Let’s look at the data and facts and see what happens. Find a quiet place in your consciousness away from some of the current climate alarmism and review some ideas that may not fall completely in lockstep with the narrative.
This except from ‘How to Teach Children About Climate Change‘:
“In addition, “teaching climate change” ought to include a deep dive into some of the more counterintuitive of humanity’s customs and practices. For instance, it would no doubt surprise many to be shown that curbside recycling programs actually increase carbon emissions. It would likewise be surprising, but true, to point out that despite pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, the United States is one of the only developed nations to meet carbon reductions goals, mostly because of fracking and the conversion of powerplants to natural gas.
It also flies in the face of the standard understanding to realize that diesel-powered cars have a smaller carbon footprint than do electric vehicles. If global temperatures indeed prove to be a significant and detrimental phenomenon, it is simple (theoretically) to induce managed global cooling with a small, controlled injection of Sulphur dioxide at the poles.
One suspects, though, that such facts are not what “believers” have in mind when it comes to teaching climate change. It’s not actually about the temperature, it’s about the control—the ever-so-delicious shared frisson of seeking to avert Armageddon. A clear-eyed, reasoned, non-coercive approach to helping us live in harmony with our planet isn’t on the syllabus.”
Let’s continue to look at the evidence and data, even if it does not precisely fit our preconceived notions of what is right.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
12 comments
August 19, 2023 at 7:14 am
tildeb
“The current climate-change fetish is reminiscent of the millenarian fevers of the last 2,000 years, the dire Malthusian scenarios of the 1800s, and the “Population Bomb” frights of the 1970s. Today’s hand-wringing is really no different.”
No. But this is an excellent example of what climate change deniers and apologists do: they cherry pick a confirmation point that contains a kernel of truth and then pretends it represents balancing these ‘facts’ with the ‘alarmist belief’ of climate change.
For example, the comparison carbon footprint between a diesel car and an electric vehicle takes the best case diesel and compares it with the worst case EV and comes up with the ludicrous 10 year break even point. In fact, a base unit Tesla 3 (the most common EV) with the most carbon intense battery (lithium ion) charged by gas plant electricity breaks even with Toyota Corolla after 8400 miles. The next 1 million miles (because Tesla battery packs can last well over 2,000,000 miles) are where the massive differences live. Throw in the fact than today’s Teslas out of certain factories use only LFP batteries (iron rather than lithium with zero cobalt) and are often powered by renewable electricity (solar and wind) and the driving difference in miles to break even starts at zero. These are the facts. But beside the point. The point is to teach kids what climate change is and what is causing this change. And you bet your ass it’s alarming and that this alarm is not just warranted but perfectly reasonable because kids will face the effects every single day (be it ridiculous temperatures, smoky air, incredible flooding, increasing drought, loss of biodiversity, and the list goes on and on and on), which is why we must teach children their role in changing the energy system humans rely on must change to renewables as soon as and whenever the choice is possible. Not doing so produces increases the RATE of climate change. Those are the facts and not this apologetic lie that fools kids into thinking climate change is just another kind of belief.
Look, the carbon footprint is a method produced and sold by fossil fuel interests to pretend people can address climate change by personal behaviour. Again, a kernel of truth but a massive distortion. People who do NOT understand climate change are fooled by this disinformation into thinking personal behaviour is what matters. At scale, it doesn’t if the energy system continues to use fossil fuels. What matters is changing the energy system itself. That’s what needs to be taught because that is what’s true.
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August 19, 2023 at 7:55 am
The Arbourist
@ tildeb
It would be nice if we (as a society) could agree that structural change is necessary to continue the happy climate occurrence that humanity happens to inhabit.
The result of not using evidence and facts to drive policy is evident in the response (and lack of response) worldwide.
If we in the West can make the transition without destroying our society and show that it not only efficient, but profitable then the rest of the world will follow our example.
What is worrying though is the idea that populations of the Western countries will need to be coerced into accepting a lower standard of living or restrictions on their freedom in order to ‘save the world’.
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August 19, 2023 at 8:06 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
I also worry about a scenario as described in The Ministry for The Future. I found that fiction novel to be very disturbing as the narrative describes one in which violent terrorist tactics are used to sabotage the current energy system and force nations into a new global paradigm.
The authoritarian vibe present in the book and what I see in some of the more recent climate protests stunts (stop oil) make me wary of completely comporting with current set of green values being set up as the new gold standard for society. I distrust Green Authoritarianism as much as I distrust the authoritarianism that can come from the Left or the Right.
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August 19, 2023 at 9:01 am
tildeb
agreed. And this is where more facts should be taught. For example, the greening of the energy system employs more people today than oil, gas, and coal combined, at higher wages and lower rates of injuries. Grids become much more stable. Fewer power outages. When they occur, they are of much shorter duration. (Germany measures total power outages in double digit minutes now rather than days and weeks). Green grids are much hardened, meaning a problem – be it temporary or outright destroyed – in one place affects a tiny portion of the whole AND successful hacks are contained to sliver rather than everything downstream (as has happened recently along the east coast of the US). The financial benefits for locales that host these supplies increases the local tax base, keeping more generational farmers on the land that has a more stable income, funding for improved and even expanded local services, and increases rural land values. In other words, the mis- and disinformation campaign well funded by fossil fuel interests is intended to protect exactly that which is causing rapid climate change. Children need to be taught how to recognize mid- and disinformation and climate studies provide an excellent resource for this. Good climate change studies empowers students and so we shouldn’t be surprised that the better informed students are about what’s really going on here have lower rates of climate related anxiety.
Of course, I am biased about the value such teaching provides because I learned from a very young age not only how to think critically but loved anything to do with interconnected systems – the more complex, the better. Meteorology is a mouthful but who doesn’t want to understand weather better, for example? A better understanding – even of something like daily weather – empowers people – especially kids – to make all kinds of better informed daily decisions. Climate change is a larger scale study but connects to every individual in some way. Teaching a better understanding better informs every single individual to where their feet are planted and what’s going on around them. It is my firm opinion that better informed students cope better with real life. And climate change isn’t just a HUGE issue but THE issue against which every other issue fades in importance. That is what kids need to learn.
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August 19, 2023 at 9:24 am
tildeb
I understand how fear of change and poor understanding drives extremism. When people find out that they are being fooled and lied to and misinformed by institutions, of course they will overreact and distrust everything to the point of equally ridiculous stunts while extremists try to either hold on to or wrest power. What’s lost is the public support to switch energy systems in a planned and regulated and coherent way, one that includes the very real problems of developing efficient and cheaper replacement equipment (like farming and construction equipment). These are real problems but also huge opportunities unfulfilled.
What is rarely recognized is that any plan on increasing production and use of fossil fuels is by definition the work of extremists when the byproduct is a well known toxic substance that is altering climate and all the weather patterns associated with it, and all the connections people have to the local and regional geography in which they live (not least of which is food). A planned reduction of fossil fuels is the only reasonable and sane approach to anyone who cares about the biosphere and anything that lives there. That includes just about everyone everywhere all the time. Any other plan is delusional because no amount of denialism or apologetics will alter reality one iota. Wondrous energy sources – often proposed by those champions of the environment, the oil and gas and coal producers – but decades from implementation (even if they are economically viable, which itself is almost never the case) is code for business-as-usual. People need to recognize this bullshit no matter how righteously or devoutly or slickly packaged it may come. Reduction of the burning of fossil fuels is what’s necessary now while equally necessary is the ramping up of replacement energy – and all the infrastructure that uses energy – tit for tat. Cheaper energy helps (solar and wind are now the cheapest producers of kilowatt hours – we don’t have to pay the source producers, go figure, so right there is an indication of why it has to be cheaper). Simple as that and not hard to teach. We have to stop arguing about what is going on and why it is going on because it IS going on. And so we have to spend way more effort on how to address it systemically.
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August 20, 2023 at 6:39 am
tildeb
For a bit of honesty, this is educational.
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August 21, 2023 at 7:41 am
tildeb
How much worse is this going to get? Today is ‘the good old days’.
https://www.google.com/search?q=TRTWorld+How+Much+Worse+is+this+going+to+change&sca_esv=558757646&biw=1920&bih=931&tbm=vid&sxsrf=AB5stBhDBy81IJZ8_yoRFtuoVmHxuCk0dQ%3A1692625141656&ei=9WjjZJnIJ-H-9APoxbO4BQ&ved=0ahUKEwjZlrmC8O2AAxVhP30KHejiDFcQ4dUDCA0&uact=5&oq=TRTWorld+How+Much+Worse+is+this+going+to+change&gs_lp=Eg1nd3Mtd2l6LXZpZGVvIi9UUlRXb3JsZCBIb3cgTXVjaCBXb3JzZSBpcyB0aGlzIGdvaW5nIHRvIGNoYW5nZTIFEAAYogRIhTZQvRpYwClwAHgAkAEAmAHCAaAB4QmqAQMxLjm4AQPIAQD4AQHCAgUQIRigAcICCBAhGBYYHhgdwgIIEAAYiQUYogTCAgoQIRigARjDBBgKiAYB&sclient=gws-wiz-video#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:26d25334,vid:kSIFzIeKQMo
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August 23, 2023 at 10:04 am
tildeb
An excellent summary
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August 23, 2023 at 11:48 am
tildeb
When it the right time to start wringing hands, I wonder?
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August 24, 2023 at 8:57 am
tildeb
The thing is, Arb, the general population is not hearing the truth. So if their kids are hearing the truth in school it will seem to be alarmist when (if it follows the IPCC modeling) it’s actually a best case scenario!
With climate set to cut today’s food production in both Europe and the US drastically by 2050 and the natural world unable to head into air conditioning or turn on some magical tap from drought stricken local landscape to water them, the window of opportunity to avoid the worst case is rapidly closing. The heat index value today in Iowa is 150* F, over 65*C. Crops simply can’t adjust.
So the fear you have about an authoritarian rise GROWS as governments dither today and pretend fossil fuel emissions AND renewables can live comfortably together when all evidence points in the opposite direction. When corrective measures are NOT implemented today and with urgency, what other option is there? As our window to readjust everything before the environment becomes hostile to human life shrinks, the anger will grow and it will take totalitarian authority to implement and adjust civilian populations to the radical changes necessary. As disastrous year follow disastrous year following even more disastrous years into the 2030s, the general population will suddenly wake up to the daily threat that IS climate change (remember, today’s global weather patterns is a response to less than 1*C rise… now imagine 4.5*C for which we are on track by 2100 that in many places will kill you if you go outside for more than a few minutes and will render most of the planet unable to support human life). In a few decades, reality will absolutely convince people that what is needed is support for draconian government and massive changes across the board.
So if you think telling kids the truth today is somehow alarmist, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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August 26, 2023 at 8:13 am
The Arbourist
@ Tildeb
I don’t think you have to worry about me going down the denialist garden path. I’m just not as confident in what people are saying about anything right now. It returns to the current gender fuss that we are in. Major media institutions like the CBC and medical institutions like CACAP have fully endorsed ideas and practices that are based on the sand castles of gender-magic, gnostic wisdom, and wishful thinking.
A broad range of institutions in Canadian society are also endorsing the anti-reality dogma and actively pushing (queer theory backed) gender ideology that exists only to further divide and confuse the common discourse and body of accepted facts.
And all the gender hoo-haa is backed by ‘science’ and professional people whose job it is to be critical and use their judgement to evaluate the worthiness of ideas.
It is rot. It is rot that weakens the institutions, ideas, and foundations that our society is built on. The Hoax Papers by Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsay exposed the credential mills present in academia which calls into serious question the veracity and authenticity of what passes for academia and scholarship these days.
So if they can get major medical associations and professionals to endorse the mutilation of children based on the gender-faith – you know the profession of medicine based on tenet of ‘first do no harm’ it leads me to reconsider what other ‘science based’ disciplines are saying about their areas of expertise.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/08/how-science-is-done-these-days/
I just don’t have the same level of trust in our institutions and their pronouncements anymore.
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August 26, 2023 at 11:13 am
tildeb
Distrust of advertised science is the inevitable result of politicizing it. Whether we’re talking about Covid related disinformation or the people and their motives for constituting the Trucker’s Convoy or gender ideology or, or, or…. honest science is being used for partisan ends. Just last week look at the bullshit being pedalled by Neil deGrasse Tyson as if sex weren’t binary.
It doesn’t help that mass media keeps trying to sell narratives for market share and funding.
This is why I offered some information that won’t be seen by many people yet indicates the absolutely overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, here, and only going to get worse, that banning single use plastic or banning filament light bulbs or wearing ‘vegan’ leather is a diversion, an intentional ploy to help promote the lie that the average person can make some difference in the climate change emergency if only more of us ate like rabbits. There is one solution and that’s to stop burning fossil fuels. Even then, meaningful differences will not reduce the effects we’re seeing today. What is needed is zero carbon emissions AND technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And trees – in their trillions – ain’t gunna do it because the changes make the growing and sequestering of carbon by way of trees impossible given the weather pattern changes today (neither enough land nor water nor moderate temperatures to accomplish this goal).
Most importantly, the awareness of how evolution has determined what climates all of life requires is the central plank that fossil fuel atmospheric emissions is pulling from under our collective feet. Nature is not designed to support life as it is now when climate is rapidly changed. And we are part of that continuum, part of life that has evolved given certain environmental conditions. Change the conditions (as we are doing), change the entire biosphere. THAT is the message that simply has no traction in today’s public understanding of why climate change is of such existential importance. There is zero evidence that rapid climate change isn’t happening globally. There are no global environmental metrics to show it isn’t other than intentional misrepresentation. This is the message all of us need to hear over and over and over and over and over until this becomes the dominant theme, the most pressing issue, for every level of government to address and every institution account for. Any and all uncertainty about this threat and our pressing need to respond now in meaningful ways is mis- or disinformation.
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