A new-to-me 'youth shock brigade' called iMatter has been formed to encourage young victims of climate-scaremongering to take to the streets on or around the 8th of May this year (hat-tip: Tom Nelson). In their own, somewhat inelegant, words:
'WE are a generation inspired by the need itself to step up and be the change we want to see. iMatter began as a simple video, created by a 13 year old, that covered the problems, consequences and solutions of climate change in like a minute. And now it's a global campaign meant to unite the voices of a generation on the most urgent issue of our time. The non profit project of Earth Island Institute, called Kids vs Global Warming, has pulled together a bunch of amazing partners to give youth a platform to raise their voices so loud they cannot be ignored.'
I think they'd all be better off paying more attention in their English classes, and generally enjoying themselves as perhaps the most fortunate generation ever to appear on the planet so far. The huge technological improvements of the past few hundred years have given them so much, and they could set out to build upon that and contribute to the ongoing improvements in just about anything you care to mention. Instead they are being told to be scared about the future, to cut down on energy use, and generally be disrespectful about all that has been achieved to date. They are frightened victims of an indoctrination campaign, which includes facile nonsense such as this:
' It's not much of a secret that our planet is messed up. We're facing a long list of problems, and most of them are caused by by one simple thing: the burning of fossil fuels.
The most urgent problem is climate change, caused by our out of control addiction to fossil fuels. When we burn fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas, we emit all this extra carbon dioxide, CO2, into the atmosphere, which messes up the balance of the atmosphere.
Scientists that dedicate their entire lives to studying this, have made it clear: to avert the worst effects of climate change, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere need to be at 350 parts per million (ppm). Right now we are at 391ppm. If we keep burning at the rate we are now, we will be at 500ppm by 2050. This would make earth a completely different planet, uninhabitable for most species. We can't let that happen.'
Let us lightly Fisk this paragraph by paragraph:
Paragraph 1. In most respects, things are improving. As for ‘most’ of our problems being caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the reverse is the case. Most of our solutions are due to the burning of fossil fuels: widely affordable food supplies, housing, transport, heavy-lifting, and electricity.
Paragraph 2. The urgency of climate change is yet to be made manifest in the climate itself, where rates of change and recent conditions have displayed nothing at all out of the ordinary. If anything, the 20th and 21st centuries have been relatively benign and more favourable to life than the previous few which suffered The Little Ice Age.
Paragraph 3. The remarkable growth of ambient CO2 levels in the 20th and 21st centuries has had no clear impact on any weather phenomena, not least temperatures as these plots illustrate (see charts for raw data sources):
Remember that during these time periods, CO2 levels have shown a marked growth during the last half of the 20th century. Can you see anything remarkable about the temperatures shown above in the last half of the 20th century? Anything at all? Anything to justify frightening the children with? And, if I have any true believers in the Church of AGW still reading this far, I challenge you to find any weather-linked variable that shows any extraordinary behaviour over, say, the last 60 years: it is not hurricanes, nor ice, nor precipitation, nor droughts, nor floods, nor famines, nor even sea-levels. So just what is all the fuss about?
Of course anything in and around the earth’s atmosphere will affect it in some way, and so variation in CO2 levels will have some impact. We know that air near the ground mainly heats up by conduction, and that heating is enhanced by infra-red capturing molecules such as H2O and CO2 and which therefore may speed up the onset of the convection which helps cool the earth by moving heat upwards where it can be more readily lost to space. It may also have a detectable effect of slowing the cooling of the ground during dry and cloudless nights, but this too has proven elusive to confirm. Leading climate scientists admit that there may be an overall 'warming effect' from increasing CO2, but that it is likely to be of the order of 1C per doubling of CO2 levels - an effect that would be hard to confirm reliably since we know that changes of this magnitude have occurred over relevant timescales in the past, and that these must be attributed to other causes, the identity and interactions of which are still not firmly established.
The collective madness of the past 30 years or so centred around airborne CO2 is a remarkable, and a depressing, event. That it will take some time to flush it out of our collective consciousness is due in no small part to those who have chosen to recruit children to support their cause based on climate alarmism, whether it be from political or financial motivations, or both. What it cannot be motivated by is climate data.
Two further examples of 'youth shock brigades' here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/03/canadian-climate-campaigners-how-to.html
