Unfortunately, some misuse science. Some of their intentions, are far from benevolent. They see science as a mechanism for political power and control. There is great danger from those who would use science for political control over us.

How do they do this? They instill, and then continuously magnify, fear. Fear is the most effective instrument of totalitarian control.

Chet Richards, physicist,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/science_in_an_age_of_fear.html

Saturday 18 September 2010

Naive climatology: what chance have the teachers when the Government Science Advisor holds such views?

Naive climatology in high places.  Sir John Beddington, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and Head of the Government Office for Science, has produced some web pages to elaborate his position (http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience).  His covering letter begins thus:




'The science of climate change

'Few areas of science have such profound implications for public policy and society as the study of climate change.
As one consequence, scientists who may have begun their careers in relative backwaters of research now find themselves thrown into the limelight.
Scientific points, and occasional errors, have become the subject of emotive debate and strong media interest. Frequently this has generated more heat than light, with polarised and ill-informed debates across the blogosphere - and indeed at times in the mainstream media.
My aim in developing these web pages is to set out what I believe to be key aspects of the scientific evidence on climate change. In a field so broad the material is necessarily selective, but I hope it presents in a clear and scientific manner an overview of some of the most important areas of study.
The evidence is compelling that climate change is happening, that human activities are the major driver for this and that the future risks are substantial. This evidence includes wide-ranging, long term and robust observations of changes that are taking place, and projections of possible future changes that are based on basic physical laws.'
I want to examine the last paragraph quoted, phrase by phrase:
'The evidence is compelling that climate change is happening'   
         Agreed.  The climate has never stopped changing.  Ever.  This is a platitude, used I suspect to deploy the phrase 'the evidence is compelling' in the hope that the naive reader will assume that applies to human influence as well.  Only the artificially contrived hockey-stick temperature plot showed little change (in temperature) until the 20th century, but it has now been exposed as an artifice involving peculiar choices in a particular statistical analysis of a noisy and complex set of data (1).
'that human activities are the major driver for this'
         No.  There is no compelling evidence for this - it is a theoretical speculation, enshrined as an added effect in computer models of climate, and that is all.  Of course human activities affect both climate and weather - the debate is about how much and in which direction.  Nothing extraordinary has been seen recently in any of the climate measures such as temperatures, ice extents, storm frequencies and intensities, rainfall, sea levels, etc.  The climate remains within bounds, but within these bounds there is a great deal of variation.   Attempts to match CO2 levels with climate measurements have been particularly disappointing for those alarmed by this possibility.  The warming and cooling cycles of the past 150 years or so, superimposed on a slowly rising (beneficially so, I would add) global temperatures (as 'averaged' in various ways - none of which are immune from problems) do not link convincingly to the rising CO2 level as a cause.  The last ten years or so have seen another break in this long-term rise in global 'average' temperature, and it is quite plausible that we are now in a cooling cycle that could last at least another 20 years.  With regard to CO2, there are massive natural fluxes in and out of the air, such that the human-caused emissions (whose magnitude is only crudely guestimated) amount to a few percent (some say c. 3%).  That alone makes the qualifier 'major'  subject to doubt.  Distinguished scientists are on record with their strong reservations e.g. (2), (3).
'and that the future risks are substantial'
             Of course.  Another platitude given that we are probably near the end of a mild inter-glacial period, and if so, a return of permanent ice cover to the UK and elsewhere is inevitable.  There are substantial challenges from cooling, arguably far more challenging than from the more credible end of the range of warming projections promoted by the IPCC.  The response by some to the threat of warming has been to call for a crippling of our primary sources of reliable energy - coal, gas, oil, and even nuclear, and for a burden of new taxes to be added to other industries. This kind of self-harm does not seem a sensible thing to do when in fact more energy means more scope for dealing with climate challenges, as does more economic growth, not least in the poorer countries.

'This evidence includes wide-ranging, long term and robust observations of changes that are taking place,'
            This is presumably referring to rising CO2 levels.  Or is it another attempt to piggy-back on ordinary climate variation in order to bolster a weak case?  There is evidence that rising temperatures cause increases in atmospheric CO2 on short and on geological timescales, the very reverse of the IPCC position, e.g. (4).

'and projections of possible future changes that are based on basic physical laws.'
              Not exactly.  This would have been more accurate: 'based on deliberately set parameters in global climate models whose own developers admit are not fit for making predictions'.  Hence the term 'projections'.  


The physical laws bit deserves further elucidation.  I think the alarmists have now conceded that the optical properties of glass (specifically the ability to transmit visible light far more readily than infra-red) are not important for real greenhouses getting hot - their high temperatures are due to the dramatic reduction in mixing with outside air, and not from any 'trapping of infra-red'.  How many school textbooks recognise this?  It was established by experiment about 100 years ago.  


The idea that just adding more CO2 must mean higher temperatures is also naive.  Physicists, notably in Germany (5) (6), and from Hungary (7) and Russia (8), are arguing that if anything, it could lead to a small cooling (due to slightly increasing the density of air, and due to increasing the radiation of infrared into space higher up in the atmosphere).  There are other arguments, in particular the saturation effect, the logarithmic rather than linear response of the radiative effect of CO2 in a chamber of gas - so providing less thermal impact for each additional ppm of CO2 (9), and a broad one of negative feedback stability that is, I think, a bit more plausible than any positive feedback.  Core features of the 'greenhouse effect' modeling in the atmosphere have also been challenged (10), (11).  Here is an example of a scientifically sceptical overview of the alarmist approach to climate science: (12).



The statements and position adopted by Professor Beddington are surely going to be influential.  Any education authority or teacher wishing to take a broader, dare I say 'more inclusive', view of climate has to be ready to challenge such authority, and its ex-cathedra announcements.  What are the chances of that happening soon?  Low I guess, although I am convinced that it will happen eventually, as and when sound science, observation, and reasoning push speculative computer models back to where they belong - which is hidden away from the public gaze and from vulnerable and/or opportunistic politicians and environment campaigners.
References
(10) http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0883  (link to a paper by Kramm and Dlugi)
(12) Overview of the case for human-caused warming being worthy of alarm: http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/  

Tuesday 14 September 2010

'...pint-size eco-spy in every home ....a library full of green tracts in every school'

Heartfelt essay by Rob Lyons on the amoral methods of Greenpeace, trying a tack on pension funds and intent on exploiting children by scaring them to scare their parents:


'This fomenting of division between parents and children is bad enough, but it is also a desperate waste of the idealism of youth. Young people may see the world in black-and-white rather than shades of grey, but that energy and desire just to go out and bulldoze through the conservatism of mum and dad can be an extremely useful way of stirring society up and encouraging change. But green politics takes that idealism and cynically exploits it for the most misanthropic ends. Whether it’s pensions, polar bears or children in peril, green campaigners demand that we should have a conscience about what we’re doing to the planet – but they don’t seem to have much in the way of a conscience when it comes to scaring adults or manipulating children.'

Monday 6 September 2010

Why would you believe this? (8 of 8): 'And so we believe as adults we have a duty to change the world for them'

The final phrase of the statement of position published on the now-defunct website for 'Schools' Low Carbon Day'.  This statement was the justification for their alarmism about climate, and their wish to alarm children in turn.  I regard the phrase with considerable foreboding:

 'And so we believe as adults we have a duty to change the world for them.'

We have seen that there is no scientific nor observational justification for their alarmism about climate.  
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-would-you-believe-this-1-of-8-few.html
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-would-you-believe-this-2-of-8.html
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-would-you-believe-this-5-of-8.html
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-would-you-believe-this-6-of-8-truth.html

We have seen they will not hesitate to frighten children to win them to their cause.
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-would-you-believe-this-3-of-8.html
http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-would-you-believe-this-4-of-8-and.html

We have seen that they are willing to manipulate children into political and economic activity (not least pressuring their families to sign up for so-called green electricity supplies via companies set up to exploit ludicrous and lucrative government subsidies).
https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-would-you-believe-this-7-of-8.html

And now we see they wish to feel a duty to 'change the world for them'.

Now if that change were merely to win customers for 'green electricity' suppliers that would merely be a somewhat ruthless commercial scam.

But the green movement is more sinister than that.  It may be not be apparent to the creators of Schools' Low Carbon Day, but they were playing with political fire.  The green extremists are a decidedly unsavoury lot, and they are not wackos way off in the sidelines.  Instead they have played a part in designing and launching the IPCC, and other UN and US initiatives, and their EU and UK offshoots.

A post today by Alan Caruba (http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2010/09/nazi-dreams-were-green-dreams.html) captures some of the evidence for this:

'Just as America is passing through a period of economic stress, the Nazis in the 1930s sought to tap into the German psyche and a “return to nature” myth was seen as a unifying measure. The same regime that would later create the means to systematically kill Europe’s Jews shared a lot in common with any number of present-day environmentalist leaders and academics.


Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is on record saying, “Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.”


Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the United Nations Environmental Program, said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?” When you contemplate the many measures taken by the U.S. government against the mining of coal, the drilling for oil, and even the shutdown of a nuclear waste repository, is it not obvious that denying America the energy it requires is one way to destroy its economy?


In one chilling way in particular, the hatred of the human race, does the environmental movement reflect the Nazi’s merciless destruction, not only of Jews, but of millions of others consigned to its concentration camps and the relentless killing wherever they sought conquest.


This is why the Club of Rome could say, “The earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man.” How does this differ from Hitler’s many expressions of hatred for Jews and others, Africans and Asians that he deemed to be “sub-human”?


This is the naked face of environmentalism. 


Remember, too, this did not happen a long time ago. The “greatest generation”, some of whom still live, fought the Nazi regime a scant seventy years ago.


President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic warns that “it should be clear by now to everyone that environmental activism is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a ‘noble’ idea.”


Couple that with a torrent of falsified “science” and you have the modern environmental movement.


The single greatest threat to freedom in America is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current efforts to acquire the authority to regulate a gas that is responsible along with oxygen for all life on Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2). 


If the EPA gets that control, it will be able to determine every aspect of life in America because it is the use of electricity, industrial and all other machine-based technology that generates carbon dioxide. 


And it is the Big Lie that CO2 is causing global warming that is being used to justify the agency’s quest. There is no global warming. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle.


The Nazi regime was made up of animal rights advocates, environmentalists, and vegetarians, of which Hitler was all three. 


And it led ultimately to mass murder.'


So, I do not trust their wish to 'change the world'.  I think that they mean to harm our society, and that damaging our children is one of their strategies.  I do not believe that such people should be allowed into schools to spread their poison to the young.

Friday 3 September 2010

Sick Kids: Greenpeace and child abuse - the video from 2007

While the horrible example of the effect of climate alarmism on a weak personality has been displayed in the sorry case of James Lee, here is a zombie-like child, hooded and almost monotonic, coached to push extreme alarmism, and apparently promoted by Greenpeace:



[Note added 7 Sep.  This is indeed a Greenpeace product.  Here it is on the site of this multinational corporation which treats children, and normal social and political procedures, with such contempt: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/multimedia/videos/Angry-Kid-/]

How many like him could be produced from our schools?  The fanatical youth movements of the 1920s and 30s in Germany and Russia come to mind.  Let us hope this kid, and others like him, gets help and better guidance before too long.

More commentary on the video and other actions by Greenpeace here: http://notrickszone.com/2010/09/03/greenpeace-violence-is-escalating-the-lines-are-drawn/

Hat tip: http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/09/should-fanatical-environmental-literature-be-used-in-us-public-school-system-.html

This current attention is due to a commenter on WUWT posting the video: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/02/stop-the-hysteria/

Has this video been used in any of our schools?  The video was published in February, 2007.  Where is that youngster now, and what does he think of it?

Note added 24 October 2013. Donna Laframboise has Fisked the script of this odious Greenpeace product, and she is not impressed by it, nor by the whole venture: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/10/24/greenpeaces-menacing-angry-kid/
She finishes her post with these words:
'Does Greenpeace now think it’s cool to fan inter-generational war? To threaten and bully older people? To make videos featuring noxious young men dressed, let us be honest, in clothing that is associated with violent gangs?
Greenpeace. Where, exactly, is the “peace” in this video?'

'...the philosophy that is taught every day to our children in their schools: the world is fragile; human beings are a blot on the landscape...'

Delingpole in the Daily Telegraph Blogs has some accurate reflections to share, triggered by the recent death of eco-activist James Lee:

'What’s really depressing is that the philosophy expressed in James Lee’s (and the Unabomber’s) manifesto – which is also, incidentally, the philosophy expressed in Al Gore’s The Earth In Balance – is also the philosophy that is taught every day to our children in their schools: the world is fragile; human beings are a blot on the landscape; through our greed and selfishness we make everything worse; really it would be better if we vanished altogether and let all the lovely pure noble animals take over.
...
Not only do our schools teach our children this misanthropic – and deeply ahistoric – rot, but so also do broadcasters like the Discovery Channel. Their sister station, Animal Planet, for example, broadcasts a series called Whale Wars celebrating the real-life adventures of animal rights extremist Paul Watson. (H/T: MSher)
It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.'

Thursday 2 September 2010

Al Gore's film - poisoning the children's minds

'I can't begin to count the number of people who have contacted me regarding how their children have been frightened to the core by Gore's film.  I have a stack of communiqués from parents describing the nightmares their kids have experienced regarding floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise, polar bears drowning-all caused by cars, air-conditioning and fireplaces, and all supported with junk science, clever writing, and slick Hollywood graphics.'


Brian Sussman is a former television meteorologist and the author of Climategate: a veteran meteorologist exposes the global warming scam.

Friday 27 August 2010

What 'every schoolchild knows' ... a stack of deceptions and myths about climate

From an article in the Washington Times, by Roger Helmer (an MEP with a blog here: http://www.rogerhelmer.com/) :

'The East Midlands region of the United Kingdom, which I represent in theEuropean Parliament, has just committed $1.5 million to "climate change skills training" (read "propaganda").

And the propaganda works. Every schoolchild knows about dangerous sea-level rise. But the children don't know that it's simply a projection of a virtual-reality computer model. They don't know that in the real world, sea-level rise (at around six to seven inches in 100 years) is the same as it has been for centuries, that the Maldives and Tuvalu aren't sinking beneath the waves. They don't know that successive IPCC reports have consistently reduced their alarmist estimates for sea-level rise by 2100.
Every schoolchild knows that the ice caps are melting - but glaciers and ice fields accumulate snow (which compacts to ice) at high levels, while chunks of ice break off at the margin. Vast blocks of ice tumbling into the sea make great video footage, but they say nothing about warming or cooling. That's simply what ice sheets do.
There has been some retreat of glaciers since about 1800 (long before CO2 became an issue), but geological evidence shows that glaciers regularly advance and retreat with the Earth's climate cycles. We are simply seeing a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. And global ice mass is broadly constant.
In 1942, six Lockheed P-38F Lightning fighters were lost in Greenland. In 1988, they were rediscovered under 270 feet of solid ice. That's an ice buildup of nearly six feet a year.
Every schoolchild knows about the plight of the polar bear (the alarmists' pinup species), threatened by climate change. But how many know that polar bear numbers have increased substantially in recent decades and that polar bears are thriving?
In each of these cases, the alarmists put the projections of virtual-reality computer models ahead of real-world observation. Yet these models are programmed with a wide range of estimates and assumptions - including the assumption that CO2 is a major cause of warming. Little surprise, then, that they predict that outcome.
The models are seeking to make predictions about climate, which is a complex, chaotic nonlinear system. Yet a key feature of such systems is that they are hugely sensitive to initial conditions and therefore simply cannot be predicted in the long term.
But all the models make one clear prediction - that with a CO2 greenhouse effect, the maximum warming will occur high in the atmosphere and over the tropics. Here at least we have a prediction we can test. And the models fail the test. Observation shows the greatest warming at ground level and in the Northern Hemisphere. Because science moves forward by falsifying predictions, this one fact refutes AGW theory.'
But what do our teachers teach on this subject?  Is it even possible for state-funded teachers to teach sense and science in this area?  I plan a post on climate propaganda aimed at teachers in Scotland next week, after I have completed a long overdue post 8 of 8 on Schools' Low Carbon Day.
I have done a quick search for the East Midlands story alluded to in the Washington Times piece.  It could be this (which gives a glimpse into one small corner of the massive indoctrination effort underway in the EU on climate alarmism, and the associated rush to ludicrous and extravagant energy sources such as windfarms): 
'21st August 2010

On 23rd July, CLG confirmed the package of measures worth £9.75 million nationally to build skills and capacity across the range of local authority responsibilities needed to tackle climate change. Of this sum, £950k has been received by EM IEP.
Broadly, the funding is to support the decentralisation of power to the local level by enhancing the skills and knowledge planners need, including in planning for increased renewable energy supply, and encouraging local communities to take positive action on climate change. It may be used to support local authorities for the following purposes:
  • Facilitating the delivery of increased renewable energy supply through the activities of local authority planning departments
  • Helping local authorities more broadly, including training for members and on adaptation
  • Allowing planning departments to promote better community engagement in the planning process, including on renewables.'