This guy (Headmaster Rob Benzie) has become Scrooge in England, except he doesn’t provide even one lump of coal, because, well that would mess up his “carbon footprint”. This is just too bizarre not to pass on, thanks to The Daily Bayonet who writes:
A headmaster at a British school decided a great lesson in sustainability would be to turn off the heat for a day. In December:
Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C. The school’s headmaster, Rob Benzie, shut down the radiators as an experiment to show students how the school could cut its carbon footprint.
The headmaster is unapologetic and wants to do it again:
…headteacher Mr Benzie, 52, defended the day, saying it was ‘a success.’ ‘We turned off the heating as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint,’ he said. ‘We allowed pupils to wear as many jumpers as they liked and everyone seemed to be happy enough although it did get pretty chilly. ‘We gave letters to pupils to take home to their parents informing them about the eco day. ‘We only had one complaint and that came from a member of staff but they just got on with it in the end.’
Mr Benzie said he hoped to repeat the eco day again next term.
The local school authority and parents should probably teach Mr. Benzie the lesson that freezing children to push a radical green agenda makes his job unsustainable, before he does something really stupid.
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Sparks says:
December 8, 2011 at 12:44 pm
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve read or watched reports of a “greatly distorted” and exaggerated media claim, in fact it’s a running issue with sceptical views of man made global warming, have a noisy around some sceptical blogs and web sites, count how many “greatly distorted” and exaggerated media claims there are on the effects of man made climate change, Rob Benzie was happy to go eco-politico with kids, and try to influence the media the way he would like, but unfortunately for him it back fired.
believe me i know only too well how much alarmism and seriously over the top stories are in the media. I have been a skeptic for a few years and have been reading Antony’s blog for 2.5 years. I just had to point out that this story was grossly exaggerated.
Misreported or not, is this really a storm in a teacup, or is it the leading edge of an oncoming human catastrophe? Ask yourself by what right/s the government claims the authority to teach your children what they should and should not think about the subject of environmentalism and behaviors toward environmentalism? At what point does the government trespass upon the rights of the parents to teach their own children about science? At what point are parents obligated to hold their government accountable for trespassing upon the parental rights and other rights of free Englishmen?
Aunty Freeze says:
December 8, 2011 at 1:47 pm
..
What was grossly exaggerated? A school head master did turn the heating off to make an eco-political point about the fictitious dangers of Co2. And he used your own kids as pawns.
What part of the article was actually exaggerated? was it someones opinion of the estimated temperature when the heating was turned off?
I understand where you’re coming from, but did we read the same article? 🙂
James says: December 8, 2011 at 7:08 am
I cant believe that there are so many people not only interested in this story but know nothing of the true facts or figures… The temp didn’t drop below 17.5 c all day. Most of the info posted on these types of sites is bollocks.
If true, this min. temperature is only a half degree below legal min. We have two skeptic posters with firsthand knowledge here, James and Auntie Freeze, who both maintain most of this post is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. But there are still possible incidental lessons, as other writers point out.
I cannot charge warmists to practice Nullius in Verba and let its absence pass on my co-skeptics’ number one science site. Can I suggest that much of the indignation is really better directed to the appallingly low standard of science now taught?
BTW there is, as some writers point out, an ancient masochistic streak in some of us Brits (well, not me!) which everyone else finds completely incomprehensible.
Don says: December 7, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Possibly he’s had one too many Scrumpies at the Blue Ball Inn in Triscombe.
Haha. Not very close to Ansford. But the Blue Balls at Lynmouth, Wellington, Braunston and Sidford are none of them very close.
However… if people here would like to meet up at one of these, I’d be game! eg email me.
It was a cool experiment. I mean it was cool, really.
@D. Patterson I commend you on a skillful spin of an essentially harmless experiment, suggested by students and approved or not objected to by the forewarned parents into a history lesson of oppression with a final flourish into expounding on gov’t interference.
And I understand it took only 7 minutes for 1st comment, but it was over 1 1/2 hours and more than 40 comments in, before the 1st reasonable comment, by BargHumer, was posted, immediately following a comment about Liberalism being a mental defect and after numerous others calling for Headmaster Benzie to be sacked and flogged.
At least jfisk demonstrated some perception although is was
climatereason who gave the 1st comment worthy of a true skeptic shortly thereafter but the thread quickly reverted to a slew of pointless and repetitive ranting.
While a few individuals did attempt to be reasonable, it was Derek Sorensen who 1st took the trouble to check the facts.
Despite his efforts, there were still an embarrasing number who kept dialing up the noise and drowning out what little signal was to be found in this comment thread.
Please try to do better in the future, folks; this was not your finest hour.
A bit late, but if you want climate craziness, this is a nice one:
Two years ago, my local municipal waste service decided to paint its garbage trucks white instead of the traditional orange, in an attempt to fight global warming by reflecting more sunlight. I kid you not.
http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.633917 … “The impact will be limited but every little bit helps”
Sure. Why not?
It could also be regarded as a demonstration of how the poorest people will be spending winter, mainly the elderly, as they can not afford the energy subsidies for the rich. That is the true lesson.
DMarshall says:
December 8, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Please try to do better in the future, folks; this was not your finest hour.
What, you’re not going to try to replicate in your own home Benzie’s brilliant attempt to pay a virtual visit to North Korea with his Head Start “students”? Si se pueda!…snif..
@JPeden North Korea? What’s your point?
DMarshall, once again you are completely missing the point!
Don’t you know that the precautionary principle dictates that we must move quickly to protect the children? You are sitting on your anti-science skeptical butt (cough) denying the children are at risk while we scientists are duly concerned that there is a crisis afoot and the kids are not being properly cared for, thus we are making a big fuss about this
peer reviewed paperpress release. If the school was cold enough for them to use hockey sticks, inside, would that be enough to convince you that action needs to be taken? What’s it gonna take, plots and graphs? How about we get back to you after we adjust the recorded classroom temperatures with a (cough) updated set of data and then you can decide whether you should be alarmed. We’ll send you an email.😉
All kidding aside, your strange concern for WUWT commenters who are concerned for these children is, weird. If we were talking about polar bears instead of children, perhaps the AGW warmies would be more concerned, yes? No-one is flying off the handle here DMarshall. They are re-acting to the article as it was written, and exactly as you would expect good people and parents to react when children are involved. This is human nature. The fact that the article is completely believable is what should concern you, and is 100% due to the damage done to Science and to society itself by the delusional cabal that you roll with. The green menace is capable of this and much much more. Shall we review 10:10 no pressure …
@Blade,
D.Marshall was absolutely right. If this event had been presented in some way as to demonstrate the reality of the AWG agenda then the comments would be very different. So many of the comments are typical of a nanny state mentality. Life has risks and pouring out so many laws and requirements for the working environment show a narrow mindedness that surely follows into the area of scientific understanding.
It is not the way.
All he demonstrated was how miserable it would be without reliable energy. We would have to take a leaf out of the book of energy-poverty elderly folks of UK who took to burning books for heat during the recent cold winters there (reported here in WUWT in post of about a year ago).
DMarshall was absolutely wrong. Perhaps you couldn’t disentangle who said what in all the quotes. Or perhaps the lack of a SARC tag tricked you. I suggest you re-read the whole thing.
The ‘nanny state mentality’ is a feature of the left, never from me. People in this thread worried about children is NOT nanny state mentality, it is human nature. Protecting children from the terrorists on the left is sane and logical. I certainly hope you agree.
If “sustainable” means anything sane, it means meeting your needs without depleting a limited resource.
As the UK, like most of the world, is sitting on untold humungous reserves of frac gas, which is great at heating buildings (and generating power), getting cold indoors is a demonstration of how not to meet your needs by not using a virtually unlimited resource.
Award the headmaster a dunce cap and a pair of stilts.
Secret ballots only. (Ballot boxes opened and counted in full view; the Headmaster is likely a disciple of the Stalinist method of deciding elections.)
The Consensual Clobberers would make sure that an open show of hands or voice vote would be Constructively Corrupted.
@Blade Concern for the children? Truly concerned people get involved and take action, not just leave of their senses.
Did any of you “concerned citizens” send an e-mail to the school, headmaster, dep’t of education or start a petition against abuse of students to by the Slime Green Communist forces?
Aren’t any of you embarrassed that the mudslinging against the headmaster, although understandable in the initial comments, continued LONG AFTER it was pointed out that the article was either inaccurate or flagrantly distorted?
It’s apparent that, among those who posted on this topic, there are few truly clear-thinking individuals and a whole lot who are so invested in their agenda they resemble religious cultists.
If comments were graded as well as moderated a lot of you who should know better would have earned yourself a great big FAIL.
DMarshall says:
December 9, 2011 at 8:28 am
@JPeden North Korea? What’s your point?
It’s the epitome of the Communist Utopia you “Benzie” “Progressives” want to impose on the rest of us. No, we don’t need any more of your brilliant pre-Enlightenment Post Normal
flights of fantasy“experiments”. In fact, from the quality of your “thinking”, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of your “learning” took place in a Deep Freeze, and that if you’d only stick to trying to reinvent the wheel, you’d fail.Yep, got it. You dismiss the article because some fact is allegedly wrong (perhaps you should apply this skepticism 😉 to your AGW madness, but you won’t of course). Look, what happened here is simple and undeniable. An AGW kook, this headmaster, used kids under his care as a prop to push his idiotic cause. What is an issue to you is the degree (literally) to which he exposed these children to cold. Just how low the temperature went for these children is real important to you. A little cold is just fine, right? Do you really want to go out this far on a limb for your cause? Really? I haven’t looked, but did you also rationalize 10:10 No Pressure? Is there anything these annoying green nutjobs could do that would wake you up?
‘Mudslinging’ you are concerned about? For real? This is what you get upset at? An event involving innocent children and an AGW kook, and you are concerned for the kook being criticized. You do realize you are in the comment section? That is what you find here. Reactions. And you know full well what the commenters here are reacting to – activists messing around with innocent children. And rightly so. It is completely natural and normal, and *necessary* in a population where some so-called ‘adults’ do not realize there are some things that are out of bounds. So knock off the trolling and the enabling. Either that, or just come out and say: ‘it wasn’t too cold, he didn’t really hurt the kids’. Or say that if your child was in that school this would be just peachy by you. Just understand this, it is most certainly not okay to most people, and God help us if someday it is. This AGW fanatic should be excoriated, and believe me if he was in most districts over here this putz would never do it again.
And yes, there is a religious cult at play here, thanks for pointing that out. It is the Green Church of Climatology. This priest in the Church, this headmaster, was preaching to the these captive children (which is bad enough and should not be tolerated), and took it further by demonstrating how cold it gets when the heat is off. This is an activist, a proselytizing evangelist. I can imagine your outrage if Jerry Falwell or Mother Theresa (while they were alive 😉 showed up at your kids school and just talked, let alone turned the heat off.
P.S. Thank you for the catchy phrase “Slime Green Communist forces“. It rolls of the tongue, I like it.
DMarshall says:
December 10, 2011 at 11:04 am
“Concern for the children? Truly concerned people get involved and take action, not just leave of their senses. Did any of you “concerned citizens” send an e-mail to the school, headmaster, dep’t of education or start a petition against abuse of students to by the Slime Green Communist forces?”
What kind of idiot would need to perform this “experiment” to begin with? That’s why I asked you why you didn’t repeat it in your own home. “Truly concerned people” need to call a spade a spade.
@JPeden That’s why I asked you why you didn’t repeat it in your own home.
I have years of physical labor (both indoors and out) under my belt, in a wide range of temp and humidity, and lived for 2 winters in a rundown house, a couple decades ago, where the indoor temp was typically 50F. A s a result, my tolerance, especially for cold, is much better than the average.
Is it lost on you that this experiment a) was suggested by students b) was communicated before hand to parents and c) didn’t violate the legal min. heating requirements?
And, I have been calling, as you put it, “a spade a spade” throughout this discussion – and have been putting the focus where it should be, which is not on one maligned school official but on a horde of unquestioning dittoheads who should know better.
@Blade AGW fanatic? Preaching to the captive children? Did you do the slightest bit of research beyond that sorry excuse for reporting at the Daily Mail?
Please go back and re-read ( possibly for the 1st time ) all my posts in this thread. I do not condone abuse of innocents but this is NOT what happened here. And the reactions of the Anointed Faithful of the Church of Climactic Contrarianism make it clear that “Won’t anyone think of the CHILDREN” meme is not only alive and well but still a wonderful excuse to spout off and foam at the mouth against any who are perceived to be adhering to the Goracle Agenda.
If they get cold, they can press the “no pressure” button and blow up the deniers, in reverse order of skepticism. As you can see, the carbon emissions are not in a gaseous state.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/30/o-m-g-video-explodes-skeptical-kids-in-bloodbath/
DMarshall says:
December 11, 2011 at 9:38 am
I have years of physical labor (both indoors and out) under my belt, in a wide range of temp and humidity, and lived for 2 winters in a rundown house, a couple decades ago, where the indoor temp was typically 50F. A s a result, my tolerance, especially for cold, is much better than the average.
Is it lost on you that this experiment a) was suggested by students b) was communicated before hand to parents and c) didn’t violate the legal min. heating requirements?
Right, your cold tolerance is much better than the average, therefore, the students should try it by attempting to replicate a “rundown house”? When you admit that it’s not going to be pleasant or conducive to learning [and prospering] which everyone with any sense already knows, including you in a rare moment! Therefore, Benzie’s infantile “experiment” was stupid, right?
But why are you so threatened by people simply noting the same thing, that your similarly illogical CO2 = CAGW ally, Benzie, enc., is stupid? Maybe because your essentially “holy” CO2 = CAGW “hypotheses” haven’t produced even one correct relevant empirical prediction yet, but you still need to believe in them? That’s stupid as well. And no amount of childish acting out and untethered post modern subjectivist gibberish can alter that fact.
Or should we all be forced to convert to North Korea’s way of life just because your Religion and its “horde of unquestioning dittoheads” says so?
Snap out of it, compadre! The alleged cure to your alleged disease is already obviously much worse than your still only alleged disease. Just ask China and India. And, of course, ask the COP17 “agreement”. “It’s dead, Jim.”