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

Tuesday 8 May 2012

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) 
-----------------------------------------
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.'

Monday 7 May 2012

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 !

Saturday 5 May 2012

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.

Wednesday 18 April 2012

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

Tuesday 17 April 2012

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

Friday 13 April 2012

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
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