An Inconvenient Youth – Updated

“I haven’t given up hope for Melissa – she is a bright kid. I planning on making a special middle school-level presentation to help her understand both sides of the debate so she can make up her own mind.”
This would be great. If you do that presentation, what are the chances that you’ll make it available (at a price) for some of your admirers to use?

This is more frightening than funny; I can see where this manipulation is going and it won’t be pretty. Unfortunately, most schools are almost totally incapable of teaching science or anything else worthwhile.

Why would you be lying to a child and saying that only 5% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic, when the true proportion is 40%?
REPLY: Warren, when submitting a comment, please use a valid email address. – Anthony

Reply: I refer you to Even Doubling Or Tripling the Amount of CO2 will have Little Impact on Temps for additional information that should answer your question. If you still disagree, please share your sources for all to discuss. – Dee Norris

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=767538
Anthony:
Good article about environmental education in Alberta in the National Post last week. This is in the Canadian “Redneck” outpost (sarcasm there for all you Albertans – Love the province). Imagine what its like here in the Enviro Wacko capital of Canada, the BC Lower Mainland.
Be prepared to duck and never turn your back. Good luck.

During the 80’s Nuclear Freeze movement, the media told us children were more worried about nuclear war than anything else. Of course, they didn’t live with the fallout shelters and “What to do in case of nuclear attack” movies in the 50’s. (I still don’t know if “Reefer Madness’ was done as a joke.)
Marx said to control a country, you have to control the press and the schools. Folks of a particular political leaning have been tying that ever since.
Me, I more worried about pop quizzes, homework and getting a date.

Unfortunately this article just makes “why” we sceptics are going to lose this war against governmental control abundantly clear.
Theres us representing logic, science, truth and freedom (about 5% of the pop.)
Theres them representing emotion, community, socialism and fear (10%) and
thens there is the rest – children the whole bunch (85% sheep)- do the maths !
In a democracy the majority decides what the truth is, no matter how absurd.

I have had the opportunity to speak to literally hundreds of classrooms through the past 20 years. I usually get asked questions about global warming during my talks and from my experience kids are quite skeptical about that they are being told, especially in grades 4 and up where they are old enough to think for themselves.
Granted I’ve been doing this in various cities in the midwest, but I have always been impressed with the questioning and the responses I get in my weather presentations through the years. So although I get quite disheartened by the propaganda and lack of sound scientific training on this subject, kids are not always the sponges they are made out to be.
But having said that, I feel lucky that “An Inconvenient Truth” has been shown very little in my area as I have two elementary kids myself.

Mr. Watts, if you think the following comment is inappropriate then feel free to not post it or to rebut it with an inline comment, but I simply feel this has to be said.
Time and time again, when a commenter lets slip the label “denialist” when discussing the various points of view related to climate change, he or she is immediately corrected, and the offending phrase snipped under the premise that it is an unfair label which unduly associates their skepticism to outrageous forms of denialism, such as Holocaust denial. Whenever I comment here, I fully respect this rule of discourse and never use the word “denialist” when debating with people; I’ve even come to agree with the rule such that I will only rarely use the phrase in other public forums as well.
With that said, the introduction to this article upsets me. “Hitler did it. Stalin did it.” This article egregiously invokes Godwin’s Law from the very beginning. I’m sorry, but I’m patently offended that my belief of teaching good, strong science to children is being conflated with the totalitarianism of the Nazis and Stalinist Russia. It boggles my mind how you can tolerate this language in this instance, but take a zero-tolerance policy when I or others use the word “denialist.” If anything, this article is worse since it matter-of-factly equates a practice/belief with Hitler rather than having to go through connotations of a word.
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Regardless, the article stems from a hypocritical, flawed premise. It’s ironic that the author proposes to counter her child’s “indoctrination” by indoctrinating her with a skeptical viewpoint. The bottom line (gosh, I need to quit using that cliche phrase!) is that although you can boil down the root points of climate change and teach them to a child, the science is much too sophisticated for even a high school level student. It takes complex mathematical and physical reasoning abilities to be able to come to grips with the caveats of climate change – abilities which are rarely cultivated before exposure to college level coursework.
While I can understand and appreciate the notion that it is a disservice to a young student to distill in them an absolute notion of the infallibility of AGW theory, it is an equal disservice to counter that notion by distilling in them an absolute notion of the errors of the theory. Unfortunately, at the level of a teenager’s education, there is no middle ground – that middle ground of balanced, fair skepticism can’t be settled upon until much, much study has been spent on the topic.
REPLY: You might want to read this article. The penetration of skeptical ideas in the classroom is essentially nil.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=767538
Be offended if you must, but the exclusion of other views in the classroom is a valid issue. It would be one thing if Dee did name calling, but she was referring to a process rooted in history, not making a label like “denialist”. If she had called teachers “Stalinists” for example, I would have snipped it.
The problem we have here is that climate change is now politicized. It is no longer “good, strong science”, but science that has a political issue attached to it that is impossible to separate.
Locally, even though I was a local TV meteorologist and school trustee, and was regularly invited to speak to classes about weather, since I made my skeptical views known, I’m no longer invite to speak. In fact a number of teachers now write me to tell me that I’m doing “damage”. One who had promised to have me in for debate has now reneged.
Of course you can buck that trend and prove that you aren’t party to such educational rejection of ideas in your own teaching environment by inviting someone to give a talk at Cornell. – Anthony

evanjones,
I work for the government, so I’m not overly concerned about misplacement of a decimal point. In government work, what’s a factor of ten among friends. 🙂
Thanks for pointing out my error. I had second thoughts right about the time I hit ‘submit’ “is that % right? Hmm, oh well, too late now.” Not the first time I look like an idiot, certainly not the last.