It started as a quasi-religious movement, led by a few persuasive individuals who created an atmosphere of mass hysteria which infected the uneducated and intellectuals alike; then it became an intergovernmental affair, organised at the supranational level; but due to international rivalries and the failure to agree on objectives, it petered out. Its final manifestation was as a mass movement of children (egged on by adults) which ended in slavery or death by starvation for most of the participants.
I’m talking about the Crusades of course, of which the Children’s Crusade of 1212 was one of the last manifestations. From Wiki:
..there seem to have actually been two movements of people (of all ages) in 1212 in Germany and France. In the first movement, Nicholas, an eloquent shepherd from Germany tried to lead a group across the Alps and into Italy in the early spring of 1212. Nicholas said that the sea would dry up before them and allow his followers to cross into the Holy Land… Two out of every three people on the journey died, while many others returned to their homes. About 7,047 arrived in Genoa in late August. They immediately marched to the harbour, expecting the sea to divide before them; when it did not many became bitterly disappointed. A few accused Nicholas of betraying them, while others settled down to wait for God to change his mind… Nicholas refused to say he was defeated and .. he and a few loyal followers continued to the Papal States, where they met Pope Innocent III. ThePontiff exhorted them to be good and to return home to their families. Nicholas did not survive the second attempt across the Alps; back home his father was arrested and hanged under pressure from angry families whose relatives had perished while following the child.
The second movement was led by a twelve-year-old French shepherd boy named Stephen of Cloys, who said in June that he bore a letter for the king of France from Jesus. Large gangs of youth around his age were drawn to him, most of whom claimed to possess special gifts of God and thought themselves miracle workers. ..Although the Church was skeptical, many adults were impressed by his teaching… At the end of June 1212, Stephen led his largely juvenile Crusaders to Marseilles. They survived by begging for food, while the vast majority seem to have been disheartened by the hardship of this journey and returned to their families.
It’s tempting to see the current manifestations of infantile hysteria as a sign that the climate change movement is at its last CO2-emitting gasp. Andrew Montford and our own John Shade dealt with the subject five years ago in a GWPF paper entitled “Climate Control – Brainwashing in Schools” in which they trace the use of disturbing, misleading, and downright false information on environmental questions in schools dating back to the early seventies, and John Shade continues to cover the subject at his blog,
https://climatelessons.blogspot.com
Why the movement should have finally led to a worldwide children’s crusade right now, with strikes planned in dozens of countries, is not clear. Since the indoctrination has been going on for three or four decades, one might ask: “Why did it take so long?”
The spark was certainly the publicity given to the 16-yearold Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, who started protesting outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018. According to the Guardian’s Damian Carrington reporting from COP 24 in Katowice on December 4th:
“The school strikes have spread to at least 270 towns and cities in countries across the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the US and Japan.”
He quotes Greta’s father, who is apparently a descendant of Svante Arrhenius, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist who in 1896 first calculated the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions:
Thunberg’s father was named after him, and said much of Arrhenius’s work has stood the test of time, but not everything. “He thought we’d be [at today’s levels of warming] in 2,000 years’ time,” said Svante Thunberg.
Suddenly, because of the strikes by schoolchildren, the climate change debate has returned to centre stage. As many as 200 kids demonstrated in Paris today, and the subject took up a good five minutes of the evening TV news. This is big.
Greta has been mentioned in 965 Guardian articles since September last year, if you can believe their search engine (which I don’t) including at least seven published in the past 24 hours:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/15/young-climate-change-greta-thunberg-children
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/15/planet-children-protest-climate-change-speech
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/15/school-climate-strike-classroom-climate-change
Monbiot, to name but one, is in great form:
The Youth Strike 4 Climate gives me more hope than I have felt in 30 years of campaigning. Before this week, I believed it was all over. I thought .. that climate breakdown and ecological collapse were inevitable … we created a cannibal economy: we ate your future to satisfy our greed… ours is a society of altruists governed by psychopaths… we have bequeathed you a world that… may soon become uninhabitable. The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already.. But those of us who have long been engaged in this struggle will not abandon you… we will stand in solidarity with you. Though we are old and you are young, we will be led by you… Together, we will build a movement that must – and will – become irresistible.
I’m glad for George that he found someone to follow so late in life. It happens more often than you’d think – to St Paul and Friedrich Engels, for example. But they didn’t follow 16 year old girls with plaits.
I went hunting on the net for the actual words of Ms Thunberg, at her speech to the COP 24, for instance. The first thing I found was this article by her at the Guardian from November, in which she says:
I first learnt about climate change when I was eight years old. I learnt that this was something humans had created… I remember thinking it was very strange that we were capable of changing the entire face of the Earth and the precious thin layer of atmosphere that makes it our home.
Because if we were capable of doing this, then why weren’t we hearing about it everywhere?… If burning fossil fuels threatened our very existence, then how could we continue to burn them? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it illegal to do this? Why wasn’t anyone talking about the dangerous climate change we have already locked in? And what about the fact that up to 200 species are going extinct every single day?
I have Aspergers syndrome so, for me, most things are black or white. I look at the people in power and wonder how they have made things so complicated.
I may be the last person in the world to know that Greta suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. Am I the first to have asked themselves: if she can see things only in black and white, can she also see them in white and black? Does she ever look at the people in power and wonder how they have made things sound so simple?
[Svante Thunberg is an actor, who has appeared in a number of plays, including Thomas Tidholm’s Tralala-la.]
Climate Scepticism 
Bugger, I just tweeted someone if he would have sponsored the Children’s Crusade. I hope that Greta and co don’t get sold into slavery or Islamic brothels
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Man in a Barrel
They weren’t Islamic brothels. They never got further than Genoa and Marseilles. Greta hopes to live to a hundred, and blames us for not planning beyond 2050. If she doesn’t see in the 22nd century, it will be our fault, and G Monbiot will be waiting for us in hell, prodding us with a pitchfork to remind us.
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“As many as 200 kids demonstrated in Paris today, and the subject took up a good five minutes of the evening TV news. This is big.”
The Gilets Jeunes?
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I was a school age climate change protestor. From the age of four until 18, I never once got driven to school. I took the bus about twice I think. After that I did 12 miles daily on foot for 2 or 3 years, including running home for lunch and running back again. Sustainable, carbon free schooling.
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Geoff, Cervantes spent some time as a prisoner in Algiers. His plays about the dungeons, the amputation of a hand, and the rest of the experience no doubt give me preconceptions that an “enlightened white man admitting privilege” can set me right on. Life around the Mediterranean shores was not a bowl of cherries. And successive European dynasties used the “history” for very different purposes.
In 1981-82, the vin de pays from Languedoc was reinforced by wine from Algeria, otherwise it would have been undrinkable. EU got tired of distilling this wine to industrialalcohol. Which led to mass grubbing up of French vines… Cut off of trade with Algeria. Shrinking behind the EU custom barrier.
Midi wines are much better now. And the cost was… M ?
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Greta Thunberg does not suffer from Asperger’s. We are made to suffer from being told ad nauseam that she has Asperger’s – like that was in any way relevant to her status as a teeny climate bopper.
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bagnio
/ˈbɑːnjəʊ,ˈbanjəʊ/Submit
noun
1.
ARCHAIC
a brothel.
2.
HISTORICAL
(in East Asia) a prison.
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Taking advantage of a disabled child is an appropriate tool for the climate consensus.
How disgusting.
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Jaime: impressive youthful climate change protest indeed.
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JAIME
According to Wiki:
She says that’s what she’s got. It looks like that to me. I suppose you and I and Monbiot might all be accused of having “restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests.” But you and I are not demanding that the whole world get out on to the streets tomorrow to defend our particular point of view. (In fact tomorrow I won’t be here. I’m going to visit a marvel of gothic architecture. But keep the comments coming. I’ll be back in Asperger’s mode on Sunday.)
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I just looked at Twitter and found the following from the Leader of the House of Commons and various reactions to it. I’ll comment at the end.
https://twitter.com/teessidedazza/status/1096520195798126592
It was really this from Twitter’s most famous Brexit-fighting QC that hit me hardest:
I’ve no idea if all the hedge fund stuff DeSmog was drawing attention to in 2015. when Leadsom was given, by Cameron, the job Gove has now, was above board. But today she wasn’t mocking anyone, except perhaps the BBC for its craven framing of the issue. And yet, according to the QC, she is evil.
It’s the heady combination of radicalisation, irrationality and being infantile that’s hard to find words for. But it’s all for the kids so that’s ok.
The hypocrisies of the Tories on climate, and environmental matters generally, continues to interest me. It’s perhaps to be expected that this event is shining a bit more light on that.
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Nice post.
‘Since the indoctrination has been going on for three or four decades, one might ask: “Why did it take so long?”’
That’s pretty short. By the time of the children’s crusades in 1212, Christian indoctrination had been expanding for almost 1200 years, and the Holy Lands to which the crusades were aimed had been conquered by non-Christian empires almost 600 years before (first by Persia / Zoastrianism, and then very shortly afterwards by the Arab / Muslim conquest).
“It’s tempting to see the current manifestations of infantile hysteria as a sign that the climate change movement is at its last CO2-emitting gasp.”
For better or worse, Christianity continued to increase its grip for at least another 400 years after the children’s crusades, and while then arguably in a shallow decline, more obviously accelerating in the late 1800s after Darwin, it continues to hold a powerful influence another 400 years later still (i.e. now).
If we assume that enhanced communication modes result in an equivalence of about 10 years to each 400, so ~30 years of indoctrination so far, this yields 10 more years of increased grip, about 2.5 years of shallow decline, and about 1.5 more of steeper decline which nevertheless will be nothing like a defeat or loss of a still major influence. This line of reasoning probably has no validity whatsoever, but I think it may nevertheless help us to avoid the above temptation.
Greta: “If burning fossil fuels threatened our very existence, then how could we continue to burn them?”
This goes to the very heart of the issue. The answer is that cultural ‘truths’ are not true at all. Everyone who for whatever initial leaning becomes an adherent, ‘knows’ instinctively not to interpret them literally, whatever they actually propagate and indeed believe. Unless of course one’s condition and so tendency to black and white, excludes the normal interpretation of cultural narratives (aka group delusions).
“Does she ever look at the people in power and wonder how they have made things sound so simple?”
The problem here is that several subtle and non-intuitive principles are required to see things this way. Starting with the fact that people (so including all authority figures) can very passionately believe in and promote something that is entirely nonsense, and yet not be lying. That the things they believe via this mode are emergent, i.e. this is not a crafted and deliberate agenda sustained over 30 or 40 years by many thousands, indeed millions now, of consciously coordinating individuals. And that the narrative doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone as such but has a ‘life’ (non-sentient, non-agential) of its own. And so on. For a child, especially one who may have been encouraged far too early to enter the climate catastrophist domain and who happens also to think in black and white, it is far, far easier to believe that the narrative is true, and that adults just can’t hack the necessary sacrifices, of which the true consequences may also not be appreciated. (The alternative, that they’re all lying, probably isn’t credible to most children, even though some more cynical adults follow this incorrect and indeed impossible line). To see things ‘in white and black’, she would have to know that these principles are possibilities; how would she know that?
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Free-school founder Toby Young has a different and persuasive angle on the accuracy of Greta’s critique:
That’s Mr Young in the current Spectator. (I wasn’t looking for something on the ‘Gilets Jeunes’ but for something else entirely. I’m here despite myself.)
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oops: “this yields 10 more years of increased grip, about 6.25 years of shallow decline, and about 3.75 more of steeper decline”
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Andy: Whatever similarities you see between Christianity and today’s climate cult you can’t argue from them to something as detailed and fraught as longevity. Take Nazism as a third religion-like phenomenon. It went 1919-1945 and that was pretty much it. Which is the outlier of the three? What about Jimmy Jones’s Peoples Temple which rather sadly ended itself? Add Buddhism to the mix. Can we now say which are outliers? One can see similarities between all these and more and that can I’m sure help us in some or other ways. But can it give us any predictive skill on longevity? No.
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Richard:
Good take there by Mr Young.
Greta: “You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it.”
Far from not mentioning it, per previous posts there is a huge litany of a high certainty of imminent global catastrophe (absent dramatic action) by presidents, prime ministers, high ministers, UN elite, religious leaders, NGOs, economists, businesses, and rafts of other authorities and influencers at every level, which is well documented and easily accessible on the internet, propagated over decades. And not to mention far more that doesn’t go the whole hog yet still has some existential angle.
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Richard:
“Whatever similarities you see between Christianity and today’s climate cult you can’t argue from them to something as detailed and fraught as longevity.”
Absolutely!!
That’s exactly why I said: “This line of reasoning probably has no validity whatsoever…”
and indeed also precisely because of the *unpredictability* of timescales, also:
“…but I think it may nevertheless help us to avoid the above temptation.”
The mechanisms are the same and certain behaviours would be expected. But there is no handle at all on growth and maturation timescales (which don’t depend upon the mechanisms but on the population conditions at the time and also available propagation modes plus more) plus indeed longevity; not to mention a whole host of detailed manifestations. Apart from saying that newly minted cultures (which don’t have cultural inertia and are born in an age of higher propagation modes *may* work on a faster timescale, even this is not reliable because it’s a race between propagation modes and population sizes that need to be reached to get some dominant voice (and of course, populations are far bigger too).
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Andy: With childlike humility (but perhaps not enough Aspergers), I now admit that I didn’t read your post carefully enough.
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I have Asperger’s, and seeing things in black and white is not a symptom. This little girl sees things that way because she is a child. Learning that things are not just black and white is part of becoming an adult.
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The world is so simple to a 16 year old.
Everything can be solved and “wrinklies” have ruined the world.
Can we go home now Mommy, where did we leave the car?.
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That the “moral spokesperson” fir the climate obsessed is now a mentally handicapped child who is factually wrong and obliviously ignorant is ironic but just. Her parents seem to be in on the exploitation of this child, so she doesn’t really have a chance.
In reality, the climate consensus at its heart is just as oblivious and manipulative.
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More reactions and counter-reactions to Young’s article:
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1096463068375191553
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1096475379496378369
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Jaime and Alan, you have it a nutshell.
If they’re so concerned about climate change here’s what they really must do (all of which applies to my childhood, and I’m only in my 50s):
Walk to and from school;
Take no foreign holidays, and certainly never use an aeroplane;
Give up mobile ‘phones and computers;
Have household heating only on bright, sunny and/or very windy days (this one doesn’t apply to my childhood, but no double glazing or central heating does);
And much, much more. Will they? Definitely not. It’s so much easier to bunk school for a day and pretend you’re being virtuous.
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Geoff,
A child who thinks in black and white, Who develops restricted patterns of interest and behaviour? Who is maybe a bit ‘awkward’ when interacting socially. Damn, that is so ABNORMAL – let’s call it Asperger’s! Severe autism may indeed be a mental disorder; I’m sceptical that Asperger’s can be similarly characterised as such. From the Autism Society website:
What distinguishes Asperger’s Disorder from classic autism are its less severe symptoms and the absence of language delays. Children with Asperger’s Disorder may be only mildly affected, and they frequently have good language and cognitive skills. To the untrained observer, a child with Asperger’s Disorder may just seem like a neurotypical child behaving differently.
Children with autism are frequently viewed as aloof and uninterested in others. This is not the case with Asperger’s Disorder. Individuals with Asperger’s Disorder usually want to fit in and have interaction with others, but often they don’t know how to do it. They may be socially awkward, not understand conventional social rules or show a lack of empathy. They may have limited eye contact, seem unengaged in a conversation and not understand the use of gestures or sarcasm.
Their interests in a particular subject may border on the obsessive. Children with Asperger’s Disorder often like to collect categories of things, such as rocks or bottle caps. They may be proficient in knowledge categories of information, such as baseball statistics or Latin names of flowers. They may have good rote memory skills but struggle with abstract concepts.
One of the major differences between Asperger’s Disorder and autism is that, by definition, there is no speech delay in Asperger’s. In fact, children with Asperger’s Disorder frequently have good language skills; they simply use language in different ways. Speech patterns may be unusual, lack inflection or have a rhythmic nature, or may be formal, but too loud or high-pitched. Children with Asperger’s Disorder may not understand the subtleties of language, such as irony and humor, or they may not understand the give-and-take nature of a conversation.
Doesn’t that describe many gawky teenagers coping with the difficulties of growing up, adapting to living in a complex social environment whilst being assaulted by raging hormones and rapidly changing brain activities and structures? Or maybe I’m thinking too black and white here? Maybe Asperger’s is the grey area of social disability that wasn’t officially recognised as a separate disorder by the medical profession until 1994. Then again, maybe psychologists are singularly obsessed by inventing disorders so they can pigeon-hole and medically dissect larger and larger parts of the general populace, because schizophrenia, even though ever so dramatic, was becoming a bit boring. Maybe psychologists have developed severe spectrum autistic disorder in their obsessive quest for the meaning of their existence!
I think what we have with Greta Thunberg is a bright, intelligent, socially manipulative individual who has been pushed into the limelight by her parents and the climate change alarmist machine, who is finding that she is actually enjoying it and all the attention it brings. What we have is still child abuse. What we may have is a child prodigy who has digested the entire literature on climate change and who now feels entitled to point the finger at her adult peers to say that they do not fully comprehend the existential nature of the “climate crisis” – which she does. What we have is a bunch of unscrupulous, manipulative and maybe not quite so intelligent adults, in many cases, who have jumped on the opportunity to use Thunberg as a weapon to advance their agenda.
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I’ve just been blocked by someone on Twitter. That happens so often that I seldom announce it on Cliscep. But the context in this instance is both hilarious and revealing. Here goes.
How Cliscep’s own Twitter account got wind of me being blocked by Marky is a mystery and must remain so 🙂
Chances are, Young’s misfit accuser hasn’t read the whole article. But the demand for evidence, followed by a block, is situation normal for some tweeters. Another reason I may soon be joining Jaime in Twitter purdah – but of my own volition.
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There again, Twitter sometimes makes the right call.
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1096731159843819525
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Hahaha. Love it. Suck it up Marky Misfit.
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Richard,
‘ . . . on this occasion’. That’s the rub. As someone pointed out on that thread, Twitter has an algorithm: the more perpetually offended snowflakes complain about accounts which don’t toe the progressive left wing line on Twitter, the greater the chance that the account will eventually be banned for the most spurious of reasons. Snowflakes never get banned from Twitter. By the evidence on that thread, they are multiplying like flies and feeding in a similar manner.
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Jaime: I’ve been thinking lots about this, with you in mind and this theory in mind (if you don’t mind me calling it that). Without question, the Twitter moderation system is being gamed every day by bad actors and it has weaknesses that sometimes allows them to gain significant ground. The other issue, though, is that the final sanction is too drastic. I’ll probably say more but it would be great to have some big data about all the complaints, complainants and judgments. But only Twitter itself has that.
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There’s been another climate crisis letter in the Graun, this one supporting the children’s crusade. It was signed by ‘224 academics’.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/13/school-climate-strike-childrens-brave-stand-has-our-support
As usual, a lot of the academics work in psych-related fields. Also as usual, some of the academics aren’t academics. For example…
Adela Pickles, Communications Director for Rainforest Trust UK: Pickles has an MA in Interactive Design and for a while produced short animations for 10:10 and the like. I don’t think she has ever worked as an academic. R T UK is a tiny charity that she runs with her husband, a writer of TEFL books. It seems to have been established to allow a similarly named US charity to benefit from UK tax laws (Gift Aid) when Britons donate to it.
Pickles told XR that she’d be in Central America in February/March, so at the moment she’s probably in Costa Rica arranging the sale of the delightful holiday home that she and her husband own in a gated community in the middle of a rainforest. $250k would prolly bag it, if you’re interested:
http://www.caribesur-realestate.com/property/perezoso-house/
Dr Dina Glouberman, Skyros Institute: Glouberman has a PhD in psychology and says she was a lecturer in social psychology at Kingston Polytechnic. But that was in the 70s. I don’t think she has worked as an academic for more than 40 years. She says she has ‘lectured for over 20 years in UK universities’ but I suspect she means that she has given lots of non-academic talks about mindfulness etc to UK students. She’s a life coach, not an academic.
Skyros Institute is an old name for a hippie holiday company she founded in the late 1970s. It currently trades as Skyros Holidays. I don’t know if Glouberman still has a financial stake in the company but she still works for it. For example, this summer she’s flying to Greece to give tourists a 2-week workshop on how to reinvent themselves. (She’s probably quite good at it. Jimmy Carr decided to quit his job at Shell and become a comedian after going on a holiday/retreat with Skyros.)
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Vinny,
Nelson Mandela once said: “Our children are our greatest treasure. They are our future. Those who abuse them tear at the fabric of our society and weaken our nation.” Human planetary abuse is, in a very real sense, child neglect.
Excuse me while I resist the urge to regurgitate my dinner. Brainwashing kids is child abuse. Using brain-washed kids to promote a political cause is child abuse.
As many of us and other fellow academics have indicated previously in this newspaper (Letters, 27 October 2018), the scientific evidence of climate change is clear. For example, the summer of 2018 has been confirmed by the Met Office as the hottest on record for England.
Say what? It was only the hottest in England on the UK database which goes back to 1910. I take it that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland don’t count when it comes to scientific evidence of climate change! It was also only the fifth warmest summer on the much longer running Central England database.
A nauseating mix of lies, misinformation, hypocrisy and emotional blackmail masquerading as concern for the planet, signed by 224 ‘academics’ who collectively constitute a malign infection afflicting modern day academia.
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Jaime, here’s another Mandela quote they might have used:
(A longer version whose overall message is, I admit, a bit different: But then where’s the full version of the quote used by the
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Predictably, The Con have at least two articles on this, and as usual they’ve gone out of their way to find the most extreme views possible.
The notorious authoritarian green activist from UEA, Rupert Read, declares that parents don’t have the right to object
https://theconversation.com/school-climate-strikes-why-adults-no-longer-have-the-right-to-object-to-their-children-taking-radical-action-111851
and they’ve found two other idiots who announce that climate is a life-threatening issue.
http://theconversation.com/climate-change-young-people-striking-from-school-see-it-for-the-life-threatening-issue-it-is-111159
Under the Read article, the energetic Renee Bagslint is giving them a hard time in the comments, ignoring the request from the feeble editor Willy de Freitas to take the afternoon off. There are several other sceptical commenters as well (including some names that clisceppers may recognise), leading to at least 3 people wailing at the fact that some alternative views have been expressed.
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Oz Journalist Tony Thomas has spent a lot of time investigating the groups behind these propaganda strategies which are and have been operating in Australia again with Teacher support:
“March of the Climate Cult Kiddies”
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/05/attack-climate-cult-kiddies/
“The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is spawn of the US Energy Action Coalition (EAC) of 50 youth-led environmental groups. (Gore has spent a lot of time in Australia, as has Christiana Figueres. The Potsdam Institute is well established at Melbourne University.)
EAC is a prominent member of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Anna Rose, after attending the UN Montreal climate fest in 2005, templated the AYCC’s first constitution on the EAC’s. In 2008, young UK activists set up their own coalition based on EAC and AYCC.”
“Those Climate Cult Kiddies: Part II”
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/05/climate-cult-kiddies-part-ii/
Current:
“A network of Green groups are mobilising our children for the climate wars”
by Tony Thomas https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/02/gen-activist/
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/17/soros-paid-al-gore-millions-to-push-aggressive-us-action-on-global-warming/#ixzz4HhZkJGTf
U.S. Programs became engaged on the global warming issue about four years ago, at George Soros’s suggestion,” reads a leaked OSI (Soros’ Open Society Institute) memo. “There has been a budget of $11 million for global warming grants in the U.S. Programs budget for the last several years,” the memo reads.
“This budget item captures George Soros’s commitment of $10 million per year for three years to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, which conducts public education on the climate issue in pursuit of creating political space for aggressive U.S. action in line with what scientists say is necessary to put our nation on a path to reducing its outsize carbon dioxide emissions.”
………the Gore co-founded Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) was established in 2006 and lasted until it became The Climate Reality Project in July 2011.
Soros’ OSI also planned on giving millions of dollars to spur the “youth climate movement.”
“This budget item also allows for the renewal of U.S. Programs’ long-standing support of the Energy Action Coalition, which is the lead organizer of the youth climate movement in the U.S., the memo reads.”
Gore’s propaganda outfit is here: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/
The UK Youth Climate Coalition is affiliated to the international Climate Action Network of NGO’s: http://www.climatenetwork.org/profile/member/uk-youth-climate-coalition-ukycc
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From the Conversation:
“Robin Guenier:
Peter – you write:
Everyone of us should be on strike … until those who are in positions of power start to act proportionally to the situation we are in.
That seems to put it plainly enough. But, as I said to you here, developing countries, and especially the major emerging economies and major OPEC countries, are responsible for the entire 60% increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the Rio climate conference in 1992. Western negotiators have tried long and hard in subsequent UN conferences to get them to accept a proper share of emission reduction. But they’ve been met with adamant refusal.
So would your strike be aimed at getting Western negotiators to push even harder, get even tougher? Threaten war perhaps? What would you regard as acting “proportionally”?
Or perhaps your strike would be aimed at getting (for example) China and Saudi Arabia to change their ways? But do you really think the Chinese politburo or Saudi royal family would take any notice? And if not, how would you go about seizing “ALL their assets”?
16 hours ago
Report
This comment has been automatically flagged for inspection by a moderator.”
One of the sanest, most rational comments, flagged for inspection by a moderator? Seriously?
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I’ve added a comment at The Con in support of Robin Guenier. No doubt it will be flagged for inspection by moderators.
https://theconversation.com/school-climate-strikes-why-adults-no-longer-have-the-right-to-object-to-their-children-taking-radical-action-111851
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To form a link between this and the next post, I estimated the number of children at Norwich’s climate protest at its peak, compared with the total number of teenagers in Norwich’s schools. I reckon there was a 1% (or less) turnout.
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And what would the 1% (or less) turnout have been under Julia Hartley-Brewer constraints:
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Perhaps Dr Emma Saxon ought to be informed that more people are talking about her tweet (1074) than children appear to be present on the attached picture of central London.
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I’m not sure whether this is better here or under “Tag Along Climate Change – The One Percent Solution” where Jamie Jessop takes the Guardian article by Rosie Smart-Knight to task, but here goes anyway.
For a view from far on the other side see the strange article posted on Psychology Today on 12 January titled “Climate Change Denial – Facing a reality too big to believe” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/denying-the-grave/201901/climate-change-denial .
The article includes near the end the following two paragraphs:
“Mental health professionals are increasingly recognizing the critical role they play in combating climate change. Data suggest that rising temperatures are linked to increases in multiple psychiatric disorders and suicide rates. In an excellent review of the mental health aspects of climate change, a group from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto comment that “The overarching threats of a changing climate, can also incite despair and hopelessness as actions to address the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change seem intangible or insignificant in comparison to the scale and magnitude of the threats.”
Organizations like Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance have been formed not only to point out the severe consequences of climate change for emotional and behavioral health but also to lend expertise in determining how best to overcome climate change denial. For these and similar organizations, climate change denial constitutes an emergency that demands immediate attention. We need urgent attention to developing and implementing the best practices for overcoming public despair and inaction and increasing the motivation to demand large-scale climate change mitigation action.”
The article is by Sarah and Jack Gorman, a father/daughter team, he a public health specialist, she a psychiatrist. They have also written a book “Denying to the Grave: Why we Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” which deals with other matters as well as climate change including GM crops (they’re good) and vaccination (also good) on which I would agree with them but what comes over from the article is that these people are so certain that their understanding of the facts on climate change is right that they regard anyone who doesn’t see things their way as in need of psychiatric help. Objectively their arrogance is quite breathtaking.
I’m no psychiatrist or even psychologist so I’m going out on a limb here but it seems to me that the psychological welfare of both Rosie and Greta has been damaged by them being fed a constant diet of apocalyptic doom, throughout their education, about what the climate may possibly do in the future. Instead of worrying in a normal way about what 16 and 17 year olds normally worry about, and getting on with their lives, they are obsessing unhealthily about a future over which they have next to no control at all. People like the Gormans and even George Monbiot – and a host of others of course – have a lot to answer for.
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VINNY BURGOO (16 Feb 19 at 9.16pm)
The list of signatories to the letter from 224 academics supporting the children’s crusade is interesting for the names missing, as much as for the names present. No Lewandowsky, no Corner or Marshall from COIN, and very few climate scientists. Rapley of the Antarctic is there, but none of the psychiatrists (Weintraub, Randall) that he championed in their efforts to make their patients more miserable. And Rupert Read, but none of the other dozens of Conversation contributors on climate hysteria, as far as I can see. 97% of climate scientists clearly do not believe in demonstrating against climate change.
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KESTREL27:
Yep, the psychologists have it completely backwards. Their constant search for plausible causes to mass denialism that might actually match social data (and therefore suggest ‘solutions’), plus their offering of (useless) help to those whose health has been impacted by the constant fear of apocalypse, especially those in the climate profession, have both been ongoing for many years. Interestingly, the social data and all the normal tools of the profession point to the belief in climate catastrophism as being a cultural phenomenon, but the extreme bias from their priors prevents them from perceiving this. Instead they largely double down, maybe to avoid cognitive dissonance. See the 3 part series at WUWT starting here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/06/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part1/
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Kestrel, yes, we met the Gormless Gormans in this recent article by Geoff. They have no grasp of the inherent uncertainties involved in predicting the climate, neither do they grasp the fact that the climate has been changing, sometimes very dramatically, throughout human history and humans have had no control over it whatsoever, on account of the fact that immensely powerful natural forces have driven that change. Where were they when Mr and Mrs Cavman were sitting on their rock sofa, heads in hands, fretting about their powerlessness in the face of climate change? They just rote repeat the current anthropogenic climate catastrophe meme and tailor their amateurish psychological ‘insights’ to try and explain society’s response to that supposed immense threat.
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Expect we’ll be discussing the political Alynsky-ite take over of western parliamentary institutions adopting Orwell’s 1984 as as their users’ manual … banning of rights to free speech for all cits, adapting that Mao model cultural revolution event as a guide for a core-curriculum student make over, occupy their heads George Soros ‘ wise … corrupting the objective methodology of the western scientific revolution that enabled Galileo, Newton, Galileo to uncover nature’s secrets … guess we’ll all be discussing these, rationally and ruefully until the last light is switched off in a once dynamic western world… So clever these activists, taking us down from within and never a shot fired.
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Dennis Ambler (17 Feb 12:08 am), thanks for those interesting links about who is pulling the strings – which unfortunately meant that your comment got stuck in moderation for a while.
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Great post! Scary stuff. How vulnerable we poor humans are to scaremongering if done well enough!
I’ve put up a post of my own on the events of last Friday: https://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2019/02/input-relentless-climate-scaremongering.html
Still hoping to get back to posting here, when I have more time for it later this year. That’s if I can get up to the speed and quality required!
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Geoff, I’m not sure Lewandowsky is particularly interested in climate change per se. He enjoys the culture wars aspects of it but when it comes to what to do about it… ? (A bit like some of us, then.)
As it happens, he did sign an open letter recently. Or so it seems. The credentials next to his name are so odd that I confess to wondering whether
NASA faked the Moon landingshis good name has been misappropriated.https://ggtc.world/2019/01/28/an-open-letter-to-the-director-general-and-executive-board-of-the-world-health-organization/
Wot?
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Vinny, I presume he’s accidentally inherited the address of Thomas A Wills, except keeping his ‘United Kingdom’ part, where he’s currently based in Bristol. Lewandowsky is avidly interested, but not for the sake of the climate. Along with a lot of left-wing folks in the US and Oz, he has deeply invested his worldview in the certainty of imminent global catastrophe being right, and if it turns out not to be, then his very identity is threatened. And it gets more threatened every day as he doubles down on support for CC that contradicts his very own work done mainly prior to his efforts in the climate-change domain.
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Ben has an article on this at Spiked
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/18/stop-scaring-kids-stiff-about-climate-change/
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DENNIS AMBLER’s useful comment at 17 Feb 19 at 12.08am is worth scrolling up to read. He mentions the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. I wrote about the UK branch, the UKYCC six years ago at
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/blue-screen-of-death-and-the-woodcraft-folk/
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/ukycc-tracking-down-the-poznan-ten/
As I remember, the WWF organised some kind of competition for young activists. The winners got a trip to the Arctic to see global warming at first hand, then set up a website with tens of thousands pounds from a network of foundations and government sources. The group of a few dozen activists then spend their time designing t shirts and banners for the next COP meeting. Then after their studies they get a job in an NGO to train the next lot.
The UKYCC web site has been out of action since about 2015, and the umbrella group the Climate Action Network seems to be dormant too, at least in the UK, which isn’t even listed as one of the countries where they’re active, though a few years ago they were boasting of having several million supporters.
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It’s not completely the thing. Yes, there are many making a huge living off our lack of understanding, but they’re pawns as well (i.e. rich pawns). They never ever want us time to question and reason. Keep us off our feet, so to speak. Constant disinformation having us chase our tails while they’re working towards their own agendas which include breaking down the fabric of America.
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Ron Clutz just posted this
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/03/03/kangaroo-klimate-kourt-ruling-in-australia/
And it really sums up the non-rational thinking at the heart of the modern climate consensus.
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Most people won’t or don’t know how to examine their own thinking. It’s hard, at first. It’s tiresome. And who has the time? But, without waxing intellectual, just being honest with yourself, and not being bullied into thinking certain ways, a little time is a lot of time.
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Ron Clutz has written an excellent blog post on energy and climate realism that could easily serve as an open letter to any climate extremist, even a child, who is willing to read with an eye towards facts.
https://goo.gl/images/mcs72v
An excerpt:
Combining opportunity with the freedom to design your own energy future, will enable the production of more energy from more sources, more affordably, and in a cleaner way than it ever could have in freedom’s absence.”
“It is by embracing this New Energy Realism that we will all move toward greater energy security and a brighter, more prosperous future. Let all nations embrace it – and the spirit of imagination and innovation that drives it – for their own sake and for the sake of the world.”
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…..here is the actual link to Ron’s post
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/good-news-outbreak-of-new-energy-realism/
Sorry, Ron.
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To the extent that the kids try to define what action they want, it takes the form of signs saying: “No more fossil fuel projects.” Just more evidence that on energy and fossil fuels, the kids are all wrong. This short video reminds what they will have to do without should their wish come true.
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IRRELEVANT UPDATE: The asking price for the delightful Costa Rican holiday home mentioned above (the one owned by a non-academic Greta- and XR-supporting anti-fracking protester who signs academic open letters about apocalyptic climate change and who owns the property via a tax-efficient Costa Rican shell company) has just dropped from $269k to $175k.
https://www.caribesur-realestate.com/property/perezoso-house/
So please ignore my advice last month about offering $250k. (Sorry about that. I’ve always been shit at haggling.) Wait a bit longer and offer fourpence halfpenny?
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When middle class Western climate alarmists adopt this woman’s accommodation and morning routine, then maybe we’ll take their zero carbon emissions policies a little more seriously. Her child doesn’t need to go on strike for the climate – she’s already living the low carbon dream full time.
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/mother-and-daughter-outside-their-house-high-res-stock-photography/755654917
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In my view, apart from common sense, children cannot have enough facts to comfortably understand the depth of climate complexities. They simply haven’t experienced enough, learned enough, and ran through enough numbers to make educated theories.
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Students in Germany are striking in order to have snow at Christmas:
http://www.newstribune.com/news/international/story/2019/mar/30/i-want-snow-for-christmas-students-demand-climate-action/772082/
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