Earth Hour is Phoney, Energy Hour is Genuine: how schools can help children appreciate modern energy supplies, and sidestep the odious conspiracies around climate change.

Source

 If people must (and some seem determined to) engage in global displays of the same thinking at the same time on their clocks, then Energy Hour has much to commend it over the profoundly unpleasant and dubious Earth Hour as promoted by wealthy fundraisers such as the WWF.  For them, and others, fear means funds and they clearly don’t have enough yet to give all their executives incomes in the top percentile – that 1% targeted, curiously enough, by some other left-wing agitators as being somehow the bad guys. [Hat-tip – all the links in this paragraph are to posts by Donna Laframboise.]  In brief, Earth Hour is phoney because it is based on shoddy science, and is part of an intense propaganda campaign aimed ultimately at winning political control on unprecedented scales using 'climate change', currently, as the preferred Trojan Horse to get into people's minds and lives.  There are at least three alternative 'Hours' being suggested as defences to this insidious power-grab:

(1) The International Climate Science Coalition  is promoting 'Energy Hour':

Ottawa, Canada, March 28, 2012: “Earth Hour is yet another symbol of how climate activists have hijacked the environmental movement,” said Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Most people do not realize that, when they turn out their lights for sixty minutes on March 31, they are not supporting science-based environmental protection. Participants in Earth Hour are unwittingly helping prop up one of the most threatening scientific hoaxes in history—the idea that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activities are known to be causing dangerous global warming and other problematic climate change.”

 Anthony Watts (WUWT ) has picked up on this and that will ensure wider coverage.  The ICSC are taking the following approach:

‘“If we are going to demonstrate solidarity with those who lack adequate energy supplies, then we need to really feel what they feel, not just turn off a few lights,” said ICSC energy issues advisor, Bryan Leyland of Auckland, New Zealand. “Earth Hour should be renamed Energy Hour and citizens encouraged to use as little energy as possible for 60 minutes so that they can get a sense of what societies without adequate power are actually like. For this is exactly where we are headed if governments continue to yield to climate activists and try to replace reliable, base load generation with expensive, intermittent and diffuse energy sources such as wind and solar power.”

(2) Tim Blair in Australia is suggesting an 'Hour of Power': 'Earth Hour is with us again this Saturday night, so you’ll want to start planning.
For your normal Earth Hour types, this is a simple procedure. Just turn all your lights off at 8.30pm and sit there thinking that you’re Jesus. But for those of us in the Hour of Power movement, a proper celebration requires substantial commitment.
Just follow my essential power party guide and you’ll be set.
First, it’s symbolically vital that you turn on every single light for the appointed hour. Sounds easy enough, but there is always a sneaky bulb out on the back porch or in the garage. Be vigilant. Don’t let even the smallest or least visible globe escape illumination.
Toddlers are especially useful for this. “Just preparing for Earth Hour,” a friend texted before 2009’s event. “Max is loving running through the house turning all our switches on. We think he’s really learning something important!”'

Jo Nova has picked up on this and that will ensure wider coverage down-under.  She has also added a few ideas of her own to it (with a little fun with 'Hello Earthians!', picking up on a demented speech by the leader of the Green Party there):

'Hello Earthians! It’s time to say thank you to Edison, to Faraday and Maxwell, it’s time to celebrate the Gift of Light.

Saturday night at 8.30 – 9.30pm this week is the Hour of Power

(Don’t confuse this with the splinter group celebrations called Earth Hour, where people sit in the dark –  so they can appreciate the glory of luminosity come 9.31).

The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch

In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age.  We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.

There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.

It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up to the people who want to tell you what kind of globe you are allowed to buy. Feed the world by helping to boost global CO2 to lift crop yields and fertilize farms all over the planet. Children are hungry in Haiti and, since CO2 is a well mixed gas, sooner or later, you will be helping them.

(3) The Competitive Enterprise Institute is promoting 'Human Achievement Hour':
‘On March 31, some people will be sitting in the dark to express their "vote" for action on global climate change. Instead, you can join CEI and the thousands of people around the world who will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour (HAH). Leave your lights on to express your appreciation for the inventions and innovations that make today the best time to be alive and the recognition that future solutions require individual freedom not government coercion.’


It seems to me there are two basic options if you want to do something about 'Earth Hour' other than go along with it (and three, if you would prefer to ignore it completely):

 Option 1 Turn off lights etc as a symbol of concern and compassion for those who do not have this wonderful resource so readily available.

Option 2 Turn on lights etc to show how much you appreciate them, and that you do not take them for granted while others lack this wonderful resource.

Either option could be used to motivate study of the great benefits we have gained from mass power generation, and how these benefits can grow hand-in-hand with economic development.  The recent surge in material progress in China provides dramatic illustration of this, as they are said to be building coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week.  No doubt, they will be displaced in due course but in the meantime, just as they did in the West, they can provide the enormous benefit of affordable, reliable electricity supplies as a stepping-stone to better futures.

Now, I must confess I am more inclined to turn all my lights etc on out of revulsion at such as WWF telling me to do otherwise.  I regard them as having made a transition from admirable to reprehensible, and anything I can do to diss them is appealing.  But these are not noble sentiments.  On the other hand, the examples above give plenty of scope to devise an Energy Hour/Day/Week etc etc that would be more edifying if you wish to take part in such activities, or if you are required to by, for example, state control over your school.

Note added 31 March 2012.  WUWT has that satellite pic of North Korea, and re-publishing of McKitrick's classic rebuttal of the sloppy, regressive thinking promoted by the like of the WWF for Earth Hour. Quote 'Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism.'

Note added 3 April 2012.  'Globe' as used above is Australian English for 'light-bulb'.


Note added 18 April 2012.  Here is a letter from a primary school announcing Earth Hour to a parent. A parent who was rightly outraged at the naive nonsense contained in the letter, and the deliberate intention it conveyed of indoctrinating the childen.

Climate Dogma lets Faith Trump Facts at the NCSE

What a mess the National Center of Science Education (NCSE) has gotten into.  They abandoned their own stated objectives of encouraging good science in schools when they jumped on the Carbon Dioxide Crisis bandwagon.  They hired Peter Gleick, just weeks before his demented alarmism and fantasies about the opposition to it drove him to crime, and they had to 'let him go'.  Now they seem to have hired another polemicist in his place, a Mark McCaffrey politely described by Patrick Frank as 'not particularly trained in climate science itself, but distinctly trained to promulgate his views about it.'  Last year,  they published an article in an in-house journal which is remarkable only for its intellectual depravity.  It is by an astronomer called David Morrison, apparently quite a distinguished one.  (We have had one of those in the UK heading up the Royal Society, and what an unhinged mess of neuroses and alarmism he provided us with, - see this report about Sir Martin Rees' views  'The human race has only a 50/50 chance of surviving another century').

WUWT has a letter by Patrick Frank which he tried but failed to get published in the NCSE journal.  The WUWT guest spot also provides the background leading up to this publication.  Please see the whole post there for more details.  I think it is instructive to compare and contrast the styles and the contents of the article by Morrison (pdf) and the letter by Frank.  I reproduce some extracts from the letter here - where all the emboldening is by me:

'When is Purported Science not Science?
by Patrick Frank

In his excellent book, “Galileo,” [1] Stillman Drake points out Galileo’s very modern understanding of science praxis, writing, “In his book on Hydrostatics, Galileo remarked that the authority of Archimedes was worth no more than the authority of Aristotle; Archimedes was right, he said, only because his propositions agreed with experiments.”

...
 In a recent NCSE Reports, Dr. David Morrison wrote an essay [4] about “Science Denialism,” which was one long effort to equate evolution deniers with AGW skeptics (Anthropogenic Global Warming).  There was very little science in Dr. Morrison’s essay.  Here’s most of it: “Climate models are indeed complex, and they do not always agree on details such as the timing of future warming. However, the evidence for warming is empirical, and its future trends are anchored in basic physics, such as the greenhouse effect and the heat capacity of the oceans.”

Those cognizant of meaning in science will immediately see the weakness of Dr. Morrison’s position: he grants causal meaning to climate warming while admitting the absence of a climate theory. The evidence for warming is certifiably empirical. But the meaning of that warming can come only from a falsifiable theory that makes unique predictions about climate. Is the warming due to the extra atmospheric CO2, or not? No amount of empirical data shuffling can answer that question.

...

Let’s take a short look at climate models. They do much less than, “do not always agree on [the] details” of future climate. They do not ever agree with the realities of past climate. For example, Demetris Koutsoyiannis and his group evaluated the advanced general circulation climate models (GCMs) used in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report issued by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). [5, 6] The IPCC used these GCMs to “retrodict” 100 years of 20th century climate, at all the points on a global grid. The reproduced trend in global average temperature looked great. As it should do because GCM climate models are adjusted to reproduce the known global average temperature. [7]
But the Koutsoyiannis group used the IPCC’s gridded 20th century global climate to reconstruct what these climate models said about the 20th century temperature record of the continental US. The GCM climate models got it very wrong. They also used the GCM retrodiction to reconstruct the 20th century temperature and precipitation records at 58 locations around the world. The reconstructions failed badly on comparison with the real data. This is a basic test of GCM reliability of that no one thought to carry out during 20 years of climate alarm; climate alarm ostensibly made credible by those very GCMs. Climate models cannot reproduce the known climate. Why should anyone believe they can reliably predict an unknown climate?

Dr. Morrison mentioned that climate models do not get clouds right, and then quickly dismissed this problem as irrelevant. But tropical and subtropical clouds strongly affect the amount of energy retained by the atmosphere. [8] Clouds have a net cooling effect on Earth. [9, 10] I evaluated the GCM cloud error as reported by the scientists of the “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project,” and found that the GCM cloud error, averaged over the globe, was at least ±10.1 %. [11]

This cloud error translated into a GCM error of at least ±2.8 Watts/m2 in energy. That ±2.8 Watts/m2 error equals all the extra forcing by all the extra greenhouse gases liberated into the atmosphere during the entire 20th century. That is, GCM cloud error alone equals ±100% of the increased “greenhouse effect.” It doesn’t take a very astute person to realize that when the error is as large as the effect, the effect itself becomes undetectable.

The scientists who use GCM projections to predict future climate do not take cloud error into account. Competent scientists would propagate that error into their predictions. But climate modelers do not. Neither does the IPCC. Propagating the cloud error would show that the growth of error quickly makes climate predictions no better than a random guess. [11]  GCMs can’t predict the global temperature even one year ahead, much less 10 years or 100 years. But Dr. Morrison tells us that’s irrelevant, because rising CO2 is enough all by itself to certify a catastrophically disrupted climate.

Remember the criterion of science? Only falsifiable predictions yield the meaning of observations. Climate models do not give falsifiable predictions, especially not at the resolution of CO2-forcing. Therefore, they can give no causal meaning to increased atmospheric CO2. They cannot explain the warming climate. They can not predict the future climate. The observation of rising atmospheric CO2, alone, is not enough to certify anything except a rising level of atmospheric CO2. Knowing causality and predicting outcomes requires a falsifiable theory. Dr. Morrison hasn’t one, and neither does anyone else. Those who predict torrid climate futures literally do not know what they’re talking about. But that hasn’t stopped them from talking about it anyway. Dr. Morrison’s position on climate is indistinguishable from an intuitive alarm grounded in subjective certainties.

Like the wages of sin among the believers.

....'
(See the original, linked to above,  for the complete version (well worth reading in its entirety) and for references.)

This brings me back to our very own Martin Rees, and the report (link above) on his doom-mongering which includes this:

'The Book of Revelation presents its own, hair-raising, account of the end of the world: "And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth." 

His fellow knight and fellow alarmist, Sir John Houghton would have loved that.  More on his Evangelical Climate Initiative here and here and here.  The last reference includes this :

'

'But he thought little about climate change until 2002, when he attended a conference on the subject and heard a leading British climate scientist, Sir James Houghton, who was also a prominent evangelical. “You could only call the process a conversion,” Cizik said. “I reluctantly went to the conference, saying ‘I’ll go, but don’t expect me to be signing on to any statements.’ Then, for three days in Oxford, England, Houghton walked us through the science and our biblical responsibility. He talked about droughts, shrinking ice caps, increasing hurricane intensity, temperatures tracked for millennia through ice-core data. He made clear that you could believe in the science and remain a faithful biblical Christian. All I can say is that my heart was changed. For years I’d thought, ‘Well, one side says this, the other side says that. There’s no reason to get involved.’ 

But the science has become too compelling. I could no longer sit on the sidelines.  I didn’t want to be like the evangelicals who avoided getting involved during the civil rights movement and in the process discredited the gospel and themselves.”

One day during the conference, Houghton took Cizik on a walk in the gardens of Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s ancestral home. It was a lovely day, sunny and bright. Houghton said, “Richard, if God has convinced you of the reality of the science and the Scriptures on the subject then you must speak out.” 

The science of alarm about CO2 is, of course, far from compelling.  But my goodness, treating it as if it were sure does suit a lot of influential people. Patrick Frank's letter is another small step on the way to exposing that faith as not only ill-founded, but in practice extremely damaging to society.  If teachers continue to push it, then it may well be left to their pupils, as they gain in wisdom and skills for critical review, to react against the conditioning they have endured for year after year after year.  Christianity has much to commend it as a religion of compassion, but it too will be damaged in the backlash over the deceptions and the sufferings imposed by those who claim to be acting in its name, and by those on the left for whom it has been a decidedly secular opportunity (e.g. see here and here), and by those more extreme still for whom it has been an ideal vehicle for their inhumanity (e.g. see here or here).

.

Note added later on 27 March 2012.  I just came across this comment on a blog post by 'klem', whichsupports the notion of a backlash led by children:

'This is typical of teachers, they are major contributors to ACC alarmism. They don’t realize that it is backfiring. I know a lot of children in their early teens and pre-teen age that completely reject ACC. They accept climate change but not the anthropogenic version. You might think that they have been indoctrinated perhaps at school, but nope, you’d be wrong. All of them go to liberal public schools which have been showing “An Inconvenient Truth’ over and over with no opposing films or opinions, the teachers openly blame humans for climate change, they ridicule any opposing views from their students, as a result most of the students have had enough and reject it all. I have been an environmentalist since 1970, and I have never seen anything like this. I have been saying for years, ACC will kill the environmental movement in the end. And now I’m seeing how. There is a whole new generation of kids who will not fill the ranks of the green movement in the future. They reject environmentalism. This is a disaster in the making. And teachers are going to take the blame.'

Memo to Education Scotland: Stop Brainwashing our Children with One-Sided State Propaganda on Climate Change

 Quote 1 'Children should not be overfed with one particular view of this ['climate change'].  It is far too complicated for that.'

Quote 2 ' ...it is brainwashing our children.'

Quote 1 is by Professor Tony Trewavas of Edinburgh University.  Quote 2 is by Martin Livermore, of the UK Scientific Alliance.  Both quoted in this article in the Scottish Daily Mail on 24th March, 2012 (hat-tip: Stuart Crawford, media commentator):

Education Scotland is an agency of the Scottish Government, a government which has produced absurd legislation on climate, and committed to absurd targets on renewable energy, thereby leading the way in sub-scientific foolishness.  The facade of scientific justification is easily exposed, but not by children.  They tend to trust what the adults tell them, and hence have long been a clearly identified target for eco-propagandising by the zealots who are intent on telling others how to live.  The Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London have failed to defend the wider society from such manipulation and shoddy extrapolation from unconfirmed speculations about the importance of CO2 in the climate system, and so it is all the more refreshing to see a member of the Edinburgh Royal Society taking a more informed, a more independent, and indeed a more civilised approach on climate matters.

This is especially encouraging and important given the recent announcement of a concordat amongst the major political parties in Scotland in support of the preposterous 'climate change targets' of the Scottish government.  This announcement has been noted and commented upon at Bishop Hill , where it is deemed 'somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet Union'.





Note added 20 Mar 2019.  Education Scotland being noticed internationally for their shameless promotion of junk science and scare stories in schools:
'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.'
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/98628/decades-climate-change-exaggeration-west-have-produced-frightened-children-febrile?page=1

Earth Day Climate Propaganda: Stuff the Data, Stuff the Science, Stuff the Panda - hey kids, look at that cute Panda!

Ross-Shire Journal

These children from a rural school in Scotland have been encouraged to switch lights off on 31st March, in order to 'support people and wildlife threatened by climate change'.

It is not difficult to spot the political campaigners who are coaching them in this nonsense.  And a regional council is on-board too, claiming that it 'hopes the effort will make people think about the energy they use, where it comes from and the impact that has on the environment and climate change.'
 (Source: Ross-Shire Journal)


Of course, the council and WWF are busy scheming to make that energy more expensive and less reliable thanks to the windfarms that are popping up in their territory to destroy wildlife, industrialise wild places, and discourage visitors and sensible industries from going anywhere near there.  Meanwhile, it is quite disgraceful that wealthy, un-accountable, biased, scaremongering, self-serving schemers like WWF have been allowed such access and influence on those youngsters.

This tiny example can no doubt be replicated in many thousands of locations worldwide, and this gives us a hint as to the extent of the  targeting of children by ruthless campaigners who will no doubt claim that they are protecting 'the world', or at least the Pandas if not the People.

The campaigners may well protect their Pension Plans by such actions, but I fear they may be bringing nought but harm to both People and Pandas, and for that matter, to Progress itself.

Note added 27 March 2012.  Earth Hour is no piece of fluffy symbolism dreamt up by nice but ill-informed people.  Instead
'Earth Hour was brought into this world by corporations
Launched in Sydney, Australia in 2007 there was never anything grassroots or shoestring about it. There’s no history of penniless activists toiling in obscurity, working their fingers to the bone, hoping against hope to attract attention to their cause.
Earth Hour is, instead, the brainchild of two large corporate entities – the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Fairfax Media Limited.'   Donna Laframboise
Note added 28 March 2012.  Donna explains the differences between Earth Hour and Earth Day: In any case, whereas Earth Day was the brainchild of a politician, Earth Hour (as I explain here) was brought into this world by wealthy corporations.http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/03/27/earth-hour-corporations-preaching-morality/

A Climate Book for Children - the cover alone deserves our contempt

Produced and published by what kind of people?  Sadists?  Sociopaths?  Dupes?  Fools?  Profiteers? 

Pic found on a blog hosted here, the AGU, home of an ethics committee once chaired by Peter Gleick, a man made decidedly un-ethical by his disproportionate alarm about CO2 and climate: http://blogs.agu.org/georneys/2012/01/26/global-warming-is-scary/  'Un-ethical' is also applicable to the cover of the above book.  As are a great many other adjectives conveying dismay, displeasure, distaste, and damnation.

The publishers are Dreamland, an Indian company describing itself thus:

If any reader in India or elsewhere can get this book and send in more details of it, I would be grateful.