We have already announced winners in the professional and general categories here. However, we did not get any student category entries. This may be due to COVID, time pressure during regular school, and possbly fear of peer pressure for writing such an essay. So, we are trying again. Students can remain anonymous when writing, but must be known to the staff of WUWT to be able to receive the award.
We believe this essay contest will help to engage a younger set of climate realists and gain more coverage for a rational view of climate change.
Here is the contest in a nutshell.
Topic: Is there really a climate crisis?
Write the best arguments against the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming that would convince your neighbors that there is no climate crisis.
Entry categories:
General Public: Any reader who does not fall into the two categories belowProfessionals: Scientists, engineers, graduate students, doctoral candidates- Students: College undergrads, high school students, and grade school.
Cash Prizes:
- First prize for student category: $2,000
- Second prize student category: $800
- All winners will receive an autographed copy of my book, plus up to 20 copies to distribute to other students.
Contest Rules Summary:
- Open to students only, Grade School, High School, and College
- Essays must question the validity of the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming.
- All entries must be submitted electronically.
- All entries must be written in English.
- All entries must be composed in Microsoft Word document format.
- Entries must be 1500 words or less, not including title and citations.
- Graphics and tables are welcome.
- Citations/references are encouraged.
- Winners can remain anonymous, but must be verified by WUWT staff.
- Deadline for Submissions: Monday, August 15th 2022 by midnight PDT.
- Winning essays will be announced and published August 31st, 2022.
All winning essays, judged by a panel of climate experts and journalists, will be published here, some non-winning essays may also be published.
It is critical that we help the world to understand that an in-depth understanding of climate science fails to support the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming aka the “climate crisis”.
Deadline: August 15th, 2022 Winning essays will be announced and published at the end of August, the 31st, 2022.
Get writing, and if you don’t want to submit an essay, tell your friends.
Good luck, Anthony Watts
I understand the motive for opening the contest to kids and offering a prize, but I don’t think it can do much more than reward a kid for agreeing with most of us here.
It is not much different than the warmists hoisting Greta onto a pedestal for mouthing the stuff she says. She has no original insights. She is just a rather graceless totem or a parrot or a puppet or a mascot—I’m not precisely sure what she is but it’s something along those lines.
We don’t need one and no kid should be burdened like that no matter what side they take.
I agree, it’s a sad fact but we will have to wait until such young people get older. Then they mostly get wiser.
As a none believer I can quote one Jesus
of Nazareth.
” When I was a child I thought as a child, but when I became a man , I thought as a man””.
Michael VK5ELL
Obviously Jesus never said that
Paul in letter to Corinthians but we all have memory lapses.
After a not so short search:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13
Their wisdom will be limited under constant mind control. INDOCTRINATION keeps the mind closed.
Humans are masters of mimicry. I personally can’t say I or any one I know has ever had a truly original thought, however, it is the way the mimicry is organized and restructured that moves the world forward. It is what I might call the evolution of human thoughts, much like Darwin’s tree of life. Thoughts build upon themselves and combine with others. Gerta is an example low level mimicry lacking thought, simply “like-think”.
Shoulders of giants. I’d say people learn from their teachers. Good teachers are the ones these contests should be targeting. The guideline for entry should be along the lines of… how are you teaching global warming to your students… and how are they responding?
When I was going to school it felt like I was surrounded maverick wannabes. But they still take this cue from their teachers. From my observations as a teacher, things haven’t really changed in that regard.
But teachers who are willing to teach the truth might be in slightly shorter supply. If we want to see a generation of students who are beginning to question the party line, we have to teach plain facts in an unvarnished way – and still make it sexy… because it isn’t.
i think this is a great idea. the essays from students will be a learning experience for all.
I’m pretty sure the lack of response is site demographics. I wouldn’t think there are mobs of Gen Z or even millennials here… PS I’m (68). Lets all do this for a week.
Perhaps they could counter this from Dr. Masters from Yale Climate Connections.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/recklessness-defined-breaking-6-of-9-planetary-boundaries-of-safety/
More scary eco porn using fossil fuels to create more junk
I would be interested in what grades 7 through 12 are teaching that somehow, a student catches on that something was not right.
–
For example, in 4th grade I learned about the multiple glaciations that shaped our State. In 5th or 6th grade I learned about the shallow sea that covered our State and laid down the thick limestone bed underlying our State. We were also taught about the lush times that formed the coal beds in part of our State.
–
No-one was pushing global warming or cooling when I was in grade school – nuclear war was the scare du jour, duck and cover! – so those tidbits of information did not come into play until I was an adult, But they sure helped me when I started looking into CO2-based CAGW. Just my grade school knowledge made me think something wasn’t right.
–
I agree with Quelgeek above that we might just hear a youngster agreeing with us here. But I also think there’s a chance that we might hear, despite all the propaganda, why some kids aren’t buying it, and I know there are some out there. So I disagree that this is not worthwhile.
–
Yeah, a grade school kid isn’t likely to knock our socks off with some brilliant scientific insight or discovery, but we may get a glimpse of what it takes to counter the brainwashing kids are getting in school.
–
I’d like to hear why some kids aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to ask a high school kid how much global warming climate change was in the curriculum and did he see Al Gore’s movie. The answer was: Not much and no.
I told him I was pleased to hear that.
The public high school is rural and north-west of Milwaukee. (Holy Hill area)
Thanks, Steve. Yes, sample size of one, but that’s more info than I had before you posted.
Thanks again.
They should ponder the Maunder.
There is nothing anonymous when wuwt insists they know the person’s identity.
In the current environment a student’s entire career can be destroyer by a single slip.
Why would any student take the risk? It simply is not worth it.
Password protected anonymous posting would protect both authors and wuwt.
We have to know their identity to mail a check.
Duh… 😉
(Okay. I admit I didn’t think of that either, Anthony. Meanwhile, ferd is having his own doh! moment.)
Laughin’ at myself. Yes… doh! Where-da-ya-mail-da-check?
Is it possible to recognize degrees of indoctrination within the students’ essays.
One can hope for entries, but it seems a little like asking the college of cardinals in Rome for essays that question the existence of a god.
At this point, anyone under the age of 25 has received several years of climageddon propaganda instead of traditional science in school. They barely even teach chemistry and physics in the public high schools these days.
It’s a lost generation when it comes to intellectual pursuit and open discussion of ideas. Even if they have a lick of common sense and are starting to question why the world hasn’t already exploded if all these predictions of doom and gloom had any basis in fact, that same common sense would tell them it isn’t worth speaking up about it in any place the brownshirts could be looking.
For Greta I used ‘doom pixie’ in an article for a professional journal and got hammered in the next issue. No sense of fun.
Maybe you should have used ‘gloom goblin’, Coeur de Lion. 😉
Doom Pixie Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That one’s going in the file.
Students from tertiary level? Today this means nothing. No individual thinking,, just a sheep bahhh following..
If you buy a car, then you need to take proper care of your car otherwise you have to face any untoward situation at a time when you are in a hurry to go to your office or work place and the car starts creating problems for you. You need to take proper car and maintenance of your car so that you can drive it to your work place, dropping you kids to their schools or day care centers or leaving to a big road trip. The problems of your car can be a headache for you and it may be a great inconvenience for you but you should take great care to avoid any problem. You need to note 7 signs indicate replacement of your car’s air filter.
So what you want these students to write about is climate change rather than climate which already has regional and temporal aspects built into its definition.
Definition of climate
1
: a region of the earth having specified climatic conditions
His physician advised moving to a warmer climate.
2
a
: the average course or condition of the weather at a place usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation
a healthful climate
a warm, humid climate
b
: the prevailing set of conditions (as of temperature and humidity) indoors
a climate-controlled office
3
: the prevailing influence or environmental conditions characterizing a group or period : ATMOSPHERE
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/climate
To write about climate change, as in anthropogenic climate change, you would have to believe in the magic properties of the greenhouse effect, the enhanced greenhouse effect and the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS).
So if you are not a lukewarmist don’t apply.
I’m not a student anymore but here’s my essay:
Erm …….? That’s it.
I don’t feel so comfortable striking a contrarian note, but it’s in my nature to question stuff.
I recall the brief was the same last time the competition was run, namely “Write the best arguments against the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming that would convince your neighbors that there is no climate crisis”
I read the winning essays, erudite stuff, but no way could could I use them to educate my neighbours, too full of complicated rebuttals of stuff written by the other side of the argument. I can’t even remember what the key arguments of each were today, never mind use it to convince someone else.
The CAGW argument is simple and hammers home a message that the public can appreciate easily. Declaration here, I wrote an essay, and that was my ‘convince a neighbour’ strategy also, KISS, keep it simple, stupid. Home in on an irrefutable measure that couldn’t be warped by politics and the records for which are irreducibly simple to collect, maintain and preserve from alteration. Above all, anyone can grasp the science involved.
I didn’t see that in any of the winning entries, good essays though they were, they failed in first rule of exams, answer the question asked. That was, how do I convince my neighbour?
“…failed in first rule of exams, answer the question asked. That was, how do I convince my neighbor?”
__________________________
Agreed, my eyes glazed over reading those winning essays.
Some of the stuff that needs to be explained and debunked like the Global Warming Potential numbers is convoluted and difficult to put into simple understandable steps that seem to make sense.
This project is utter bull$h1t. You are asking for essays for a problem that does not exist in any form in any time in history, There is no evidence that it will ever occur in the future.
WUWT is locked into the greenhouse effect, the enhanced greenhouse effect and the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS).
Get it through your thick lukewarmist skulls: they don’t exist. Stop listening to Willis and Monckton.
You are asking for essays of the equivalence of the influence of unicorns on our society.
Stop being shills for the warmist movement.
Sometimes I think griff has more integrity.
Get a grip on reality, WUWT, or you will just go down in history as a website that wrongly adhered to the belief that atmospheric CO2 had some sort of influence on surface warming.
IT DOESN’T!!!
Agreed, well sort of, see Richard Hill above. To make the case for radiative forcing blah blah blah makes anyone’s eyes water. Stick to understandable topics like CO2’s benefits, predictions that don’t come true, historical records documenting climate extreme events decades or centuries ago. Point out the data manipulations with links to what they said then and what they say now. And links to the silly headlines. “Climate change causes mustard shortage” etc.
If you want to kill a snake, Steve, go for the head not the tail. It’s quicker.
What parent in their right mind is going to let their child enter? Social services will show up at your door backed by the DOJ to seize your child citing child abuse.
The Teachers Union and Twitter will be all over any student that dares enter. Look for mobs of protesters threatening to torch your house because you are going to torch the planet.
Their application for Love Island will somehow be lost in the post. 🙁
I asked a young relative of mine, who is very intelligent and capable and has already stood up to class and teacher over climate, if they would be interested in entering. They said “I’m sorry to disappoint but climate change is not my area of expertise and I wouldn’t know what to write and probably wouldn’t have enough time to sit down and research.”. A possible reason that student submissions are hard to come by is that those who do know something about it realise that they don’t know enough to write an essay for an adult forum, and anyway their spare time is for other things.
They also said that if they did enter, they would want their identity concealed (like I said, very intelligent).
I only graduated high school, but have been reading this blog for ~11 years.
Does that qualify me as a “student”.
I think it does. 🙂
“However, we did not get any student category entries“.
Apparently no one under 60 reads “the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change”.