Child Victims of the Climate Scaremongering become Political Pawns

Image: http://www.v5.bearskinrug.co.uk

The day of children demonstrating about the climate scare took place last Friday.  It was sickening evidence of how successfully some people have managed to frighten children, and then recruit them as political pawns.



Tim Ball has a thoughtful article at WUWT about the children's panic, and the propensity to panic in general:
'They are taken in by the false claim that a minute amount of human-produced CO2 is effectively controlling the entire atmospheric system since 1950 and causing environmental collapse through global warming. They don’t know that there is an upper limit to the amount that CO2 can increase temperature. They don’t know that the average level of CO2 over the last 250 million years is 1200 ppm. They don’t know that every projection of temperature by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 was wrong. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, how did so few, fool so many, to such an extent, for so long?
Similar situations occur throughout history of people fooling the world, although this is undoubtedly the largest in terms of its acceptance, impact, and cost. It is tempting to point the finger at the IPCC, but the speed with which the story took hold, spread, and deceived so many people requires better explanation. It likely won’t stop it occurring in the future because it speaks to the nature of human beings and our inordinate and pandemic fear that the sky might fall. However, we might stop the current insanity.'

Mark Morano has put up many links on the children's climate demonstrations.  In one he reports on tweets from the GreenPeace co-founder Patrick Moore:

'Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore condemned the climate school striking kids. “This is a fascist tactic. You are using innocent children for your own ends, and this is child abuse of a psychological nature,” Moore wrote on March 15.

“It’s normally called brainwashing, and you are guilty of participating in it. Mao would be proud,” Moore added.

Moore continued, ripping the adult promoters of the kids protest ...

“You are clearly projecting your own psychosis on the children. Self-loathing is a heavy burden. Why don’t you express it through adults rather than abusing innocents?” Moore asked.'

Geoff Chambers at Climate Scepticism looks for explanations of why the children's demos happened this year, since they could have occurred anytime during the decades of climate panic indoctrination.  He starts off on a much earlier panic involving children:

'It started as a quasi-religious movement, led by a few persuasive individuals who created an atmosphere of mass hysteria which infected the uneducated and intellectuals alike; then it became an intergovernmental affair, organised at the supranational level; but due to international rivalries and the failure to agree on objectives, it petered out. Its final manifestation was as a mass movement of children (egged on by adults) which ended in slavery or death by starvation for most of the participants.

I’m talking about the Crusades of course, of which the Children’s Crusade of 1212 was one of the last manifestations. '

Even in staid old Switzerland they are beginning to notice:
'In the interview Köppel called the climate movement a “political mass trance that that is currently rolling over us” and that children have been prompted to skip school and protest an “infantilization” of politics ... Köppel notes that the planet has warmed “only one degree since 1860” and that this increase is nothing unusual in a historical context.'

In still occasionally blunt-spoken Australia, some are not at all impressed:

'But Dr. Kevin Donnelly, a conservative commentator and senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, claimed the movement was the product of “biased” academics and failings in 'education.

“I’ve just been on the Strike 4 Climate webpage, where you’ve got seven or eight-year-old kids barely out of nappies being involved in a strike,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide.

“A lot of these students are barely literate or numerate.

“I think it’s absurd.” '

It is absurd, but it is also shameful and tragic.  These kids need help.

Paul Homewood has the compassion:
'What on earth are we doing to these youngsters? Do we really want them growing up so indoctrinated and unable to use their own faculties that they cannot even check the facts for themselves? Do we really want them to grow up so neurotic that they are scared of the weather?

Are we happy to see them marching around like a bunch of zombies, full of meaningless slogans about topics that they don’t have the slightest understanding about?

It is a sort of mass hysteria that has unfortunately been all too common during human history. It used to be a matter of burning witches, or human sacrifices by the Aztecs. Now it is demonising CO2.'

Children Scared by the Climate Panic have been ' carefully taught to hate and fear'

The evidence of systematic, widespread eco-scaremongering in schools is now accumulating rapidly with the onset of 'strikes' and 'demonstrations' by children during school hours.  Our GWPF report in 2014 called for an official enquiry into the extent of this abuse in schools in the UK, and it is by now surely obvious to all that our suspicions and concerns were well-founded, and that our illustrative examples were no isolated anomalies.  

Back in 1949, the songwriters of the musical 'South Pacific' were on to this type of problem in a different context (that of racism):

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

This is highly relevant to the climate-alarm based scaremongering in schools around the world today.  This awful phenomenon brings shame on our institutions, and our political leaders, for their generally supine gullibility over decades of absurdly hyped climate alarm.  That is bad enough by itself, but the deliberate recruitment, by frightening them, of young children to be vehicles for putting pressure on their parents, and on politicians is particularly disgraceful.  
Moral outrage is surely the perspective of those of us who find the case for any level of alarm over CO2 to be an unconvincing one.  But even those who believe that some alarm is in order can be appalled by the harm being done to children by eco-zealots of one kind or another.  The statistician and economist Bjorn Lomborg is one such.  Below are some extract from an article he published today with this headline:

'Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises'

Extract 1
'Although the students’ passion is admirable, their focus is misguided. This is largely the fault of adults, who must take responsibility for frightening children unnecessarily about climate change. It is little wonder that kids are scared when grown-ups paint such a horrific picture of global warming.'

Extract 2
'And some prominent politicians, as well as many activists, have taken the latest reportfrom the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to suggest the world will come to an end in just 12 years.

This normalization of extreme language reflects decades of climate-change alarmism. The most famous clip from Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth showed how a 20-foot rise in sea level would flood Florida, New York, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Shanghai – omitting the fact that this was seven times worse than the worst-case scenario.

A separate report that year described how such alarmism “might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn.’” And in 2007, The Washington Post reported that “for many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today.”

When the language stops being scary, it gets ramped up again. British environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, has suggested that the term “climate change” is no longer adequate and should be replaced by “catastrophic climate breakdown.”

Educational materials often don’t help, either. One officially endorsed geography textbook in the United Kingdom suggests that global warming will be worse than famine, plague, or nuclear war, while Education Scotland has recommended The Day After Tomorrow as suitable for climate-change education. This is the film, remember, in which climate change leads to a global freeze and a 50-foot wall of water flooding New York, man-eating wolves escape from the zoo, and – spoiler alert – Queen Elizabeth II’s frozen helicopter falls from the sky.'

Journalists are Taking Notice.  
Here is a headline from the Washington Times online yesterday:

'Motivated or manipulated? Rise of youth climate activism fuels alarm over exploitation'
The article draws attention to the deliberate plotting that has been going on to make use of children:

'Kids are fast becoming the face of the climate change movement as teenagers, ‘tweens and even younger children file lawsuits, stage walkouts and lobby lawmakers. But newly released documents have raised questions about whether the students are being motivated or manipulated.

A cache of emails released Wednesday on Climate Litigation Watch showed that top climate activists at the 2012 La Jolla strategy session sought to involve children in a legal and civil offensive against the fossil fuel industry, which would include worldwide marches from the “youth climate movement.”

Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher C. Horner, who obtained the emails via an open-records request with the University of Oregon, said the presentation contained in the email is more evidence that students have been used as props.

“It turns out that the frenzied street theater of children’s marches and schoolkids’ strikes was laid out behind closed doors years ago, at the organizational meeting of what became a climate litigation industry,” Mr. Horner said in an email.'

See the Washington Times link for more details.  See also this WUWT piece from yesterday.

Candles in the Gloom.Suggestions on how people can, and ought, to help these children, and adults who have been through the education system in the last 30 years or so will be the focus for more posts on this blog in the near future.  But in the meantime here are three good efforts already in place.  The first is a video produced by Friends of Science, and is directly aimed at children involved in the climate protests:

(YouTube video, hat-tip: https://cliscep.com/2019/03/08/educating-greta/#comment-34676 )

The second is from the Climate Conversation Group, and is in the form of an open letter, and is a bit more pointed.  It begins with these words:

'...You currently ignore reason, evidence and science and the global political system is on the brink of a catastrophe. The devastating effects of your ignorance are felt by millions of people around the globe for we are far from reaching a common understanding of the climate. Yet this can change.

Young people make up more than half the global population. Your generation have never known global warming, which has barely occurred since the late 1990s.

Almost nobody is included in the local or global decision-making process. That is the nature of democracy and the reason we elect a representative.

We will no longer tolerate your failure to learn how the world works. We demand you pay attention to science, for there is no evidence of a climate crisis. '

The third, is at that most excellent blog, Climate Scepticism.  Richard Drake has sympathetically raised the prospect of 'Educating Greta', the adolescent who has recently been the focus of much publicity on climate alarm.  Here's a taster:

'Since 17th February I’ve been thinking about how I would educate Greta. Finally, I think I do have something to say. There are four stages in her possible enlightenment for me now:

1. The Guenier
2. The Gates
3. The Drake
4. The Ring

As you’ll see these are going to be sketchy and category-based, to get the precocious youngster to think. And I hope the materials I point to in the process may even stimulate the grey cells of other readers.'

Tomorrow we can expect to accumulate more evidence of the impact of those who want children to be frightened to serve their political ambitions.  It will be neither a pretty nor an edifying sight.  But it is where we are today.


Note added 15 March 2019.  Here is a fourth good effort, re-published today at WUWT.  Also in the form of an open letter:

'By Brian Dingwall, New Zealand

Hi Kids,

Many of you will be marching today, demonstrating for an issue you believe to be very important.

Many years ago, I was young, well informed, and absolutely convinced I knew enough to make good decisions for the future of the world, and couldn’t understand just how obtuse all the oldies were, how they just didn’t know the stuff I had just learned.'

He goes to make many excellent points, e.g.

'The world has many historic consensuses that have turned out to not be so. So far, I don’t mind sharing with you, I have yet to be persuaded.

My background is in science, with a smattering of economics, and statistics and I well understand the case for catastrophic climate change. I find it unconvincing.

As do a raft of well qualified experts in many fields, even Nobel prize winners, and I urge you to find out who they are, and why they have reservations.

There are two sides to this debate, but only one is well resourced, so you have to work a bit harder to find the arguments of the sceptical scientists.'

The cruel arrogance of Unicef traumatising little children in a school.

The Press and Journal has the story:

Parents slam ‘cruel’ disaster drill in Inverness after children are left traumatised

‘Furious parents claim their children were left traumatised following a disaster exercise at an Inverness primary school.

The backlash has forced international charity Unicef – which organised the simulation project and chose Lochardil Primary as one of only two UK schools to take part – to review how it runs the scheme.

During the event, primarily for primary six and seven pupils, organisers told children a month’s worth of rainfall had struck the Highland capital overnight – but the emergency services couldn’t come straight away, so they had to look after themselves and each other.

Photo: The Press & Journal

Classroom furniture was overturned and cordons put in place around the school, with a police officer in attendance and a teacher role playing they had sustained a broken arm.

Parents have hit out after they say they were handed no prior warning in relation to last Friday’s event and questioned the motive, claiming it went to unnecessary lengths for little or no gain.'

Totally Out of Order

One parent of a child at the school is reported as saying: 'There was no need for them not to tell the children that this was a drill. '

Another parent: 'I am really annoyed about the whole thing. I was very confused as to how it could go ahead without parents being told something.  I thought it was quite cruel and all it did was create a quite traumatic and negative experience.  It was totally out of order.'

I hope the parents sue them, and the education authority running that school.

Some Background Notes 

There can be little doubt that 'climate alarmism' motivated this disgraceful event.  Unicef ( and Unesco for that matter), have been building up to this for years now.  On this blog alone, there are several references to their arrogant, aggressive attitudes to using children as political levers for climate alarm campaigns.  

Here's two of the earliest ones:

Exhibit 1: Unicef in 2011

By what stretch of a tortured imagination, can it be found desirable to abandon the basic adult responsibility of protecting the young from being terrified of their future?  The fact that this abandonment is based ultimately on computer models that can be tweaked to produce anything the owners of them want to see [apart from verisimilitude] is even more jaw-dropping.

Here it is happening in Africa.  Read this extract from a press release by UNICEF dated 31 October 2011:

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/11/alarming-children-constructing-climate.html

Exhibit 2: Unicef in 2012

UN Climate Conference: Scare Wits out of Youths. Make Them Neurotic Transformative Climate Doomsday Agents. 

Denmark.  A blogpost describes the extent of politicisation of climate scaremongering in the UN and elsewhere.  Some attention is given to a resource manual produced by UNICEF: '

'Stephanie Hodge, education program specialist for UNICEF, said: “Our current climate change education is “antiquated” and in dire need of renovation. We should be asking What is global citizenship? Climate change education is really about a process of change, about starting transformation through education.” I.e.: it’s also about a restructuring of the children’s brains - brainwashing for the NWO. To help bring about this change and transformation, UNICEF, with help from its sister agency, UNESCO, has come up with a new curriculum guide, entitled, Climate Change and transformation, Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction in the Education Sector: Resource Manual.
The UNICEF Resource Manual opens with this paragraph: “I am the present and the future. A victim of climate change, I live in a region that is constantly affected by disasters. Hurricanes and floods are my reality.”  — Walter, a 12-year-old boy from Belize.

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/p/climate-curricula-school-curricula.html

And the most recent one:

Exhibit 3: Unicef in 2018

‘'This Friday, December 14th, during the Climate Change Conference COP24 in Katowice, young Polish delegates will take part in a discussion panel entitled “No climate for young generation…”, organized by UNICEF Poland and The UNEP/GRID-Warsaw Centre.'

and

‘

The intellectual and/or moral poverty of climate alarm campaigners has been easy to illustrate for years.  This latest COP parade adds to the pile.  As more and more adults are able to tackle, refute, and object to the specious and hyperbolic claims of those seek to raise alarm over our impact on climate variation, it makes sense for campaigners to increase their already substantial attention on children - not only to brainwash them for future use, but also to use them now as levers on political power. 

More details here: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2018/12/cop24-climate-alarm-pr-idea-lets-try.html

Note added 23 Feb 2019.  More newspapers have also reported on this event:
https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/News/Parents-hit-out-over-Inverness-schools-disaster-exercise-21022019.htm
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/scottish-news/3914377/lochardil-primary-inverness-school-fake-disaster-parents/
https://www.highland-news.co.uk/News/Parents-hit-out-over-Inverness-schools-disaster-exercise-21022019.htm
Note added 20 Mar 2019.  The sinister aspects of this event are made more apparent by studying Sowell's steps in brainwashing:

'1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defences, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs - a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form."'