“Climate anxiety and dissatisfaction with government responses,” says The Lancet, “are widespread in children and young people in countries across the world and impact their daily functioning.”
And what does California do about this? It is now the third state to “mandate scaring our kids to death.” Along with Connecticut and New Jersey, it is adopting, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity tells us, “Next Generation Science Standards.” The coursework has been “billed as a new way of teaching science.”
Or maybe to more effectively hard wire young minds with the left’s progressive belief system.
Under the curriculum, “students will be told rising global temperatures will cause flooding and coastal erosion,” says the CTUP. They will also be taught that human-caused “hurricanes, floods, droughts, and heat waves, can disrupt food systems and ways of living,” while “climate change will be linked to such health risks as respiratory disease and heat stroke.”
“This isn’t science; it’s ideology. These are the same fanatics who told us 30 years ago that the world was overpopulated and everyone had to stop having kids – right now.”
Without even seeing the curriculum, we know what won’t be included. Facts such as:
- California produces roughly 1% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and can have no impact on the climate or Earth’s temperature if that number somehow dropped to zero tomorrow.
- While the U.S. emits a little more than 11% of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse gases, Nicolas Loris, vice president of public policy of C3 solutions, says “the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions 100% and it would not make a difference in abating global warming.”
- Global temperatures have hardly moved since 1979, when satellite measurements, the only metric we can rely on, were begun. As noted before: “Tree rings from Siberia, conflicting ice cores, archaic equipment from earlier eras, the subjectivity and error of thermometer readings, and a temperature reconstruction that produced the ‘hockey stick’ chart do not inspire confidence in the temperature record going back thousands of years.”
- Measuring the global temperature is impossible anyway. Says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen: The very “concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility.” When the media make breathless reports about the hottest day or hottest month or hottest year, understand that they are basing these great pronouncements on an “average without meaning.” Simply averaging “the surface station data together to get one global temperature for the Earth” tells us nothing.
- While there is a political consensus that man is overheating Earth due to his modern usage of fossil fuels, there is no scientific consensus of man-made catastrophic global warming. The somewhat famous assertion that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing cataclysmic changes to the climate, which has been cited as an unassailable truth for a decade, is nonsense. A poll of earth scientists taken last year found that only 59% “believe anthropogenic climate change will ‘significantly harm’ people’s standard of living in our lifetimes,” say H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute. The 97% figure was dished up by an activist and “his merry band of climate extremists,” who would have come up with 32.6% had they not excluded thousands of research papers they didn’t like when they made their survey.
- Science doesn’t work on a consensus basis. “The word pairing ‘scientific consensus’ is a destructive science-stifling oxymoron,” says Robert J. Marks, a Baylor University professor. “The processes of proper science could hardly be more different” than reaching a consensus, writes economist John Kay. “Good science involves perpetual, open debate, in which every objection is aired and dissents are sharpened and clarified, not smoothed over.” Two years ago, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard history of science professor, whose 2004 paper that claimed there was a “scientific consensus on climate change,” wrote that “science is a process of learning and discovery, and sometimes we learn that what we thought was right is wrong.” The headline on her Scientific American essay? “If You Say ‘Science Is Right,’ You’re Wrong.”
Instead, California students, who are already suffering from “climate distress” in large numbers – 80% of those between 14 and 24 are experiencing “grief, anger, anxiety, and hopelessness” because they’ve been fed a steady diet of panic-inducing climate exaggerations and disinformation – will get a booster dose of alarmist dogma.
Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
