Guest post by John Shewchuk
In 2017 the “The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change” was created and continues to be distributed in our public high schools. It was produced by the Paleontological Research Institution through funding by the National Science Foundation. List price is $25, but it can be freely downloaded here > https://priweb.org/index.php/pubs-special/pubs-spec-5813-detail
This 283-page Guide is intended for science educators and is the climate change alarmists’ effort to indoctrinate school teachers on man-made climate change so they can then brainwash students. The Guide’s intent is blunt and direct with this page 4 statement, “And we must communicate to our students that climate change is politically but not scientifically controversial.” It even has a section called, “Rules of thumb for teaching controversial issues.” Really? For science teachers? That in itself should be a red flag.
About one half of this Teacher-Friendly guide presents what appears to be well established topics on paleontology — which is the study of fossil animals and plants with respect to different climates. The problem begins with the other half of this Guide, where it cleverly steps outside the well-established world of earth history and slips into the realm of well orchestrated climate science deception — with a heavy dose of alarmism.
Although the title of this Guide focuses on climate change, it is important to note that it was, after all, produced by the Paleontological Research Institution — which is expert in the field of “fossil” history and past climates — not the future. In fact, their website’s “About Us” page clearly states the following, “The Paleontological Research Institution serves society by increasing and disseminating knowledge about the history of life on Earth.” Note that only “history” is mentioned.
If the Paleontological Research Institution is expert in history, then exactly where does the expertise on “future climates” come from? The Guide’s editors repeatedly reference IPCC documents and literature — 41 times. This is where the bait-and-switch deception begins. The Guide’s editors cleverly interweaved past and future climate changes into a masterful tapestry of climate science deception.
The editors skillfully inserted language that was not designed to teach science, but instead designed to invoke emotion, with words such as: love (7), suffer (5), depressing (2), scared (1), doom & gloom (2), alarmed (2), unprecedented (3), disruption (8), consequences (15), horrible (17), choices (18), and most importantly, hope (15) — where the parenthetical numbers reflect the number of times used. Since when does science education engage in emotional rhetoric? It doesn’t. Political agendas and associated propaganda does.
And then there’s my favorite paleontological word, mitigation, which is used 100 times. Paleontologists previously mitigated construction site degradation of fossil sites, but now they want to mitigate our lifestyles. This is clearly evident from their new paleontological mission found on page 229, “We will need to use numerous strategies to make changes to mitigate climate change, some of which will be social and political.”
Through exploitation of the CO2 paper-tiger, this Guide is yet another tool used to control humanity via the young. Without prior knowledge in climate science, or experience with the pitfalls associated with the-sky-is-falling activists, vulnerable teachers easily get sucked into the intellectually corrupt, man-made climate change groupthink — which is constantly reinforced by the climate crisis drumbeat from the liberal media.
This deception is no different than having political operatives use validated research on past world conflicts, which was documented by a respected historical institution, and then strategically insert sections asserting how current conflicts will progress into the future. Sounds absurd? You bet.
The same goes for climate forecasts. Just like future wars, future climates are not possible to predict. All climate models continually fail, because they all believe climate is primarily driven by carbon dioxide. No matter how hard they try to make this false logic work, they fail. Albert Einstein eloquently alluded to this futility by saying, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Even with the Guide’s incessant man-made climate change dogma, it is riddled with self-inflicted duplicity. For example, at the end of the “How Systems Work” discussion on page 30, it admits, “Clouds have the potential to counteract global warming, although we do not know exactly by how much.” In tiny print on page 20 it laments about climate models with this statement, “Note that models are always limited in some ways.”
And then the big CO2 sham is exposed, not directly, but separated by 152 pages. In the first paragraph on page 91 it boldly claims, “CO2 can be thought of as the ‘biggest control knob’ for Earth’s temperature” … and then way back in the last paragraph on page 244 it quietly states, “New dating techniques have shown that there is no statistically significant difference between the timing of temperature increases and CO2 increases.”
Beyond the numerous misleading and contradictory statements, the Guide contains many graphs and charts which have been purposely scaled, adjusted, and cherry-picked to promote the climate change agenda. While most understand the limitations and dangers of these visual aids, the children do not.
This Guide is purposely designed to indoctrinate high-school teachers and students into advocates for social change based on the “big lie” that carbon dioxide controls global warming. The data does not support this myth, and the alarmists know it. But the more it is repeated, the more people believe it, and so they keep milking the golden goose of a misinformed public — young and old.
There is no climate crisis. The only crisis is our lack of knowledge about past climates. Until we fully understand what caused past climate changes, we only pretend to know the future. This “teacher-friendly” guide does nothing to promote legitimate science, but instead peddles fake science. So, as we await the highly anticipated 2016 melting of the Arctic ice (according to the eminent Al Gore), we should probably rename this publication “A Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Alarmism.”
There is no climate crisis, nor climate extinction. In fact, no climate change over the past 100 years can be shown to be man made. There is no signal for man-made warming found in climate data.
All earthly climate change ultimately derives from the sun. For example. Since 1950s Ocean Air Sheltered, OAS, regions in the world cooled. Since 1930s OAS regions of USA cooled. All warming in later half of 20th century is due to Ocean Air Affected regions. It’s oceans under influence of the sun.
Lansner & Pedersen, 2018
https://twitter.com/swcrisis/status/1168810738963701760/photo/2
Soviet brainwashing would have had a run for its money to come up to the level of deceit incorporated in this “The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change” manual. This sort of educational abuse nonsense is the real crisis in our climate.
Science teachers may be looked up to by other teachers as guides to this topic. Thus, targeting them with key propaganda, and hiding it within a publication that is otherwise scientific, is a good and effective ruse aimed at co-opting key influencers.
It may work – don’t be disarmed by your own knowledge base. This movement is dangerous. It has to be challenged on two fronts: directly by complaining to the Education Department concerned, and by the provision of alternative balanced and fair assessments.
Children should be taught how to think, particularly on matters of science, not how to repeat the pablum of an aspirant paradigm. People living on the political extremes know their worst opponent is a thinking public, hence the copious supply of drugs and alcohol, failing that, prison cells.
The main failure I find with modern grad students is the shortfall in analytical thinking about their experimental design. “I followed the rules so the answer is correct.” They do this even if it is obvious there is a serious error in the experiment and the derived answer is impossible.
The more rote learning, the more this is a problem. Conceptual planning and conceptual analysis are the keys to sifting garbage science from truth and realisation.
It is going to be a struggle. So…arise and struggle!
…the original printing was in Mandarin < snark
Agreed – I didn’t get very far into this lovely piece of Climate Alarmist BS before finding under the Resources Section – Michael Mann. And shortly after was a whole chapter on “Consensus”. I gave up at that point because there was no point in continuing further. I could have written the rest of the document from NYT or AOC Nonsense. No wonder our kids come out of schools so Brain-washed and Indoctrinated that you can’t even hold a rational discussion with them anymore.
The future is an infinite multiverse of possible realizations. Sort of a Shrodinger’s wave function from the quantum realm expanded to the macro-futureverse.
The present is the observation that collapses the wave function to one realization, and then freezes it as it becomes the past – an immutable history. The 1st and 2nd Law of Thermodynamics demands this one past.
There are no alternate you’s in another universe of multiverses. Only the future where anything is possible.
It is this infinite realm of “possible” that the Controlling Left invents hobgoblin futures to scare sheeple into stampeding to thier slaughter.
We can make sure that doesn’t happen with simple knowledge and communication.
“It is this infinite realm of “possible” that the Controlling Left invents hobgoblin futures to scare sheeple into stampeding to their slaughter.”
Above: one of the best quotes I’ve heard to describe the Globull Warminists motivations! Thanks!
The realm of the possible is severely constrained by having to take a random walk, not generating random anything. Anyone claiming to predict the future has to explain how we go from here to there. They cannot just invent a “there” with random circumstances. Each step has to proceed from a previous point. Fantastical images of thermaggedon are just that – fantasy and horror produced by impossible leaps.
FOLLOW THE MONEY and it makes sense that a probably once respectable organization would sell out. All it takes is a few radicals getting themselves into a position of influence in an organization to get away from the founders mission statement. What is it with paleontologists? I tried to start a dinosaur tourism business here in the Neuquén Basin of Argentina (on a normal day I would encounter dozens of dinosaur bone fossils in the field) and the local paleontologists stopped it. They also stopped a dinosaur footprint park that I volunteered to reconstruct the environment for (a group of sauropods, followed by a raptor, walked across a shallow bay at low tide).
Yes, follow the money. NSF = taxpayer funded. So, taxpayers of the USA are paying for propaganda to be used in government/taxpayer-funded schools to brainwash children.
And 283 pages? Unless these are publications are at kindergarten level, they are not “guides.” They are tomes.
John Shewchuk,
Perhaps some balance may be achieved by drawing attention to the teachers’ guidance notes on climate change which the UK High Court decreed must be produced by the UK government’s Department of Education and provided to UK state schools if they show Al Gore’s science fiction movie to children.
The guidance notes can be read and downloaded from here
http://www.metlink.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/teachers/inconvenient_truth.pdf
I hope this is helpful
Richard
A good thought, Richard, but primary and secondary education is almost entirely outside the purview of the national government. States have a lot of influence, but the largest factor by far is the local school board, where they decide the curriculum and the text books, although some states like California and Texas, I believe, do their textbooks state-wide. Now the battle has to be taken up at 3,000 local entities, and nothing is as unmovable as a local Board of Education.
Boards of Education, almost universally, are under the complete control of the local teacher’s union.
What specific tactics do you propose for conducting this battle?
I don’t understand these sentences…
“CO2 can be thought of as the ‘biggest control knob’ for Earth’s temperature” … and then way back in the last paragraph on page 244 it quietly states, “New dating techniques have shown that there is no statistically significant difference between the timing of temperature increases and CO2 increases.”
How does this expose the sham? It sounds like rubbish to me, but it does appear to support their case rather than expose it as a sham. No significant difference between the timing of two things suggests that they are correlated – although the continually stupid assumption that correlation implies causation is evident.
Anyhow, great article thanks.
Beat me to it. I think that Mr. Shewchuk misread the “no statistically significant difference……..” as not supporting the “CO2 can do anything” message. Actually, it’s a response in advance to the objection raised from time to time by skeptics, that global temperature changes precede changes in CO2 concentration (which therefore cannot have caused the temperature change).
Which makes me wonder what the “new dating techniques” really involve. Playing with the data till they get the answer they want? In climate science? Perish the thought.
The statement: “there is no statistically significant difference between the timing of temperature increases and CO2 increases” is also a cleverly contrived statement of nonsense. It is meant to imply far more information than is known. The lack of a “statistically significant difference” in no way proves a “statistically significant similarity”.
The statement seems to address the data that many historical proxies for CO2 and temperature show that CO2 LAGS temperature, rather than leading it. This would imply that CO2 is an effect, not a cause of increasing temperature. The statement, in my view, was written to confuse that data.
“The statement seems to address the data that many historical proxies for CO2 and temperature show that CO2 LAGS temperature, rather than leading it. This would imply that CO2 is an effect, not a cause of increasing temperature. The statement, in my view, was written to confuse that data.”
Exactly.
Jay W dribbles, he shoots……he scores!
“no > statistically < significant difference…", True.
There have only been a few ice cores. And the ice cores are only from roughly two locations (Greenland and Antarctica). So not enough data statistical analysis.
Well, you’re not going to find any greater diversity in locations, as ice fields old enough to provide similar data don’t exist outside Greenland and Antarctica. So, how many more cores would you need at each location to be “statistically significant”?
“Teacher-friendly”, eh? Translation: “We make brainwashing kids fun and easy”. They know that “climate change” is a minefield. You have to craft the lies well, and camouflage them to make them appear truthful, at least to kids who, let’s face it, have already been at least partly brainwashed, so they already “know” what the truth is. Any kid who has doubts isn’t going to know how to stand up to that onslaught of lies, risking disapproval, and likely, a poor grade. Sad.
— Spin and hype begin before the book. Facts are:
* Climate change is no more critical to the 21st century than any other time.
* I imagine mathematics, chemistry, physics, English, Art, … are unaffected. Nearly every subject is unaffected by climate change apart from, maybe, biology and geography.
Basic science of climate change cannot be understood without physics. Which requires an excellent understanding of the scientific method. Studying climatology should require physics first. Because climate change is infused with politics, one must be able to distinguish science from pseudoscience. This ability to distinguish useful science from propaganda and groupthink, by learning the principles of the scientific method, is the the most useful learning in the entire school curriculum. In my experience climate change activists promote propaganda and erase the public’s understanding of scientific method.
It’s a badly made PDF too. There are no hyperlinks for contents to the book text! So beware: incompetent educators at work. I imagine writing this is the only job these authors could get. It is split into 12 sections with 285 pages in total. It’s as large as a Climatology or Meteorology 101 textbook. In comparison: “Climate in the 21st Century“, 2003, edited by William Burroughs, was 240 sides.
The term “climate change” is used 517 times in this book. As if mindless repetition can instill mental habits and patterns. Geoengineering is mentioned 47 times and there’s a whole chapter on that. “Scientific method” is never mentioned. The future promises us proto-geoengineers are entirely ignorant of the scientific method. Now there’s climate nightmare for you.
Ooops.
“So beware: incompetent educators at work.”
Sadly this level of incompetence is typical today.
“Basic science of climate change cannot be understood without physics. Which requires an excellent understanding of the scientific method.”
Excellent point. And it is a fact that most kids don’t think abstractly until at least 14 years of age.
Reading more of it, the authors are obviously greenhouse gas / climate activists.
The ignore evaporative cooling. The term latent heat is entirely absent for the book. This is child abuse, or deliberate miseducation.
Latent heat and evaporative cooling are also ignored despite being equally important for surface cooling with radiative cooling. The term latent heat is entirely absent. I can’t look upon this book as anything other than child abuse and propaganda. This kind of degeneracy by adults disgusts me.
Latent heat is extremely important, not only of evaporation, but also of fusion (melting). Global warming alarmists talk about how many degrees X amount of CO2 will warm the atmosphere in Y years, and this is supposed to melt the polar ice caps.
But they never mention the fact that while it only takes about 300 calories to heat a cubic meter of air by 1 degree Celsius, it takes about 800,000 calories to melt a cubic meter of ice, and that can happen only if the temperature is above 0 degrees C (spring or summer in polar regions).
So, even the most alarmist predictions of warming of the atmosphere can only raise sea levels by a few millimeters per year, with plenty of time to build seawalls around low-lying cities.
“I imagine mathematics, chemistry, physics, English, Art, … are unaffected. Nearly every subject is unaffected by climate change apart from, maybe, biology and geography.”
You may be right but just as the homosexual lobby wants EVERY school subject (in the UK, anyway) to have pro-homosexual content, so the climate alarmists no doubt want every school subject to have climate alarmist content.
English: Let us look at some works of literature which have climate alarmist content.
Art: Let us produce some paintings showing the effects of “Climate change”. (Flooding, droughts, rising sea levels – you know the stuff.)
Physics: Let us look at the connection between temperature and greenhouse gases.
Maths: Let’s draw some graphs: how about a nice hockey stick.
Moral and religious education: Let us examine our moral responsibilities in the face of climate change.
Wizard of Oz revealed
After doing the job of brainwashing all those students, do they get a pension invested in ‘mitigation’ efforts like industrial scale wind turbines?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-wind-power-pension-fund-investment-1.4524564
Always invest in a scheme where the owners can print their own money, you can’t lose…
Did anyone notice any actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing global warming in that book?
They admit that it is politically contentious subject. That should be enough to disqualify it.
Win a trip to a beach side climate meeting if you meet your indoctrination goals.
Paleontological research bases much of it’s temperature studies on tree ring proxies which have been proven to be worthless as an indicator of the real temperature. Paleontology has a real problem.
One would think that paleontologists, above all other scientists, would be aware that climate change is not controlled by humans, but by the the entire astrophysical universe our planet inhabits .. and that first and foremost, climate has always changed, and most of that geohistory had no humans in it. And that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are part of a vastly larger equilibrium system of our planet’s interior, its crust, its oceans, its atmosphere, and its biosphere – all of which are exchanging CO2 on a constant basis going back hundreds of millions of years, ever since Earth first acquired an atmosphere.
But alas, apparently not.
“So, as we await the highly anticipated 2016 melting of the Arctic ice (according to the eminent Al Gore)…”
I’m not sure it is beneficial to await happenings of the past.
/grin
Last year, I taught a university level “Contemporary World Affairs” class where I refuted all the tired points that this “Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change” attempts to make. I focused on the numerous failed predictions of the so-called climate change experts and destroyed all their suppositions with facts. Reading this guide, I kept thinking “just get to the point” or “what’s the claim?” The authors themselves don’t even seem to know, only that “IT” is happening, and we must act now to stop “IT”, but never really defining what “IT” is, or why “IT” is bad. Ultimately, it’s just boring and circular, and “true!” because, well, we said so.
how was the response of your students?
This propaganda needs to be challenged. Teachers WILL use this to indoctrinate kids if it is not challenged. They already have. Somebody with education credentials needs to do a systematic take-down on that guide and publish it where educators can’t avoid seeing it.
Better yet, a court challenge resulting in banning it from schools, because it is overly biased.
It appears to be deliberately deceptive, although I suspect it is the result of the authors firmly held beliefs derived from the uncritical consumption of the nonsense that came before it.
“And we must communicate to our students that climate change is politically but not scientifically controversial.”
It’s politically controversial because it’s so scientifically controversial. Climate science is the most controversial science I’ve ever come across. Denying its controversial nature is just part of the projection techniques used by the political left to hide the fact that the truth isn’t on their side and this misrepresentation of fact from the left extends far beyond climate science …
“… not scientifically controversial …” == “… the science is settled …”. Just a new, improved way of saying the same old thing.
If politics had not chosen sides and the scientific method was allowed to prevail, climate science would be mostly settled by now, at least regarding the actual sensitivity of the surface temperature to incremental W/m^2 of input, moreover; the entire range of physical sensitivity proposed by the IPCC would have been falsified and their reason to exist would disappear. Of course, it’s this conflict of interest that has kept climate science, as summarized in the IPCC reports defining what the ‘consensus’ believes, so broken for so long.
“New dating techniques have shown that there is no statistically significant difference between the timing of temperature increases and CO2 increases.” No difference, eh? Both CO2 and temps are all over the place, but there is “no statistical difference”. Ooooh-kaaaaaay…
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/2479241984/hE074CD3A/
To deliberately warp the minds of children through a “mask” of some facts to gain belief in lies, is, to my mind, a destructive element allowed by whom? They are the ones that should be indentified and vilified as wicked.
This not about free speech and opinions, but done with malice and self interest.
Chapter five in the contents:
“Changing Temeratures and Carbon Dioxide”
“And we must communicate to our students that climate change is politically but not scientifically controversial.” It even has a section called, “Rules of thumb for teaching controversial issues.”
Once again these people reveal their true colors through the process called “projection”. Their entire movement constantly reveals to those who can separate the truth from their deception. I am constantly impressed by the consistency, so much so that I have found out that it seems to be a “Law of Leftist-Alarmism Behavior”.
For example the above quote can be looked at as if it is a mirror. Here the truth is that the political is acted on as if it is NOT controversial, when actually it is all of that and more.
However the scientific is treated as if it is NOT controversial, when actually it is exactly that. Science spends a great portion of it’s time swimming in contradiction and confusion until which time experimental results sorts out the actual results.
That being said,.. even the most time honored facts in science risk the chance of being overturned with each passing day. That’s why I am a firm advocate of teaching science history as core curriculum. Once established then and only then can science be taught.
“We will need to use numerous strategies to make changes to mitigate climate change, some of which will be social and political.”
The omission of the economic aspects of their proposed “mitigation” is noticeable, and almost certainly intentional. The “mitigation” is primarily economic, they know this. It has nothing to do with the climate or the environment, and any social or political changes are only to enable the economic changes that they wish for.
They wish for a worldwide planned economy, where they are the “planners”. They will very likely be disappointed to find that they wouldn’t be put in charge, rather they would likely be liquidated as soon as they are no longer useful. Hopefully, they fail in this endeavor, or else a vast number of people around the world will perish (billions of them).
Along with a few others, I regularly engage in climate debate with several alarmists in our local weekly newspaper. One of the most vocal (and delusional) of these alarmists is a science teacher in an area “Magnet” school. He consistently demeans us as unintelligent, under-educated, selfish, and most recently, immoral.
In this past week’s edition, he tells us to hurry up and write our last letters as our time has come to an end. Then he lets us know that he has been clipping our letters and categorizing them by our names. He then promises that if he sees that we have died, he is going to deliver copies of our letters to our family at our funerals or memorial services. He warns us to be careful what we write, because our letters will define us for posterity, for better or worse.
This is the type of pathological people entrusted to teach our children.
But can’t give a scientific answer to how the fossils even came about. They sure as heck will never say “billions of dead things, buried rapidly in rock layers, laid down rapidly in water, all over the earth” – even though that is the only reasonable explanation given the evidence.
“A Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate” bru-ha-ha.