Climate alarmists have worked diligently, and persuasively, to undermine the teaching of sound science, the scientific method, and critical thinking in America’s primary, secondary, and college classrooms. Climate alarmists want to indoctrinate America’s youth, turning green robots loose on their parents and the world.
We at The Heartland Institute have fought, sometimes with success (West Virginia), at other times in vain (Texas), to keep textbook manufacturers, reacting to ginned-up protests, from scrubbing all traces of climate realism from their textbooks. We’ve implored them to continue acknowledging in texts intended for use in the nation’s classrooms that a lively debate concerning the causes and consequences of climate change still exists.
Openness to evidence and continual questioning are the cornerstones of scientific discovery, scholastic virtues climate alarmists cannot allow to exist.
This was brought to our attention once again by a post-election blog item at the Huffington Post, arguing alarmists must redouble their efforts to indoctrinate students. Efforts to fight climate change will fail, according to this analysis, unless schools turn out post-industrial, “green citizens.” According to the blog post, preventing climate change requires “greener economies, greener legislation, greener policies … [ultimately] we need greener societies. To succeed, fundamentally, we need green citizens.”
The article continues,
[creating green citizens] must start in the classrooms. Education is the red thread tying together the Paris Agreement with the other historic agreement of 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Education … is … the foundation on which to shape a sustainable future for all, and the planet. Sustainability calls for new ways of seeing the world, new ways of thinking, new ways of acting and behaving as global citizens. Only education can catalyze such deep change.
The writer complains “half the countries in the world still do not explicitly mention climate change or environmental sustainability in their [education curricula]” and calls on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to take the lead in changing this. UNESCO should push political leaders to add educational components to the national commitments they make under the Paris climate agreement and to work with professional educators around the world to create a system where promoting sustainability – not the acquisition of knowledge, competence, or civic virtues – is the central goal of all educational endeavors.
I agree with the writer on one point. It all comes down to the education system. Will the education system embrace freedom, individuality, personal achievement, diversity of thought, intellectual curiosity, and exploration of different points of view, and thus continue to drive entrepreneurship and scientific discovery, which have raised living standards for people around the world, reducing poverty, privation, and death and improving human well-being? Or will the education system instead be driven by a single overarching goal, sustainability, set by self-appointed intellectual elites who, in the height of hubris, believe they know best what goals are worth pursuing – believe they should decide for everyone, everywhere, what people ought to believe and how they ought to live?
If, as the Huffington Post writer demands, the educational system is “reoriented” toward pushing “true and lasting sustainability” as the overarching goal of education, I fear the gulags and Orwellian re-education camps can’t be far behind. Humankind, both present and future generations, would suffer under such an educational regime, bringing about a world where, in the words of the immortal Thomas Hobbes, “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” not because we have been thrown back into some anarchic state of nature, but because we will be enslaved to a misanthropic doctrine of stasis and ultimately death.
This Huffington Post article made it clearer to me now more than ever before: We must take back the education of our kids from government schools, driven by government-approved curricula, taught by government-approved educators. Educational choice is the cornerstone of continued human well-being.
— H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Huffington Post; Human Events; and National Association of Scholars
IN THIS ISSUE …
Wind, solar stocks fall after Trump’s victory … IPCC finds “mysterious” warming during hiatus … Activist scientists can’t demonstrate “warming” or effects … UK, Greece, and Germany undermine climate commitments
WIND, SOLAR STOCKS FALL AFTER TRUMP VICTORY
Demonstrating how dependent wind and solar power companies are on continued government largesse, stocks of wind and solar companies plunged in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the November election. Despite decades of government subsidies, mandates, and support, electricity generated by wind and solar power companies is still more expensive than that produced by conventional fuels like coal, nuclear, hydro, and natural gas.
Shares of the nation’s largest maker of solar panels, First Solar, fell 6.5 percent the day after the election and shares of another large solar power manufacturer, SunPower, dropped approximately 18 percent. Stocks in the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas Wind Systems, fell as much as 14 percent in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election before settling 6.6 percent lower at the close of business. About 41.3 percent of Vestas’ revenue comes from the Americas.
Based on his public statements, stock market analysts expect a Trump administration to take steps to expand the use of fossil fuels and deemphasize renewable power.
SOURCES: Washington Post and Bloomberg
IPCC FINDS ‘MYSTERIOUS’ WARMING DURING HIATUS
Two organizations charged with studying the human causes of climate change have been caught once again altering recorded data to change temperature records to report higher warming in recent years and lower temperatures in the past.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report (AR3), stated, “The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by about 0.6°C,” a figure confirmed by the Met Office, the weather service of the British government. This recorded amount of warming, as shown by numerous citations provided by No Tricks Zone, was widely accepted or confirmed in the scientific literature.
Since AR3, both the IPCC and the Met office have acknowledged a hiatus in warming temperatures since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the IPCC writing in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), “For the period 1998–2012, 111 of the 114 climate-model simulations show a surface-warming trend larger than the observations. … Almost all … historical simulations do not reproduce the observed recent warming hiatus.”
Despite only 0.6°C warming having been recorded in the twentieth century, and a hiatus in rising temperatures since the, AR5 reports temperatures rose during the twentieth century by 0.85°C, or 0.25°C more than it said in AR3. IPCC has failed to explain this mysterious 0.25°C of additional warming.
Perhaps the explanation is found in recent Met office efforts eliminating between 0.2° and 0.3°C of warming measured from the 1880s through the 1940s, and reducing the 0.3°C cooling recorded between the 1940s and the 1970s, a “global cooling period extensively referenced in the scientific literature,” to less than 0.1°C in its data sets.
In the words of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist, Ronald Coase, “If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.” Perhaps this kind of questionable data manipulation is what cost the Met office its contract to provide weather information to the BBC in 2015.
SOURCE: No Tricks Zone
ACTIVIST SCIENTISTS CAN’T DEMONSTRATE “WARMING” OR EFFECTS
Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Kerry Jackson compares the evidence alarmist scientists use to claim humans are causing dangerous climate change, to the evidence used in a trial, showing the science is hardly settled beyond a reasonable doubt. As Jackson writes:
The alarmist community has had almost three decades to prove its assumptions, and while it is plausible that there has been a small measure of warming, the disaster many predicted hasn’t occurred. Worse for them, it’s impossible to say with any degree of certainty that the warming that has happened – and quite possibly there’s been none at all – was caused by man.
What the alarmists call “proof” and “evidence” is nothing more than conjecture. They cannot prove that man’s activities have warmed the planet, even if the next 100 years are twice as hot as they have predicted. They can lay out their “evidence” as if in a courtroom, and urge the jury to make the connection. But the fact they can’t get around is that there is more than enough reasonable doubt to throw out their prosecution. Carbon dioxide simply isn’t the only suspect. Earth’s climate system has far too many influences for the inquisitors to settle on just one.
SOURCE: Investor’s Business Daily
UK, GREECE, AND GERMANY UNDERMINE EU CLIMATE COMMITMENTS
The United Kingdom’s Court of Appeal recently upheld the government’s decision to cancel the Climate Change Levy (CCL) for renewable power generators, in effect retrospectively removing a green power entitlement, “giv[ing] fair warning [what] The government giveth, … the government [can] taketh away.”
Green energy producers had challenged the government’s decision to end the CCL exemption renewable power generators had received since 2001, which boosted the companies’ bottom lines by an additional 381 million pounds in 2014/15.
The Court of Appeal determined the government can always change a tax code without giving notice. “They are entitled to do so, as it is their function in a democratic society to manage the public finances … [and] make such changes as are required in the public interest.”
While Great Britain’s support for renewable power is waning, it appears Greece will win European Union support for two large coal-fired power plants. The European parliament’s industry committee approved a rule change allowing Greece to receive up to 1.75 billion Euros in free carbon allowances to build the power plants. Without carbon credits it can sell on Europe’s carbon trading market, Greece would not be able to afford to build the plants.
Environmentalists are up in arms over the action. “You couldn’t make this up,” Imke Lübbeke, the World Wildlife Fund’s head of climate and energy policy in Europe, told The Guardian. “The [Emissions Trading System] was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but it now risks being abused to facilitate investments in the new coal plants. … This would violate climate targets and … is in no way compatible with the leadership role the EU aspires to play in global climate policy and carbon markets.”
In addition, at the UN climate conference being held in Morocco, Germany announced it was lowering its 2030 carbon dioxide reduction target from 30 percent below 2014 levels to 20 percent, reflecting its commitment to coal power.
These moves, among others, are bringing EU’s climate leadership into doubt.
SOURCES: Global Warming Policy Foundation; The Guardian; and Reuters
The Climate Change Weekly Newsletter has been moved to HeartlandDailyNews.com. Please check there for future updates!
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
