RIP Christopher Booker, your climate writings will inform and help teachers & pupils for many years to come

The GWPF has reported the passing of the journalist Christopher Booker

'Everyone at the GWPF was saddened to hear of the passing of our friend and colleague Christopher Booker, one of the doughtiest campaigners against global warming hysteria and vested interests in the climate debates. 

Booker’s Sunday Telegraph columns never failed to question orthodoxies and to ask awkward questions about global warming dogmatism.

He wrote two highly successful reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The first, in 2011, looked at the BBC’s biased coverage of climate change, while the more recent paper on groupthink has been one of GWPF’s most successful.

An archive of Booker’s enormous contribution to climate sceptical thought and critical analysis over the last ten years can be found on the GWPF website. 

Christopher will be fondly remembered by all at the GWPF for his erudition, bravery, integrity and his endless good humour.'



My thoughts

His books 'Scared to Death: from BSE to Global Warming, why scares are costing us the Earth' (co-authored with Richard North) and 'The Real Global Warming Disaster' deserve to be in every high school library, along with his GWPF publications listed at a link above, in anticipation of the day when senior pupils will do projects trying to make sense of the CO2-driven lunacy.  They will benefit from his lucid writing, his ability to spot foolish and ill-informed actions and beliefs, and his detailed tracking of who did what and where and when, all backed up by references.  As well as helping them get their projects done, he will also provide reassurance that not everyone engaged by the hyperbole around rising CO2 was credulous, or venal, or malevolent, or self-centred, or destructive of society and progress during these past few decades of the madness.

Not Safe For School (NSFS): the mentalities of CO2 alarm 'scientists'

  Here, thanks to Josh (hat-tip WUWT), is a graphic giving insight into what mentalities drive some climate scaremongers in 'science' (some are sincerely alarmed, but that may exclude many who are mainly doing it to make money from carbon trading, renewables subsidies, research grants, and so on, as well as those on the far-left who are doing it for political gain, and those on ego-trips):

cartoonsbyjosh.com

Here is a recent example of 'panic' and 'ego' at work, an essay by James Dyke on the Conversation:
'Climate change: ‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist'
Extract:

“But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”

He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”

This essay, and another of the genre by Mark Maslin, are discussed at CliScep:   https://cliscep.com/2019/05/25/the-conversation-or-does-my-brain-look-big-in-this/  'Both of them are packed full of interesting facts. Unfortunately none of the facts are about the climate. Most of them are about Dyke and Maslin.'


We Can Do Better Than That

https://sd.keepcalms.com/

This is surely the ideal: cool, calm, and collected study of what we know and what we might do.  Here is a recent example, an essay by Ian Aitken published on WUWT:

'Climate Change Are We Experiencing a Climate Emergency?'

Extract:

'We know that climate change is happening – but the fact that climate change is happening (as it has for billions of years) does not in itself constitute an ‘emergency’ (or even necessarily a serious problem); global warming and climate change are not intrinsically bad things – few would want to return to the pre-industrial climates of the Little Ice Age. As the IPCC stated in their last Assessment Report, ‘Climate change may be beneficial for moderate climate change’. We are experiencing moderate climate change and it has indeed apparently been net-beneficial. '

But such reasonableness, such willingness to check with reality, is not a feature of climate alarm propaganda such as the deceits of the polar bear scare that had such an effect on poor Greta.  Who knows the extent of such scaremongering in schools - in Greta's case it may just have been one teacher acting on his or her initiative to share their personal fears with their pupils, but in some it will be an integral part of curricula.  The number of children in the recent wave of school 'strikes' who say they see no future for themselves because of 'climate change' is very saddening.  How they might be helped out of this wretched, and unwarranted view will be a focus of further posts here this year.

Christian Aid Wants to Deceive Children about Climate. Why?

'Someone sent me [Paul Homewood] this teachers study aid being circulated around schools by Christian Aid.

Far from being an educational aid, it is little more than insidious propaganda aimed at young kids.

It is so full of inaccuracies, exaggerations and significant omissions that it is hard to know where to start!'

For details of Paul's criticisms, see his post:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/christian-aids-blatant-climate-propaganda-for-schools/


BUT WHY?

Why does Christian Aid stoop to this level? Is it a victim of infiltration  by radicals intent on using the organisation as a vehicle for their political ambitions?  That would explain it.  They would not be the first:   https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/p/climate-curricula-school-curricula.html

Whatever the reason, the materials are unworthy of any organisation with aspirations to basic decency.  

Making Little Activists

Their Ideal School

Teachers are Scaring and Misleading Kids over Climate Change: Greta Thunberg For Example

A primary school teacher abused her position to scare Greta about climate change when she was around 8 years old: 'The most visible child climate change activist is Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. She recently publicly admitted to having been indoctrinated into fearing climate change by elementary school teachers. In her words, “I first heard about

Picture source

this when I was 7, 8, or 9 years old. In school the teacher explained what climate change was and how it was caused and they showed us pictures of starving polar bears”. Elementary school teachers have a fixed and well defined curriculum of things like language, grammar, arithmetic, and so on. This curriculum does not include climate science and these teachers are not qualified to teach climate science.'
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/04/26/the-scary-reality-of-climate-change/

So, pictures of starving polar bears knocked poor Greta over the edge.  No-one near her was able, or perhaps even willing to help her.  A simple dose of the truth might have done the trick: 'Hey Greta, the polar bears are actually doing OK.'

Here's a telling post from Paul Homewood:

“Pictures Of Starving Polar Bears Convinced Me”

APRIL 24, 2019

tags: greta

By  Paul Homewood

h/t stewgreen

https://twitter.com/tan123/status/1120669325260668928 

And where did she get this strange idea from? As she relates, her teachers at school told her, when she was about eight.'

--------------------

It Is Time for Parents to Go on the Offensive

Propaganda is deep in the school systems in many places, almost always it would seem because of leftwing ideologues, and compliant teaching and administrative staff.  Climate variation is arguably of no real interest to them, but it appeals greatly as a vehicle to produce fear and in due course threaten society.  Here is a recent example of an extreme ideologue having been commissioned by a major published in the States to write a textbook on US history: 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/meet-the-man-who-wrote-textbook-calling-trump-and-his-supporters-racists.php

It is now time for parents to study the textbooks given to their children, and to be ready to make strong complaints when they find blatant propaganda instead of educational content.  Why should anyone tolerate malevolent people targeting their children's minds with warped opinions from within the school system?

As Sarah Hoyt points out

'If you don’t read your kids’ textbooks, and don’t have other books and evidence ready to refute this sort of thing — and please note this stuff goes on in both public and private schools — you’re falling down on your job. You might have your reasons, but you should also be aware you’re failing your kids.'

I shall finish this post with another quote from the Thai blog from which the opening quote above was taken:

'Rather than be the accusers of the fossil fuel industry as evil activists who are trying to keep elementary school teachers from teaching climate science to elementary school students, climate scientists should look in a mirror. There, they will see the evil of child abuse and child exploitation to further their activism against fossil fuels. The scary reality of climate change is that someday these charges and related lawsuits will be brought against the perpetrators of these crimes against children to shore up a failed case against fossil fuels that their own science is unable to defend.'

Further Reading.  Some suggestions from recent blog activity:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/18/stop-scaring-kids-stiff-about-climate-change/
https://cliscep.com/2019/03/08/educating-greta/
https://quillette.com/2019/03/21/when-children-protest-adults-should-tell-them-the-truth/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/04/25/stop-scaring-children-witless-about-climate-change/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/scientists-co2-the-miracle-molecule-key-to-feeding-saving-the-world
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/61371
and still worth reading today, the 2014 report on climate brainwashing in UK schools: http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-control/
And to get a vivid notion of what we are up against, here is a heartfelt piece by an adult victim of the climate scaremongering:   https://www.brightonandhoveindependent.co.uk/news/opinion/it-s-time-to-talk-to-kids-about-climate-change-1-8905068
How best to help her, and her children?
Note added 27/4/2019  Here's something good: from a 16 year old who, unlike poor Greta, has avoided climate scare indoctrination:   https://quillette.com/2019/04/25/teenage-climate-change-protestors-have-no-idea-what-theyre-protesting/

Note added 20/82019  The exploitation and abuse of poor Greta Thunberg gets worse.  Here is a summary of some of the accusations: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/33183-green-machine-child-climate-activist-a-tool-of-an-gore-esque-corporate-con
Meanwhile, she is a passenger on an extremely expensive, extremely uncomfortable, extremely high carbon yacht crossing the Atlantic in order to use up far more 'carbon' than if the poor lassie had just taken a commercial flight.  This is because some of the crew are going to fly back to Europe. and more crew will be flying to New York to bring the boat back later.  There is even talk of there being a diesel-powered boat following the yacht to take movies of it and be a back-up.

For the Classroom Wall: 50 Years of Environmental Predictions of Doom & Every One of them Rubbish

Illustrating some of the torrent of junk science and irresponsible doom-mongering we have been putting up with.  Encourage your children to spot modern examples of this soul-destroying half-witted arrogance:

cartoonsbyjosh.com

(hat-tip: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/22/earth-day-not-a-single-environmental-prediction-of-the-last-50-years-has-come-true/)

More info at these links (hat-tip GWPF):

https://www.thegwpf.com/on-earth-day-none-of-its-gloomy-predictions-have-come-to-pass/

https://www.thegwpf.com/on-earth-day-none-of-its-gloomy-predictions-have-come-to-pass/

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/happy-groundhog-day.php