Earth Day was upon us again on April 22 and once again we were bombarded with appeals to protect the Earth for our children. Our children, in turn, were submitted to agenda-driven indoctrination that would have made Stalin proud. As they are every day, it turns out.
In the United Kingdom, a report released in early April entitled Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools, revealed that global warming and climate change propaganda has infiltrated every aspect of education, leading Education Secretary Michael Gove to publicly state that school principals are "breaking the law if they preach an eco-agenda."
The report found: "In every case of concern, the slant is on scares, on raising fears, followed by the promotion of detailed guidance on how pupils should live, as well as on what they should think."
The Wall Street Journal reports that climate change has conquered campuses. Universities no longer push education in the hard sciences like petroleum engineering or geosciences because there are few takers. Elementary schools have successfully destroyed the basics of scientific inquiry in children and anyone expressing an interest in petroleum is instantly demonized.
In Alberta, the NDP tabled a petition of 26,000 signatures recently to try and stop oil companies from helping re-draft the school curriculum. Fossil fuels are consistently demonized in school materials, with no mention of the benefits to humankind.
Critical thinking on climate could be taught at schools. Your children could be learning that between 1912 and 1963, an almost eruption-free period of volcanic activity, global temperatures rose by 0.5C due to a lack of aerosols and ash which lower temperatures. They could be taught that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions up to 1950 were too small to have caused any significant climate change, so climate change to that date was mostly natural. Then, climate cooled for 25 years from 1950.
Instead, they will be taught that industrial greenhouse gases (GHG) caused by human activity, principally CO2, are the sole reason for a rise in global temperatures since 1880 - and that global warming is all their fault.
Your children could be taught that there have been three known periods of natural warming in human history - the Minoan, Roman Optimum and Medieval Warm Period.
These were interspersed with the Dark Ages Cold Period and the cold, wet, rainy extremes of the Little Ice Age, brutal and violent times to be alive.
They could be reading Brian Fagan's books or James Marusek's 1,400 page weather chronicle, showing how common it is to have extreme swings in weather events and climate patterns in history.
The children will instead be told, repeatedly, that the globe is warming and extreme weather is the result. They should be reading the evidence in Madhav Khandekar's report, showing that, despite nominal global warming to 1998, there has been no trend of more extreme weather globally.
They could be studying the evidence - that global hurricane energy has declined 40 per cent since 1998. It has been 3,108 days since the last major (category 3 to 5) hurricane hit the United States, the longest major hurricane-free period in American history.
They will be taught that wind energy is clean, green and free - and "reduces emissions" - even though evidence has demonstrated it is dirty and rare earth mineral mining for turbine magnets have destroyed swaths of China.
Wind power is wasteful and nine times the cost of conventional power. Wind increases emissions with back-up natural gas plants ramping up and down 24/7 to keep pace with wind's variability.
They could be discussing atmospheric scientist Judith Curry's testimony to the United States Senate that "CO2 is not the control knob of climate variability." They could be discussing how the sun is a main driver of climate change.
They could be told that global warming stopped all by itself, years before the Kyoto Protocol was enacted to "stop global warming" and despite a continued rise in carbon dioxide.
Instead, your children are still being told global warming is a new, unique catastrophic threat.
Generations of children have been terrorized at school and through Earth Day to have an unfounded 'fear of global warming,' a psychological state comparable to the Stockholm Syndrome, where they are unable to liberate themselves from their tormentors. The critical thinking skills have been scared out of them.
This Earth Day, question what your children are learning. Is it climate cult indoctrination or true education? Must we sacrifice the work of centuries of scientists on the altar of Gaia?
Michelle Stirling-Anosh is the communications manager for Calgary-based Friends of Science. She is also a research associate at Winnipeg's Frontier Centre for Public Policy and is an online columnist for Calgary-based Troy Media (http://www.troymedia.com). Stirling-Anosh has a certificate in career development from Athabasca University and is co-researcher of a PhD thesis on the extra-therapeutic factors in the application of drama therapy for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She has been creative director Anosh Communications International since 1995 and worked as a consultant on the market development of World SkyCat hybrid air vehicles for the heavy lift market for lighter than air in Western Canada. She can be contacted at: michelle.stirling@fcpp.org
