The US Department of Education used taxpayer funds to indoctrinate children to believe the dubious global warming theory.
Details of the global warming event
On July 20, 2011, the Education Department held a children’s reading event in Washington, DC. The event organizers handed out free books. Two of them came from the Nickelodeon network’s “Big Green Help” series. (Penny Starr at CNS News has the most detailed report on the event.) The books each featured a licensed Nickelodeon character: “Spongebob Squarepants” and “Dora the Explorer.” Each book told a fanciful story on this theme:
- Global warming is occurring.
- Man, through his “unnatural” activities, is responsible for it.
- Man can stop it by giving things up.
The teaching text is very facile. One might expect that in a children’s book. But “facile” here means more than “written for a three-year-old.” It’s way too simple, and says many things that simply do not follow.
What’s wrong with the logic?
Penny Starr’s piece quotes the Spongebob book:
Earth has these gases called greenhouse gases…They’re in the atmosphere to keep the temperature of the planet just right. Carbon Dioxide is one of those gases. But when we make more greenhouse gases than the planet needs naturally, like you’ve been burnin’ tires and fuel, it locks the heat in the atmosphere. That makes the planet hotter than it should be. That’s global warming. And that’s not good.
That argument assumes at least three things:
- That the sun shines at the same exact brightness, year after year, decade after decade, century after century.
- That every other “greenhouse gas” stays at the same level everywhere.
- That if carbon dioxide rises, nothing will take it away just as fast.
How would Ronald Reagan address Mr. Obama, if he were alive today? Photo:
None of these assumptions is safe. The sun shines in cycles. Sometimes it shines hotter, sometimes colder. In the Middle Ages, the son shone bright enough for Greenland to be truly green. (Eric the Red was not the shady real-estate salesman that global warming alarmists make him out to be.) Then at about the time of the first English settlements of North America, the Little Ice Age set in.
Carbon dioxide is not the only “greenhouse gas.” Water is another. When clouds roll in, they moderate the temperatures during day and night. Any warming of the ocean would produce more clouds that would provide shade. Any engineer knows what to call this: negative feedback. When something makes the globe hotter, something else will act to cool it down. No problem.
Besides the clouds, any global warming that does occur will make plants grow. When plants grow, they take in carbon dioxide. That is how they grow.
But that’s too much for a thirty-second sound bite in a children’s cartoon. It’s also inconvenient for a government that wants to control how we think and act, in the smallest detail.
More inconvenient facts
Those aren’t the only facts that give the lie to the global warming narrative. A few more:
The government suspended Charles Monnett, the scientist who first said that polar bears were drowning. Questions had come up over how he ran his projects.
New evidence, from satellites, shows that when the earth gets warmer, it dumps the excess heat into space. Heat moves in three ways:
- Conduction. Touch a hot stove and you’ll see—or feel—what that means.
- Convection. When air gets hot, it rises, and cold air moves down to replace it. This is how sea and land breezes work. (Baseboard heaters work the same way, by setting up convection currents in room air.)
- Radiation. Anything that gets hot, will give off radiation. That works for a whole planet as well as one small object on it.
Whoever built the climate models that the United Nations relies on, forgot to account for radiation. We now know that radiation disposes of far more heat than anyone realized.
The real issue
Why is the government spending money that it doesn’t have, doing something that only local school boards should worry about? More than that: why is the government giving a science lecture full of rookie mistakes?
Could this have anything to do, perhaps, with UN Agenda 21? Why else try to convince children that global warming is real?
Environmentalism is always about control. To get the kind of control they want, they must persuade people to hand it over to them. Children are far easier to persuade than are adults—and global warming is only one of many lies that environmentalists tell.
This is one government contract that Nickelodeon, if they really cared about their (adult) customers, should never have taken.
Featured image: a stack of schoolbooks with an apple on top