Sanjeev Sabhlok has written an excellent piece for the Times of India entitled
Here are the introductory paragraphs:
'Most adults have little or no time to investigate the claims about climate change. They either accept them, assuming that “authority figures” have done their homework, or sit on the fence.
Some consider that only scientists are supposed to understand science. But everyone has an equal place at the table of science and if our questions are not answered or the evidence doesn’t stack up, we are free to reject that “science”.
Climate alarm has long given up the pretence of any link to science. Millions have been successfully “converted” – and they get duly worked up if their belief is questioned: “have you been outside recently?”, “erratic climate events are everywhere!”, “rainfall is getting less every year!”, “flash floods, including in Rajasthan are clear proof!”.
Some of them have gone to the next stage and become missionaries. They go about distributing their religious pamphlets in schools, indoctrinating innocent lower-IQ children. Hopelessly confused children like Greta Thunberg are being churned out as a result. At an age when children like her should be learning to ask questions, they have become the brainwashed front for the climate religion. There is little difference between such “committed” youth and Hitler’s Youth or the youth churned out by ISIS’s madrassas.
In my view, if anyone tells a child that climate change is man-made just because someone says so (such as a missionary “scientist” but now increasingly, “royals” and “celebrities”), that person has committed a sin against the enlightenment, against human progress.
I would personally have been supportive of Greta Thunberg if she had been a prodigally intelligent child who dazzled her teachers with amazing questions, then found the answers and was now promoting a view that she thoroughly understood. It would not matter to me that she had come to the wrong conclusion. After all, no one can be right on everything all the time. But she suffers, sadly, from mental issues and speaks as a missionary – she cannot answer a single question about the science.
We are very prone as a species to superstitions, panics, delusions, manias and hysterias. We have gone through thousands of them (many still underway), such as religion, alchemy, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, the Y2K bug, the SARS panic, much of Ayurveda and Chinese traditional medicine and all of homeopathy.
The climate hysteria will ultimately pass, but to avoid such hysterias in the future we need to get our children to start thinking and stop believing. Climate change is a superb topic for teachers and students to explore.'
Sabhlok is proposing something positive to help prevent such madness again. His notion of incorporating regular 'question-asking' into school curricula seems well worthy of consideration. But it may also be useful in the shorter-term for helping children and young adults recover from the scaremongering about climate which they have been exposed to. See the full article for examples of the questions Sabhlok thinks would be relevant on climate.
Note added later 30/8/19. Here is an example of what we are up against - teachers wanting to encourage even more children to 'strike' over 'climate disruption'. I doubt if a single one of these children can make a coherent case for alarm, or get beyond the shallow slogans of the zealots. After all, I daresay neither can most of the adult zealots.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/30/climate-strike-teachers-students-greta-thunberg
