By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-47584093
A lot of words have been written about the schools’ climate strikes, so I don’t intend to revisit them. But here’s a few of my observations:
1) There have been two strikes so far, Feb and March 15th. If they stick to Fridays, the next will be due either on April 12th, which is a school holiday in many areas, or a week later, which is Good Friday. Either way I doubt whether many kids will turn up!
2) While there has been some reporting in the rest of the media, the coverage on the BBC has been grotesquely over the top:
They have treated the strikes as if they were some world shattering event, rather than the bit of juvenile showing off which they really are.
3) In most towns, the numbers of pupils on strike last week appears to have been tiny.
This is evident from photos and video from the BBC coverage, such as in Huntingdon below, where there about 30 kids protesting. There are about 3000 children of school age in Huntingdon, so some 2970 kids did not go on strike.
And in Norwich, 200 turned up out of a school age population of 20000.
I suspect these sort of ratios are commonplace across Britain. It is also apparent that many of the protestors are not children, but older students.
It is obvious that the BBC has been acting as a cheerleader for the strikes, with local camera crews up and down the country on hand to make them appear something they are not.
Look closely and you will see that most of the BBC’s pictures and videos are deliberately framed to disguise how tiny most of the protests are.
4) Winner of the Dopey Banner competition must go to this lass:
Does she actually think she is working for our benefit? Or that we give two hoots whether she stops or not?
It is a symptom of the sense of entitlement some kids have nowadays that she thinks she is doing us a favour by going to school.
I’ve got a suggestion for her. Stop doing your schoolwork and don’t bother going back to lessons. But don’t come back snivelling when you can’t get a job or a place at Uni when you’ve finally grown up.
5) The chants and slogans reveal how little understanding the children actually have about climate change issues. They mindlessly repeat apocalyptic warnings about sea level rise, twelve years to save the planet and the other nonsense that their minds have been fed with.
But nowhere is there any recognition of what is going on in the real world. Nor any sense of a historical perspective. For instance, have any of them even heard of the Medieval Warming Period or Little Ice Age?
Sadly the main fault here must lie with their teachers, who seem to be more interested in pumping impressionable minds with left wing propaganda than facts.
6) There is the same lack of knowledge and downright naivety about the politics of climate change.
The children all seem to think that the government can wave a magic wand and make the bogeyman vanish. They simply chant slogans about getting rid of fossil fuels, without the slightest idea of what that would mean for their lives.
None of the kids seem to be aware that the UK only accounts for 1% of global emissions of CO2. Or that in the last decade, while Britain’s emissions have fallen by 170 Mt to 398 Mt, the rest of the world’s have increased by 3536 Mt.
7) Perhaps the most striking aspect is the underlying attitude of sense of entitlement and a chip on the shoulder.
Let me give one example.
These four protestors were at the Birmingham rally. They go on to say:
Anybody who has lived on this planet for longer than us, they have been irresponsible in their actions and their attitude towards the climate
What, even their older brother? And of course these four have been perfect citizens! Their hypocrisy stinks.
Many of the protestors claim that their generation has somehow been let down, and that the rest of us have selfishly destroyed the world for them.
What arrogance!
The world they are now growing up in is arguably the healthiest, best fed, most well off and comfortable ever. And that applies globally.
Would they prefer to have been born in the 1950s, when the air was thick with pollution, most houses had nothing more than coal fires, no central heating and outside loos, and we had to walk or cycle miles to school?
And that generation was grateful that it did not grow up in earlier decades, with mass unemployment, kids working down mines and being sent off to war when they were old enough.
And, by the way children, they had bad weather in those days too!
Rant over! But if anybody still needs convincing that the climate of the past was not idyllic, take a look at the Xmas 1947 edition of the local steelworks magazine:
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 19, 2019 at 06:39AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 