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'Brainwashing' over climate change

New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

25 May 2006

Ministry of Education accused of 'brainwashing' over climate change

The Ministry of Education has been accused of attempting to 'brainwash' primary school students about climate change. The accusation has been made by Roger Dewhurst, of Auckland, in a letter to MPs. Mr Dewhurst, a consultant geologist and hydrogeologist is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. His letter to MPs read:

"Recently I was invited to give a talk on global warming to some of the children at a Bay of Plenty intermediate school. I gave my talk to about a hundred 11 to 13 year olds at the school. I was well received by the children who showed far more interest than I expected.

"I was appalled to see a one page propaganda sheet apparently put out by the Ministry of Education which made it abundantly clear that officialdom has swallowed the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming stuff hook, line and sinker and is promoting it without a shred of balance. These small children are actually being invited to propose their own solutions to the 'problem' of global warming. This is not education, it is attempted brainwashing. Fortunately there is a teacher in the school who thought that it would be a good idea to have a bit of balance.

"When the anthropogenic global warmers can explain why there were five or six periods of glaciation in the earth's history, a couple of these before there was life on land, with longer periods between them generally warmer than today; why the temperature has fluctuated very rapidly in the last 2.5 million years between warmer and very much colder; why atmospheric carbon dioxide levels lag temperature rise and why carbon dioxide and methane levels rose with global temperature when our palaeolithic ancestors were chipping stones, I might begin to think that they have something useful to say.

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"They have to explain the past, not just deny it. Looking at the Pleistocene alone on a scale of 1mm per 1000 years we have an event rather more than 2.5 metres long. We are still in this event. One centimetre at the top represents the 10,000 years since most of the last load of ice melted.

Two millimetres represents the time humans have been capable of recording anything. A slice thinner than a razor blade represents the time over which humans have been able to make some sort of attempt to measure the temperature.

And on the basis of dubious numerical models constructed in a slice of time mere microns thick the Fart Tax Freddies and their ilk claim to predict the future climate for the next 100 years or so! That is not science, it is bone necklace and monkey skin hat stuff larded well with politics and grant money."

ENDS

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