WE are frightening children with exaggerations – they believe they don’t have a future and that the world is going to end, writes Bjorn Lomborg.
“The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids.
Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20ft (six metres) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen, estimating that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that.
When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W Bush’s administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
This argument is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good. We focus, for example, on global warming’s impact on malaria – which will be to put slightly more people at risk in 100 years – instead of tackling the half a billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.
Exaggeration also wears out the public’s willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54% of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is. A majority of people now believe – incorrectly – that global warming is not even caused by humans. In the United Kingdom, 40% believe that global warming is exaggerated and 60% doubt that it is man-made.
But the worst cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes – particularly among children. Recently, I discussed climate change with a group of Danish teenagers. One of them worried that global warming would cause the planet to “explode” – and all the others had similar fears.
In the US, the ABC television network recently reported that psychologists are starting to see more neuroses in people anxious about climate change. An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming. In her words: “I don’t like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals.” From a child who is yet to lose all her baby teeth: “I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”
The newspaper also reported that parents are searching for “productive” outlets for their eight-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled over the past half-century, to about 22,000. Despite diminishing – and eventually disappearing – summer Arctic ice, polar bears will not become extinct. After all, in the first part of the current interglacial period, glaciers were almost entirely absent in the northern hemisphere, and the Arctic was probably ice-free for 1,000 years, yet polar bears are still with us.
Another nine-year old showed the Washington Post his drawing of a global warming timeline. “That’s the Earth now,” Alex says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then it’s just starting to fade away.” Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the end of the drawing: “In 20 years, there’s no oxygen.” Then, to dramatise the point, he collapses, “dead”, to the floor.
And these are not just two freak stories. In a new survey of 500 American pre-teens, it was found that one in three children, aged between six and 11, feared that the earth would not exist when they reach adulthood because of global warming and other environmental threats. An unbelievable one-third of our children believe that they don’t have a future because of scary global warming stories.
We see the same pattern in the United Kingdom, where a survey showed that half of young children aged between seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern. This is grotesquely harmful.
And let us be honest. This scare was intended. Children believe that global warming will destroy the planet before they grow up because adults are telling them that .
When every prediction about global warming is scarier than the last one, and the scariest predictions – often not backed up by peer-reviewed science – get the most airtime, it is little wonder that children are worried.
Nowhere is this deliberate fear mongering more obvious than in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth , a film that was marketed as “by far the most terrifying film you will ever see”.
Take a look at the trailer for this movie on YouTube. Notice the imagery of chilling, larger-than-life forces evaporating our future. The commentary tells us that this film has “shocked audiences everywhere”, and that “nothing is scarier” than what Gore is about to tell us. Notice how the trailer even includes a nuclear explosion.
The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue.”
By Bjorn Lomborg,
Copenhagen, Denmark
**************************
Republished from the Guardian with permission
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/jun/15/climate-change-children
The picture of the pig is from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” asking children “how big a pig are you?” and at what age the pig should die so as not to use more than its fair share of Earth resources.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
The link to the planet slayer calculator is http://www.abc.net.au/science/planetslayer/greenhouse_calc.htm It is part of the ABC Science for kids and funded by the tax payer. The ABC’s managing director has defended the site!!! Play it yourself and find out when your kids will die.
The latest in the global warming debate is the ACF has complained to the ACCC that six Australian companies have ‘exaggerated” the effects of the ETS. Yet their web page begging for donations to save the world from GHG shows a factory with frightening black smoke belching from it. Last time I breathed out, CO2 was colourless. Perhaps the ACCC should investigate the claims at http://www.acfonline.org.au/
The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue.
Well good luck with that. Our kids are also frightened by the incapacity of adults to deal with any number of crises facing humanity. To suggest they are fearful of climate change because they have been brainwashed by exaggerated media reporting is too simplistic. They are quite capable of drawing their own conclusions. If you think otherwise then you don’t have much experience with contemporary kids’ lives. They think the world is f*cked. Full stop. Climate change is just another brick in the wall. Pretending we can stop children from being frightened by not talking about scary things is naive in the extreme.
It is by preying on immature minds that the AGWarmers are so successful. It is the beginning of a carpet bagger’s heaven.
Here’s one bloke trying to do something and I hope for the sake of the few provident people left in the world that he is successful.
http://www.spaceandscience.net/id16.html
SLim,
I hope you are kept very far from children.Thinking that talking incessantly about bs like AGW or whatever else is the pop-fear of the day does not impact children is completely bogus.
If the kids do think we are totally screwed, it is because tools pretending to help the kids are actually harming them.
The good news is that kids eventually grow up, realize who has been lying to them, and reject the scary armageddon lies told by scam promoters and others.
Way to miss the point, hunter. You clearly have no idea what goes on in a classroom or school community.
Slim,
I think we do know what goes on in a schoolroom – it’s called brainwashing.
I always enjoy the opportunities the spin doctors present to teach my daughters (11 & 13) about vested interests and that skepticism is the first step towards truth. A half hour of discussion and research soon uncovered pertinent information.
Facts like the latest IPCC report claiming overwhelming scientific consensus turns out to have been written / signed off by only 52 scientists not thousands!!
Facts like the same people who published the report (IPCC) also failed to publish a dissenting view signed by some 400 scientists of equal standing in the scientific community including several Nobel prize winners!!
Facts like a peer review of that report by some 500+ independent scientists produced an outright endorsement of that report by only 7% of the reviewers!!
This exercise went a long way to allaying their fears on the matter.
However you might just find it extremely difficult to answer the innocently asked question… “Daddy if that’s true why are all the politicians so dumb?” without going into an explanation of the fact that they would appear to be just that or they are lying, self serving, cunning, sly, cheating, selfish, self centered, corrupted individuals and totally pathetic examples of humanity… I settled on telling them to look up the meaning of Sociopath instead.
It does not matter how far down the rabbit hole we go for light (truth) always extinguishes darkness (lies) and never the other way round.
Another tool introduced to them for assessing a lot of these matters is the maxim ‘follow the money’ but that’s a whole other story. 😉
Take care.
Here’s what the Greens think of our future – check out pages 10 and 11.
http://greensmps.org.au/webfm_send/149 – if that doesn’t scare the kids nothing will.
My 14yr old daughter was recently baby sitting a 5 or 6 year old, who became terribly upset to the extent of tears ,when daughter did not want to turn off the TV at the little one’s bedtime.
Implored that it would kill the polar bears. I know the parents and doubt that it came from them.
And to think that I used to worry about grown ups making my kids phobic about spiders.
Is that the one that reckons the real evil is actually having money to spend. Unless its changed the real evil was ones income not what you do with it. If our children believe the world is screwed we must be doing everything wrong. Life in the western world is actually better than it has ever been for most of us. Why are the media and politicians so swayed be these evil pratts?
dhmo,
Money mate .High Priestess Pennywong and her fellows will collect our water and our money .
Our children and grandchildren shall flourish, our crops shall be blessed with a perfect climate.
The waters shall be sparkling and healthful. The great weather God will love us dearly.
The Good Baron Algore and his fellows shall collect a little money from this tithe – in our interests of course.
There is the problem of how many crops there will be , but hey ,the elite will not starve .
They must live to save us again.
DHMO
Have a read of the online version of “Keynes at Harvard” – it’s riveting reading and it starts to explain what is happening to us.
Thanks for the link janama, it reminded me of some of my favourite quotes
“Politics is the art of the possible, which is why second rate minds go into it. Genius however likes to challenge the impossible.”
“Nationalism the last refuge of complete scoundrels”
“Secrecy the first refuge of the inept”
I found the most frightening (‘tell’) in the globalist comments. Gattaca meets 1984 here we come…
As the tird power in aus politics it has always stunned me the purported leaders of the so called Green movement have never mentioned or pushed for any of the real solutions.
They never mention the Hydrogen on demand motor built by Hudson 30 year ago and suppressed. They never mention Teruo Kawai’s overunity (self powering) magnetic motor ready for production in 97 and subsequently suppressed. They never mention Tesla’s free electricity system on offer 100 years ago but suppressed.by J.P.Morgan.
They never mention Henry Moray’s work (suppressed)….
They never mention Wilhelm Reich’s work (suppressed)….
They never mention Royal Raymond Rife’s work (suppressed)…
They never mention Antoine Prior’s work (suppressed)….
They never mention John Kanzius soon to be suppressed…..
They’ll never mention the Fogal transistor (very very suppressed)…
And so on and so on and so on….
Hmmm… is there a pattern emerging here???
dhmo never mind the kids thinking it’s all screwed, as an adult ( admittedly with Peter Pan syndrome) I am outraged on a daily basis by what I see the public fool system combined with the ‘Weapon of Mass Deception’ (media system controlled by 6 people) is doing for our future.
At the end of the climb up the money trail you’ll cross over at some point into the start of the ‘path to power’ and don’t we all know “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
What need would we have for money if we were all taught to develop our own inherent unique god given talents. The ones that make you spring out of bed because you love doing it so much you would do it for free anyway. Obviously you would be good at doing it and therefore efficiently productive and if allowed to do so in said manner would happily give away anything in excess to your immediate needs.
Of course this would unleash all the aforementioned suppressed technologies and would see pretty much the immediate demise of Big oil, Big pharma, the Banksters most of the Medical industry, most of the lawyers, all bureaucrats and definitely all politicians. Personally I think the world would be a much better place.
A pre requisite for the above scenario however is that WE ALL HAVE TO GROW UP.
By that I mean dropping the ‘limited liability’ lifestyle option and be prepared to stand in full personal liability for our own actions as soveriegn individuals.
Louis you seem to have taken the red pill on offer in ’The Matrix’, thanks for that pointer to the material on Keynes.
Keeping in mind that the Truth…
a) is not for everybody
b) will first piss you off
c) is only for the brave
d) but will set you free
you might like to check out some / all / none of the following (via you tube)…
IMHO the following constitute a BIG red pill so you have been warned 😉
Empire of the City (Power of the ring)
Esoteric Agenda
Kymatica
Its an Illusion (John Williams at stoke) {this is gold}
Zietgeist
Anyway for fear of offending the sheeple who have an unfortunate propensity to shoot the messengers I’ll collapse the soap box now and leave you good people in peace.
Goodnight, goodbye and good luck.
History indicates we can instill anything we want in our offspring, the facts are undeniable but the creation of an attitude or belief is dependant of the intellect and the will of the dominant being. Each individual can direct the course of their offspring (the future) dependant on their beliefs and understanding, so which direction are you heading them towards and under what authority?
“A majority of people now believe – incorrectly – that global warming is not even caused by humans.”
So who is misleading whom, Mr Lomborg? Who else is propagating unfounded myths? Could it be YOU?
The good thing about all these scare stories is the fact that it is inducing those who propagate them to refrain from breeding. It is the very best thing these people could ever do for the gene pool.
They can also be relied upon to provide a continuous supply of opportunities for me to point out the extent of their stupidity to my own children. So the kids already understand that their classmates, and their teachers, are fully capable of wasting a great deal of their lives with their heads up their own, or someone else’s backside. They understand the needs of the plodocracy for reassurance through constant repetition of mantras and totally futile symbolism.
Have I brain washed them? Nope, they can take the piss out of their old man something shocking. They are increasingly astute observers of “the herd” who are learning when to run with it, and when to stand aside and watch it run. They know there are times to invest in it, and times to take the profits out of it. So no matter what the future holds, they will prevail.
Sometimes the courts can provide a just outcome when the usual political channels are clogged up. Back in 2007, you may have read about the case in the UK, where Judge Burton took some of the inconvenient hot air out of Al Gore’s sails. Burton ruled that Gore’s little flick had nine factual errors, that it was political in nature (rather than scientific), and that school children would need consent notices from their parents before they could view it at school.
http://tinyurl.com/l3z8vp
Now we have a new problem: Cap’n Trade may become a reality in Australia and in the US. If so, what’s the best way to fight it? I’m not a lawyer, but my idea is to set up a Church of the Flying CO2 Monster, along the lines of the Universal Life Church (with a nod to Pastafarianism).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Life_Church
The Church could sell carbon dispensations at half the going rate, and tell the latter-day Pol Pots of this world: Make my day. (Pardon the Clint-Eastwood-ism.) Of course, the Church would be absolutely up-front about the known legal issues involved in competing head-to-head with the official state-sponsored anti-CO2 religion.
Suppose that the authorities in our respective countries charge the Church with fraud. My understanding of that legal concept is that actual damage must have occurred, and that the plaintiffs have the burden of proof. That would open an interesting can of worms, since there’s essentially zero scientific evidence that the usual anthropogenic sources of CO2 make a significant contribution to climate change–let alone do any harm to man or beast. A lot of pesky facts would come out during such a trial.
What say you, cohenite?
Larry I’d like to be the church of the flying CO2 Monster’s Archbishop of California.
Why not? For a goof.
“For the defence I call Lubos Motl to the stand.”
I think Lubos might even show up for the trial. Along with Watts, D’Aleo, Spencer, Lindzen, Milloy, Nelson, Horner… .
It would be fun.
That is a technique used to sell life insurance. It is called backing the ambulance to the door. Making fear of short term death the motivator for someone to buy right now and do so before the agent leaves. Usuaally a slaesman gives an example of delivering a check to a widoe a few weeks ago whose man suddenly died and they had hesitated and sprung for a policy. Ever notice how obama overuses the urgency ploy? If we don’t move quickly, bad consequences will happen immediately.
Yes, Harry, Nicholas Stern took this to a new plane by using entirely different discount rates to calculate the costs vs benefits of so-called climate abatement methods. If anyone did that in a company prospectus in any of the OECD nations, and most of the rest, they would get an extended tour of the prison system.
Moreover, if any company auditor failed to detect such a breach of the law that was committed by the directors of a company, then the auditor would do a stretch for negligence, for gross breach of his professional duty to uncover and report such matters.
And a banker, like Stern claims to be, who failed to uncover such deliberate and fundamental misrepresentation of fact in a loan proposal would face the sack the moment his failure was discovered and he would only remain employed in the industry by withholding such critical information as to his personal competence.
But Stern was working in the UNIPCC/world bank/Eurospiv millieu where such fundamental flaws are regarded as virtues, if not core competencies.
Ian,
Thanks for the opportunity to elaborate. I was talking about GHG emissions as a purely spiritual issue. The Flying CO2 Monster is offended when benighted souls burn fossil fuels, without purchasing appropriate dispensations from enlightened people, who understand the mysterious ways of the FCO2M, and who also understand that the IPCC claims–and the government policies based on them–are pure hogwash.