Helping Children Cope with the CO2 Scare - a new resource

The articles I've seen on helping children cope with the CO2 Scaremongering are mostly along the lines of 'tell them they are not helpless, get them out on demonstrations, encourage them to walk to school and turn off lights'.  In other words, 'take the scare seriously, and fuss over it'.  I doubt that is going to help, and it may even make things worse for the young victims.  Better by far is to help them see that have been duped, and even well-intentioned adults have been duped.

This will take time, and lots of study and persistence.  Many parents and high-schoolers can dig deeper for themselves into alarming claims about climate, and those who do so can help those who have not done or cannot do such work on their own.

A new website has just started up and it could be a great resource for this:

Here is the link to it:  http://climaterealism.com/

As well as feature articles, there is a reference section currently with the following topics:

Allergies, Alpine glaciers, 

Carbon tax, Cleaner air, Climate change impacts,

Climate models, Climate record, Consensus, Coral Reefs, Crop nutrition, Crop production,

Disease/Virus,Drought,

Economic harm, Economics and policy, Emissions by country, Emissions Impact,Extreme cold, Extreme heat, Extreme Weather,

Floods,

Great Lakes, Green New Deal,Greenland ice melt,

Health impacts, Heavy Rainfall, Historical CO2 levels, Hottest Year,Hurricanes,

Insurance policy,

Jobs created,

Little Ice Age,

Meat and Agriculture,Medieval Warm Period, Migration, Mortality,

National security, Natural climate change,

Ocean currents, Oceanic conveyor belt,

Pine beetles, Polar bears, Polar ice caps,

Renewable Energy, Republican proposals,

Sea level, Snow, Snowpack, Social cost of carbon,

Solar impact, Species Impacts, Subsidies,

Terms of debate, Tipping points, Tornadoes,

U.S. temperatures, Underlying Science,

Vulnerable populations,

Water levels, Wildfires, Wine.

So that's plenty to be getting on with!

(Hat-tip: WUWT )

Note added 21 Mar 2020.  There's more!  An apparently sister-site called Climate at a Glance is also well worth a visit.  It has short summaries on a range of topics:     https://climateataglance.com/

'Climate At A Glance puts frequently argued climate issues into short, concise, summaries that provide the most important, accurate, powerful information. The summaries are designed to provide a library of solid yet simple rebuttals so that legislators, teachers, students, and laymen can easily refute the exaggerations of the so-called “climate crisis.”

Excellent!  Just what is needed.

(Hat-tip: NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat )

A Young Survivor of the Tsunami of CO2 Scare Propaganda: Naomi Seibt, Climate Realist

What a refreshing change from the facile alarmism acquired by Greta Thunberg and her followers.  This video has Naomi Seibt speaking while often juxtaposed beside clips of youngsters demonstrating climate alarmism, and my goodness, she comes across as a calm voice in favour of science, and of discussion, and indeed of 'climate realism'.  A very impressive young woman.  Let us hope she can help a good many of those still floundering in, and no doubt often genuinely upset by, the scaremongering over CO2.  And may she, and Greta alike, go on to have careers free from all this unjustified and distracting alarmism some day soon.

(hat-tip: Climate Depot)

P.S. Further insight into Seibt's views and plans, and some threats she has received because of them, can be found here:
https://www.thegwpf.com/meet-the-19-year-old-anti-greta-who-warns-thunbergs-alarmism-must-be-stopped/

One in five in a sample of UK children report nightmares about climate change

One in five in a sample of UK children 
report nightmares about climate change

The Jakarta Times , and others e.g. the London Metro, have published a Reuters piece on the results of a survey of UK children (hat-tip GWPF Newsletter 04/03/20).  These results, if correct - and they do seem plausible, are a sharp indictment of schools and the mass media for all they have done, and are doing, to scare children  about climate without good reason:

'One in five children are having nightmares about climate change, according to a British survey on Tuesday, as students globally stage protests over a lack of action to curb global warming. 

About 17 percent of children in Britain said worries about climate change were disturbing their sleep while 19 percent said these fears were giving them nightmares. 

The survey of 2,000 children aged eight to 16, conducted by pollster Savanta-ComRes for BBC Newsround, also found that two in five, or 41 percent, did not trust adults to tackle the climate crisis.'

Children, listen to this: Don't Be Afraid of Climate Change!

Writer Melissa Nichols has done children a great favour by writing this little book - 'Don't Be Afraid of Climate Change'.  It classes 'Climate Change' as a big, bad wolf, and takes the young readers through several of the ways this beast has been trying to scare or mislead them:

'But like all big, bad wolves, Climate Change doesn’t like telling  the truth. Let’s look at what he’s been saying, and see if he’s  been truthful or if he is just trying to scare you. '

She then goes through the topics, one by one and points out how wrong they are.  Here is how she handles the first topic:

'Polar bears are starving, and soon there won’t be any more  of them.  

Sorry, Climate Change, polar bears are doing just fine. Their  numbers were down in the past, but not because of you. They  were widely hunted, but thanks to polar bears becoming a  protected species, there are more of them running around now  than 70 years ago - around 25,000 more! That’s a lot of polar  bears.' 

Here are the headings for the other topics she covers:

Get ready to go for a swim. The ice is melting! 

The oceans are rising. We’re all going to be underwater. 

Hurricanes are getting stronger, and there are more of them.

Drink plenty of water while you can. Droughts are getting  worse. 

Climate Change used to be called Global Warming. And it’s  still getting hotter. 

Wind power is just about as good as it gets for helping the  environment. 

Solar power is a clean energy that everyone should have to  use. 

Nuclear power is evil. 

Pipelines are bad. The more pipelines that are built, the  more natural gas people will use. 

Cow farts and fossil fuels are producing enough methane to  knock us all out. 

CO2 levels are going to kill the earth. They must be stopped  right now! 

Ban fracking. It’s bad. 

She concludes (my italics):

'Climate change is not something to be afraid of. The world has  been changing since its beginning. It will always will. This is  not a bad thing. You have been changing from your very  beginning as well. This earth has been hot, and it has been cold.  We have always adapted to its changes and learned to enjoy  each day as it comes. '

At the end of the book, she provides a selection of references for further reading on each of the topics.  These will help older children and adults to dig a little deeper.

This is a wonderful book, one that deserves to be in every home, and in every school library.  The book is brief, simply-themed, very readable and with attractive illustrations.  There is surely scope for a hundred books like this, covering more ground, more topics, and with a range of content-levels.  We need books for 5, 10, 15 year-olds, and 20 and 25 and 30 year-olds as well.  All have been exposed all their lives to the scaremongering about CO2 and climate variation, and surely most could do with some help to get a calmer, better-balanced view of it.   In the meantime, I strongly recommend this book for all age levels.  It makes a great start on what will be a big, and kind, and truthful, task: helping victims of the CO2 Scaremongering recover from it.

[Hat-tip: Climate Depot]

Descent of a Man: famous David Attenborough has helped mislead, and frighten, children about climate

The GWPF has just released an indictment of David Attenborough, the much-admired populariser of wildlife studies.  His emotive voice-overs in misleading documentaries have surely been one of the drivers of the current high levels of climate anxiety in young people:

'London, 27 January: A new video documenting Sir David Attenborough’s inaccurate claims about climate change and Arctic wildlife blames his apocalyptic language and misleading narrative for the dramatic rise in eco anxiety among young people.

The video published today by the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) and written by Dr. Susan Crockford, a Canadian wildlife expert, shows that increasing climate angst felt by many young people around the world started with Attenborough’s films that blamed starving polar bears on human-caused global warming.

The parents and teachers of these youngsters trusted Attenborough’s BBC productions to be accurate portrayals of the effects of climate change but that trust has been betrayed.

David Attenborough’s claims that ‘the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon’ have captured international media attention but it is now apparent he has failed to ensure that the scripts he reads for his Arctic documentaries and the messages they contain are true reflections of the natural world.

"Misleading narratives about starving polar bears and fabricated stories of dying walrus, used to support an escalating message of doom about the Arctic, are not supported by facts," Dr Crockford said.

"Attenborough did not verify any facts contained in the scripts he was paid to narrate and passed along misinformation to naïve viewers, including many young children," she added.

One of these children was Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who said she was shown images of starving polar bears in school when she was 8 or 9 years old. The timing and nature of the material suggests the film she saw was Attenborough’s ‘On Thin Ice’ documentary from the ‘Frozen Planet’ series released in 2011.

"David Attenborough bears the brunt of responsibility for the recent epidemic of ‘eco-anxiety’ among children and young adults. Much of their misguidedly negative sense of how Arctic animals are fairing and their bleak outlook on the world come from the heart-wrenching but unverified stories found in Attenborough’s documentaries,| Dr Crockford said.

It is the responsibility of teachers and parents to reassure these worried youngsters that polar bears and walrus are not suffering because of sea ice loss blamed on climate change. Children need to be told the truth: that whatever scary stories some biologists come up with about what might happen in the future, Arctic species have demonstrated that they are much more resilient to changes in sea ice than Attenborough’s films suggest.

The GWPF is sending copies of this video to all head teachers of UK schools together with a letter, telling them that they are responsible for the mental health of their pupils and that they have a responsibility to provide their pupils with accurate information about the state of wildlife in the Arctic.

Watch: Attenborough's Arctic Betrayal (13 min)'

Key points from the letter can be read here, along with links in support of the case made: GWPF letter support

Well done Susan Crockford for this work, and well done the GWPF for promoting it.