Monckton from the Conference in Rio: scaring children with climate propaganda is child abuse, and parents should not tolerate it.

Scotland, and in particular Edinburgh has accumulated much to be ashamed about in the sorry saga of climate scaremongering of the past 30 years or so.  The University for sustaining alarmism, the Royal Society for its supine conformance to establishment views, and even the town council for giving an award to an intemperate leader of climate alarm.  But on the credit side of the ledger we do have some entries, and one of the most notable of these is the work of Lord Monckton.  His deep study of the subject from the outside, but with mathematical and logical assurance, has been impressive, as has been his willingness to engage in debate and make presentations on what is known, and what is not known or has been deliberately misleading about the causes and extent of climate variation.

The YouTube video below contains a report by Monckton from the UN conference which took place this month in Rio, a conference which seems to have well-reflected the moral and intellectual turpitude of the UN's handling of climate matters in so much as it was a failure on a grand and shaming scale.  His report contains many useful insights into what took place in Rio.  But of most interest for this blog, is when he notes in particular how the young have been exploited to take part in the conference, and addresses the question of children being deliberately scared about climate by teachers in public schools in the States, and how they may also be being taught to regard humanity, and therefore themselves, with loathing.

The report is part of an interview conducted by Alex Jones, who himself refers to young children (in 1st grade, and in kindergarten) in Austin, Texas, being reduced to tears by their teachers around climate and human impact on it.

Monckton urges parents to gather the best evidence they can find on what is actually being taught in their childrens' schools, and to consider, if no reforms are made, taking legal action against any teachers who seem guilty of propagandising children in and around climate.  He notes this is illegal in Britain, and expects that it may well be in the USA as well. 

His advice to parents who suspect their children are being abused by extremist teachers, is to try to get hard evidence on what is actually being taught.  As Monckton notes, 'little children are being taught by left-wing extremists that humans are a poison on the planet and should be wiped out' .  Jones describes such people, such extremists, as the scum of the earth.  Monckton notes that help with investigations into what is being taught in schools may be found in homeschooling organisations.

If parents find hard evidence of mental abuse of their children, and get no progress from the head teacher, then they should go to the police.  He maintains that even if only one or two abusive teachers get imprisoned, then the rest will 'run for cover' and stop their propagandising.

There is certainly a lot of climate material out there for children which is scary, and which denigrates humanity.  There are certainly 'activist teachers', and many who would encourage and facilitate such activism on climate.  There are certainly many reports of fear and anxiety amongst the young.  It would be a salutory thing if someone somewhere could bring all this together and achieve a successful prosecution on a charge of child-abuse.  That would surely help clean up climate curricula and help protect future generations from deliberate scaremongering aimed at producing 'little activists'.  It may even help reduce the damage that has been done to those childen who have already been harmed.
 
Added 30 June 2012.
The CFACT site has examples of posters and other images from the Rio conference,  Here is one from which one might well conclude that humans are being seen as a poison on the planet:

Added 10 November 2012
Re Edinburgh University and alarmism.  This video of a recent tv panel discussion of climate includes the participation of a very hot-headed young man who is actually a lecturer at that university: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf1a94SyNmg&feature=youtu.be

Added 11 November 2012 
Re Edinburgh University and alarmism.  This tv clips sees Edi lecturer David Reay report a child's question asked at one of his climate talks "When will I die?".  Sounds like he is quite impressive, at least to children.
  http://programmes.stv.tv/the-hour/showbiz/celebs-on-the-sofa/103085-superheroes-help-inspire-kids-to-learn-about-the-environment/

Posting here will be lighter than usual in June

Many distractions underway will be taking up most of my limited attention.  Hoping to get back to at least weekly posts by the end of the month.

Cry Wolf! about climate and watch how the money rolls in. Scare 'em and snare 'em, kids and all.

Charities 'spread scare stories on climate change to boost public donations'

The headline is from an article in The Telegraph way back in 2004.  Well worth reading the article in full, and well worth reading the academic paper it was triggered by.  The problem is still with us in 2012, as evidenced by this post on WUWT.  Anyone wanting to trace how, why, and where scaremongering materials for schoolchildren about climate change have been produced in recent years, will surely want to investigate the deliberate promotion of scare stories by fund-raisers as one contributing factor.

Here is how the Telegraph article begins:

'Environmental charities are exaggerating the threat of climate change in an attempt to raise more money from public donations, according to a report by Oxford University academics.

The charities, including WWF-UK, the world's biggest independent conservation organisation, claim that a quarter of the world's species are facing extinction by 2050.
 

However, the report says that this is a "woeful misrepresentation of the underlying science".

Many species said to be at risk - including the red kite and the Scottish crossbill - are not facing imminent extinction, according to the report by four academics from the biodiversity research group at Oxford's school of geography and the environment.'

Here is how the article ends:

'Dr Richard Ladle, a theoretical ecologist at Oxford University who also contributed to the report, said that most species cited as being in danger of extinction by 2050 "probably won't be".

Dr Ladle said that WWF's response to criticism of the claims was that the ends justified the means.
"Our argument is that we don't think the ends do justify the means because if you are hyping something to that extent, you are going to have the equivalent of 'compassion fatigue' in the charity sector.

"Biodiversity is declining worldwide, but if you keep telling people that we're on the verge of a global disaster, and then the process takes longer than people think it's going to take, we are going to be in trouble and the non-governmental organisations are going to be in trouble in terms of their funding.
"Change in diversity takes a long time. My gut feeling is it will take a lot longer than 2050."

However, a spokesman for WWF-UK insisted that it was unfair to judge fundraising in the same way as academic research. "Climate change is real and it endangers species," he said.  "But you have to simplify issues for appeals. There is no way you can cover all the science. Fundraising appeals are very emotional."

Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: "The biodiversity research group cannot really claim that it constituted crying wolf, as there is potential for the worst-case scenarios to be realised." '

The moral turpitude of the campaigners is nicely revealed by that last quote: since there is always potential for fire in a crowded theatre, shouting 'Fire!' there is not an unreasonable thing to do - just think of all the lives you might save.  This young woman went on to be a key labourer in the rushed drafting of the UK's Climate Change Act, passed in 2008, a chore for which a grateful government elevated her to the House of Lords as a baroness.  The careless ignorance of that government is illustrated not just by the appalling nonsense of that Act, but also by its drive to scare the public and push climate alarmism into schools through, for example, distributing copies of Al Gore's drama 'An Inconvenient Truth' within which 'truth' is rather hard to find.  Their scary tv ad features in this dismal catalogue of propaganda efforts collated by the Washington Post.

The WWF was once held in high esteem for trying to do good works for wildlife around the world.  Now it is not so regarded by those who have seen the harm it has done through its relentless campaigning around climate.  It became a vehicle for the politically ambitious, providing what are now huge budgets for interfering in the affairs of many countries without being accountable to their electorates.  A recent report in Der Spiegel, highlighted here by Donna Laframboise, suggests that its reputation is about to fall even further or more widely:

Laframboise begins her comments with this:
'A splendid and disturbing investigative feature in Der Spiegel explains why the WWF doesn’t deserve your charitable donations.'


I completely agree.  It has, in my view, done a great deal of harm to society - not least through contributing to the scaring of children - and, incidentally, it has harmed wildlife too according to the Der Spiegel report (quote 'Undermining its own standards seems to be a specialty of the WWF.')

Meanwhile, one of the chief agents of the WWF's fundraising strategy, one Robert Napier, went on to become, in 2006, Chairman of the UK's Met Office.  Why would he do that?  Why would anyone hire him to do it?  What, in others words, were they thinking?  And what, of late, has been happening to the reputation of the Met Office?  Here is a tv clip highlighting their 'lamentable performance' with some vigour on, of all places, the BBC in 2010.  Here is an article in the printed media from 2011.  Extract: 'First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.'   Here is a blog post from 2012: 'Met Office forecasting produces another epic failure.'

Meanwhile, in 2009,  a blogger wrote this on the BuyTheTruth site:
'The UK Meteorological Office, whose Hadley Centre runs the IPCC scientific assessment (“Working Group 1”), is now a department of the UK Ministry of Defence [as of 2011, it is no longer there]. And its Chairman is none other than Robert Napier, a green activist and alarmist with tentacles into some of the world’s most powerful drivers of climate alarmism and social control.'  [please see the rest of that post for chapter and verse on this.]


Climate alarmists, and those who can see advantage in such alarm, are embedded in 'the establishment' and in many major 'charities'.  We ought to be dismayed at what this has led to in terms of actions and materials designed to scare the young and recruit them to a political cause, but we no longer need be surprised by it.

To end on a more positive note, here are some words by Richard Lindzen in 2001 (as quoted here):
“The question of where do we go from here is an obvious and important one. From my provincial perspective, an important priority should be given to figuring out how to support and encourage science (and basic science underlying climate in particular) while removing incentives to promote alarmism. The benefits of leaving future generations a better understanding of nature would far outweigh the benefits (if any) of ill thought out attempts to regulate nature in the absence of such understanding.” 

 [Note added 20 October 2012:  The puzzling appointment of Robert Napier as Chairman of the UK's Met Office came to an end in September after six years.  A self-serving reflection on his time there can be found here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/barometer/people/2012-07/ready-steady.]

Some Grist for the Millers of a Calmer Curriculum on Climate for Schools

It may seem harsh, but my supposition of what the reasoning process inside the minds of many people who have been successfully convinced by the climate scaremongering of the last 30 years or so is something like this:

'Gosh, the climate is changing.  Gosh, humans have an impact on climate.  Gosh, CO2 is called a greenhouse gas - and greenhouses quickly get very hot and unpleasant.   Gosh, we are releasing huge amounts of CO2.'

Each one of these insights bar one will be new to most people, since they will not have not studied the climate system, nor even given it much thought.   I included the 'gosh's to reflect this..  This novelty makes them vulnerable to the big conclusion:

'Gosh, we are in big trouble!'

Yet the evidence from climate records, both ancient and modern, does not suggest that the additional CO2 will have a dramatic effect, nor possibly even a readily detectable effect as a driver of climate change.  Furthermore, calmer analysts than the handful most culpable for the acute alarm about CO2 we now have to endure, have argued that the impact on climate (including temperatures) of a further doubling of ambient levels of that gas will range from negligible up to 'quite hard to detect'.

Unfortunately the alarming view has won far greater political and financial support than the calming one, and it may well take many a long year for the educational system to turn its back with contempt and outrage at some of the materials that have been produced for young people.  The seriously misleading movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth' is bad enough, but it has helped trigger a wave of materials no better or even worse than it.

The alarm has been sounded, the fear is widespread, and a great many individuals and organisations now have a vested interest in what it has led to in terms of government and other well-funded initiatives, including educational ones.  So what is to be said to current and former pupils once the tide of alarm has clearly turned?  It will not do merely to declare that some scientists and others were too easily scared by their computers and too willing to abandon their basic adult responsibility of avoiding ill-founded scaremongering.  They shouted fire in our theatre, and it will take a lot of time before many of the audience can relax enough to get back without this extra anxiety to more or even to less important matters, including a basic enjoyment of the great successes of the human play to date.

One approach is to show the relative importance of factors other than CO2.  An article posted on the GWPF site today reports on the work of one Nicola Scafetta, who argues that some 60% of the global warming observed since 1970 can be explained by cycles he has looked for in the system.  From this point of view, the modest warming observed over that period (similar in size and duration to a warming observed earlier in the 20th century and not blamed on CO2) is largely 'natural' and to be expected.  This of course diminishes the presumed importance of CO2 increases over this time, and thereby might help calm things down a bit with regard to that gas.  Note that he presents his work as just a theory, and he is awaiting critical review from his peers.  Just as he should.  I suspect he is not part of a cabal intent on concealment of data and methods, and other manipulations to protect and promote their theory at almost any cost in terms of their integrity as men and as scientists.  I daresay there will be no Climategate revelations to shock us about his groups of coworkers and colleagues.

His method is based on identifying cycles in climate records, and using them to make hindcasts and forecasts, both with some appreciable success according to his account.  He identifies three major mechanisms behind these cycles:

'There are three major mechanisms acting together: gravity, nuclear fusion - luminosity production, magnetism.

1) The planets act on the sun mostly via gravitational tidal forcings that are characterized by the astronomical harmonics in the same way that the tides on the Earth are regulated by lunar/solar gravitational harmonics.

2) The sun is in a state of almost perfect balance between gravitational forces and nuclear fusion luminosity production. This balance is very sensitive to gravitational or luminosity changes.   If, for example, gravitational forces make some additional work (relative to a given average) on the sun, the sun responds by increasing its luminosity production to restore the balance, and vice-versa.  The planetary tides slightly modulate the gravitational work balance inside the sun, and the sun responds by modulating its luminosity production. Because the luminosity production is energetically around 1,000,000 times the gravitational work released into the star, the solar core should work as a great amplifier of the planetary gravitational tidal energy.  Thus, solar luminosity and all dynamical solar processes end up oscillating with a set of frequencies related to the planetary frequencies. This is the theory I propose in my last published paper, just last week.

3) The oscillating sun induces equivalent magnetic oscillations in the heliosphere. Magnetic oscillations have numerous effects: they modulate the incoming cosmic ray flux and modulate other electric currents in the heliosphere, that is, they regulate the space weather which is mostly made of electric phenomena. These phenomena occur together with the luminosity oscillations.

The Earth system is very sensitive to these electric changes because they cause ionization of the upper atmosphere and regulate cloud formation. Thus, the cloud formation will approximately follow the astronomical harmonics and make the albedo oscillate by about 1-3% . An oscillating albedo causes oscillations in the amount of light reaching the surface of the Earth, which is what causes the oscillations observed in the surface temperature.

Of course at the moment not all single physical mechanisms are understood, quantified or modeled.

Point 1 has can be easily quantified

Point 2 has been quantified, at least I made a proposal,  but a full model also needs empirical modeling because solar physics is not so advanced.

Point 3 needs the understanding of how clouds form in details and the relation with cosmic ray etc. that is still under study. The modeling can be empirically done.'

Now it strikes me that these could be diluted and enlarged upon and illustrated in ways which could make it interesting and accessible to high school pupils, and perhaps even pictorially for younger children since even they have been the target of alarmists intent on recruitment for their dubious cause.  We can partially counter their scaremongering with the presentation and enjoyment of broader theories, promoting a proper respect for observations and scientific method, and for the wonderful ability we have of using them to make more sense of things, and to make more and more progress in industry and agriculture.

(hat-tip for GWPF piece linked to above: Tom Nelson)

More Materials on Climate for the Conscientious Teacher

The Australian Carbon Sense Coalition has published a presentation by H. Leighton Steward which could serve as useful illustrated compendium of arguments against alarm about CO2 in the air.  It is 90 pages, mostly graphical, in a pdf.  Hat-tip: Tom Nelson.

Here is a montage I made of a few of the graphics (each one occupies a page to itself in the original):

I have spotted a few typos so far (I rather crudely corrected one above - see red u for nitrous oxide!), some parts say 'modified' or 'adapted' from source materials,  and some of the information does not have sources given, so some checking would be in order before using it, but overall my impression is hugely favorable.  This looks like a very handy document to have around, and to make use of for projects and illustrations on the classroom wall.  A lot of interesting exercises might follow merely from sharing out a selection of pages and challenging your pupils to check them out to see what further support, or criticism, they can devise or discover from other sources.

The Carbon Coalition encourages widespread use of their materials e.g. from their 'About' page:
'Material on this site is protected by copyright. However we encourage people to copy, print, resend or make links to any article providing the source, including web address, is acknowledged. We would appreciate notification of use.'

They provide more downloadable pdfs here: http://carbon-sense.com/carbon-sense/

Calming the Climate Curriculum

One contributing factor to the astonishing spread of alarm over CO2 and climate may be that most of us have not given much thought to climate other than complaining about bad winters/summers/storms or recalling sunnier times in our childhoods.

So the notion that the climate is changing worldwide, which ought to be as banal an observation as you can get since it has never stopped changing over a great range of scales, can yet come as a bit of a jolt.  And when some at least of the folks in white coats tell us we're causing the change, and that it must be for the worst, we get a further jolt.  And then when the unscrupulous or the merely irresponsible spot an opportunity to scare us for their financial and/or political advantage over 'climate change', then the jolts can arrive thick and fast - from the media, from the eco-activists, from the anti-capitalists, from the fundraising NGOs, from the financiers and investors in carbon credits or in the farming of subsidies for renewables, and from the politically ambitious who spotted the bandwagon in good time to help it along or who were merely swept along by it and all the opportunities it has provided.

One result of this headlong, headstrong stampede based as it is on mere supposition that the extra CO2 must have such a powerful directional effect on climate that we should be acutely alarmed by it, is that educators at all levels have been swept along too.

Many seem to be enjoying the chance to be spreading alarm amongst the young, given the explosion of websites, books, and other media aimed at them.  A common approach is to mention greenhouses - well known as hot and uncomfortable places - or cars parked in the sunlight with all windows closes - and assert that CO2 has the same effect on atmospheric temperatures as the glass has.  Not true of course, but truth is not a key concern where supposition suits so many.

A threatened polar bear pictured on an iceflow may be accompanied by text suggesting that switching off lights, driving less often, and using 'renewable energy' more will save it.  It is not true, of course, that they are under undue threat given that their numbers have generally been increasing in recent years

Another picture might show a high wave crashing against a seafront, covering nearby houses in spray, and be accompanied by dire warnings of dramatic rises in sea level underway, even accelerating.  Not true of course, since the slow ongoing rise of sea levels seems to be paying not the slightest attention to rising CO2 levels, and may even be flattening out in recent years as it has over the past thousands of the bigger picture.

But these untruths are helpful when you are making the case that humans are disrupting a fragile nature, heretofore in balance.  And of course, nature is neither fragile overall nor has it ever been 'in balance'.

No matter, we humans must be a bad lot, our inventions, our achievements in engineering and in food production, our tremendous victories over poverty and starvation, and over the vagaries of a variable climate, are to be decried in so far as they produce CO2.  That gas which does not act to raise temperatures like the glass in a greenhouse does, which does not appear to have ever been a driver of climate - in recent years or over millions of years, and whose recent rises coincide with both rising and declining temperatures, and with essentially business as usual as far as other weather or weather-related phenomena such as ice extents are concerned.

The madness over CO2 will surely continue to subside, and as it does, a calmer curriculum on climate will have to be found.  What might it look like?  Here are three items which caught my attention recently and which may be just the sort of thing that could inspire sensible and informative teaching on climate topics.

Item 1.  A simple display to help put CO2 in its proper context as one of many factors influencing climate in interacting ways:

 This diagram is due to Kiminori Itoh who used it in a guest post on the blog Climate Science: Robert Pielke Sr.  Such a diagram is not too complex.  It uses the idea of rivers flowing into each other, with many sources, and more than one outlet - to show more effects than just temperature changes.  CO2 can thus be seen as just one of several contributions, and we can readily imagine there may be many more.  Just as we could imagine a great river system as having innumerable sources or springs.  Feedbacks are not shown, but could be mentioned to appropriate classes by noting, for example, what regional climate changes could lead to more aerosols, or what temperature changes might produce more or less vegetation, or more or less de-gassing of CO2 from the sea.  Contrast the more complex river system with the one above it - which is of course the nearer analogy to the worldview pushed by the leaders of the IPCC.

Item 2.  Many, I'm tempted to say all, of those scientists most agitated by CO2 do not possess much by way of the gravitas associated with great achievement in physics.  Many are more like geographers than scientists in so far as they are documenting and describing and modelling what they believe is taking place rather than deriving results from hard theories which they rigorously test with new data.  There is a video showing an easy-paced talk on climate given in 2010 by a very accomplished physicist, William Happer of Princeton University, reported by Luboš Motl who also provides a summary of the contents.  As Motl notes, it is instructive to listen to the list of achievements of Prof Happer (given by the lady introducing his presentation) and wonder how they might compare with those of physicists on the agitated side of the CO2 debate!

 The video can be downloaded from here: http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/physicscoll/ucb/video/col.streaming.11-01-10.mov  (I watched it using Quicktime, but to get the soundtrack to work properly when Happer comes on,  I had to mess around a bit.  In the end, I got it to work by adjusting the 'Wave Balance' to the left - a control option which appeared via 'Volume Control' in Windows XP).

Motl is himself a theoretical physicist, a subject about which he blogs as well as on climate.  His views are often expressed quite strongly.  Here is the last paragraph of his above-linked post on this video:
'It's too bad that all the arrogant yet uninformed folks who want to talk about the climate – all these Gores, Hansens, Manns, and similar jerks – can't be forced to learn the basic physics of these physical systems, at least at the level of Prof Happer's talk.'

I commend the presentation because it brings back memories for me of the very high quality of professors I was lucky enough to listen to many decades ago, and who would all, I like to think, have had no truck with the facile and irresponsible alarmism of so many of their counterparts today.  The presentation is calm, the discussion session frank and amiable, and there are no grandiose appeals to authority  nor scaremongering.  It is not perfect - stronger answers would be possible for some of the questions and points made, but it is honest and straightforward.  I think there are videos of Prof Lindzen which convey the same sense and sensibility, and these too could be used to help inspire better materials for schools.

Item 3.  This is a report of a school field trip led by staff from a school in Maryland, USA.  I only saw this today, and am relying on a single report re-published here. (hat-tip Tom Nelson)

The report is on one of the many 'climate alarm' websites (e.g. 'The climate crisis isn’t just some far-off threat: it’s a clear and present danger. Galvanized by this sobering reality, Climate Central has created a unique form of public outreach, informed by our own original research, targeted to local markets, and designed to make Americans feel the power of what’s really happening to the climate. Our goal is not just to inform people, but to inspire them to support the actions needed to keep the crisis from getting worse.) so I hope I am not being misled by it, but I found it encouraging.

The teachers involved do not seem to have set out to scare their pupils, and have also made a point of discussing positive and negative effects of particular changes in climate, or policy options such as oil pipelines.  They also looked at real data, asking 'how do we know?' and 'where is the proof?'  Finally, they were out in the field, not in a laboratory, not in a computer room, not watching a DVD, and doing measurements of their own.  I like to think the teachers will have helped the children feel we are not feeble victims of climate, but rather we can do and have done many things to protect ourselves from its variations.  A sensible level of confidence and optimism about the future would be good results from a calm curriculum on climate.

Note added later on 22nd May: for some recent pictures of more alarming teaching of climate in schools, see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/05/teaching-climate-change.html 
There are those so imbued with the righteousness of their stance that they will do anything they can to get children on board their bandwagon:

That's a schoolteacher in the picture, setting out to scare children about methane. Disgraceful.

(hat-tip: Climate Etc)

Child-Scaring Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) teaches children about climate with Wind Turbine Manufacturer Bayer

Link to source

In Australia, the CSIRO, already notorious for scaring children, has teamed up with Bayer, a manufacturer of wind-turbine blades, to teach young children about climate change.  Let us hope they toned things down from what was reported in the Canberra Times a few weeks ago.


The Wake Up 2 The Lies blog has more information on this new initiative, which was reported in the Mercury yesterday.

Link to source

Not much information has been provided on the content of the teaching in Tasmania, but past reports of the deliberate scaring of children in Australian schools by government agencies do not bode well.  Their own Chief Climate Commissioner, Tim Flannery has managed to scare himself witless about climate, forecasting doom and drought at every opportunity.  Well maybe not so much on the drought these days since heavy rain fell on that particular parade of his gross irresponsibility.

Australian Climate Madness has also commented on reports on scaring children in Australia

Several more links relevant to Australia can be found on the Pages here (esp.Climate-curricula, Climate-anxiety, Climate-sites).






Last year, the Australian Herald Sun newspaper ran this story:

Extract:"To put all of this before our children . . . is one of the most appalling things we can do to children."

You can say that again.  And no doubt we shall have to.  Again and again and again. Until this poison is removed from schools across the world.


Note added 24 April 2013.  Rotten is as rotten does.  Some evidence of a rotten culture at CSIRO is given here: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/technology/sci-tech/csiro-accused-of-more-shabby-tactics-20130413-2hs51.html
and here: http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/04/14/1437234/corruption-allegations-rock-australias-csiro

Climate science in Australia schools: 'Not teaching, but abusing'

Andrew Bolt reports from Australia(article shown below):

'Geophysicist Michael Asten is astonished that climate science is taught in schools as an exercise in groupthink, with sceptics not disproved but abused:

  Climate Nonconformist, who is also in Australia, adds some recollections from his own school days:

'I remember my year nine science text-book doing a similar thing with the moon landing conspiracies; giving the conspiratorial argument alongside a scientific reply. The difference is that - to my knowledge anyway – there is no scientific reply by the conspiracy theorists. This hatchet job on Ashby makes a mockery of science by excluding one side of the argument and forgetting that science is defined by debate. Students are being sucked into this fallacy that science is unquestionably authoritative and one-sided.
In my Environmental Science classes, only one lesson was devoted to the other side of the debate. Our teacher merely informed us that there was another point of view, and showed us a video featuring Andrew Bolt. A token gesture. The rest of the course was dedicated to renewable energy, greenhouse theory, energy efficiency and alarmist outcomes, while ignoring the key parts of the debate; namely the hockey stick controversy and climate sensitivity.
We were uncritically shown Al Gore’s now debunked movie, forcing us to sit through the hysteria and self-adulation the former vice-president engaged in. We were told that the film contained errors, but none were specified. This is unfortunate, considering the deception surrounding the Vostok ice cores. For high school students, it is difficult to critically evaluate what appears to be irrefutable evidence of man-made global warming, especially when we’re dissuaded from questioning “the science”. The concept of causation did not occur to anyone. For us, this was proof.
The precautionary principle was taught as though it was scientific idea, rather than as the flawed approach to policy-making and environmental propaganda that it is. We learned about the potential beneficial uses of organisms, something which I now realise provides environmentalists the excuse the preserve every possible species, justified on the off-chance they might hold the cure to cancer or something like that. Together, these two ideas provide the green crowd with a potent tool to prevent industrial development. Of course, I couldn’t see through that at the time.
On the plus side, I did have one science teacher who was dismissive of global warming alarmism.'

The comments on the Andrew Bolt article are overwhelmingly from readers outraged by this reported abuse of education, and/or adding experiences of their own or their children's.  For example here is a selection scattered over the three (currently) pages of readers' comments:

Sadly this travesty has been endorsed by a large swag of science education gatekeepers in a wide range of education jurisdictions including the national curriculum.

Of course, Australia is now a post-modern post-scientific culture as witnessed by the failure to sack Tim Flannery over his blatant failure to accept responsibility for misleading statements about AGW.

Fair Go (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (08:26am)

My son encountered this first-hand when his class had to study ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. When he challenged some of the claims made in the film, he was threatened with detention.
When he produced a printout of British High Court judge Mr. Justice Burton’s ruling on scientific errors and political activism in the film, it was thrown in the bin.

Clownfish of Launceston (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (09:39am)

When you have children leaving school who are barely literate, who can hardly speak English but some sort of modern pidgin and who couldn’t care less about school in general we see that the educators have done their work well. You can’t control people who can think.
Where is the Victorian Premier in all this? Is he unaware of what his education department is incorporating into the syllabus? Where does the responsibility for factual science being taught lie? This is an outrageous highjacking of the education system. In future years those same children will be wearing the consequences of this scam against the people and will know who to thank for it.

mags of Queensland (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (10:01am) 

Indoctrination - designed to close minds down and instill “unquestionable beliefs”.
This is simply an abuse of children.

ExWarmist (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (10:03am)

Having just finished high school and studied physics, i have to say this is pretty spot on, sceptics in my class were told either “you’re wrong” or “the argument isn’t so much whether we can afford to believe it but can we afford not to?” in other words this might be totally wrong but we should believe it so the world might not end. Sigh.

Pat of Sydney (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (12:23pm) 

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Poor old Australia, once known as a land of free and independently minded people.  I hope they are mostly still like that, and will start clearing the poison out of their climate curricula just as soon as they can get rid of their current government. 

 (hat-tip: Tom Nelson)


Note added 10 May 2012.  That article by Michael Asten on climate education is available in full here: http://www.climaterealists.org.nz/node/885  Extract: 'The interested student, however, will discover material that may illustrate larger problems in science education. Perusal of the resources for secondary school physics students provided by the Australian Institute of Physics (Vic) Education Committee suggests some of our science educators have indeed lost the ability to teach objective and open-minded scientific inquiry.'

Climate Education in High Schools - What it could be like

I've been musing for a while on what decent curricula on climate might contain for schools, at both primary and secondary (high school) levels.  I have not got much further than thinking that a glass of water would make a good starting point for discussion time at some stage, linking as it does to the water cycle which is such an important part of the dynamics of the troposphere.  The water cycle would be a big feature of my ideal curricula, and could be treated at simple, familiar levels of observing clouds and precipitation, and later at a more advanced level looking at energy transfers and the major features of circulation in the troposphere.  The exciting theories of Svensmark and Shaviv would also permit a link between the glass of water and the cosmos itself.  Speculating about how events in our galaxy, and within the solar system, could affect the rate of formation of water droplets in the air, and hence clouds, would provide a gloriously grand perspective that any teacher would surely enjoy presenting on.

Anyway, I have just stumbled on a site today which is much further down that road than I am.  Here is a video by one of the site owners, Kristie Pelletier:

Link to video

 They have developed curricula materials, and publish a DVD containing materials divided into three lessons:

Lesson 1 15:37 minutes 
Overview of emerging science, past climate, temperature data errors, CO₂/ temperature relationships, and the huge effect of water vapor and clouds. View  6 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)
Lesson 2 17:39 minutes
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate model CO₂ warming fingerprint does not match reality, violent storms and hurricanes. View  8 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)
Lesson 3 17:48 minutes
Melting icecaps & flooding, the role of the sun, the importance of CO2 for life and other benefits, and the true nature of science. View  8 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)

I find this site to be very encouraging, and I look forward to studying it more carefully.  In the meantime, let us rejoice that it exists, and that they have made much progress in producing materials for schools.  There will surely be an increasing demand for enlightened materials on climate as more and more people come to realise the weak foundations, and gross irresponsibility, of the scaremongering proposed, and used, in other materials on and around climate shown to their children.  Well done Kristie Pelletier and Michael Coffman, creators of the Global Warming Classroom !

Have Calm Not Alarm in your Climate Classroom

Josh shows the way pictorially for those who would rather see a calm treatment of climate in their classroom instead of one intended to create alarm.

CartoonsbyJosh

More background here at Bishop Hill.

Climate Teachers – how do you deal with the fact that there is no evidence that dangerous global warming is occurring?

Photobucket

'...our analysis finds no evidence that dangerous global warming is occurring; nor that human carbon dioxide emissions will cause such warming in future; nor that recent Australian climate-related events lay outside normal climate variability; nor that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have any discernible impact on future climate.'

That statement above seems clear and explicit enough to be contradicted very easily if the science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is truly settled.  But it won't be contradicted because it can't be: there are no observations of temperatures, of storms, of ice, or sea level, etc etc that show cause for alarm over anything extraordinary happening.  [The quote comes from a recently published report,  linked to below, from climate experts in Australia (hat-tip Greenie Watch).]

Given that observations are not there to show dangerous global warming is occurring, what is causing all the fuss?

All we have are computer models programmed to give each additional bit of CO2 a warming contribution at the surface of the Earth, and theory which says that that by itself should produce effects that we would have the greatest difficulty in discerning against the many other sources of variation in the climate system.  

For example, a doubling of CO2 levels might produce no more than 1C increase in the computed global mean temperature, and quite plausibly 0.5C or less.  No cause for alarm there.  In fact, such a modest warming would be overwhelmingly beneficial given what we know of relatively warm spells in the past such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Climate Optimum. 

Now such good news, funnily enough, does not bring with it a need for increased state power, nor more power for the UN, nor more funds for what used to be primarily wildlife conservation or humanitarian organisations, nor more clients for crisis consultancies, nor more platforms for political extremists bent on destruction.

Imagine that!  No starvation caused by using farmland to make fuel  for vehicles instead of food for people, no scary pictures of flooded cities to scare us, no children being told that polar bears will die unless they make their parents turn down the heating, no crippling of industrial development by discouraging conventional power stations around the world, no energy cost increases due to subsidies for renewables and no damaging of the environment to make way for them, make them, and live with them.  And no more jobsworths and consultants going on and on about that bizarre notion, the carbon footprint..

So, given that the actual weather, ice, and sea-level records show nothing extraordinary about the last 50 years or so, and given that the basic theory is for a modest increase in temperatures due to more CO2, where is the problem?

It lies inside those computer models.  They display a positive feedback which amplifies the effect of the CO2 to produce far larger temperature increases.  Far larger than have been observed so far - not least since we have seen no overall increase at all over the last 10 to 15 years, let alone any rising trend in line with model projections.

These models have some practical value in extrapolating from and interpolating amongst observations of existing weather systems over a few days, not least because they can be frequently re-adjusted as new observations come in.  That is weather.  On climate, they have had no practical value whatsoever, and may be so misleading that we'd actually be better off without them.

Even their owners and operators admit they are not fit for predictive purposes, and can only be used to provide illustrations of what might possibly happen under various assumptions.  Illustrations which have failed to reproduce important features of past climates when used retrospectively.  They perform poorly on temperatures, and worse on everything else such as precipitation.  You would not want to bet your shirt button on them, let alone your entire way of life.

But let us go back to Australia, and this recent report (pdf) by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks & William Kininmonth published by Quadrant Online.  It is entitled

What's wrong with the science?

They wrote it in respose to some recent reports by government agencies, apparently engaging in a PR campaign to try to increase public alarm over climate.  They write:

Is there any substantive new science in the science agency reports? No.

Is there any merit in the arguments for dangerous warming that are advanced in the reports? No.

Did any mainstream media organisation question the recommendations in the reports in their mainline news reporting? No.

Was there any need for, or purpose served, by the reports? Yes, but only the political one of attempting to give credence to the impending collection of carbon dioxide tax.

They have a government down there whose lies over a carbon tax have been widely exposed, and whose decisions linked to alarmist projections about droughts and rising sea levels have been widely resented for the diversion of resources to build desalination plants and otherwise mismanage water resources.  They have also had green-inspired fiascos over home insulation, and bushfires, both of which also led to tragedies.  A recent election in Queensland saw votes for the party in power plummet very dramatically indeed, and since they seem suicidally committed to the green dogma over climate, they would surely grasp at any PR straws that were presented to them.  

And straw is all they got.  See the report for more details of this, but also for a useful overview of the case against alarm over airborne CO2 as the authors shred, point by point, the shoddy claims being pushed by their government's agencies.  They deal with temperatures, precipitation, sea levels, greenhouse gases, and ocean heat content.  For example, on the last topic, they show this plot:

Note the divergence between models and reality -  a very common leitmotif in climate alarmism.

How do teachers cope with this divergence?  What do you say about the scare stories in the textbooks and websites targeting children about climate change, while news comes in of polar bears and penguins doing very well, of glaciers not disappearing on request, of snows also failing to be a thing of the past, of hurricanes not becoming more frequent or intense, of sea level rises not accelerating, and of the great iceaps and sea ice doing nothing untoward, and of course, of temperatures behaving just exactly as if the additional CO2 of the past 15 years has had no discernible effect on them?

Note added 2nd May 2012: Josh (http://cartoonsbyjosh.com) captures it:

 For some background, see: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/2/cartoon-the-cartoon-josh-164.html

A Child’s Epiphany About Eco-Mania

I wanted to be an eco-nut, just like some of my peers

But everything they told me

Fell down around my ears

They said the world is warming, and that is somehow bad

But when I see what cooling does

More heat would make me glad

They said our fuel is critically low, as you must realise

But all that is clearly based

On many layers of lies

They said more CO2 means more Y, where Y is something scary

Then Mother Nature ups and acts

In ways that are contrary

I used to fret on polar bears, on penguins, and on pack-ice

But now I see how they all thrive

As if my fears were groundless

It’s fracking this and fracking that, will frack us up forever

Our taps will ignite, ground tremors give fright

But reality might differ

My radical chums said religion is wrong, a terrible miasma

But their high priests from computer suites come

And preach their stuff as dogma

Beware the warmth, beware the fire, beware the fuel of fossils

Look at this chart, look at this plot

And tremble ye poor mortals

But I don’t like to shiver, from fear or freezing snow

And as for turning eco-nut

I’ll tell them where to go.

I’ll tell them where to put it, their doom-besotted drivel

I happen to think we humans

Are actually quite special

We deal with things, we find new ways, we add to our great progress

We thrive when challenged but get annoyed

When fed that eco-nonsense

Climate Authorities: they don't need evidence - the debate is over, the science is settled, you must not question them, you are not worthy.

CartoonsByJosh.com

 As showing now on Bishop Hill and on WUWT.

 Greenie Watch compiler J J Ray with a relevant example:

'Warmists normally defend their beliefs by saying "The experts tell us" and speak of "The science" but never mention any actual scientific facts. But surely "The experts" themselves have some facts to put forward? Nope. I reproduce below the full screed put out by none other than "hockeystick" Mann in defense of his position. It too is full of accusations and complaints but references not one scientific fact. He claims that the globe is warming etc. but gives no evidence for that assertion. He can't, of course -- because it isn't. So it's no surprise that he doesn't even give a link to any report that would support his assertions.': http://e360.yale.edu/feature/climate_scientist_michael_mann_fights_back_against_skeptics/2516/

Some alarmist apologists have even argued that the 49 ex-NASA scientists, astronauts, and adminstrators were not qualified to speak out, as they did in their recent letter, about the work of climate alarmists still employed by NASA.  Here is an example in response to a comment on a blogpost: 

'With all due respect, the signers of the letter are not intellectually qualified to critique the work of James Hansen and his colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the rest of the leading climate scientists.'

  

Of course, if you believe  'the debate is over' and 'the science is settled', then 'you must not question them' is not a big stretch in either moral or intellectual terms.

Three cheers for Josh!  He has their number and no mistake.

Climate Education: why are they lying to our children and terrorising them?

 Herbert London's book 'Why Are They Lying to Our Children' is one I have wanted to post about for a while.  I just came across this article from the Australian site News Weekly of July 2011, and I reproduce an extract from it below.  It gives London's book a prominent mention, and some quotes from it.

The book was published in 1984 (of all years!, Orwell would be horrified at how his book has been used by some alarmists as a manual rather than as a warning).

The Australian writer below observes that 'things have only got worse in terms of Green alarmism' since then.

Extract

EDUCATION: Greens terrorising our children

by Bill Muehlenberg

News Weekly, July 23, 2011

The Greens thrive on alarmist scenarios, hoping to terrorise people — even children — into giving up basic freedoms in the interests of supposedly saving planet earth. They have been doing this for decades now. Indeed, these Chicken Little activists have perfected the art of fear-mongering.

Today it is hyped-up alarmism over global warming. How quickly we forget, however, that a major campaign to convince us that global cooling was underway took place just a few short decades ago. Then there were nuclear winter panic campaigns, world starvation scenarios, and so on.

There are always scary gloom-and-doom scenarios being played out by Green activists who want to terrorise us into their agenda — an agenda which is usually about global governance (as Australian Greens leader Bob Brown reminded us again recently) and the diminution of human freedoms, if not of humans themselves.

I have written before about how many of these radical Green leaders want to cull humans, radically shut down economic growth and turn the West into a stone-age civilisation. Others have documented such social engineering gloom-and-doomism.

In 1984, Herbert London wrote a book entitled, Why Are They Lying To Our Children? In it he looked at how the classroom has become a battleground, as our children are being intimidated and threatened with a lot of Green agitprop.

He began his book in this way: “War, famine, environmental disasters, material shortages, and a declining quality of life — that’s what school children are being taught to expect in their futures. What these grim and mostly inaccurate forecasts are doing to their lives I don’t know for sure. But I do know this: Our children are absorbing excessively negative misinformation.”

It is not just all the gloom and doom that is harming our children. It is what they are not being told which is also so worrying.

London lists important facts left out of the school curriculum, “for example, that the wealthy nations play a constructive role in furthering world economics; that rapid economic growth has changed many non-Western nations from poor to middle-income status; that most resources are more accessible and less costly today than ever before; and that new forms of energy have been created. All these forms of progress are likely to proceed even more effectively in the future.”

In the more than 25 years since London penned those words, things have only got worse in terms of Green alarmism. They are just as anti-free market, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-freedom as ever, and they will latch onto any new scare-mongering pretext to push their agendas.

They really are anti-growth Luddites who want to take us back to a standard of living from which most of us have long ago gratefully escaped. And the developing nations, who want to catch up to the prosperous and free West, are also going to suffer from the Green panic-merchants.

But it is our children I especially fear for. Just as London reported on how our youngsters were being deliberately targeted back in the 1980s, it is the same today, if not worse. Consider a recent headline from a Sydney newspaper: “Australian kids are living in climate of fear”.

The article goes on to say: “Primary school children are being terrified by lessons claiming climate change will bring ‘death, injury and destruction’ to the world unless they take action.'

Emboldening of last sentence by me.  See the original (linked to in title above) for the rest of the article, and for more references.

Note added 16 Novermber 2012
Just seen this blog post from Samizdate which was in response to the above post and which contains some useful observations as well as some comments from others:  http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2012/04/environmentalis_1.html

Another 'Climate Authority' with a badly blotted copybook: Nature magazine caught campaigning again

How many teachers teach what they teach on climate because their bosses tell them to stick to the curricula?  How many climate curricula creators create what they create because government tells them to?  How many governments insist on what they insist upon on climate because their trusted authorities tell them to?  Authorities such as Nature magazine.

A distinguished climatologist, Dr Pat Michaels, has just published this on WUWT (I added the emboldening at the end):

'This paper marks, in my opinion, the death of credibility for Nature on global warming. The first symptoms showed up in 1996 when they published a paper by Ben Santer and 13 coauthors that was so obviously cherry-picked that it took me and my colleagues about three hours to completely destroy it. Things have gone steadily downhill, from a crazy screamer by Jonathan Patz on mortality from warming that didn’t even bother to examine whether fossil fuels were associated with extended lifespan (they are), to the recent Shakun debacle. But the latest whopper, by Ben Booth and his colleagues at the UK Met Office indeed signals the death of Nature in this field.'

Poor teachers. You are at the delivery end of the chain of intellectual corruption, or at best intellectual incompetence in which publications like Nature play their part.  But let us reserve our greatest pity and compassion for your pupils.

Nature is notorious in enlightened circles for publishing the hockey-stick contrivance by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes in 1998, and a follow-up by Mann in 1999, without following their requirement that authors should make data available on request.  (Further double-dealing by Nature in this area is described in Chapter 5 of Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion).  The hockey-stick was a contrivance exploited to the full by the IPCC in AR3 a couple of years later.  Now we are a year or two away from AR5, and already authors have been rushing into print with candidate contrivances for similar treatment by the IPCC machine.  The latest is a peculiar (apparently one of the 'our computer says' kind) paper by UK Met Office researchers declaring that an Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (MDO) whose cycles and surges have been recorded for over 4,000 years in ice-cores, is due to 'dirty pollution and volcanoes' - that word 'dirty' being there presumably to distinguish it from the 'non-dirty' pollution, as the IPCC would see it, of CO2!  Now volcanoes by themselves would not be of any use to the IPCC, but 'dirty pollution'!  What a gift for the PR guys and gals.  No wonder the Met Office issued a press release about it.  No wonder Nature did an editorial around it.  And no wonder that calmer, more independent scientists are looking at it askance.  Another extract from the post by Michaels (emboldening mine):

For instance, Judith Curry had this to say at her blog, “Climate Etc.,”

Color me unconvinced by this paper. I suspect that if this paper had been submitted to J. Geophysical Research or J. Climate, it would have been rejected. In any event, a much more lengthy manuscript would have been submitted with more details, allowing people to more critically assess this. By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science.

Sic transit another 'authority'!  Or, given the harm that climate alarm campaigners are doing to the world, should I say 'sick'?

Note added 16 April 2012.  A German meteorologist has just expressed his contempt for Nature magazine.  For example 'With climate models one can bring about the end of the world, and at the same time provide a little fun in an otherwise staid science scene. You can get your kicks out of it, generate lots of research funding, and keep the world in suspense through the media. This is what two science teams in the USA have done, and have published their fun-and-games in ‘Nature’, a publication that has long since stopped being a scientific journal and has become a comic book for climate junkies' 
More here: http://notrickszone.com/2012/04/16/veteran-german-meteorologist-nature-journal-a-comic-book-climate-modeling-a-playground/

Note added 18 April 2012.  The investigative journalist Christopher Booker looks with dismay at the collaboration of Nature in climate alarmism over the years: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/9204223/In-the-eyes-of-Nature-warming-cant-be-natural.html.  (hat-tip: Climate Science)

Note added 04 May 2012.   The oceanographer Carl Wunsch at Oxford is reported on Bishop Hill as saying 'He seemed faintly disgusted by the lengths to which some climate scientists will go to get published in Nature or Science with the attendant publicity, media appearances and so on.  He sometimes found it difficult to tell which of the Daily Mail and Nature was the peer-reviewed journal and which the tabloid.  Nonetheless, he said, his colleagues  reassure him that just because something appears in Nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.'

Note added 18 June 2012.   More evidence of the moral and intellectual degradation of Nature:
 'Here is an extraordinary example of the depths to which academic journals are willing to go in support of the great green cause.
Count how many times Bain et al use the "d-word" in their paper on attitudes towards AGW - it certainly looks as if the authors intended to generate offence and controversy rather than truth and light. Hilariously, the authors are writing about how to convert people to the green cause!
I think it's pretty interesting that the editors have decided to give their backing to this kind of thing. One almost wonders if they are struggling for readers and need to try to get some attention. Of course it has long been clear that Nature has been so corrupted by greenery as to put a question mark over all of its output. This latest paper is just confirmation of what we already knew.'
 http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/6/18/potty-mouthed-nature.html

Intergovernmental Pushers of a CO2 Crisis - the IPCC - in disgrace again over 'profoundly inaccurate' Press Release

You cannot trust the IPCC

How many teachers teach what they teach on climate because their bosses tell them to stick to the curricula?  How many climate curricula creators create what they create because government tells them to?  How many governments insist on what they insist upon on climate because their trusted authorities tell them to?  Authorities such as the IPCC

Evidence mounts but no arrests yet at the IPCC

Donna Laframboise has already exposed severe shortcomings in the IPCC in her book,  The Delinquent Teenager, and now she has published a post highlighting yet more egregious actions which have recently been exposed by Roger Pielke Jr, and an inaction, by that malignant organisation.  Poor teachers. You are at the delivery end of the chain of intellectual corruption that begins in places like the IPCC thanks to a few rogue but influential leaders there.  But let us reserve our greatest pity and compassion for your pupils.

Here is a brief extract from the new post (linked to in the title below):

Disasters and the IPCC 

April 10, 2012 at 3:19 pm

Will a load-of-nonsense IPCC press release be corrected?

A little more than two years ago the UK’s Sunday Times ran a headline that read: UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. (A screenshot may be seen here. The full text of the article is backed up here.)

The very next day, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a press release. It accused the newspaper of running “a misleading and baseless story” which it further characterized as “a baseless attack” on a section of its 2007 report.'

See the above-linked posts by Donna and Roger for the rest of this story.  In a nutshell:

1. The IPCC lied in that press release three times:
           1.1 It claimed that the relevant 2007 report was accurate when it was demonstrably not
           1.2 It claimed that the IPCC's procedures had been followed when they demonstrably had not
           1.3 It claimed that an unpublished paper said essentially the opposite of what it was found to contain when it was eventually published
2.  The IPCC included, in the 2007 version of its relevant materials (but not in the 2006, nor in the 2008) a graph which seems to have been an invention of IPCC activists and which cannot be found anywhere in the relevant scientific literature.

And the inaction?  The IPCC has not yet apologised, nor retracted the seriously misleading statements.  As Pielke says in his post :

'The IPCC 26 January 2010 press release still sits uncorrected on the IPCC website (here in PDF). If the IPCC has a commitment to getting things right, shouldn't it correct "baseless and misleading" claims that it has made?  '

The harm and loss which the scaremongering over CO2 has already brought to the world is still accumulating and may well do so for many years yet while we wait for politicians to catch up with the reality of what is known about the minor role of this trace gas in the climate system.  They may well wish to direct some of their subsequent anger to the shoddy and rule-breaking way in which the IPCC has been run and directed.  Given the very high stakes involved and the degree of trust accorded it by ill-informed governments, that really does border on the criminal.