Posted by Dee Norris
Teach children the path to follow, and even when they are old, they will not stray from it. (Proverbs 22:6)
Childhood indoctrination. It’s a dirty word. Hitler did it. Stalin did it. It can never happen here in the free world, now can it? Of course not.
In the past few days, I have had a couple of disturbing conversations about AGW with the younger generation, including my own daughter. Particularly striking is the one I had with the 12-year old daughter of a friend.
(Warning: The following transcript may incite anger in libertarians and parents).
Dee: So, do you believe in Global Warming?
Melissa: Oh, yes!
Dee: Oh? Do you think that people are responsible?
Melissa: Uh huh. They put all that junk in the air and it has to be causing the world to get warmer.
Dee: Is that so? That junk is called carbon dioxide and of all the carbon dioxide that is going into the air, how much of it do you think that people are adding?
Melissa: I dunno… Maybe 75 percent?
Dee: 75%? What if I told you it was less than 5% and the rest was all natural?
Melissa: Well how about all the polar bears that are drowning? The ice cap is melting.
Dee: Ummmm… How many polar bears have drowned?
Melissa: I dunno, but they’re going extinct.
Dee: Oh, really? Polar bear population had doubled in the last few of decades.
Melissa: You are making me mad.
Dee: Why is that?
Melissa: Cause you are.
Dee: OK, so where did you learn that the polar bears are dying?
Melissa: A movie they showed at the school.
Well, gentle readers, I knew to which movie she was referring: Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, I was there that day when the school’s earth science class sponsored a public showing and did my best to correct some of the more glaring errors made by Mr. Gore, but it seems that I failed in my task.
To this day, the indoctrination continues to warp the opinions of children too young to understand the science or politics behind AGW and who only care about the cute, cuddly polar bears having to swim 50 or more miles between melting ice flows just to stay alive.
Recently, the American Institute for Public Service, a national foundation that honors community service, recognized Cool the Earth for the efforts to educate the youth of the San Francisco Bay Area about the dangers of Global Warming. The founder of Cool the Earth, Carleen Cullen had this to say:
“What I love about working with young people is their absolute optimism,” said Cullen. “You tell them, ‘Hey, we’ve got this little problem over here with our friend, the polar bear, and with humans as well,’ and they’re not overwhelmed by it; they’re not skeptical or cynical. They just ask, ‘What can I do to fix it?’ “
Read the entire article at the SF Chronicle here: Carleen Cullen fights global warming or see it for yourself at Cool the Earth.
P.S. I haven’t given up hope for Melissa – she is a bright kid. I am 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. Who knows, perhaps I can shame the school into letting a skeptic have equal time.
Update: I spoke with Melissa tonight (Sept 10) and she is quite excited that an essay about her is so popular that Google ranked it in the top 10 out of 1.2 million hits for ‘Inconvenient Youth’. This seems to have spurred her into digging into the facts behind AGW to see the truth for herself.
On the other hand, in that same search, I found a video posted just this week which was also entitled “An Inconvenient Youth” and is of an 8-year old boy with a message for politicians to stop global warming. I am very sure he didn’t just come up with this on his own. Judge for yourself:
An Inconvenient Youth from Colin McCullough on Vimeo.
Truth’s a very sharp tool
but dull it just a wit
and by it you’ll be bit.
Justice is a must,
too bad you let it rust.
The American way
has gone astray.
Signed: Superman
P.S.
I moved to China.
P.P.S.
I left the Hulk in charge.
Hope this is not too far afield.
The following link is to an article on the characteristics of successful propaganda. It (the article) is from a military/political perspective but you can see the similarities in the greenie/media onslaught of lies and half truths quite clearly.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20051129.aspx
“Stalin and Hitler are good examples….not many following those ideologies today.
I am really not worried about this”
Yes, but there are many statists who learnt a thing or two from those 2 monsters; they may be appalled at Hitler and Stalin’s politics and morality, but agree with many of thier propaganda techniques. After all, Enviormentalism, Animal Rights, and Vegatarianism were all part of the Nazis political plank. Wasn’t it Goebbels who said, “When you lie, lie big.”?
It’s too bad the US followed the Prussian Model concerning education. Many of our educational problems can be traced back to that model. Climate Science is a misnomer. It is now in the realm of “opinion” and not science. Like economics, Climate Science makes all sorts of claims it cannot support; and economists are now either “conservative” and “liberal” practioners. I remember in HIgh School Keynes was considered the great liberal economist. When I asked if his theories actually worked as advertised, the teacher said I was missing the point. I imagine a student today would be given the same answer if he asked about Mann’s Hockey Stick.
@Counters:
Perhaps you hurried through the essay, but you seem to have missed a couple of points that I made.
I am glad to see you agree with me about teaching good science. This would not be a problem, if it was sound science they are being taught, but in many cases, the emotions of the children are being manipulated without teaching all the science or even presenting any facts. Just emotional arguments to shape their opinions. That is the indoctrination. No matter the cause, it is inappropriate. Surely you agree that this sort of ‘teaching’ is wrong?
I think that speaks for itself. I believe in teaching the science and letting the people decide for themselves. Always have, always will.
Note that the kids of my generation were raised in the absolute belief that we would be out of all essential resources well before the year 2000.
Well, okay, a good portion of the population STILL thinks we are going to run out of resources by the year 2000 . . .
But at least it became obvious to enough of my generation not to drive the engine of progress off the left edge of the table. And resource numbers are much harder for a layman to track than a single global temperature average.
With GW, it’s even easier than with resources: the temps go down and minds change.
I think we can let the numbers do the talking. Before too long, if I am not mistaken, the little dears will have plain old forgotten they ever subscribed to GW nonsense.
And if the skeptics are wrong. the numbers will tell us that, too–provided always that the satellite and Argo buoys numbers are kept honest.
Here’s the deal: kids are being indoctrinated like crazy in schools, true. But kids become disillusioned with their programming when they become teens and early adults. Environmentalism is going to reap a hurricane of contempt for its current excesses. Al Gore himself will be lucky to find any historians who paint him in a good light.
Anthony,
I had my 11 year come home with a pack of AGW nonsense. I was able to tell her about the other views, however, I toyed with the idea of making a presentation at her school but did not have the time to pull together a set of slides suitable for a 10-12 year old audience. If you have such a presentation would you consider posting it on your website for others to use?
REPLY: Not at the moment, but maybe I should make one. – A
“You’re making me mad.”
That says it all. It’s emotional not factual. Anthony, you’re going to have a tough time telling them there’s no Santa Claus (ie, a cause they can believe in). Wear armor and keep your good humor.
Also keep it simple and watch out for the parents who want to ban you from the school.
If they are using AIT as a teaching tool for science, they are not “teaching” science. Where’s the balance? Oh, I forgot, “balance is bias” according to Mr. Gore.
In the 70’s we were forced to read, and encouraged to believe, the Population Bomb. We were doomed by an increasing population. 2 million humans was supposed to be the maximum carrying capacity of the planet. Erlich was wrong, but still got press for being a prophet for years. Gore and his desciples are wrong now, but I fear they will continue to hold sway for many years to come. You have to give them credit, they grabbed the agenda and have controlled it ever since. They are not about to let go.
Leif Svalgaard: “…My 10-year old granddaughter is telling me that she has heard that the sunspots are ‘terrible for giving us all that cold weather’ [never mind she has that backwards]…”
You mean cold weather causes sunspots?? Wow!! 😉
Jeff Alberts (11:50:19) :
Leif Svalgaard: “…My 10-year old granddaughter is telling me that she has heard that the sunspots are ‘terrible for giving us all that cold weather’ [never mind she has that backwards]…”
You mean cold weather causes sunspots?? Wow!! 😉
I don’t think that is what she meant. Read it again, carefully this time.
Here is another news article where kids are getting quite emotional over issues related to classroom instruction of AGW.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/08/the_dark_dreams_of_global_warming/
Great post Dee! Indoctrination is the operative word. The Wiki definition says it all:
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned. As such it is used pejoratively. Instruction in the basic principles of science, in particular, can not properly be called indoctrination, in the sense that the fundamental principals of science call for critical self-evaluation and skeptical scrutiny of one’s own ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoctrination
@warren (10:13:27) :
“Why would you be lying to a child and saying that only 5% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic, when the true proportion is 40%?”
Warren,
1st of all, CO2 makes up less than 1/10th of 1% of the atmosphere.
http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/datasets/mauna/welcome.html
2nd, humans emit 2% to 3% of the CO2 each year into the atmosphere. Here, read the following in quotes (the link follows):
“CO2 is an efficient greenhouse gas. Increases in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 may adversely alter the global climate. Although a good deal is known about the impact of human activity on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, several questions remain unanswered. Our ability to answer those questions may very well provide a more complete understanding of the impact that human activity currently has and will have on the global climate. Natural sources of CO2 emit approximately 300 Gigatons of CO2 each year. Human activities are responsible for about 6 Gigatons, or a mere 2% of that total.”
http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/
Of this tiny 2% total, the US is responsible for 25% of it which means the rest of the world is 75% responsible for global warming IF it turns out that man-made CO2 is causing the warming.
Now, if you have a source that shows 40% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere is from humans (I think they can tell by the difference in isotopes from fossil CO2 vs natural CO2), please post it. I’ve been searching for a while for a source that shows the proportion of man made CO2 in the atmosphere vs natural CO2. My guess is that it’s still around 2% because I think nature absorbs both man made and natural CO2 as if it were all the same.
Mark
My greatest worry with this type of indoctrination is not the false information about CO2 and global warming, it’s the promotion of external responsibility.
Ideally kids would be taught their part in protecting the environment, not assume that all the planet’s pollution ills are Big Oil’s fault. There are loads of things they should be doing before worrying about polar bears or mountain glaciers.
No littering.
Protect local wildlife, even support it.
Stop wasting food.
Reduce consumerism.
Think twice before getting pets that will spend their days alone or worse be abandoned as they stop being cute. Or a cat that will decimate anything but the local rodent population.
Growing their own food.
Walking or cycling rather than riding in cars.
Etc.
All these would make them better, healthier individuals, whereas global warming education will just make them depressed and apathetic.
We are seeing an unpleasant trend. Whether it’s the African farmer, short of water because the forest has been cut down; the desert islander who has extracted too much ground water; or the home owner watching his property fall into a sea which has been eroding that shore for hundreds if not thousands of years; they all blame CO2, oil and specifically the US.
Last year, my son was shown “Inconvenient Truth” at school with no alternate opinion offered. When he came home, I typed “inconvenient truth debunked” in the browser window and let him explore as long as he liked. I am proud to say that he has learned to have a healthy amount of skepticism regarding anything presented at school.
I think only Santa clause gets a pass when children grow up to be adults who discover they have been lied to.
“And they lie to you! Me and my brother stayed up all night waiting for Santa Claus . . .
“We were gonna get his whole bag of toys, make it look like an accident.”
At my school things go a bit different. If you believe the whole global warming thing, people either feel sorry for you or laugh at you. I guess I’m lucky.
Watch it now evanjones
Lets not confuse something based in reality like Santa Claus with the whole cloth fantasy of Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.
I for one believe in Santa Claus, I just don’t think he is involved with all the presents and reindeer and stuff.
🙂 St Nick is a historical figure, as opposed to Al Gore who is a hysterical figure?
Not the first time I look like an idiot, certainly not the last.
Oh, you didn’t. Not by my lights, anyway.
I fully understand it was just one of those slips that you see and then can’t go back and edit. But I thought I would post a correction in any case.
One of the interesting side points: AGW advocates place CO2 greenhouse effect as high as 20% or even 30%. That seems much in conflict with what else I have read.
I assume the higher estimates include positive feedback loops in the mix. This would seem to invalidate the high estimates, seeing as how the Aqua Satellite has–so far–decisively shot down the positive feedback equation.
But that is an assumption. I’m not sure how they get to 20-to-30% from under 5%.
Love the polar bear photo. Maybe you could find one of a bear munching on a cute fluffy white baby fur seal.
Leif Svalgaard (10:47:46) :
terry46 (10:28:47) :
The earth is cooling […] It’s caused by the sun spots,or lack there of […]
Much as I hate to keep saying it, but ascribing climate change to simply the Sun, is a too convenient ‘truth’. Some of the other threads here have extensive discussions of this ‘myth’. The evidence for solar control is weak and we should not replace one unsubstantiated dogma by another one. My 10-year old granddaughter is telling me that she has heard that the sunspots are ‘terrible for giving us all that cold weather’ [never mind she has that backwards]. I see one indoctrination replaced by another one.
I don’t think anyone is ascribing alleged climate change simply to the sun, but darn near every degree of temperature here on earth comes from there. We’ve had good total solar irradiance numbers for maybe the dozen years SOHO/Virgo has been up, but for the centuries and millennia covered by the global warming debate, we have absolutely no proxies for TSI with the precision we need to see if the sun is a/the culprit.
This last half of the solar cycle, Virgo has shown a 2 w/m^2 drop, good I’d guess for maybe a third of a degree temperature drop, but for the MWP or LIA or any of the Big ice ages, who can say that the sun’s burner wasn’t set to a different level? The Catania observatory folks are positing the sun as a variable star, and proxies we do have show 40 and 100 thousand year ice age cycles. Could something 1.4 million km in diameter have 100k year cycles? I’d guess yes.
The sun provides the heat. Our greenhouse atmosphere just lets us hang on to it and damps out the oscillations. If the sun changes, sooner or later the earth will have to change. Our fiddling with the CO2 numbers is just ignoring the elephant in the room.
I”m not sure where I find the “good” science in “An Inconvenient Truth”. I think beyond the obvious attempt at indoctrination, is that SAT statistics are morbidly bad. Why are we wasting taxpayer funds and student contact time on this unproven theory (AGW/ACC) and not spending time on the basics that we are already proven to be failing at?
THAT makes my blood boil!
I’ve been searching for a while for a source that shows the proportion of man made CO2 in the atmosphere vs natural CO2. My guess is that it’s still around 2% because I think nature absorbs both man made and natural CO2 as if it were all the same.
Well, I hate to poke a hole in skeptic theory, but one thing I (roughly) agree with the AGW crowd on is the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere that is man-made (over a third).
Yes, at the same time you’re right about the small % of CO2 mankind emits in one year.
Here’s how it works (the stats are a couple of years old):
Amounts in Bil. Metric Tons Carbon (BMTC)
Total Sinks:
Atmosphere: 750 BMTC
Vegetation/Soil: 2000 BMTC
Ocean: 38,000 BMTC
Input to Atmosphere/Output from Atmosphere:
Ocean: To Atm.: 88, From Atm.: 90
Difference: -2 BMTC
Vegetation/Soil (Natural): To Atm.:119, From Atm.: 120
Difference: -1 BMTC
Vegetation/Soil (Man): To Atm.:1.7, From Atm.: 1.9,
Difference: -0.2 BMTC
Industry: To Atm.: 6.3, From Atm.: 0, Difference: +6.3 BMTC
Total: To Atm.: 215, From Atm.: 211.9,
Difference: +3.1 BMTC
That’s a little under half a percent of CO2 increase per year (3.1 BMTC) to the total atmospheric sink (750 BMTC) each year.
It’s as if there is water coming into a bathtub and going out at the same rate. There’s no change in water level. but if you turn up the water even a little bit, the water level goes up slowly and accumulates over time.
Now, CO2 does not persist forever, so eventually outflow will increase to match inflow (assuming inflow remains steady) and homeostasis will be achieved.
But CO2 levels are up 4% (from 1/30% to 1/26%) over the last decade on account of a slow, steady, mostly accumulating increase of a little under half a percent per year.
If positive feedback loops applied, the AGW crowd would be right. But it appears that feedback is negative, not positive, so the increase in CO2 simply doesn’t matter and, arguably, even is a Good Thing).
“…a set of slides suitable for a 10-12 year old audience.”
As far as I can see, what’s called for is nothing less than a sea change in the way we teach science in public schools. There’s hardly a curriculum left, and the stopgap programs (at least those I’ve seen as a parent) are killing off interest with dispatch.
When my daughter was a p.s. fourth grader, she was subjected to a unit called “Learning about Electricity”. The group project had no other instruction than the class reading of a textbook on how to participate in group work in an egalitarian fashion. The rest was strictly hands-on.
Students were given a 9-v battery, some wire and alligator clips, a flashlight bulb, a plywood board and a lever switch. Then they were encouraged to enjoy The Freedom of Discovery. This experience lasted, as I recall, six weeks.
When they were done, they were to demonstrate that they could complete a circuit and turn on the light.
The insipid, p-c book and the unit itself were county-wide for that grade, in the largest county in the metro area, so this wasn’t an anomaly, though the teacher, who drank coffee and graded papers while her students contended for their right to an education, may have been exceptional.
In any case, I wondered what is happening in the rest of the public school system that can salvage minds being treated with this kind of contempt.
It also occurs to me that there is one precious resource we seldom mention when we explain the need for sceptical inquiry. Though the squandering of money is most often cited, I really think that the time lost to propaganda, social indoctrination, non-directed group work, the latest fad in science… poses a far greater risk to youngsters. Bloggers above, including Evan, are right. Ultimately the dears will grow out of their indoctrination, given enough time. But look at what they’ve lost!
Are private schools any better?
“We were gonna get his whole bag of toys, make it look like an accident.” evanjones
evan,
You are a wit if there ever was one.