need not care two hoots about the details of the flimsy arguments for alarm, or critiques of them, when they can just ride on the waves of political and financial support these arguments have provided, and step off them on to other waves in due course.  But they leave behind people damaged because they have come to believe in one or more of the scare stories being pushed upon them.

This may be one such organisation in the States.  It was not at all clear to me who they are from their website called 'Schools for Climate Action' but they, or he or she, claim: 

‘We are a non-partisan, grassroots, youth-adult campaign with a mission to empower schools to speak up for climate action in order to protect current and future generations.‘

Here is another possible one, in Australia, called 'School Strike 4 Climate Australia'

who say:

'We are school students from cities and towns across Australia.  Most of us have never met before but are united by our concern about our planet.  ​We are striking from school to tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is - a crisis.'

Jo Nova noted in 2015,  Greens using school children in Australia by getting them to write contrived letters to politicians: 

'  Gary Johns (former Labor Minister in the Keating Government) writes in The Australian that children are being dished up green speakers at school, asked to write letters about “their thoughts” to politicians, and taking letters home to parents seeking their permission to join the campaign which is run by a volunteer for The Greens. The children were offered sample activist letters to copy.'

Dennis Ambler, in a recent comment at the Climate Scepticism blog has drawn attention to some more useful links in this area:  'Oz Journalist Tony Thomas has spent a lot of time investigating the groups behind these propaganda strategies which are and have been operating in Australia again with Teacher support:'  

There are also a good few to be found amongst my own listings of websites aimed at children or teachers about climate.

The Sad Story of Swedish Schoolgirl Greta Thunberg

On WUWT earlier this year: 

'No need to make horror films anymore. Look what is being done to ourchildren'

That is the title of a post which provides a link to a video of Greta giving a TED talk.  It is quite moving to see such a young person making her statements like that, ill-informed though they are.  But as well as being a victim of climate scaremongering, she may also be a victim of PR-driven manipulation.

Andrew Montford has provided some background on this here, making use of research published in the Swiss Swiss magazine Weltwoche .  Here are some extracts from Andrew's article (as reported here):    

'Thunberg’s profile has only grown since. Her appearance at the UN climate conference in Poland propelled her to international fame. Most recently she was in Davos. Her message to the billionaires at the World Economic Summit was stark: ‘I want you to panic’ about climate change.'

and

'However, her sudden appearance in the limelight has led to some pointed questions: is Greta’s celebrity status less to do with chance and more to do with a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign?

and

'It revealed that Thunberg’s school strike had coincided neatly with the launch of a book about climate change written by her mother, Malena Ernman.  Is this a coincidence? It looks less like one when you learn from the same article that the first publicity of Thunberg’s protest came via the social media of the book’s PR man, Ingmar Rentzhog, on the day of its launch.'

and

'Further worrying details have also emerged. As well as working for Greta’s mother, Rentzhog had also recently launched a business called ‘We Don’t Have Time’, a sort of climate-focused PR agency.  In October 2018, he invited Greta to join the company’s Youth Advisory Board and in the weeks that followed he used her image intensively ahead of the company’s share issue.  This seems to have been very successful, bringing in something short of a million pounds. But whatever the figure, Greta has proved to be an extraordinarily lucrative asset for Mr. Rentzhog, and the environmental press has been extraordinarily helpful too.'

Meanwhile, a UK schoolgirl 'striker' speaks out in The Guardian

Here’s an essay by one of the older schoolchildren (17 years old) who have ‘gone on strike’. She clearly has wound herself up into quite a state of fury and dismay over climate. Her position seems to be: some scientists have said we are facing catastrophe, therefore we are facing catastrophe, therefore grown-ups should be behaving as if we were. This is not a substantial position given the feebleness of the case for that ‘catastrophe’. Nor does it take note of the massive harm that would likely follow from even more grown-ups supporting ‘climate action’. Too much harm has already been done, and the momentum of such as the UK’s Climate Change Act does not yet seem spent.

Forward tho I canna see ...

So, there are groups of people who will be pleased with what happened last Friday. Is this their last hurrah? 

Will wiser minds (and wiser heads of schools) begin to prevail to (a) discourage this mass truancy, (b) investigate how it came to pass, and (c) look for ways to help the children and adults develop a calmer, more informed view of climate variation.  Geoff Chambers points to the children's crusades of the 13th century - hopefully an implausible scenario for what might happen next, but a cautionary tale nevertheless:

'It started as a quasi-religious movement, led by a few persuasive individuals who created an atmosphere of mass hysteria which infected the uneducated and intellectuals alike; then it became an intergovernmental affair, organised at the supranational level; but due to international rivalries and the failure to agree on objectives, it petered out. Its final manifestation was as a mass movement of children (egged on by adults) which ended in slavery or death by starvation for most of the participants.'

There is to be another exhibition of 'climate alarmed children' in the UK, and elsewhere, on 15th March.  Perhaps that will give us more insight into the further success of those who would use children as pawns and placard bearers ostensibly for the cause of climate alarm.

Note added 19 Feb 2019.  Speculation in Germany and elsewhere that Russia is behind recent climate demonstrations by schoolchildren.  They were behind such groups as the CND in the 1960s, so it would not surprise me if they were using their agitprop skills to manipulate youngsters and associated useful idiots in order to weaken 'the West'.
See: https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/is-russia-behind-climate-change-protests-in-eu-definitely-yes-says-ukraine
(hat-tip GWPF  https://mailchi.mp/1f95a254fdb2/german-climate-law-put-off-as-government-splits-deepen )
Note added 20 Feb 2019.  Andy Shaw has written a thoughtful, sympathetic essay about the schoolchildren's protests.  He also has some ideas on how we can help them:
'I think that we should appeal to positive side of young people protesting. We should appeal to their sense of agency and purpose. Many teenagers are intellectually curious and want to work things out for themselves. Everyone feels the need to fit in, but not necessarily follow the herd.

We should pose questions. Is this really true? Is this the only way of looking at it? What do other people say? Everything has a cost and a benefit, what are they? Where debate is closed down and one side are castigated and labelled, independent thinkers should ask why.'

Note added 02 Mar 2019.  More evidence of sinister exploitation of young people by persons possibly unknown: an 'open letter' published in the Guardian, and reported on here at WUWT:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/02/we-the-young-open-letter-from-the-student-climate-change-strikers/

A New(ish) Climate Comic Book: more self-indulgent, shallow exhibitionism

Behold another person enjoying the frisson of climate doom, and the gratification of being seen to be doing something about it:

'French cartoonist Philippe Squarzoni has taken up the huge task of trying to convey the complex science of climate science and the global emergency that it implies in the form of his autobiographical/documentary graphic novel titled ‘Climate Changed’. '

Source

'Hopefully, this will enable the general public, which does not always seem inclined to wade through dense texts on scientific topics, to get a better appreciation of the challenges of global warming.' [published 2014]

Source:  https://www.dhakatribune.com/feature/2019/02/09/climate-changed-a-comic-book-warning-about-global-warming


But the evidence for a 'global emergency' is lacking.

Merely pointing to adverse weather events is not good enough.  Even pointing to the modest warming that has taken place over the last 150 years or so is not good enough.  Both can be explained by 'business as usual' in the weather system.  The bar really ought to be set a lot higher when it comes to promising doom and destruction to us all unless we wreck our current way of life.

There have been plenty of publications from scientific experts to warn us about being too hasty and getting into a panic about our CO2 emissions - some can be found in this listing for example. 

But here's an extract from a very recent critique of climate scaremongering from Belgium:

'The current climate model (‘IPCC model’) systematically yields highly overstated predictions compared to measurements and can therefore not be used to form climate policy – especially if that policy results in extremely high costs and destabilises vital parts of the energy infrastructure.

We are not just saying that. Already some of the most renowned scientists have preceded us (e.g. Freeman Dyson, Frederic Seitz, Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg), including Nobel Prize winners (e.g. Ivar Giaever and Robert Laughlin). They also argue that the earth’s climate is far too complicated to be explained by a simple one-dimensional CO2 relationship.'

And later on, they comment on the strategy of using children to promote climate alarm:

'Child being misused by alarmists

b). In Belgium, the climate movement has now also started using children for their ideological cause. A rather peculiar strategy. What children need to learn is to take a critical look at the facts. So what is happening now goes against everything that education should stand for. We are increasingly seeing children being abused to achieve goals.

Who remembers that washed ashore refugee boy on the beach, an image that was frequently used by refugee organisations, or the asylum boy who had a microphone pushed under his nose with TV crew chairman Dijkhoff, or the crying Lili and Howick in the NOS news, etc.? Anyone who wants to be proved right by putting children at the front of their causes is morally reprehensible. Teachers who work in this manner should be deeply ashamed.'

Source: Climate Intelligence Foundation, as reported by WUWT:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/08/refutation-of-the-the-belgian-climate-manifesto-by-the-climate-inteligence-foundation/

Evil is as evil does: developing ways to strike eco-terror into children

There are lots of examples in this blog alone of deliberate efforts to scare children about our supposed impact on climate and the environment in general.  Here is one which as far as I know was never deployed widely (but it was, for example, used in a primary school in Las Vegas in 2013), but it nevertheless won an 'NNSA award' for its instigator.  That's the National Nuclear Security Administration -see https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/about-nnsa.  Who knew they were on the eco-alarm bandwagon?  Why, I wonder?  What was in it for them?  Looking good to their government masters I suppose by aping and abetting the 'sustainability aka eco-alarm' fad.  Bit of a sideshow for an agency charged with looking after nuclear weapons, but there you go, that's politics for you.

There it is, on the left, the 'Green-Reaper'.  




Eric Boehm describes it all very neatly in his article on the Reason site two days ago:

'...

Thanks to a FOIA request from journalist Emma Best, the details of which were published this week at Muckrock, we now know a bit more about the history of the Green Reaper—a verdant version of the Grim Reaper that manages to combine the ominous presence of the original with the vacant eyes of a cartoon character. While the mascot seems best suited to shatter children's innocence by informing them about the inevitabilty of their own deaths, the documents show that the Green Reaper, which was designed in 2012, was intended to be used in "community outreach presentations to local elementary school children" and in internal memos reminding government workers to conserve energy and carpool when possible.

One of the most terrifying details in the FOIA'd documents is the claim that—in addition to making appearences at schools—the Green Reaper shows up "randomly" at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Um, no thank you.

The Green Reaper costume cost about $5,000 to manufacture, but the documents provided to Muckrock don't give a full accounting of how much time public employees spent brainstorming and designing it. Regardless, the government liked the design so much that Dawn Starett, the program manager who invented the Green Reaper, won a 2013 Environmental Stewardship Award from the NNSA for it.

...'

Hat-tip: Glenn Reynolds  who provided this link to a piece by Ann Althouse:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-green-reaper-mascot-department-of.html

Details of the FOIA request that uncovered this 'piece of work' are here: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/green-reaper-53571/

Note added 25 Mar 2019.  A video highlighting the Green Reaper, and going to look at climate anxieties, and climate scare propaganda aimed at children:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXIxk5fBfo