Wow. Just wow. Tony Thomas has uncovered the material the AAS provides to thousands of Australian teachers and students under the guise of science education resources.
As far as climate science goes, they might as well have hired Greenpeace. Mining is a questionable activity, Bob Brown is a hero, students should be lobbyists, and climate activists are champions. Forget the calculator, just whip out the placards. Science is not about evidence or thinking, but about following “reputable web sites” (which is code for “give me your brain and I’ll tell you what to think”). Coal is not so much a combustible mineral, as the number one “climate killer”. Not quite the dispassionate, logical path we used to think an Academy of Science might pursue.
“Ask students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause.” — AAS advice to teachers.
Or how about this:
Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will … appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.”
Because 15 year olds obviously know more than the voters, right?
But the young ones will be voters soon, and the Academy presumably wants to train them to vote the right way. The AAS is kind of union for scientists so it’s in their interest to get students to vote for bigger salaries, projects and grants for scientists.
“If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?” — AAS
Watch the unspoken corollary: If you want to trash the planet, you’d vote for the other side.
The AAS have quietly become a political lobby group, so it’s a bit like letting the CFMEU* write school coursework on social history for teens. Worse, it’s like the government has given them a $9 million grant as well. The AAS describes mining not as a marvel of hominid enterprise, but as a controversial activity and “not a pretty site (sic)”. They even prompt the kids to ask:
Could we do without it?… Would you work for a mining company?
Mining companies are so beyond the pale these days that good people have to ask whether they would work for that sort of group. (Like a tobacco company — oh, the smell.) Can I suggest that the Minerals Council and AMEC, will find this interesting, and any large miners who sponsor or plan to leave bequests to the AAS might want to reconsider? (There are independent scientists who need your help and understand the value of mining.)
The thing that shocks me most about what Tony Thomas has found is not that the AAS has become a political activist group, and lost all sense of what the scientific method really is, but that this course has been running for two years and that science teachers have not protested. (And nor have academics). Where are the good science teachers, and can they get in touch? (Comment here or email joanne AT joannenova.com.au). Anonymity guaranteed if needed. Thanks…
The AAS is rationalizing these resources right now. They need to hear from real scientists.
– Jo (PS: For non Australians *CFMEU = Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.)
Under the hood on Science Academy’s climate schooling
By Tony Thomas
Jemima, aged 16, trudges home from high school.
Mum: “Have some Milo, darling. How’d that Australian Academy of Science assignment go?” Jemima: “Terrible! I flunked Advocacy and Campaigning in Searching for the Truth.”
“What? I thought you were doing monotremes!”
“Nah, I had to do a poster supporting action on climate change to share with the school, but my science teacher Mr Smith said it wasn’t emotive awareness-raising enough. Then he asked me, if I have ever taken action or advocated for a cause? I said no. And then he asked me if I know anyone who has? I said, yes, my Climate Champion is Bjorn Lomborg.”
“Jemima! You wicked creature! Want to get yourself suspended? What we pay for fees! Wait till your father blah blah…”
Links to the Academy’s school material need registration, so I’m using bold type for important quotes from the material.
The Reach of the Academy Courses
The Academy operates in schools alongside activist groups Greenpeace, Cool Australia, Oxfam Australia WWF, GetUp, Lock the Gate, you name it. But unlike those, the Academy’s on–line course Science by Doing (SBD), including the exhortations to activism, has been directly taxpayer-funded with about $9m from Labor and conservative federal governments[1]. SBD is a total secondary science course for Years 7-10, delivering the required curriculum, whereas the other external purveyors offer only supplementary material.
Since the SBD site went live in mid-2013, about 9300 secondary science teachers, or 37% of Australia’s 25,000 science teachers, have signed on for the free course, along with 50,000 students. Total registrations at last week were 62,300, despite little marketing – word of mouth among delighted science teachers is doing the job. Hits on the website were running at 2.7m in August. Growth of penetration into school is so high that the courses’ executive director Professor Denis Goodrum expects “market saturation during 2017”.
Source: Academy of Science
The Academy’s SBD and primary courses have flown under the public radar, because registration forms required school affiliation. Last month President Holmes[2] at a green conference in Hobart, invited the public to register and inspect[3]. Which I’ve done.
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
It’s a rare moment when I am on the same side as he is.
On the other hand, The Wall St Journal writes that it is watered down but will “transform” the economy:
If approved and implemented, the agreement would force businesses and citizens to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal and could fundamentally transform the global economy.
Both James Hansen and the Wall St Journal are right. The Paris agreement will achieve nothing for the environment, but transform the economy anyway.
“This is a good agreement,” Prakash Javadekar, India’s environment minister, said. “This means that all together will act to mitigate the challenge presented by climate change.” India is one of the key countries in the international negotiations.
From the deal itself. The global carbon market is voluntary. The words “must”, “requisite”, ” and “enforce’ are not used in the entire document and there is no mention of “decarbonize” either:
Article 6. 3. The use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes to achieve nationally determined contributions under this Agreement shall be voluntary and authorized by participating Parties.
The exit clause (sing hallelujah)
Once this is signed, a country can get out four years later, perhaps a whole year before another big five-year-review pulls them back in.
Article 28
1. At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary.
COP21 won’t get a meaningful agreement, but they will get “breakthrough success”
Don’t think China, India and Russia can save us. They won’t give up fossil fuels in a meaningful way, but they all have a price and buying them off is a lot cheaper than you might think. That’s because the goal is not for them to reduce CO2, but only for them to give the appearance of doing so.
It’s not about CO2, but about PR
Paris is a theatre– a grand show, and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Jianmin said as much. He “laughed when the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ was mentioned. “It is a kind of performance,” he said, “It makes no difference.”
The 1.5C “high ambition” target is a perfect PR win. The Green Machine will be able to claim a major success getting X number of countries to sign up for a breakthrough pledge to do something “more ambitious”, something that “far exceeded our hopes” but that is really decades away and likely to happen even if nobody did anything at all. It’s the do nothing, unaccountable promise that politicians love to make.
All three nations have publicly poured cold water on the Paris solutions, but view that as just posturing for a better position to negotiate from.
Figure how the equation looks for China:
how do I hobble my competitors, steal their factories, and sell them more of my goods?
how do I collect more of their pointless guilt payments (carbon credits etc)?
and how can I look like a hero in the West at the same time?
Answer to all three: smile at the press conference, and pander to the global extremists in words only. Do token efforts and turn the guilt screws on the West as appropriate.
Things for India don’t look that different to China. For Russia the equation is more complicated as it involves oil exports and ISIL. But all of them will sign a deal that hurts the West but doesn’t impinge on their own growth. And in China and Russia, there is no push-back from their citizens for “selling out”. We can’t rely on undemocratic countries to save us.
Why we know it’s a grand theatre
The Green Machine actions betray their words. When the Climate extremists get a choice they often choose the less effective and higher CO2 option – so there is something they want more than CO2 reductions, something that trumps mere “carbon pollution”. Ponder that Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Green Machine won’t consider nuclear energy, super critical hot coal, fracking for gas, or Direct Action type plans that cut CO2 cheaply. As I said last week, Tony Abbott was dangerous because he gave the Green Machine what it “said” it wanted — cheap cuts to CO2. Really what they want is personal power, glory and money. They also like invitations to hot dinner parties and two week long junkets every year. Who wouldn’t? And getting that out of COP21 at Paris is a very different goal to reducing global atmospheric carbon dioxide or actually changing the temperature, which are both incidental, an accidental kind of collateral damage to achieve the primary goal. The top Green permitted solutions to the climate problems are always the ones that increase dependency on big-government — like inefficient renewable energy, government funded research, carbon taxes and fake markets that are government run.
Reducing actual emissions is unaffordable — but the reality of that won’t save us from a “true global deal” and a “major success” at COP21. The West can’t afford to pay to convert the developing world to renewables zero-emission heaven. The West can barely achieve real emission cuts for themselves. But what matters is getting India, China and Russia to look like they are doing something. That’s a PR victory for the Green Machine, and it would be used to keep dragging funding from western taxpayers.
PS: We’ll be getting back to original research and the notch and solar model soon after the Paris Show concludes.
PPS: We could really use your help in the tip jar. Thanks to our dedicated supporters. We can’t do this without you!
You will never guess. Not only does no one care if carbon credits don’t cut carbon emissions, but hardly anyone cares if so called climate money is even spent on the climate. As many as 66% of climate projects funded by the developed world have nothing to do with “climate vulnerability”.
It’s the bragging game — politicians want to make out they are doing a lot for the climate, but there’s barely any accountability to check whether they get value for money — by how many thousandths of a degree did that policy cool the world? So they inflate their spending promises by claiming random other projects are “climate projects” or they use accounting trickery.
University of Zurich’s Axel Michaelowa, who studies climate aid grants, found “there was a huge misrepresentation. Governments were actually really not able to report properly” on aid that was supposed to help countries reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
His study, conducted on specific climate grants four years ago, showed a list of “projects without any conceivable climate change connotation,” such as Belgium funding for a “love movie festival” in the early 2000s in Africa, a U.S.-funded study on Savannah elephant sounds, and uniforms for park guardians in Central America with aid from Spain.
Bravo for the full gloss, hi def, professional production, top editing, audio and camera work. It probably cost a motza, paid for by Climate Truth (formerly Forecast the Facts). So the side with lots of vested interests pumps the myth that the unfunded volunteer grassroots opponents are all funded by fossil fuels. (Projection anyone?) It’s the one and only cannon in their arsenal.
They use all the best intellectual weapons of the leftie toolkit: namecalling, bad manners and swearing.
If only it had a joke?
Like other attempts to be funny — the big-gov-pandering-fans-of-authority just can’t do political satire. (It’s by definition, really.) The video works as pap entertainment to keep believers from straying — it’ll help keep the Gullible Smug feeling smug. But on the rest of the population it will help skeptics more than hurt them. It takes a special kind of brainwashing to “know” droughts are worse and summers have never hit “ninety” degrees before. (Lordy!) But without any real surprises or ironic insights there are no gags for the mainstream audience. How funny is the line “fossil fuels are useful”? Laugh your socks off.
The full 2 hour 40 minute testimony of Ted Cruz and his invited guests.
Don’t underestimate the importance of what is going on in this testimony to Congress. It captures why the USA is the best hope for defeating the religious climate meme. Which other western democracy comes close to this? As Mark Steyn says, the most important form of competition is the competition of ideas. Paris will not get a binding agreement mostly because the USA congress stands in the way. (Though that doesn’t mean they won’t get billions; more on that in the next post.)
The landscape of the US presidential campaign has undergone a phase change. Watch this and think back to the bland weakness of Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2015 the top Republican candidates are competing to be the most skeptical, and to demonstrate how they don’t pander to political correctness. And Ted Cruz surely is the best informed on the climate topics.
Judith Curry ” I can no longer get government grants….”
Please copy your favorite quotes below so those who can’t watch the lot can pick up the gems.
UPDATE: Best short parts are around 2:14 – 2:20 with Steyn and Curry. A lot of the proceedings were dominated by the Democrats who turned up and outnumbered the Republicans. Only two Republicans were present. Cruz could’ve used more support. h/t Rodzki, TdeF at #13, #14, #15 for a good synopsis of the whole event.
h/t ianl8888, Alistair, Geoff D, Joe B, Pat, Yonnie.
A new seismic survey shows there is a blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. To describe it, the researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”. Of course, just because the parts of Antarctica that are warming are near or over this hot blob does not mean it’s causing the melting. It could be a coincidence. ; -)
… this is the first detailed look at the Earth beneath this region.
Not surprisingly, the maps show a giant blob of superheated rock about 60 miles beneath Mount Sidley, the last of a chain of volcanic mountains in Marie Byrd Land at one end of the transect. More surprisingly, they reveal hot rock beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.
The Bentley Subglacial Trench is part of the West Antarctic Rift System and hot rock beneath the region indicates that this part of the rift system was active quite recently.
The study really highlights how little we know about heat flow in Antarctica:
While heat flow through the Earth’s crust has been measured at at least 34,000 different spots around the globe, in Antarctica it has been measured in less than a dozen places. In July 2015, scientists reported the heat flow at one of these spots was four times higher than the global average.
Ever since then, scientists have been wondering why the reading was so high. “Recent extension in the Bentley Subglacial Trench might explain these readings,” Wiens said.
The IPCC says the West Antarctic is melting thanks to CO2.
Though they can’t explain why the rest of Antarctica doesn’t appear to be melting as well.
…
Naturally we don’t have any idea if the heat flows have gotten stronger lately since we didn’t know about the hot rocks before, and rather oddly, the volcanoes are going in the “wrong direction”:
When asked about paying for developing nations to adapt to climate change, the 1066 British people surveyed said they were willing to give an average of only £27 ($30US) a year. This is far below the UN gambit that hopes to take as much as $150 per head per year. But even that £27 figure is deceptively high. The real story is that the number was skewed up by a few people who were willing to pay a lot each. Nearly half the crowd didn’t want to give a cent. The median value was a paltry £6 per year. And this was in a test loaded with nice and authoritative messages about how useful those payments would be. Fully 45% of Brits surveyed did not want to contribute anything at all. (The figure is probably similar in the US, and people wonder why Trump is so popular?)
The question is about the public Willingness to Pay (WTP) and the answer is “negligible”:
Overall, taking all responses together, results show that respondents are willing to pay about £27 per year in income taxes to support adaptation efforts in developing countries. This is equivalent to $29.37, using purchasing power adjustments (World Bank 2014), significantly less than the back-of-the- envelope $100$150 per capita (based on the World Bank adaptation cost estimates discussed earlier). However, if we take the median WTP of £6 per year as our statistic of choice, with the understanding that support for developing country adaptation would depend on majority (at least 50%) support from the public, then it is clear that public support for developing adaptation is negligible.
The subtext of this survey is the finding that only 43% of UK people surveyed agree with the IPCC. Fifty-seven percent are skeptics. This fits reasonably well with a larger, and more neutral survey in the UK showing that 62% are skeptical of man-made climate change.
Figure 2. Personal belief about climate change (CC) (% respondents who chose statement). Total sample size D 1066.
Apparently the big problem was that 31% of Brits think climate change is mostly natural, which is something the researchers say is “wrong”:
Clearly, much needs to be done to motivate people to lend support to those who despite contributing relatively little to global carbon emissions – are likely to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. However, regression results on our data suggest that this will be no easy task. Together with ability to pay, WTP appears to be strongly driven by a combination of beliefs and individuals’ perception of their own knowledge levels, rather than actual knowledge of climate change or education levels. In particular, a belief that nature is the main cause of climate change appears to have a strong negative influence on the decision whether to contribute or not.
The researchers don’t know why the skeptics don’t want to pay, and essentially suggest, in the politest possible way, that they might be selfish, uncaring and immoral people. They wonder if skeptics rationalize their scroogelike behaviour by strategically adopting the belief that man-made warming is natural? What petty small minded people those skeptics would be… so unlike the noble researchers who speculate about complex sub-conscious mental defects in people they have no data on:
Interestingly, a belief in nature as the main cause of climate change (31% of the entire sample)
has a strong negative influence on participation overall. Perhaps, this suggests a fatalistic attitude of
those with such beliefs. Or perhaps the causality lies in the opposite direction: those who do not
wish to support adaptation projects for vulnerable others, justify their choices by explaining climate
change as natural phenomenon. This would suggest that, for these respondents, moral responsibility
for others is excused by the presence of some external factor (in this case, nature) over which the
respondent feels they have no control (Eshleman 2014). One might consider this a form of ‘strategic’
fatalism. Whatever the reason for this interesting result, however, the implication is clear: a belief
that climate change is caused by nature allows some people to absolve themselves of responsibility
towards those who will be negatively impacted by climate change.
The researchers do not suggest that skeptics don’t want to pay because they know the models are wrong, the scientists behave badly, and it’s quite likely that the world will cool instead, which rather mucks up those “adaption” plans. I guess they didn’t google “Climate skeptics” for ten minutes before they wrote their paper. (And nor did any of the “peer reviewers”.)
The researchers define “real knowledge” as agreeing with the consensus. How big is that confirmation bias?
In the years to come historians will note the remarkable role played by the Heartland Institute in the global scientific debate. Heartland didn’t start out to be a scientific group, but the NIPCC report is more comprehensive, balanced and will stand the test of time while the IPCC reports have already failed… And all done with a tiny budget compared to the billions squandered on mainstream universities.
Likewise Marc Morano, CFACT and Climate Depot. I never fail to be impressed with Marc’s professionalism and relentless good humour as he fends off the propaganda. Watch the schedule below for the World Premier of the Climate Hustle movie. I’m very much looking forward to seeing that!
See also Willie Soon, Bob Carter, James Taylor, Fred Singer, Christopher Essex, Jim Inhofe, Patrick Moore, Christopher Monckton, Tom Harris…
Kinda amazing to be in the room from so far. The playback can be replayed.
Wow. Just wow. Tony Thomas has uncovered the material the AAS provides to thousands of Australian teachers and students under the guise of science education resources.
. Send in your suggestions!
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