Targeting Children for the Cause of Acute Climate Alarm over CO2 - will the zealots ever stop?

Two new pieces in the Yale Climate Media Forum were announced yesterday.

Parenting in an Age of Climate Change:Communicating the Tough Truths to Children
by Allison Guerette & John Wihbey

Climate Change Included in Science Teaching Guidelines
by Lisa Palmer








(The editor, Bud Ward, is not a neutral observer of the climate change fiasco. For example, he is one of the jurors for something called the Schneider Award, and they unanimously gave it to James Hansen last year.  I wonder if it is awarded to whoever was deemed to be the best at creating Schneiderian Scenarios - 'scary', 'simplified', 'dramatic' - with which to engage our attention?  Hansen would surely be a frequent contender if so.)

There is a lot to be studied in these two articles, and I hope to get back to them next week.  In the meantime, Tom Nelson has picked up on one point, and I have spotted another.  Here they are:

 (1) Inoculating children against ideas disturbing to the zealotry

Tom Nelson 
 Good question: How can left-wing teachers "inoculate" children so that they don't believe it when their parents tell them that CO2 doesn't cause bad weather?

From 'Parenting in an Age of Climate Change: Communicating the Tough Truths to Children | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media':

"In a 2010 address to the National Science Teachers Association, Lynne Cherry, author and director of the Young Voices on Climate Change films, put forward the following prescription for dealing with climate change issues and the sometimes-pernicious influence of media:

How we can respond to the current onslaught against climate change in the media? We can “inoculate” kids by having them not just learning about climate science but actually going outdoors and doing climate science."

(2) On a 'steadily-rolling disaster' calling into question 'the very way we live'
The text in quotes is taken from the second paragraph of the article by Guerette & Wihbey linked to earlier.  I have submitted a comment on it.  If past experience is anything to go by, it will not appear*.  So here it is, with italics and emboldening added:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

April 24, 2013 at 3:23 am

 

Quote “Climate change offers a unique parenting challenge: a steadily-rolling disaster to which we all contribute, punctuated by periodic events and mounting scientific evidence. It calls into question the very way we live and the world we will leave for our children.”

Well, the absence of warming over most of the past two decades does not look to me like a ‘steadily-rolling disaster’, nor does the drop in hurricane activity, nor does the absence of anything extraordinary happening anywhere in weather, ice extents, or sea levels and temperatures.

We most assuredly will face climate-linked challenges in the years to come – we always have and we always will. But I rather think we would be better prepared to deal with them by doing more of the most successful ‘way to live’ the world has ever seen.

I think you would all do better to leave the children out of this squabble, and try your best to protect their childhood from political interference.

*Note added 25 April 2013  Hurray I was wrong! The comment has appeared, and a response to it.  Hope springs eternal.  Pushed for time at the moment but will try to get a reply in before the end of today, after which I will have no chance to do so for several days.

Note added later on 25 April.  Here is my reply:

'Thank you for responding, Leiran.  I followed the link you gave, but I found nothing there to disabuse me of my ‘facts’. I saw the charts showing changes, but since climate always changes I would expect to see such charts. If we could contrive this by some magic, at just about any period in our atmosphere's history, we would find such charts.  Depending on the space and time scale you choose to focus on, we are typically warming or cooling, seeing ice extents vary, and so on, over days, decades, and centuries. On the grander scale of millions of years, we can see that generally the planet has been warmer than now, and  that over thousands of years, that we are in an overall cooling trend within our relatively warm phase, the Holocene interglacial, of the current ice age.

I do not see an indication of a ‘dramatic global temperature increase’ following the industrial revolution.  I do see a gentle one since the end of the Little Ice Age, say from about 1850 onwards.  And within that, I see nothing to convince me that the remarkable rise in ambient CO2 levels since the 1970s has had any discernible effect – the rises in the first part of the 20th century being somewhat similar in rate and size as those which occurred later under higher CO2 levels.  Nor, in my innocence, would I expect CO2 to have a major influence.  It is a trace gas whose contribution to the brief delaying of heat loss from the Earth’s surface to space is very modest compared with the contributions of airborne water in all its phases.  It also does not seem to contribute much at all to the great heat engine of the climate system – the daily transfer of heat from the tropics towards the poles, a system which dominates our weather and in which water plays a very important role. 

I first started on a serious study of the climate system in the mid 1970s, and after a gap of some decades, I am getting back to it now.  So please be assured my remarks are not casual, nor are they intended to be provocative.  I have not been convinced that there is sufficient reason to be alarmed about CO2, and I have looked on with bemusement at the strange mix of severely damaging policy proposals and actions passed with great assurance by some while the climate really does go on behaving pretty much as if the additional CO2 doesn’t really matter very much.  Just like Prof Lindzen expected it to.  Let me commend this report of a talk by him from 1989 to you: http://www.fortfreedom.org/s46.htm

My bemusement turns to horror, dismay and sometimes anger when I see the same sort of assurance bringing scare stories to the young about climate threats attributed to mankind’s influence.   That seems to me to be an abandonment of a basic adult responsibility to protect children from terrifying beliefs about their world when the grounds for such beliefs are so flimsy. '

Note added 5 May: the reply did not get past the moderator!  But a good couple of comments from Barry Woods did - see comments below.
Note added 8 May: I just tried again to post a comment, using only the first two paragraphs of the one above in case a shorter comment has more chance of success.

Hold Fast, South Dakota – keep facile and destructive climate alarmism out of your schools!

An informative article in South Dakota's Argus Leader presents the dilemma facing education administrators in that State as they prepare to debate and decide on whether to adopt 'The Next Generation Science Standards' as released earlier this month..

The Argus Leader article notes

"A core idea in the standards is that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming).”

“That idea is not controversial among the 41 scientists and educators who wrote the standards. But many politicians consider man’s influence on global climate change to be unresolved.”

And goes on to note:

“Three years ago, the South Dakota Legislature passed a nonbinding resolution that urged public schools to take a “balanced approach” when teaching climate change. It asserted the science on the subject is unsettled, open to interpretation and prejudiced by politics.”

There is wisdom here.  But it is under threat from the new curriculum being offered to all States.  It may or may not be adopted in South Dakota:

"Mary Stadick Smith, deputy secretary for the Department of Education, said there is no timeline for the agency’s review of the standards.“We need to review them carefully and we’re going to move forward cautiously to make sure these are the right things for our students,” she said."

 She is being reasonable.

The simple-minded view that human contributions in particular, and rising CO2 levels in general, are major drivers of ‘global warming’ has received criticism for decades from scientists, and Mother Nature has helped them along by refusing to cooperate with the dramatically rising temperature plots produced, after a great deal of pampering, by global climate models (GCMs), and widely promoted by such as the IPCC.

Two reports published this month in Europe add yet more weight to the case for admitting the complexity of the climate system and the importance of many other factors influencing it.  Factors which by and large the IPCC claims little knowledge of, and which the GCMs can’t handle at all or can’t handle at all well. 

Here are the key points recently presented by 4 professors from universities in Belgium:

“The authors of this contribution were recently been granted the honour of presenting their point of view as climate sceptics at the Royal Academy of Belgium. During a series of six well-attended lectures we showed, among other things, that:

1. The climate has always changed. This was true during ancient times and it has also been true since the beginning of the modern era. These climate changes have always been, and still are, independent of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere;
2. During Roman times and the Middle Ages temperatures were observed well in excess of those currently experienced. From the 16th till the 19th century a cold period referred to as the “Little Ice Age” predominated. All these changes took place without mankind being held responsible. We believe that the increase in temperatures that occurred during a certain part of the 20th century is the result of a recovery from this cold period. These various events can be explained by a combination of warm and cold cycles of different magnitudes and duration. Why and how this happens is not yet fully understood, but some plausible explanations can be put forward;
3. The so-called “abnormally rapid” increase in global temperatures between 1980 and 2000 is not unusual at all. There have in fact been several such periods in the past, during which temperatures rose in a similar manner and at comparable rates, even though fossil fuels were not yet in use;
4. Temperature measurements do not necessarily correlate with a building up or a decrease in heat since heat variations are energy changes subject to thermal inertia. Apart from heat many other parameters have an influence on temperature. Moreover the measurement of temperatures is subject to numerous large errors. When the magnitude and plurality of these measurement errors are taken into account, the reported increase in temperatures is no longer statistically significant;
5. The famous “Hockey-stick” curve, known as the Mann’s curve and presented six times by the IPCC in its penultimate report, is the result among other things of a mistake in the statistical calculations and an incorrect choice of temperature indicators, i.e. proxies. This lack of scientific rigour has totally discredited the curve and it was withdrawn, without any explanation, from subsequent IPCC reports;
6. Even though they look formidably complex, the theoretical models employed by the climate modellers are simplified to the extreme. In fact there are far too many (known and unknown) parameters that influence climate change. At the moment it is impossible to take them all into account. The climate system is extremely complex, containing not only chaotic components but also numerous positive and negative feedback loops operating according to various different time scales. Which is why the IPCC wrote in its reports that: “…long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (page 774, Third report). This is very true. To this day all the climate predictions based upon these models have turned out to be totally incorrect. Strangely, nobody seems to care;
7. The relationship between CO2 and temperature, obtained from the Vostok ice cores, shows that a building up of CO2 occurs 800 to 1000 years after an increase in temperature is observed. Hence the increase in the concentration of CO2 is a consequence of the warming of the climate, not its cause;
8. But the coup de grâce to the “warmists’ theory” – certainly not yet visible in the French and Belgian media – comes from the observation that for the past fifteen years or so the global temperature of the Earth has remained constant. During the same period CO2 emissions have increased by far more than in the past, reaching an unparalleled record this year. Honest climate scientists admit that this observation is an embarrassing inconvenience for their theory. However, attempts to make us believe that the Earth is continuing to warm up persist. Will we have to wait for another twenty, twenty-five or thirty years for the global warming advocates to finally admit that there is no unambiguous correlation between the global temperature of the Earth and human-generated CO2 emissions?
9. The claim that Hurricane Sandy is due to human CO2 emissions is totally unfounded and has been vigorously contested by numerous meteorologists. This regrettable distortion of the facts has been denounced in an open letter, addressed to the General Secretary of the UN and signed by more than 130 world-renowned scientists, including one of the present authors;
10. Finally the “abnormal” melting of the Arctic Sea ice, that made the headlines of numerous journals during this summer, was also observed during previous decades. Amazingly the record high increase in Antarctic Sea ice that occurred at exactly the same time has been completely ignored by the very same media. Moreover, no mention has been made of the current, particularly rapid, regeneration of the Arctic Sea ice.

These ten statements are facts. We would be ready to accept that they could be wrong, if evidence were presented to scientifically disprove them. In the meantime, and in view of the lack of coherence and unreliability associated with the numerous predictions made by the IPCC, it is time to set the record straight. The public and politicians must be informed about the hypothetical character of the predominant ‘consensus’ on climate change, which has been uncritically disseminated in the media for more than ten years. If it ever existed, this so-called “climate change consensus” has now been totally undermined by the facts."

Source: http://www.thegwpf.org/belgian-scientists-double-standards-climate-change/

Also this month, from further north in Europe, from Norway comes another report full of trenchant and well-supported criticisms of the simple-minded view of the climate system which has so exercised decent people as well as political and financial opportunists of many kinds over recent decades:

“To illustrate the way that scientific, political and ethical concerns are mixed in the debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming this report used the by now famous quote from Gro Harlem Brundtland, that ”doubt has been eliminated”, and that it is ”irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the situation” as a point of departure. 

The goal of the report was to enter this debate and “battlefield” of arguments and take stock of the debate about anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Based on the present review of this debate there are several conclusions to be drawn. The first and simplest one is that considered as an empirical statement, the assertion that “doubt has been eliminated” on AGW is plainly false.“

Source: http://www.sintef.no/upload/Teknologi_og_samfunn/Teknologiledelse/SINTEF%20Report%20A24071,%20Consensus%20and%20Controversy.pdf

Hat tip for the two reports: Global Warming Policy Foundation.


Hat tip for the newspaper report from Dakota: Tom Nelson

Climate Control brings a new dawn for People Control (aka totalitarianism), and even children can help.

A. Suppose you happen to have an urge to control the lives of others in all the important details, but that you need a bit of cooperation from them at first.

B. Suppose you have found a topic by which to catch their attention, indeed by which to scare them and make them worried about their future.

C. Suppose, furthermore, you have spotted that most people love nature, and do not want to harm wildlife, and therefore are predisposed to admire and support those people who make it their life’s work to help out the world’s flora and fauna.

Question 1. Where do you go?  What organisation might you join to further your ambitions?

Answer 1. That’s easy. A lot of suitable organisations have sprung up or transformed themselves to take advantage of the new opportunity.

They too discovered that topic in B.  It is of course airborne carbon dioxide, a trace gas in the atmosphere vital to plant life, and thence to virtually all life.  The levels of it have been increasing, and simple calculations suggest that could one day, perhaps by the end of this century,  make the world a little bit warmer, perhaps as much as about one to two degrees centigrade on average*.  Which, if the similarly warmer Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period are anything to go by, would be good news all round: more agricultural land, longer growing seasons, possibly reduced storminess and more predictable monsoons, reduced heating bills in the heavily-populated colder countries, and so on. 

But wait, how is that scary?  Well of course it is not. Quite the reverse.   

But what if you could program up computer models purporting to reflect the climate system, and include in them, not the rising CO2 levels (because that is actually way beyond their capacity to model) but instead a presumed overall effect of suppressing heat loss from the planet to outer space? As well as not being able to model CO2, these computer models can’t model clouds, nor solar variations, nor many features of the ocean very well.  That means there are lots of adjustable parameters to play with.  With a bit of luck, out of the shambles that can result from trying to model such a horribly complex system, you can with a bit of pampering ( ‘flux adjustment’ for example) get outputs that look something like some aspects of our climate.  If you keep the handling of water vapour nice and simple – just let it go up with temperatures, then you might see a positive feedback appear which leads, amidst the spaghetti tangle of very varied projections, to some which give end of the century mean temperature increases of 5 or 10 or 15C.  Bingo!   

Now get the spinners in to write lurid tales of doom and disaster (what a leading guru of this new climate movement called ‘scary’, ‘dramatic’, ‘simplified’ scenarios).  Engage  policy-makers with helpful ‘summaries’ and these vivid scenarios.  Soon the money will be flowing in the right direction as simple (or is it venal?) politicians swing into action in pursuit of the clear advantages they can see for themselves and their causes.  Before you know it, whole political classes will be on board.  Charities once concerned primarily with the poor, or with wildlife, will push all that to one side and champion ‘climate change’ as the big issue, the biggest money-earner they have ever seen. 

So, by way of example, let's say you join the WWF (the organisation formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund).  Lots of jobs there, some with six-figure salaries – this is a wealthy multinational corporation now.

You’ve missed the pioneering years of this great fund-raising.  But you still want to do your bit.  You want to help secure the gains and, don’t forget, you have all these ambitions about control at the back of your mind.

Question 2. What next?  Where should you concentrate your efforts?

Answer 2. That’s easy too.  Who are easier to scare, children or adults?  Well, yes the children.  So there you go.  Scare the children into supporting your ambitions, and not only will that be good for your pension and career prospects in the longer-term, it will also help in the immediate future.  You see some of the children will go home and shame and pester their parents and so they in turn will be more likely to support your political goals.

Google ‘wwf children climate change’ and you’ll get a couple of million hits to help give you ideas. 

But I just want to draw attention to one perhaps less obvious opportunity (hat tip Donna Laframboise): work with slum children in a developing country.  There’s surely a nicely vulnerable group to get started with.  It may also be a way to tap into EU funds.

Never mind that those children have more serious, more real, and more challenging problems to look forward to, and that their parents are tackling them now.  No never mind that.  Planet needs saving.  Do what we say. Before it is too late.

You’ll soon learn the score, and it will give you an early experience of control over others – that’s what you want after all.  For more details of this opportunity, visit http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/04/19/latest-from-the-wwf-eco-indoctrination-of-slum-kids/

*Note added 22 April 2013 Here are the simple calculations, widely used, deployed by distinguished physicist Will Happer.
Extract, referring to delta-T-2, the expected temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 levels: 
' In fact, the basic physics of the CO2 molecule makes it hard to justify a number much larger than ∆T2 = 1 C – with no feedbacks. The number 3 C comes from various positive feedback mechanisms from water vapor and clouds that were invented to make the effects of more CO2 look more frightening. But observations suggest that the feedbacks are small and may even be negative.'
Further illustration is given here.

For the Climate Classroom Wall: actual versus doomsters' projected global mean temperatures

 The so-called settled science and the associated computer models produce the rising spaghetti spread of outputs you can see in the the diagram below just published by Roy Spencer (hat-tip Bishop Hill).  This variation is there despite the pampering of the models, and the careful orchestration and selection of their runs and outputs around the world.  The alarmed ones credit the rising temperatures to rising levels of CO2.  But they do not include CO2 in the models as an active participant in the simulations.  Instead a presumed effect of the CO2, grandly labelled an 'external forcing' despite it being clearly internal to the climate system, is added and the models are run to watch how they adjust.  The added effect is done by reducing, suddenly, the rate at which radiative energy escapes the model atmosphere.  As you might expect, and as the alarmed ones hope, model temperatures then tend to rise and thereby inspire those who wish scare children and disturb adults with tales of impending doom.

Source: Spencer

 The early part of the chart shows some alignment with estimated actual mean temperatures in the lower troposphere derived from satellite observations (UAH, RSS), but this is not due to the predictive skill of the models so much as the parameter adjustment skills of the modellers trying to get good fits to past observations.  Spencer does not report on when the forecasting part of the model outputs begin on these plots, but in the comments below his post he guesses that it may be no later than 2007.  Ignoring the 1998 spike widely attributed to a very strong El Nino, the sustained divergence of actual from model seems to begin in about 1995.

Note also that there are other forecasts of global mean temperatures that have a better track record so far than the climate models.  Here are two:

(1) Global surface temperatures projected from 2007 model runs are shown in the green band.  The blue (cyan) band is for the empirically-fitted model by Scafetta in which he merely makes a combination of past, observed cycles in temperature plus ad adjustment to reflect the overall warming of the 20th century.  The thick red line changing to thick blue is derived from observations. The thick black line shows Scafetta's model projected into the future.  So far, it is doing a lot better than the multi-million pound GCMs.   I reckon Scafetta's model could be run on a decent programmable calculator such as this one costing about £30.

 (2) An even less expensive prediction model is the basic persistence one devised by an expert in forecasting techniques after working through a checklist of what it takes to produce forecasts based on best practices (a checklist against which the climate forecasts of such as the IPCC fail dramatically).  This expert was so dismayed by the poor basis for forecasts made by the IPCC and taken up by such as Al Gore, that he announced a public bet over whether Gore's claim of a 3C rise by the end of the 21st century (and this is at the moderate end of IPCC predictions) could beat a simple persistence forecast.  In the 63 months since the bet began, the persistence forecast has done better in 55 of them.  Details are here: The Global Warming Challenge. 

These plots can help your pupils regard the IPCC, and assorted CO2 alarmists in general with the contempt they deserve.  They may have to regurgitate their 'science' to pass exams, but they can treat it like theology rather than science - the exam answers are then more about the faith of the alarmed ones than about science or the world outside of their expensive but woefully inadequate General Circulation Models (GCMs).

Note added 20 April 2013  Taking the model outputs seriously, because to do so suits them very much, alarmed ones have made many blunders.  Pierre Gosselin has assembled a collection relating to their confident assurances re warmer winters for Europe.  Examples can be seen here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/climate-teachers-have-you-seen-any-of.html

CO2-Conjecture Causes Contempt: scared children used as an argument for scaring more of them over the global warming that has not taken place in their lifetimes.

An article in The Guardian today reports on a UNICEF commissioned sample survey being used as an argument for no-change to the treatment of ‘climate change’ in school curricula for under-14s in England.

The sampling (the details of which are omitted from the article – that by itself is unimpressive to say the least) found 3 out of 4 children aged 11 to 16 years (no other details given other than they are British) claiming to be ‘deeply concerned about the impact of climate change’, and  ‘worried about how global warming will change the world’. 

This is at a time when there has been no ‘global warming’ during the lifetimes of these children, when melo-dramatic speculation over the importance of CO2 is under wider and deeper attack than ever before, and when there has been nothing at all extraordinary taking place in weather, in sea level, in ice variation, and in sea temperatures.

The results of the poll should, you would think, have caused outrage in any objective observer.  Who has been messing with the minds of these youngsters?  How can they get away with doing that?  How can it be stopped?

But no.  The article, and the organisation which commissioned the survey, UNICEF, are taking the view that the results mean the indoctrination and scaremongering in schools should continue.  In this perversion of logic and morality, they wish to resist the very modest proposals that would increases the chances of under-14s being left alone to concentrate on their basic studies rather than be exposed to climate campaigns in the classroom.

Like other short-sighted NGOs, Unicef have not hesitated to exploit the climate scare to raise funds.  Look at this for example, part of a screenshot from their website here.

Children in developing countries are among those hardest hit by 'climate change'?  Is that right?  First, we might ask, what 'climate change'?

Is it the change that has brought record crops to India?  The change producing record harvests in Kenya?  The change producing record harvests in South America?  Perhaps it is the change that has brought record coffee harvests to Indonesia?  Or the record grain harvests in China?

Is it the change that has seen reduced hurricane activity?  It can't be the climate change known as 'global warming' because we know that one has not been happening for nearly two decades now.  And it won't be good enough to dig out examples of local floods, or droughts, or other burdens unless they can be shown to be extraordinary.  Everywhere experiences climate variation, and in general, the wealthier the country, the more able it is to cope.  The wealth of many developing countries has been increasing quite dramatically.  Good news, eh?  I wonder if these points are in the desired curriculum for 'climate change'?  I fear not.  They would distract from the message of alarm which is so highly-valued by those who wish to indoctrinate the young by such means.