Note: I don’t normally allow the discussion of things related to Nazi Germany here, including discouraging the use of the word “denier” due to it’s “Holocaust Denier” connotations. But this full page ad in the Sunday papers in Britain, touting “climate crime” and “climate cops” is just a bit over the top, and deserves some attention. It is particularly relevant since the sponsoring website climatecops.com has a teachers section, and we’ve just seen some sensibility from Schwarzenegger in Sacramento on this very issue. I find this method of indoctrinating school children to normal everyday living being harmful to the earth with the “climate crime” connotation as distasteful and wrong headed. I have no problems with energy conservation, in fact I encourage it. But combining such advice with a “climate cop” idea is the wrong way to get the message across. Can you imagine what sort of reaction the neighbors will have to the kids hanging this door hanger on their front door? Will the result of this now be hiding your electric dryer behind false walls so the kids and neighbors don’t see it?
At the very least, npower could have chosen a different color scheme: red, black and white are the same three colors used in the flag of Nazi Germany What were they thinking? – Anthony
Reposted from the website EU referendum:
Can I be the only one more than a little disturbed by the latest campaign to be fronted by energy company npower?
Launched today with large colour ads in the Sundays, it appeals directly to children, urging them to enlist as “climate cops”, to root out “climate crimes“, and thus “save the planet”.
In a luridly-designed website, mimicking the style of “yoof” cartoons, it offers a bundle of downloads, including a pack of “climate crime cards“, urging its recruits to spy on families, friends and relatives, inviting each of them to build up a “climate crime case file” in order to help them ensure their putative criminals do not “commit those crimes again (or else)!”
Quite what the “or else!” should be is not specified, but since the “climate cops” are being encouraged to keep detailed written records (for those who can read and write), there is nothing to stop these being submitted to the “Climate Cops HQ” for further sanctions, the repeat offenders being sent to re-education camps. And for those “climate cops” that successfully perform the “missions” set (or turn in their own parents), there is the reward of “training” in the “Climate Cop Academy”.
In a system which has echoes of Hitler’s Deutsches Jungvolk movement, and the Communist regime Pioneers, perhaps successful graduates can work up to becoming block wardens, then street and district “climate crime Führers”, building a network of spies and informers.
How nicely this ties in with James Hansen’s call to put the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming.
No doubt, with a willing band of “climate cops”, the prosecutors can spread their nets wider, reaching into the homes of all climate change deniers, until the insidious virus of doubt is exterminated (final solution, anyone?). Then we can all march on the sunlit uplands of a “carbon-free” planet – to the tune of Ode to Joy no doubt.
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Denis: You or your students might enjoy playing with various processes on the raw data: http://www.woodfortrees.org
I’m glad some sanity has returned to this thread… To be honest I think some of the reactions here to nPower’s ads/website has been a bit over the top. As a Brit with kids of the target age, I think it’s just a rather clumsy attempt to engage kids in energy conservation; nothing much wrong with that. The whole ‘cop’ thing is just a metaphor and the kids aren’t going to take it any more seriously than any of the other marketing that they get swamped with. It might be in rather poor taste for people who have suffered under various forms of police state but it’s not the End of the Free World.
More cynically, some might see it as an cheap way for nPower to greenwash their power generation activities and get something to put in the CSR section of the Annual Report…
I don’t know what those journals you read are repositories of, but they sure aren’t of scientific knowledge. Peer reviewed hogwash peer reviewed by other peer reviewed hogwashers is more like it.
Sorry for not responding last night; Vista decided to flip me the bird and I ended up having to re-format. Anyways, at some fundamental level, Bruce, you have to accept the utility of the scientific method. Perhaps your qualms aren’t necessarily with AGW, but with science itself. If that’s the case, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
REPLY: Get XP or a Mac, Vista is the OS of pain.
It is as false to dismiss all AGWers as self-serving lefty fraudsters as it is for them to accuse we who disagree with them as oil funded mass-murderers. Straw man argument, Fatman. AGWers’ reasons for pushing the debunked and discredited AGW hypothesis are many and varied, be they political, professional and/or egotistic, monetary, or emotional, and in any combination.
Moderator: I do mostly avoid Vista; I use Ubuntu for the vast majority of my work at home. Still have to boot up Vista every now and then to manage my iTunes library and to play the occasional game. In the process of updating Vista, something went FUBAR… MBR got messed up, then the repair option nuked things more than it helped them and I couldn’t even get into my Ubuntu partition. Pain… just pain.
Anyways, Bruce, AGW is hardly a debunked and discredited hypothesis and it’s delusional to suggest to otherwise. Certainly, some areas have been shown to be in drastic need of review, but the theory is much more robust healthy than Average Joe Skeptic believes. The bottom line is that your prescription as to the motive of AGW proponents apply more to the skeptics who refuse an aspect of its premise habitually. I have no political, professional, egotistic, monetary, emotional or any other motive to “believe” in AGW. My personal analysis simply leads me to believe it is the best theory out there to explain the climate trends of the past 150 years.
You really need to disconnect the political and the scientific sides of the debate. Although it’s a heavily politicized topic, there most definitely is a fine line. Promoting AGW does not automatically imply promoting a socialist, unitary world government, just as being skeptical of AGW does not automatically imply that someone is in cahoots with Big Oil.
REPLY: Well, on Vista we agree. I run a new laptop that “had” Vista on it last year, pulled the hard drive, put in a new one, put on XP and Ubuntu and I’m a happy camper. I gave Vista 6 months, and decided it was a waste of time and effort. The eye candy makes it a slow dog for anything useful – Anthony
Perhaps your qualms aren’t necessarily with AGW, but with science itself. If that’s the case, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Wrong again, counters. It is precisely because I (and many, many others) have respect for science and the scientific method that I totally reject the AGW hypothesis, which has not only never been proven, but has been completely discredited. Only those with an agenda (or the mentally challenged) still believe it.
I think pranging the Lilac murderers is a reasonable first step . . .
Thanks Paul (Woodfortrees) My project team had a task to look at your site over the summer hols and try to look for any patterns in data.
Simple patterns hopefully, rather than the stats analyses!
I suggested temp and sunspots etc All the usual things.
Also to look for trends by using different starting points to show how you can get patterns in either direction depending on starting point.
Did not realise you were in England.
Perhaps I should get you to come to the school to discuss this. 🙂
Just teasing.
We had Simon Singh give a whole school assembly last December on the Big Bang. It was excellent.
However, at the end he did make a few comments about how you should not believe anything from people who doubt AGW. It is definitely proven.
Afterwards I told him about this site and the surface stations project.
He said he only trusted satellite data anyway.
Is it not the satellite data that shows the cooling since 1998? and only the surface stations that almost show continued warming? 🙂
Very disturbing, but not surprising. The environment movement is dominated by left-wing people who love using the State’s powers to control and repress.
Serious posts, funny posts, interesting tangent posts. Read lots but no time to read all. Would that each of us — bite the tongue, take a breath, count to ten, before slopping broad bush strokes that sully us all. That’s “them,” not us.
counters:
“Sorry, but this is ridiculous. This is a stupid advertising campaign by an energy company. It’s amazing that anyone is reading more into that.”
You haven’t had first-hand experience of being bombarded by their propaganda, …er.. ‘advertising campaigns’ like we have in the UK.
Especially when said company have upped their prices exorbitantly so I now have the dubious pleasure of forking out over 1000 GBP for the privelege of heating my small house for about two months of the year – mornings and evenings only. And I can’t get a much better deal from other companies.
Bunch of hypocrites, accusing people like me of ‘climate crimes’ whilst simultaneously cleaning out my wallet!
Dennis Hopkins:
“We had Simon Singh give a whole school assembly last December on the Big Bang. It was excellent.
However, at the end he did make a few comments about how you should not believe anything from people who doubt AGW. It is definitely proven.”
I’m a bit surprised at Simon Singh.
However, beliefs are infinitely more powerful than science, so perhaps we should cut him some slack.
counters:
“I use Ubuntu for the vast majority of my work at home.”
At last, something we agree 100% on 😉
counters:
“In the real world, governments aren’t setting up Ministries of ClimateTruth”
In New Zealand, they have a Minister for Climate Change.
Coming soon to a government near you…
[…] British Utility nPower sponsors the “Climate Cops” a cartoon website aimed at children encouraging them to ensure that “climate crimes” such as using the dryer, putting hot food in the fridge and leaving the TV on do not go unpunished. I first read about this on a European blog, followed up here. […]
is it just me, or does this remind anyone of the sort of comics, advertisements, and the likes that are geared at young children by PETA?
does anyone remember the comic book entitled, “you mommy kills animals”?
http://www.theanimaladvocate.org/040726_mommykills.jpg
just another item to add to the list of things that will poison the minds of our children… *sigh*
[…] Don’t let the Climate Cops get in your kids heads. Can I be the only one more than a little disturbed by the latest campaign to be fronted by energy company npower? […]
Is it not the satellite data that shows the cooling since 1998? and only the surface stations that almost show continued warming? 🙂
Yes. And not even all of the surface data. HadCRUT shows some cooling.
The (British) Advertising Standards Authority rejected our complaint. This, it said, “… seems to be just an educational way to engage children in this topical issue.” The odd thing is, we hadn’t actually made a complaint – we wrote asking them for help in framing a complaint. See here.
Intriguing (and yet distrurbing) development. I have to admit it would be nice if my 12- and 16-year olds would DO some of these very things. I think they are actually the worst offenders in my home, standing in front of the refrigerator to open and close it a few times to see what’s in it, to reach in for a cold drink that they then put back in, only to be back a few minutes later for another sip. It took a while, but I did finally get them to stop taking 30 minute showers. Although, at the present, I think I’m the only one who takes water conserving showers as a matter of routine…
The chairman of nPower should be asked to explain himself (herself?). I wonder if the company has entered an “alliance” with an environmental group that is pushing this? Being a US citizen, I’m afraid I do not know if the nPower (as a UK entity) is a public firm with stockholders and an oversight board, nor the extent to which there is a regulatory oversight system, any of which might be “asked” about this program. Or if stockholders, approached with a petition (filed by a stockholder) at the annual meeting to raise attention to the perceived problem. These latter techniques are employed as routine methods by enviro activists and social rights activists in the US. They should be considered as a means to provide a “wake up call” to nPower’s executive management
One question that might be posed to regulators, management and owners on the “educational value” provided: How do the “climate cops” know that the adults of any “case” don’t offset their emissions? Goodness, even Al Gore does that! And if Big Al does it, it must be okay, right? Does that mean the Klimate Kops are authorized to check my finances?
This also rather reminds me of the attempt by the animal rights group PETA to get people to not drink milk a few years ago. The campign was set as a parody of a well-known US ad campaign. In PETA’s case the slogan was “Got Beer?” As I recall, they had radio and TV spots prepared, bottle and can openers and other labeled merchandise (propoganda) bought, paid for and delivered. Then they found they had just pissed off the anti-drunk driving people. Needless to say, the whole campaign ended up in a dumpster.
As for the potential for violence mentioned by more than a few commenters, we already have these situations in the United States, with extremist groups such as the Animal/Environmental Liberation Fronts burning and defacing what they do not like, spiking trees so that they cannot be harvested (even if the land and trees are privately-owned, I believe), and destroying fields nearly ready for harvest that are believed to contain GMO crops. Then there are groups like “Earth First!”, known for its perception that humankind is but a parasitic plague upon the earth, parasites that they wish to see eliminated. Anyone here ever read the Tom Clancy novel “Rainbow Six”? Sets a fictional scenario (we hope) for how far some of these groups might go to depopulate the Earth in their Druidic quest of worshiping, protecting and “restoring” Gaia, Mother Earth.
Gene, one of those very same people is Maurice Strong, one of the higher-ups in the IPCC. He’s infamous for quotes such as this:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
And here he is now in a position to actually set his plan in motion. Imagine that. But I’d be willing to wager he would be one of the select few to still be allowed to maintain an industrial lifestyle after the rest of us are forced back into hunter/gatherer subsistence.
We haven’t a clue and our actions show it.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/forbes/2008/0811/094.html
what`s electricity?
i been in the stone age for years,
guess that makes me a star citizen
now only if there was a county worthy of having me
sure isnt one on this planet
all the leaders have screwed them all up
Someone thinks of a way to conserve energy which has a fun slant for kids and suddenly it’s a communist conspiracy being compared to the Hitler Youth. Kids love the cops and robbers dynamic. My under 11’s soccer team’s colours were also red, white and black. Way to suck the life out of an innocent child’s activity. You’re reading way too much into this.
Klimate Kristalnacht is a most definate maybe. Here’s the difference though – I’ll shoot whatever pricks are marching around breaking shtuff…I don’t care if the little bastards are someone’s precious little nazi.