Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Washington Post thinks Americans don’t take Climate Change seriously enough. Opinion columnist Catherine Rampell thinks we should look to the example of how German teachers educate children about Climate Change.
Take Emmy-Noether-Schule, an 800-student secondary school in east Berlin I visited recently. Educators there consider climate change so pressing that they integrate it into just about every class you can think of (including, when the instructor is so inclined, Latin). About a quarter of the content in the 10th-grade English textbook, for example, is about threats to planet Earth. That means when kids learn to use the conditional mood in English, their grammar exercises rely on sentences like this: “If we don’t do something about global warming, more polar ice will start to melt.”
Likewise, in an 11th-grade geography class dedicated entirely to sustainability, students write poetry about klimawandel (climate change). My favorite couplet, from an ode by student Hannah Carsted: “The water level rises/ The fish are in a crisis.”
I guess we can all learn something from the German example.
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Germany has a poor provenance when it comes to brain washing their children. Let us not forget the Hitler Youth and the Nazi domination of the education system which resulted in such fanatic soldiers ready to die for that pathetic nasty little man!
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Haven’t the Germans, of all people, learned nothing from the Nazi regime?
This stuff is almost straight out of the Hitler Youth manual. They could have a youth competition for words for a new National Anthem… to the tune of the Horst Wessel Song.
Lunatics
Well we did; it is the media that is in the hands of the totalitarians. That teachers are statists should surprise nobody.
That’s also why German MSM is dying.
The original Producers was too funny to include here, where the discussion is of a scary recurrence of state indoctrination of the Jugend.
Should go below, obviously.
Es tut mir Leid!
Hoffen wir, dass morgen nicht zu ihnen gehören:
Oops. Morgen und Ihnen.
You mean that we don’t belong to a Hollywood fiction tomorrow? Hey why not the Producers.
I’m getting rather tired of the vegetarian lobby too–who are STILL publishing Ancel Keys’ long-debunked garbage about red meat and heart disease when virtually ALL the evidence points to refined carbs as the source of ALL the “diseases of civilization.” But these days it’s about eating to “save the planet.” Save it from COWS????!
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21642222-americas-largest-ethnic-group-has-assimilated-so-well-people-barely-notice-it
People of German descent and America have been linked for another reason. When the English crown passed to the House of Hanover from Germany in the 18th century it was only logical that people of German descent would pick the new colonies in America in which to settle. Many Americans have German surnames and are completely unaware or indifferent as to how that came about.
English royalty fought their German cousins in WWI. The English Battenbergs found it convenient to change their name to Mountbatten at that time.
They couldn’t have their cake and eat it.
I think that I can summarize this from a historical and cultural perspective.
Firstly the Germans were lead into catastrophe by a few nasty but charming men and indulged in an horrific five year long orgy of violence, mass murder, genocide and mass-rape in which tens of millions died. (Sod Godwin.)
And then, just when you think that it’s time that we all moved on, they seem to have decided to apologize to the world by attempting to show how wonderfully easy it would be to convert a modern industrial nation over to running power extracted from the sun and wind.
How kind of them. Aren’t we lucky.
20 years into this project, and with 100’s of billions of euros spent on subsidies – the Germans have managed to derive 14.8% of their energy from Solar and Wind, in 2014.
They also now have extraordinarily high electricity prices and a dependency on gas imports from their non-friend Mr Putin.
I suppose that all they now need to do is spend a little more money on convincing the world that such a meagre achievement at so great a cost is a glorious success.
Goebbels would be proud.
As Churchill might have said, “never in the field of human bullshit, has so much money been spent by so many, on so little actual usable energy”.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany-energy-mix.png
The 14.8% corresponds to the German wind power capacity factor, i.e. the percent of rated nameplate capacity actually generated. This not the percent of total generation including all sources.
1. http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/07/germany-2014-report-card-is-in-its-25000-wind-turbines-get-an-f-averaged-only-14-8-of-rated-capacity/#sthash.AQdV3SsA.dpbs
Thanks. That’s actually a neat coincidence. I got my 14.8% for 2014 figure by adding up the totals for wind and solar from this chart from wikipedia. Unfortunately, when I posted the link it just comes up as a small box – however the box can be clicked to reveal a chart of official percentages of energy use: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany-energy-mix.png
We do NOT derive 14.8% of our energy from reneables, but 2%.
PLEASE PEOPLE finally learn that electricity consumption = one seventh of primary energy consumption.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Electricity_Production_in_Germany.svg?download
“Electricity Production in Germany” by Theanphibian – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_Production_in_Germany.svg#/media/File:Electricity_Production_in_Germany.svg
Sorry. Second link is better for rapid viewing of distribution of sources.
It’s charts like that that make it clear why Russia Today and Al Jazeera are heavily promoting eco-fear, anti-fracking and wind/solar renewable energy in the west.
Meanwhile the useful idiots in our own countries keep up the work of aiding them in their plans to push us to into frittering away our energy budgets on pipedreams whilst Putin and the Arabs spend the cash that we give them on pipelines (and on brainwashing eco-crap for their T.V. outlets).
They’ll very soon be predominantly (>50%) dependent on coal.
Shutting down their nuclear plants for fear of tsunamis and building more coal power stations to replace nuclear should do the trick.
As Churchill might have said, “never in the field of human bullshit, has so much money been spent by so many, on so little actual usable energy”.
Amazingly prescient, Churchill would doubtless also have gone on to mention something about a new dark age and a perverted science.
VIDEO: 2 mins 18 secs:; 7 June: Rappler Philippines: Australian climate
activist delivers country’s apology for Philippines
Through a spoken word video, Chris Wright, a member of the Global Call for Climate Action, delivered his apology for vulnerable countries like the Philippines.
“So this is an apology from an Australian, for the small part I played as Haiyan raged against your shores – ***But I can’t watch storms anymore,” said Wright.
http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/environment/95598-australian-climate-activist-apology-philippines
well-trained or brainwashed? from Chris’s LinkedIn:
UNFCCC Fellow, Global Call for Climate Action, 2012 – 2013…
amusing, tho putting faith in any YouGov poll is not advisable:
8 June: UK Independent: Andrew Griffin: UK and US main barriers to
addressing climate change, survey finds
In a new survey taken months before officials meet for perhaps the most
significant climate change talks ever held, YouGov found that people the US
and UK lag far behind countries including China in wanting those talks to
produce a meaningful commitment to address climate change…
“Despite some lingering doubts, particularly in the US,
a failure to reach an agreement in Paris would likely be met with
disappointment throughout much of the world,” YouGov notes…
***The company noted that in China all questions were taken online, which
could have affected the results.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/uk-and-us-main-barriers-to-addressing-climate-change-survey-finds-10303279.html
“…for the small part I played … ” LAUGH — OUT — LOUD. Exaggerated sense of self-importance, no? Poor guy… with that kind of an ego, he figures everyone is listening into his cell phone conversations all the time so he never talks to anyone anymore. Pitiful.
@ur momisugly all the Chris Wright’s of the World:
You need a healthy dose of the Anti-Hubris Medication of Dr. Carlin (heh):
(language warning and, no, I do not agree with ALL he says, lol) — youtube
True Gaia worshippers are not Envirostal1inists. They believe Gaia can take care of herself.
{Note: I’m not a Gaia worshipper, just have talked with a couple — I only add this for those who might possibly read this who want to be Gaia worshippers and who are quite obviously confused in the HOPES that they will see that the l1e of AGW and the tenets of Gaiaism contradict each other. Next step…. the truth about God… . Okay, okay, I won’t start, DON’T WORRY, MIL, er STURGIS ;). +++++ Actually, hippies aren’t the main AGW accolytes. It’s the typical “liberal” (those who often just “feel” something is correct instead of looking at the evidence…) who is the main victim of the Enviroprofiteers’ propaganda.}
I wonder if the different responses to the survey were affected by the fact that voters in the US and UK know that they are going to be paying out 100billion dollars every year from 2016 , whilst voters from “countries including China” know that they will receive the 100billion dollars every year?
Could that possible influence have crossed the “minds” of the Independent’s journalists or the polling agency YouGov.
Klimate Kool ade will do that to you.
the us is almost as bad. Can you go through a day without hearing something green?
From the dean of umass amherst to the grad uating class of 2014…his very first sentence was “the most important issue you will face is climate change”…..what bull
So after the Merkel Youth program what’s next? – the re-opening of Auschwitz where all “deniers’ will face death in the CO2 chambers?
But it IS re-assuring to know that “Americans were not only most likely to express indifference about climate change; we were also most likely to say our own government was already “doing too much” to stop it.”
There is some hope then that it will be those stubborn damn Yankees with all their righteous might, who will not be dictated to by a totalitarian inquisition, once again save a free thinking European resistance.
They must be so proud; teaching their kids what to think instead of how.
In the Free World, what the Germans are doing to innocent, young school children is called….Brainwashing. Hitler did the same thing. Despicable!!
The next time one finds oneself shaking their heads in dismay, over the blind obedience to AGW catechism… remember this article. Fanatics do not just “happen”. Pity is the correct response but also fear… because the consequences can be a 1984ish horror. GK
This sickens me. I have a 6 year old daughter, and I’m dreading the day she starts coming back from school with green propaganda.
What do I do? Go to school and rip the teacher a new one? They are so stoopid and sure of themselves they wont even listen to reason.
Damn Quebec and the damn carbon exchange, as well as its socialist teachers.
This is a problem with state or provincial and federal regimes usurping local control of public schools. In the good old days, skeptics could have run for the school board and had a say in curriculum. Now teachers’ unions are laws unto themselves and curriculum decided by distant regional and national governments.
Sturgis, it was local control that dumbed down the standards from the turn of the century (1900’s) in the first place. Why? They could get more federal money by being able to “successfully” teach more children. Back then it was just easier to ease the standards than it was to find new ways to teach children who struggled to learn. Thankfully, that kind of thinking has ended.
There should be no federal money in local schools, period. The central government arguably has a role to play in higher education, but should stay out of primary and secondary education.
Helping out impoverished school districts lacking a property tax or other basis of funding was and should be a state responsibility.
America’s decline will continue as long as the national regime continues to usurp powers which properly belong at the state and local levels and with private associations and the people.
If local schools for whatever reason dumb down their curricula, then the market will correct them by parents voting with their feet and other means. Finally, there are the courts to ensure that public schools don’t teach religion as science.
You say things I actually agree with except for one really big issue. The issue that contradicts your states’ rights belief is that we are a Republic nation of states which defines who can be discriminated against. And Brown versus the Board of Education stipulated that a state cannot develop an educational system that discriminates against a protected class. If you don’t like that, you should lobby for your state to secede from the United States.
Pamela,
As I said, there is a role for the courts. We can do away with public schools without discrimination.
And actually I do favor secession, if the next president be a Democrat. It’s the only way. Constitutional amendments won’t work, since both parties are just wings of the government party.
Eastern Oregon and Washington would first have to secede from west of the Cascades before joining with the Mountain West, Great Plains and South to form a more perfect, less united Union.
What do I do? Go to school and rip the teacher a new one? .
Of course not. First of all, the teacher may well agree with you, but may not be in a position to do so publicly. They want to keep their jobs. So cut them some slack. Second, your duty to teach is not to the teacher, but to your daughter. You have two tasks:
1. Teach her the difference between the right answer and the facts. When she is old enough (probably several years from now) at the mention of ice melting, walk through the WUWT Sea Ice Page with her. By the time you get to the end, she’ll have a different perspective. That’s just an example of course, there’s lots more.
2. Make sure she understands the need to get good marks is predicated on getting the right answer. When she has graduated and it is her turn to rule the world, she can change the right answers to whatever she wishes.
dmh commented :
“1. Teach her the difference between the right answer and the facts. When she is old enough (probably several years from now) at the mention of ice melting, walk through the WUWT Sea Ice Page with her. By the time you get to the end, she’ll have a different perspective. That’s just an example of course, there’s lots more.
2. Make sure she understands the need to get good marks is predicated on getting the right answer. When she has graduated and it is her turn to rule the world, she can change the right answers to whatever she wishes.”
Good for you and anyone who takes the time to teach their children rather than expecting the public school system to be responsible for all learning.
I agree. [Teach] her, what I believe is right, is up to me.
And yes, I will have to teach her the difference between the “right” answer and the facts.
I just find its really sad when a parent has to actively subvert the education system. Though its necessary, its a sorry sorry state of affairs.
This is one area in which my sons (the last one is graduating from high school this month) have listened to their Mom. I’ve taught them the need to be politically correct if necessary, for the sake of marks, but loaded them with facts, historical analogies (eg Lysenkoism) and rational arguments. They are all skeptical of CAGW. If only they would listen to me on other topics!
Dear Vigilant Fish,
(so sorry — again! — for that time I assumed you were a man!! — horrors (JUST KIDDING, guys))
Good — for — you, Mom! I’m smiling as I picture you listening to “Pomp and Circumstance” (or whatever they play at his commencement ceremony), sitting tall, maybe wiping a tear… . To have ALL of them graduate is wonderful. So happy for you! #(:))
CONGRATULATIONS!!
Janice
P.S. And they will listen… (they already have, more than you realize, you know)… . You will grow wiser with every passing year (Chinese fortune ;)).
dmh:
There is no justification for lying to children.
It is one of the most heinous crimes ever.
Cowards always find justification for their cowardice.
And then the thugs with guns will come for you at night, anyway, and all your lies and cowardice shall be in vain.
This advice would certainly apply to whatever assessment will be cooked up to test NextGeneration Science Standards. But Common Core States Standards assessments performance tasks in writing and math problem solving have no “right” answer. What they are looking for is a well-argued response, using whatever three sources are provided.
Make sure she understands the need to get good marks is predicated on getting the right answer.
Not in my class, it isn’t. And not in my wife’s classes. And, to the best of my knowledge, not in very many of my colleagues. When teaching subjects where the facts may be in dispute, we look for rational argument, evidence, and cogent presentation. Encourage your kids to make the best presentation they can of what they really believe. Exception, of course, for the ideologue teacher who has a demonstrated track record of intolerance. But I don’t think there are nearly as many of those as this conversation would suggest.
Just because teachers are bound to cover the topics set down in the curriculum does not mean they are forced to suppress nonconformist opinions.
John Slayton commented: “Just because teachers are bound to cover the topics set down in the curriculum does not mean they are forced to suppress nonconformist opinions.”
Now I understand why some….Pam :-)….support CC. The standards set forth in CC are a lot like the ‘standards’ set forth in Agenda21. Very Utopian and quite frankly desirable for a learning environment. No Godwin. In my neck of the woods….urban, high density….the school district purchases curriculum that supposedly supports CC standards. No one teaches directly from the CC…..unless I’m wrong. And by my guess less than 1/2 of the inner city teachers today can deliver to CC standards much less understand what they really are. For the record I am married to a retired inner city teacher and my daughter teaches inner city today.
Reply
I’m not sure how many people posting currently have kids in school right now, but there is no need to look to Germany as an example. Kids already get plenty of this in their current curriculum.
Anyone that thinks Germany is doing more indoctrination than what is currently happening in the US, needs to pick up some school books and take a look… doesn’t matter what grade level.
Laughable for how wrong you are Mark. None of our textbooks harp on AGW. Granted we are a poor rural district in Oregon.
Pamela,
Here is what CC actually says about “climate change”:
https://www.masterresource.org/debate-issues/common-core-climate-indoctrination/
Not as bad as could be, but still pretty bad.
The risk is that once you nationalize and socialize public (and in effect private) primary and secondary education, a malevolent administration can abuse its power even further to indoctrinate kids. And few teachers would object, their being unionized public servants of the central regime, seeking to achieve the goals of their distant masters, rather than dedicated professionals hired by local school boards.
Sturgis is again wrong. I have read the entire CCSS documents. I specifically refer to the ELA Literacy appendix that highlights reading standards in Science. Climate nor climate warming is mentioned.
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/introduction/
Again, Sturgis must be referring to the NextGeneration Science Standards, not the Common Core States Standards.
Sturgis, I have a challenge for you. What state do you come from? I would be interested in reading up on your state standards as well as educational history from the 1900’s onward and then offering a report.
Every state has a history related to the provision of public education. Oregon has such a history. Caveat: I always have to dig beyond the “official” record to get to the real goods, but it’s a start.
Pamela,
Washington.
Of course states have a history of supporting schools, especially in the West. Land was set aside to support schools.
That’s why I say the states should be the level of government to support needy districts, not the federal regime, which has no business meddling in, let alone controlling, local schools.
My great-grandmother was a pioneer one-room school teacher. My aunt was a high school and community college teacher, so I come from a long line of public school teachers.
But since unionization, what was once a noble profession has now become a public employee job with little to no accountability. The oppression of big government begins in the state monopoly schools and indeed couldn’t work to suppress freedom without them.
We spend more on “education” and get less (except more robbery of liberty) than any other country. The sooner the public schools are done away with, the sooner America will have a chance to free herself and be America again.
I support giving poor parents vouchers to send their kids to private schools. If a community wants to set up its own private school to replace its suborned public school, great. But unionized public schools have to go if there is to be a hope for regenerating America.
It would be nice if educators were as motivated to learn science as they are to teach it.
won’t matter a bit because the parents, whose direct responsibility the raising of their own children is- have defaulted, out of cowardice and will proceed to demonstrate by example that submission is the way the family avoids confronting evil – except when they also whine their apologias.
EXCUSE ME??? Bark up some other tree.
Staggering, we truly are, breeding a generation of halfwits. This ‘learning’ is akin to grabbing a knife at the sharp end, it will only end in tears.
And here, we have movies like Tomorrowland teaching us not to buy that bullshit.
Will the USA Air Force, Army and Navy acquiesce to the G-7 Obama-Merkel Demands of “Fossil Fuel Free World in 2085”?
So the USA Air Force must replace all aircraft with hot-air balloons, the Army must replace all mechanized units with horse-drawn mechanisms and the Navy must re-institute Sails and Ors for propulsion.
Answer: Mr. Obama and Mrs. Markel will not be seeing the morning sun on any day in the year 2056.
Good reddens.
Ha ha
“It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.” Joseph Goebbels
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Lenin
“When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine.” Bertrand Russell
As a German I say: I feel embarrassed of being German! It is disgusting what is going on in Germany, both at schools and at universities. You guys are right if you compare “Energiewende-Germany” with “Nazi-Germany”. The methods are the same and the Germans are open-minded for any indoctrination. It is awful!
Well I hop from project to project and the number of warmunist engineers has dropped to zero. In 2009 I was in a solar industry company surrounded by believers, I predicted a cold winter and Hamburg promptly froze over, I had fun (Hamburgers are helpless when there’s black ice on the street.)
These days I don’t find anyone still defending the theory of manmade Global Warming. So, I see a trend there.
The youngans are completely apathetic about it, the propaganda has backfired badly.
Victory as WV School Board allows students to debate global warming
THE CFACT EDITOR POSTED THIS REPORT ON 29TH. APRIL 2015
– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2015/04/09/victory-as-wv-school-board-allows-students-to-debate-global-warming/#sthash.A5YhVoIc.dpuf
The West Virginia Board of Education voted yesterday to put an end to months of controversy and open up teaching standards to permit students to consider both sides in the climate debate.
The Board voted 6-2 in favor of amending the standards to, as the Charleston Daily Mail reports, “allow students to use scientific models to form their own conclusions on the debated topic.”
“Supporters of the changes, including board members Wade Linger and Tom Campbell, argued that ‘science is never settled’ and that debate will lead students into a deeper understanding of the issue,” the paper added.
The vote represents a significant victory for student rights and for science. The scientific method demands consideration of all data, without regard for the impact this may have on a cherished theory. Open minds and free debate are essential to science and climate science is no exception.
When the Board voted in December to amend teaching standards to allow students to consider both sides in the climate debate, global warming pressure groups were apoplectic.
They ridiculed the Board and demanded it drop its revised standards and ban facts which question the man-made global warming narrative from the classroom.
CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, who edits CFACT’s Climate Depot news and information service and a contingent of students from CFACT Collegians chapters at the University of West Virginia and Marshall University testified before the Board, which voted in January to temporarily pull back the amended standards and further consider the matter.
CFACT also asked readers to submit comments to the Board and large numbers did. Sources close to the West Virginia Board report that CFACT readers submitted thoughtful and persuasive comments that made a significant impact on the proceedings.
The original standards forced students to only consider “rises” in temperature. The amended standards substitute “changes” and permits students to consider “natural forces” as well as human activity when they study the climate.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would do the world a lot of good if it adopts similar standards.
Thanks to everyone who emailed their comment to the Board. Your voices were heard. Well done!
_______
Here’s the comment CFACT sent in
Subject line:
Protect students’ rights to all the facts about the climate
Email:
The Board of Education should ensure that its science standards permit students to examine and learn from all the data and analysis about global warming.
Must students be made ignorant of scientific data which shows that over the last 18 years climate computer models have consistently projected a warmer world than scientific observations record? Global warming has not occurred as projected during the entire lifetime of today’s school children.
Should the actual recorded data of world temperature, sea levels, storms, droughts, floods and all the rest be banned from our classrooms? Is comparing this data to the pronouncements of highly funded global warming pressure groups heresy?
Claims of an overwhelming scientific global warming consensus have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.
The discussion is far from over. The true mind of science remains open to new data and alternative explanations. Whether and how much of the approximately 1/2 degree C of warming which occurred in the latter half of the 20th century is due to human industry has not been conclusively established. Neither have any of the incredibly expensive “solutions” proposed to address any global warming been shown to be meaningfully effective or worth their tremendous cost.
The Board owes every child an open-minded education free of indoctrination.
Categories
– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2015/04/09/victory-as-wv-school-board-allows-students-to-debate-global-warming/#sthash.A5YhVoIc.dpuf
When I was young it was a toss up, we would either die in Kennedy’s nuclear holocaust or from strontium 90 in our coffee. Asbestos was the building material of choice and you were not grown up if you needed your hands to smoke a cigarette. However the sepsis wards were becoming a thing of the past and there were very few cars on the streets to kill us. After all that I am unlikely to worry about the weather, but I would not do anything that might stop my grand children fitting in with their peer group at school.
The situation in the UK is also very troubling. Official inquiries into the extent of narrow-scope, one-sided, politically-loaded inclusion of climate topics throughout school curricula are very much to be hoped for in both countries. See our report here for more examples and arguments in favour of such investigations: http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-control/. In the meantime, it will largely be up to concerned parents checking out what is happening their local schools and trying to get a calmer, wider-scope coverage on climate. If only scare stories are prominent, then the children are indeed at risk of being brainwashed. That technique does involve stressing the targets by using emotionally powerful materials, distancing them from their previously trusted sources of support (for example, parents who question climate alarmism being dismissed as ‘deniers’ and declared to be needing their children’s help rather than the other way round), and making it clear that they will find life a lot easier if they conform to the viewpoint being imposed on them. The book ‘Inside American Education’ by Thomas Sowell provides many examples, not just in the climate area. The book ‘Facts, Not Fear’ by Michael Sanera and Jane S Shaw provides more illustrations of misleading teaching across a range of popular environmental topics, along with suggestions for remedial actions by parents.
This is how we should be doing it!