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 is always a casuality when people claim to know the truth that other people don’t. Truth is generally not accepted until the fact, so basically everyone is wrong, except those who are open to the idea that soemthing might be happening, regardless of cause. Those who say global warming is caused entirely by human activities are wrong; they need to be open-mined enough to recognize other factors, and recognize that they could be wrong. Those who say there is no such thing as global warming do a disservice by not being open-minded enough to find out if it is at least possible. All do a disservice to humanity by not worrying about what the future holds if the world climate changes from what we are used to.
“…until AFTER the fact…” sorry for the omission.
Pofarmer (18:16:43) :
Leif, I think the “anti” AGW camp, if you want to call it that, would be perfectly satisfied to let the science play out and see what unfolds. I know I sure would. The problem is that the “pro” AGW camp insists that we do “something” now. Unfortunately, the somethings they want to do prove to be very expensive, and some of them may be foolish. Therefore the “anti” camp is forced into an extreme response to counter this foolishness.
The anti camp (personally I like being called a skeptic) can afford to relax and let the past conditions return, we know we survived them. The pro camp sees a coming tipping point Real Soon Now, and no one’s done much of anything yet, at least the Kyoto signatories are all emitting more CO2 (or fuel) than before as far as I know. So they are beginning to panic and getting more and more strident in their attempts (their need) to keep climate change front and center in the public’s eye.
I imagine they’re getting really annoyed that the US presidential campaigns have pretty much ignored the topic. That might change if people try to attack Palin on it, but I doubt that’s a good strategy. Given the rate at which the US Congress moves, I suspect that by the time anything is ready to commit a huge amount of money to the congress critters will hear loud and clear its a boondoggle people don’t want.
[please leave religious calls to action off this site~charles the moderator]
One thing I don’t see mentioned much in discussions on CO2 and temperature, although it may be relevant here, is that the effect of CO2 on temperature falls as the amount of CO2 rises. In other words, the effect is logorithmic.
In a 1971 paper for Science (Vol 173, July 9), Stephen Schneider (yes, that Stephen Schneider) and S.I. Rasool wrote: “As more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the rate of temperature increase is proportionally less and less, and the increase eventually levels off.”
The context here was that Schneider and Rasool were evaluating, in the 1970s when the planet was cooling, whether adding more CO2 would warm things up. Can’t happen, they said. CO2 doesn’t have that kind of warming power.
Have the laws of physics changed since 1971?
And yet, I rarely see this argument brought forward. Have the laws of physics changed since 1971?
OTOH – after indoctrinating all the kids with the skewed illusions of the adult world, it will all come undone as the kids mature, rebel, and discover on their own that they’ve been fed a pile of hokum. And with the coming cooling period, it won’t take much.
That polar bear picture is great, with the blood-stained ice. It states a stark reality which I fear many adults don’t want to face.
People prefer that which is cute and cuddly, and frown at creatures eating other creatures.
Do you remember the outcry about hunting baby seals back in the 1970’s? The fur from baby seals made the best coats, and rich women wore the coats to the opera and gained status, up and until the picture of a cute baby seal was put beside a picture of blood-stained ice, by the media. Abruptly rich ladies left the comfortable seal-skin coats in the closet.
(In the same way, the movie “Bambi” resulted in a sharp decline in the number of hunting licenses.)
All you need to do is show a picture of a cute baby seal, placed next to the picture of a polar bear chowing down on baby seal on blood-stained ice, and you will see the popularity of polar bears suffer a precipitous plummet.
People have a kindness within, and yearn for the day when “the lion will lie down with the lamb.” They want everything to be cute and cuddly. Unfortunately we live on earth, not in heaven, and down here we need to eat.
I personally raise rabbits, chickens, goats and pigs. They are only cute and cuddly when they are small; when they grow up they lust and fight and behave in highly nonspiritual ways, but despite their obnoxious behavior I feed them and do my best to give them a good life. Then, after I have done all these kind things, I kill them in a swift and “humane” manner. I have fed them, and now it is their turn to feed me.
I also run a day-care center, and the children I care for tend to be New-Age and soft-hearted, and the very idea of killing and eating the creatures we care for is an anathema to them, at first. They state we should become vegetarians.
So I take them to the broccoli. I point out the pretty, white cabbage butterfly. Should we kill the pretty butterfly? The children shake their heads, “No.” Then I point to a nearly leafless broccoli plant, (my garden is organic,) covered with green worms. I state these caterpillars are the pretty butterfly’s babies. Should we kill the pretty butterfly’s babies? Or should we be vegetarians with nothing to eat?
The next logical step would be to get parents to sign permission slips, and teach the children about fasting. I wouldn’t do it, because children don’t need their growth stunted, but there are times I feel Americans need to learn more about what hunger is like. Where are else on earth are the poor people so fat? Only in America are the people depending on charity (welfare) waddling.
Why are our poor waddling? It is because we are a good, kind, and soft- hearted people. We don’t want Bambi to suffer; don’t want baby seals to suffer; don’t want polar bears to suffer; don’t want poor children to suffer; and don’t want earth to suffer any soot or CO2 or other nasty, yucky things.
In essence, we want to be couch potatoes, able to lounge forever with never a pang.
For this reason I am glad your article mentioned politically incorrect things like Stalin and Hitler. It brings dreamers down to earth with a thump. It reminds them we are not in heaven yet, and in truth we are a people who, according to some, were so naughty we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Therefore, as much as we may insist, “we’ve got to find our way back to the Garden,” we are not back there yet. We are here. And here is a place where you must squash innocent bugs, even if you are a vegetarian, and must chop the head off an innocent chicken, if you like the taste of fried wings.
You’d be amazed how many kids come to my farm and have no idea the bacon in a bacon-double-cheeseburger comes from a cute Wilbur, like the Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web.” They don’t know milk can’t happen without a humping male beast, or that it comes squirting from teats. They don’t know an egg comes from a chicken’s backside. They don’t know lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers come from dirty dirt, and sprout up better if that dirt is enriched with reeking manure from a beast’s backside. Yet…..every single one knows about Global Warming.
In other words we are raising a generation of environmentalists who know nothing about their environment.
Isn’t this an amazing turn of affairs? Especially when you consider that in my grandfather’s boyhood most Americans were either farmers, or had relatives who were.
Thomas Jefferson worried about what would happen to us when our society ceased to be agrarian. Looks like we are going to find out.
Reply – If you look closely at the picture, you will notice that Our Friend, the Polar Bear is standing over his dinner.
I had hoped to find an online copy of the classic Far Side in which a pair of polar bears are standing over an igloo whose top had been removed and a pair of boots were showing. One bear is remarking to the other, “I love these treats, hard and crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside.”
On a more serious note, to unarmed or technologically disadvantaged humans, polar bears, wolves, lions, tigers and even komodo dragons are not our friends. They are predators who will happily dine on human flesh if given the opportunity. It is only technology that allows us to recreate these dangerous predators as cuddly and cute (well, maybe this is not true for komodo dragons). Nature, red in tooth and claw. – Dee Norris
@evanjones (13:54:16)
All I want is a breakdown of the CO2. How much currently in the atmosphere is from man, how much from nature. I’m sure they can tell the difference between man-made and natural CO2 by the differences in isotopes. So why can’t I find a site that measures both types of CO2?
Monday Night Football, sorry for not reading every post and perhaps being repetative.
That there are organized endevours to manipulate our youth are nothing new, wow, even approaching a centrury. And what better way to monopolize the rhetoric than require a public school system and dictate the cirricula. If you can control the Education debate and the journals, the just manufacture peer review and union participation. Only then can an ideology can begin to make inroads. I studied public education for a few years before I got hooked on climate science. If you think this climate business can get shady, education forces, imho, are dark ops.
The logic of so many of these social issues always seem so scientific and logical. Show a 30 year trend where CO2 and Temp both increase. Announce the tipping point, and prepare ‘The Graph’. Match the slopes of the two lines, and make a portrait graph, portrait because you get the steepest rise for a given run on a sheet of paper.
That these issues are, eerily, being turned into a popular vote, that Gore showing up with 300 million for Madison Ave. to manufacture a consensus opinion out of an ignorance of science speaks volumes about our educational system.
I’m just gettin warmed up….
Did Gore stand up and debate his science in the courtroom? No? Enough said about his stature.
This debate is becoming tedious. Let’s go to court! Can we?
I still haven’t gotten over the ‘much ado about nothin’ Y2K scare in the late 90s! I personally call it the biggest lie of any century! Maybe the Moon landing was another greatest lie, too, just as George Bush’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD) pre-emptive justification for the Iraq debacle was!
However, when it comes to global warming environmental destruction, we have only ourselves (the human race) to blame. So blame game aside, what can we do about it? I could start walking instead of driving or live without airconditioning (where I come from in Southeast Asia) or whatever sacrifice it takes. The point is it is all up to us individually and collectively to decide.
polar bears aren’t going extinct in the medium to short term so all that proves is that your argument is weak and you think that you are smarter than a child, which most people aren’t. As far as your claim that 5% of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced annually comes from people, the claim is absurd. Perhaps this figure works if you are referring solely to human respiration, but when you figure in the industries, agriculture, energy production, deforestation and livestock production that are all by humans for humans, plus consider not only the CO2 released, but the negative impacts which prevent it being broken down, then your claim is patently absurd.
Imposing it on a child is completely irresponsible. Bragging about it should be embarrassing.
People of certain age surfing the blogosphere prepared to believe anything they read are certainly deserving of anything they swallow, but at least give kids a break, huh?
facts 1: you + bible 0
Reply – Your closing comment left me puzzled. I am not sure if you meant to imply that I am a believer in one or another of the many versions of the Christianity and that some how if I am a Christian, that would negate the very validity of my statements.
I think your primary objection to my discussion with the youth was that you inferred that I somehow browbeat her with my superior knowledge and experience. In fact, you can see that once she retreated into emotionalism, I chose to respect her opinion and change the topic to how she formed her opinion. My dismay was not over what she thought, but how the information that shaped her opinion on what she considers a very important topic was imparted to her. AIT is loaded with errors and miss-statements. The UK courts stopped AITfrom being shown in schools due it’s misrepresentations. Yet our children are using it and its secondary and tertiary re-tellings to form their opinions.
Because I take the time to research the various distortions in the media, I am was that polar bear population has grown five-fold since the 1950s, but here was this poor girl who was worrying about their immediate extinction due to the misinformation in AIT and the profusion of media coverage. These kids are not ‘surfing the blogoshpere’ but are getting this messages from mainstream (and therefore assumed to be trustworthy) sources. Outside organizations are targeting elementary school children to get them involved in saving the polar bear from man-made global warming. I find this to be very wrong.
On your other point about CO2 percentages, the annual CO2 contribution by humans due to their activities is about 5%. This has been frequently discussed on this blog and in fact, many comments on this essay have supported that claim. If you have sources supporting your position, please share them for discussion. – Dee Norris
I have a Powerpoint presentation on global warming science at http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming – at the lower left on the page. I presented this at a Mensa meeting here in Seattle earlier this year. My daughters (13 and 17 years old) were there for the presentation.
I intend to update and simplify the presentation soon and make more presentations of it at local venues.
Mark (21:54:37) :
This link might help with your isotope question. I hear the site is prretty reliable. 😉
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/spencer-pt2-more-co2-peculiarities-the-c13c12-isotope-ratio/
Anthony: “If she had called teachers “Stalinists” for example, I would have snipped it.”
Then you need to start snipping. The article begins: “Childhood indoctrination. It’s a dirty word. Hitler did it. Stalin did it.”
The writer then provides the reader with an anecdote. Anecdotes are intended to illustrate a point. In this case, what point? The writer supplies the answer: “…the indoctrination continues to warp the opinions of children…” In other words, teachers are indoctrinating children, just like Hitler and Stalin.
So yes, the writer has not only called teachers Stalinists, but also Hitlerites. That’s the point of the article.
Reply – Odd, but I don’t remember even mentioning teachers at all in the essay. Perhaps you are reading too much into my words or picking up themes from subsequent comments?
My two examples were the impressions of a 12 year old from a public showing of AIT by the earth science class (the students suggested showing it based on Gore’s call to action, BTW) and the actions of an organization whose founder watched AIT. I thought I had tread very lightly by excluding extreme examples of indoctrination such as the call for children to be Climate Cops by a company in the UK as previously discussed on this blog.
As an aside, I find the really the interesting part about essays is they act like a kind of a Rorschach test: It is not so much what one sees in the static inkblot, but the why and how one sees it. – Dee Norris
Doing my part to debunk the indoctrination over in this corner of the world: Al Gore Lied About Drowning Polar Bears
Dee, you should have pointed out just how many bears drowned.
As I recall… Four bears died in a storm. Four. Measly. Bears. (at Point 8)
Brendan H (01:19:48) :
In other words, teachers are indoctrinating children, just like Hitler and Stalin.
So yes, the writer has not only called teachers Stalinists, but also Hitlerites. That’s the point of the article.
No, this is ignoring the little word ‘like’. What the writer clearly implied was that Hitler and Stalin [and I may add, the Church] showed us how effective indoctrination of children is. This all has to do about the method, but nothing to do with the content, of the teachings.
A tale from the UK.
My elder daughter (now 13) was shown Al Gore’s ego-trip film last year at her school as part of her science classes without any of the guidance ordered by Mr Justice Burton regarding the scientific errors in the film (see BBC News report for reference).
Being incredibly sceptical of education policy in this country (UK) my ex-wife and I have taught her and her sister to thinkfor themselves. When she told me that she had seen the film I showed her a copy of the Channel 4 documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”.
She asked to borrow the DVD so she could take it into school and have it shown as a balance to An Inconvenient Truth. When she asked her teacher whether she could show the documentary she was told that no only could she not show the film but that she should not undermince the teachers, the school or the curriculum by showing the film and that if she were to do so in school hours she would be given detention.
Call me old-fashioned if you will, but that sounds like indoctrination.
Just thought you might like to know that it happens in the UK too.
‘There is no firm evidence for climate change caused by changes of the Sun’s output on a time scale of less than several hundred million years.’
Leif….I am working on a compilation of such evidence – and will send you a link once it is in a suitable form – there are dozens of papers, which I would have thought you would be familiar with – so maybe you just don’t regard the evidence as ‘firm’ – from a 22 year solar cycle effect on sea surface temperatures (which in my view is unlikely to be TSI alone and probably includes a cloud effect as proposed by Svensmark) – and then to cycles of longer periodicity but irregular, such as the LIA and MWP, Holocene optimum etc – which coincide with the beryllium-10 data as a proxy of solar activity –
I would call the evidence ‘strong’ for a solar contribution, though the mechanisms are not clear – there could be a number: UV heating and the polar vortex (Shindell at NASA), Cosmic ray modulation and ionisation (Svensmark and the European Space Agency research now underway); direct electrical current and voltage effects (Tinsley at Dallas) and they ALL may play a role; ADDED to that is the supposed ‘internal’ variability of the oceans and their heat store – but the more I look at the oceanography, the less convinced I am of its internal nature – maybe for the very low frequency of 1500 year cycles.
I totally agree that we need to steer clear of either-/or thinking – many factors are involved, and I am putting a 20% maximum for the carbon dioxide effect (though I think it likely to be nearer 10%), with the other 80% shared between solar field effects, TSI and ocean oscillations.
Rene (11:38:03) :
‘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.’
I hope you’re right. I think the film “An Inconvenient Truth” is totally inappropriate for grammar school children (<age 13) even if it’s true. Grammar school children, generally, do not yet have the pre-requisites for this kind of presentation. One has to have at least a rudimentary grasp of chemistry, physics, astronomy, and climate science.
I agree with the theory of evolution (not necessarily Darwin’s), but to attempt to teach that to a first-grader would be indoctrination, not teaching.
Paul: “And yet, I rarely see this argument brought forward. Have the laws of physics changed since 1971?”
We talk about it all the time here. It’s been mentioned many many times. I guess people take it as read. Just search on “logarithmic” and see what you come up with.
They aren’t going extinct at all. Prove otherwise.
Sorry, but your claim is absurd. Show us your “facts”. Let’s see a vetted source for your CO2 figures.
I can tell you now what the upcoming generation of public school children will believe about the future: Because mankind is polluting the air with CO2, then that will be the cause of our hot summers, and cold winters. When people stop polluting CO2, then there will be no more bad weater, cold winters, or hot summers. No hurricanes, nor tornadoes, no droughts, no flooding.
Just ask one of them after they’ve received their indoctrination.
Peter Taylor (05:24:37) :
there are dozens of papers, which I would have thought you would be familiar with – so maybe you just don’t regard the evidence as ‘firm’
There are hundreds [if not thousands] of such papers, and I estimate that over the 40+ years of my study of this subject [I have even contributed some of those papers myself] I have carefully read about 200 of them. I have found all of them [including my own] wanting in one way or another, either they were simply just poor [this subject does seem to lend itself to such papers], or they were solid enough, but with time the correlations claimed went away [e.g. my own papers on the ‘Vorticity Area Index and Sector Boundaries’ – Brian Tinsley still believes in the effect], or they were too speculative [involving untenable mechanisms], or the statistical significance was too marginal [I recall a case where a researcher had correlated some parameters with over a hundred other ones and proudly announced that she had found 2 correlations that were significant at the 95% level – one would have expected 5 just by chance], etc, etc.
Contrary to what it may seem, I actually want there to be a connection, but with scientific honesty, at least this researcher will have to admit that none pass muster [so far]. Now, if you lower the bar enough, you will undoubtedly find some that do, so the main difference in views may simply be how low you want to set the bar.
Awww, that poor kid!
“You are making me mad.”
Well, a little anger never hurt anyone. Being angry is actually a really good prompt for learning.
Anyway, hopefully Melissa will learn. Hopefully we all will.