US Public Schools Continuing To Push Climate Indoctrination
Paul Tice, senior fellow for the National Center for Energy Analytics, took the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize the ‘climate change’ curriculum in New Jersey public schools
The educational materials, Tice explained, are not just found in sections of science courses, but in all school subjects.
Districts are encouraged to insert lessons on ‘climate change’ into English language, arts and mathematics.
In foreign language classes, students discuss the impacts of ‘climate change’ “on the target language of the world.”
In the state’s Visual and Performing Arts standards, students are required to “research global issues, including climate change, using multiple research methods to inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles, and varied cultural perspectives.”
To support the state’s climate curriculum, the New Jersey Department of Education points educators toward resources that provide only positive views of the potential of wind and solar to replace ‘fossil fuels’.
“New Jersey’s climate curriculum is pure indoctrination,” Trice wrote in the Journal column.
Dr. Sterling Burnett, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, told Just the News that this type of climate ‘education’ is common across the country, and it’s been going on for years.
“It’s all got climate alarm built into it. It doesn’t question the idea that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, despite the fact [it’s] not supported by the data or the evidence,” Burnett said.
Some states have attempted to include in the curriculum taught in public schools different perspectives on ‘climate change’.
Last year, Florida’s Board of Education approved the use of videos produced by the conservative Prager University Foundation in the state’s public schools.
Legacy media outlets were critical of the decision. The Guardian reported that kids would be exposed to educational materials that “portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous,” even though there are many reasons to be concerned about the environmental impacts of wind and solar energy.
The Guardian also quoted ‘experts’ worried that kids in Florida would be exposed to “messages of support for fossil fuels and doubts for renewable energy resources.”
Politico quoted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit stating that the “climate is always changing,” to which the reporter was compelled to refer to the statement as “repeating a climate-denial motto.”
Streit’s statement is scientifically accurate.
Among other points, the PragerU videos challenge the belief that ‘climate change’ poses a risk to the survivability of the human race, and that wind and solar are a good idea for developing countries.
Other attempts to provide kids with different perspectives on ‘climate change’ and energy have also been rebuked.
In April 2023, the CO2 Coalition, whose members include a Nobel laureate, purchased a booth at the National Science Teaching Association’s annual convention in Atlanta.
The group distributed “Simon The Solar-Powered Cat,” a comic book that explains the process of photosynthesis, which benefits from carbon dioxide. The purpose of the lesson is to dispute the demonization of the ‘greenhouse gas’ as inherently destructive and dangerous.
The association found the materials so offensive that they kicked the CO2 Coalition out of the convention.
The Heartland Institute last year launched an initiative to provide educational materials that challenge the idea that humans are causing catastrophic climate change.
“Climate at a Glance” uses government sources to provide perspectives disputing the “climate crisis” on a range of topics from extreme weather to polar bears. They also created a downloadable app for the lessons.
Burnett, who helped author the materials, said the Heartland mailed out 7,000 free copies of the printed version.
He said that while not all the educators who received the copies reacted positively to the materials, Heartland received a lot of “good feedback” on it from teachers.
“The thing we’ve been pushing all along is that science is not teaching what to think. When you’re getting your science education, especially your basic education in the early grades, it’s teaching how to conduct science. It’s teaching how to think, not what to think,” Burnett said.
He said all the climate education in public schools teaches that the ‘climate crisis’ is ‘settled science’ and that there’s no legitimate dispute about it.
Burnett said the whole idea of “consensus science” is problematic.
“There was a consensus at one time that the universe revolved around the Earth. That was wrong. There was a consensus that the Earth was flat. That was wrong. There was consensus that diseases were caused by humors in the body, and you just need to balance the humors. It was wrong,” Burnett said.
While most states are keeping educational materials in schools uniformly in support of a climate crisis perspective, polls are showing that young people are becoming less inclined to accept it.
A recent Monmouth University poll found in the last few years a 17 percentage point drop in the number of people ages 18 to 34 who believe that ‘climate change’ is a very serious issue.
Many of those polled would have recently graduated from high school.
https://principia-scientific.com/us-public-schools-continuing-to-pushing-climate-indoctrination/
****************************************************Thanks for Publishing the Truth, New York Post, Climate Activists Don’t Care If People Die
They rather welcome it in fact: "Too many people"
The New York Post published an article by noted researcher Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D., in which he argues climate activists not only don’t care about people’s well-being, they, in fact, support policies that result in unnecessary deaths. Lomborg is right. Poverty, in part due to lack of access to reliable energy, and the modern health and agricultural innovations they make possible, is the world’s number one killer. Because most climate policies promote ending or sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels in the short-term, they leave the poorest populations in poverty and vulnerable to extreme weather events, resulting in unnecessary deaths.
In the New York Post article, “Green activists don’t care how many people will die from zero fossil fuel use,” Bjorn Lomborg provides an array of data demonstrating that fewer people are dying from extreme weather and temperatures now than ever before as the planet has modestly warmed. His research indicates, however, that even fewer deaths would occur from these causes were it not for climate policies prematurely restricting fossil fuel development and use. Lomborg writes:
We endlessly hear the flawed assertion that because climate change is real, we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use.
…
The assertion is convenient for politicians, because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false because it conflates climate science with climate policy.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests that there is nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done.
But the reality is that the world over the past centuries has improved dramatically — largely because of the immense increase in available energy that has come mostly from fossil fuels.
Life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and incomes have increased ten-fold.
Lomborg goes on to discuss the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found limited, or no evidence climate change is impacting most extreme weather events and that deaths attributable to extreme weather have declined by 97 percent over the past century even as the Earth warmed slightly, in large part due to the energy, materials, and products fossil fuels make possible.
Climate realism has made these same points across the course of hundreds of articles debunking false claims that extreme weather is getting worse and dozens of articles discussing the decline in premature mortality due to extreme weather, weather related diseased, and non-optimal temperatures.
In addition, Climate Realism has discussed the tremendous benefit modestly warmer temperatures, fossil fuels, and rising CO2 has produced for food production, saving millions from starvation. Lomborg makes this point as well.
“Four billion people — half the world’s population — entirely depend on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas,” Lomborg says. “If we ended fossil fuels quickly, we would physically have no way to feed four billion people.”
Lomborg is right, net zero by 2025 is not just costly, $27 trillion per year on average, equal to a quarter of the worlds current GDP, over the century in a vain effort to control the weather, it is, in fact, nothing more than a road to economic decline and increased deaths. Lomborg concludes:
When politicians tell us they are “following the science,” they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies.
“The science” informs us about the problem, but is not the arbiter of solutions.
Democracies are.
Sudden, dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption will have huge downsides — which their backers would rather ignore.
Climate change is a problem, but a civilization-endangering cure can be far worse than the illness.
The vast majority of Climate Realism posts debunk and deconstruct false claims of climate alarm being hyped by the mainstream media, but every so often we’ve got to give a media outlet kudos for allowing important truths about climate change to be told. This article by the New York Post is one such instance. Thanks, New York Post for boldly presenting truths that are inconvenient to the popular climate crisis narrative and unpopular with the woke media and politicians kowtowing to it, and to misanthropic climate activists funding the media narrative and, all too often, the politicians themselves.
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UK: Met Office Should Put 2.5°C ‘Uncertainties’ Warning on All Future Temperature Claims
It is “abundantly clear” that the Met Office cannot scientifically claim to know the current average temperature of the U.K. to a hundredth of a degree centigrade, given that it is using data that has a margin of error of up to 2.5°C, notes the climate journalist Paul Homewood.
His comments follow recent disclosures in the Daily Sceptic that nearly eight out of ten of the Met’s 380 measuring stations come with official ‘uncertainties’ of between 2-5°C. In addition, given the poor siting of the stations now and possibly in the past, the Met Office has no means of knowing whether it is comparing like with like when it publishes temperature trends going back to 1884.
There are five classes of measuring stations identified by the World Meteorological Office (WMO). Classes 4 and 5 come with uncertainties of 2°C and 5°C respectively and account for an astonishing 77% of the Met Office station total. Class 3 has an uncertainty rating of 1°C and accounts for another 8.4% of the total. The Class ratings identify potential corruptions in recordings caused by both human and natural involvement. Homewood calculates that the average uncertainty across the entire database is 2.5°C. In the graph below, he then calculates the range of annual U.K. temperatures going back to 2010 incorporating the margins of error.
The blue blocks show the annual temperature announced by the Met Office, while the red bars take account of the WMO uncertainties. It is highly unlikely that the red bars show the more accurate temperature, and there is much evidence to suggest temperatures are nearer the blue trend. But the point of the exercise is to note that the Met Office, in the interests of scientific exactitude, should disclose what could be large measurement inaccuracies. This is particularly important when it is making highly politicised statements using rising temperatures to promote the Net Zero fantasy. As Homewood observes, the Met Office “cannot say with any degree of scientific certainty that the last two years were the warmest on record, nor quantify how much, if any, the climate has warmed since 1884”.
The U.K. figures are of course an important component of the Met Office’s global temperature dataset known as HadCRUT. As we noted recently, there is ongoing concern about the accuracy of HadCRUT with large retrospective adjustments of warming in recent times and cooling further back in the record. In fact, this concern has been ongoing for some time. The late Christopher Booker was a great champion of climate scepticism and in February 2015 he suggested that the “fiddling” with temperature data “is the biggest science scandal ever”. Writing in the Telegraph, he noted: “When future generations look back on the global warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which official temperatures records – on which the entire panic rested – were systematically ‘adjusted’ to show the Earth as having warmed more than the actual data justified.”
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Great Barrier Reef Doomsday Claims Should Be Audited: Scientist
Australian geo-physicist Peter Ridd says an additional $5 million (US$3.3 million) allocated to the Great Barrier Reef in this week’s budget would be better spent on “genuine environmental problems.”
The funding was handed down as part of Labor’s 2024 federal budget on May 14.
In a statement released last month, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation said the reef had suffered through the “worst summer” on record, with cyclones, severe flooding, starfish outbreaks and mass bleaching.
The funds will help the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to engage tourism operators undertaking reef monitoring, protection, and stewardship.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation says the full extent of mass bleaching is not known, but claims aerial surveys over 1,000 reefs showed a rate of 73 percent bleaching within the area, plus another 6 percent in the Torres Strait.
“The Reef Summer Snapshot shows the highest levels of coral bleaching were found across the southern region, where temperatures are typically cooler, and parts of the central and northern regions, where in some areas corals were exposed to record levels of heat stress,” the Foundation said in a report online.
Yet Dr. Ridd, a researcher into the Reef, believes its poor health has been greatly exaggerated.
“It is telling that in the latest doom-news about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching, they failed to mention that the Great Barrier Reef had record amounts of coral in 2022/23 despite having suffered four ‘catastrophic’ bleaching events in 2016, 17, 20, and 22,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
“We ended up with twice as much coral than in 2012 when a couple of cyclones genuinely destroyed a lot of coral.
“How did we end up with so much coral if those last four bleaching event were so catastrophic—even the fast-growing coral takes five to 10 years to regrow.”
The coral that bounced back, he says, is the type most susceptible to water bleaching.
“That proves the last four bleaching events were exaggerated in terms of the coral death, and there is no reason to expect this latest event to be much different,” he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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