WUWT reader “Newty” writes in a comment in response to the National Geographic scaremongering at 2013/11/05 at 12:38 pm
Seriously though I was terrified before I first started coming here. I’ve recently become a father and we did question bringing children into the world when the threat of global warming seemed so certain and so imminent.
I work with children and many of them are seriously anxious as a result of just this kind of article that sits in the school library.
It reminds me of how I worried about nuclear war years ago. Fear is damaging our young who should grow up with optimism and hope.
I couldn’t agree more, best wishes to you and to your family – Anthony
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I remember those anti-nuke petitions being passed around elementary school during the 80’s. I refused to sign and wrote Reagan a letter asking him to scare Gorbachev until he finally surrendered.
“Global Warming Fear is damaging out young” – and the bills from reactions to the fear will need to be paid for by our young.
I just had another nice chat with a brilliant intern I commute with. She’s open – and loves to ask questions and discuss technical aspects of machinery, energy, physics and all sorts of stuff she’s learned in her first 3.5 years of college. We drive by a windmill at the Budweiser plant in Fairfield on our drive every day. I point out every morning and evening that the wind mill is not turning –seems it sits idle about half the time –sometimes for days in a row.
I told her to form her own opinion. I told her that when it does not turn, inefficient quick throttling backup systems must churn up to make up for the non spinning wind mill. I said when the wind blows, everything else must shut down enough to accept the costly wind mill energy. Windmills require close to 100% back up – and the back up power can not be as efficient because a plant needs to run continuous to be harnessed efficiently.
I asked her to think about what this generation is teaching today’s youth and how it’s borrowing money that will be paid in the future –because, it’s today’s youth that will need to pay the bills for this foolishness that makes Greenies wealthy today.
She gets it… and asks lots of good questions… her eyes are opening. She will make a difference one day. Seed planted.
Thoise billionaires such a Bill gates etc who trusted these Ba####ts will be very annoyed when they find out that they have been really had badly.
GeneDoc says:
I keep harping on this point: Stop scaring the children. It is stupid and debilitating, leading to nihilistic attitudes that can be very damaging.
===
Nihilistic indeed. I grew up no expecting to see the age fo 40.
The threat of imminent desctruction was probably a lot of the reason for “No Future” theme of the punk rock years.
However, the couple of times two very edgy super powers nearly frightened each other into a first strike means the cold war fear was perhaps not quite as baseless as the AGW one.
It is all about government by fear, of which the never-ending “war on terror” is also a part.
Sorry to say but that guy is a moron – if he had an open mind and didn’t mind doing a little research he would not be freaking out over global warming. That is pathetic – the very type people the Manns and Gores of this world use for their own ugly purposes. A semi-educated individual would recognize AGW for what it is – junk.
If I were their child I would choose different parents. These two would be too much of a handicap.
Welcome, Newty, and for sharing your thoughts.
I ran into a bit of an issue with my second son who kept coming home from grade school worried about carbon dioxide and how it was bad for the planet. I didn’t directly confront any of his teachers, but we’ve had many talks together and, fortunately, he is now starting to be able to see through the fear and take a more reasoned approach. Unfortunately, there is a real sense of fear that is being instilled in some young people, rather than helping them be excited and optimistic about the future.
The impact of climate change on obsessive compulsive checking concerns:
http://anp.sagepub.com/content/46/3/265
@Patrick Guinness Frank –
I would take it a step further and criminally charge these fearmongers with child abuse.
Welcome from me too, Newty – one of Anthony’s lurkers who’s been visiting WUWT since 2009 and stayed sane throughout the whole madness as a result. Good people live here, and they aim for a world of logic and common sense for their descendants.
And if you haven’t read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”, as recommended by one viewer earlier, then grab it. Great read, best-seller, and full of good science (fully referenced as well).
Cheers!
Fear, scare campaigns, bullying etc are typical ‘progressive left’ methodology while neglecting the facts and truth. Plus a good dose of propaganda. This will give you some idea, today in Sth Aussie the theme was a ‘scorcher’ plus extreme heat at 35 degrees C. Not even 40 odd which is not uncommon from now on in hotter parts of Australia. “Make people anxious and we have them!!”
Several years ago I gave a talk on the sceptical view of climate change to a group of British 10 year olds destined for a grammar school.
The good news was that they had never heard of Al Gore. The bad news is that they were on the verge of being nihilistic and were convinced that by the time they became adults the earth would be virtually uninhabitable.
This was based on astonishing misconceptions, firstly that the Atmosphere consisted mostly of Co2 and secondly that 90% of all Co2 was made by man. They had no conception of the real composition of the atmosphere nor of natures contribution to Co2 content
tonyb
@ur momisugly eliza 9.14 pm I am not sure if Bill and his wife even KNOW what is being done in their name, in some ways he has done tremendous good in others he is a bit just ” out of the garage” naive.
Survival of the fittest and the most intelligent – my four daughters have no fear of Global Warming and are breeding like rabbits. However, there is the little problem of Global Cooling……
Fear, uncertainty and doubt on an entirely different planet. Surrealism at its finest: “Letting people do damage for nothing”. Hmm, how to measure the long-term damage inflicted on world psyche by narcissistic dorks on a bender? The naivety and blinkered yet detached pomposity on display at this little shindig is simply breath-taking!
Seeking to create fear in despair in children isn’t the only way that children are used as pawns by believers.
The Alaska Supreme Court is in the deliberation phase of a lawsuit that is seeking to get the courts to declare the atmosphere a public trust. It is one of 8 cases brought to various states, fronted by children and orchestrated environmental activists. Julia Olson, founder of Our Children’s Trust and architect of this strategy was featured in The Atlantic “Olson and other supporters of the suit believe that having kids as plaintiffs makes a particularly visceral appeal to adults to take action.” http://tinyurl.com/7cezy3f
I wrote an opinion piece for our local paper ( http://tinyurl.com/lvhld7m ), and dug into this case pretty deeply. In the court documents, two of the children state that they watched “An Inconvenient Truth” in school and became alarmed enough to seek action. “Kids Versus Global Warming” also had an impact. There is an industry out there designed to alarm our children.
I entirely agree – I’m very glad not to be young now.
Not so much troubled by all the manufactured pseudoproblems, though; it’s more that this young generation is going to have to repeat, in spades, the dreadful struggle against fascism which my parents’ generation thought they’d won. God grant that “we” win this time round.
For those questioning why the original commenter hadn’t done the research: You need to read more carefully.
He did do the research. He came here.
If anyone is truly concerned they won’t be pacified by something written on the internet… not unless they critically evaluate it. There are a lot of voices on the internet.
The parents are doing fine and the kids will be alright.
The opportunity cost alone of wasting $1 billion per day on AGW hype is hurting our children.
Too right – adults tell kids there is no hope for the future, that they are doomed to a miserable existence at the edge of survival until the biosphere becomes totally uninhabitable, then we wonder why they smoke drugs and don’t bother with school.
Crazy.
– If you are not a good little boy/girl and don’t work hard to stop every gramme of CO2, then the bogeyman will come & get you !
– Daddy, where is all the extra heat you said would destroy us ?
“It’s hiding …where we can’t see it deeep in the ocean
…but one day it’s going to jump out and get us ..whoaaa !”
– So a child that started school in 2000 was told : “when you grow up, it will be so much warmer than now and the planet will be on it’s way to catastrophe”
– So now in 2013 that child after 13 years of Eco-indoctrination has finished school, they find the temperature is still the same as when they started.
…… And you wonder why kids hate & despise adults ?
It’s child abuse but here in the UK it is extremely difficult/impossible to get top grades in a range of school subject course-work and exams without trotting out some of the ‘standard’ blatant lies ‘cos they are the required answers!
Eco-fascist indoctrination runs from age 5 right through into the Universities…
The thing that puzzles me most though is that some people with high-level science education who were educated before this organised campaign of lies and deceit set in can still believe this eco-crap… They have the tools to dissect and reject this nonsense but many choose not to use them! Most strange…
Goethe was right: “Nothing is more terrifying than ignorance in action.”
Unfortunately while terror sells magazines it also scars our children’s intellects.
It is indoctrination along the lines of a certain youth brigade from the 1930’s and 40’s and I don’t mean the boy scouts! By creating future generations of alarmists, worriers and botherers the only thing they will do is create confusion in children’s minds. They will be taught one thing and will experience something completely different.
The most important lesson to learn is that scaremongering is a tactic of control, diversion, subversion, subjugation and rabble rousing used by the more powerful on the less powerful.
A careful study of scaremongering tactics should be part of everyone’s education: sadly as most of us already grown up didn’t get it, we have to learn it on the hoof, starting from the position of credulity and eventually facing the life’s challenge of remaining decent, caring and generous after years of needing to develop a cement exterior to protect that decent, caring and generous nature from the fusillades of scaremongering from this side, that side and from within.
There are certain common factors to scaremongering waged over a longer time period (of greater than one political/electoral cycle):
1. The contentions are neither easily shown to be true nor easy to falsify.
2. The potential, if true, is genuinely scary.
3. The script is amenable to the messengers of scaremongering (huge headlines, dramatic pictures or videos etc etc)
4. Significant amounts of money can be made from riding this wave, whether or not the assertions are true or false.
5. A power coalition of interests can coalesce to form a united front which saturates the airwaves.
6. Strident intolerance on both sides is usually reached after widespread awareness raising is complete.
7. Employment ostracism can result from not following the party line.
8. The information necessary to confirm or refute the hypothesis is available only to the few, often only to the coalition of interest.
9. The expertise necessary to evaluate the contention may be higher than that of the majority of people.
10. The money is made not by being right or wrong, but through selling something or other during the period of the scaremongering (you’ll note that the total research spent on warmest hype is far, far higher than on the emerging truths of the more skeptical, carbon traders will have made money on South Sea Futures, large consultancy budgets existed for ‘greening the economy’, whereas none was available to do similar work using the cheapest energy available).
In my adult life, here is a list of some of the ‘bogeymen’:
1. The Iranians/the Iraqis are about to bomb us (change the country according to will from 1980 through to 2005).
2. BSE and vCJD: millions of us will die.
3. ‘Global Warming’: £100bn and counting wasted on fraudulent research.
4. Y2K bug – a mythical pile of shit akin to the scam of the century.
5. Bird Flu – probably engineered in a military lab somewhere and then released to create the scare, which allowed pharma companies to get millions in grants to make vaccines.
There are probably more.
What I’ve come to learn is that many people can only make money by creating dependency: they actually aren’t any good at human relations between emancipated adults. As a result, the way for them to get rich is for them to create scares. It’s not very nice, but it’s usually less bad than bombing someone for money, which our Governments have done rather a lot of.
Then there are the Government scams, false flags.
Those are the most difficult to elucidate, the least possible to get reliable inside information on.