Indoctrination Alert, as the Natural History Museum in London appears to be the latest in the long line of museums to fall into the alarmist camp, like the Australian Museum here, opening a new 8-storey extension, the Darwin Centre:

The £78 million ($148.83 million) building houses 17 million insect specimens and three million plant specimens as well as a Climate Change Wall of screens showing the impact of global warming.

Sharon Ament, director of public engagement at the museum, said the Darwin Centre “will really show our visitors why and how our scientists tackle some of the most pressing issues we face today – from the spread of disease to the impact of climate change on the planet’s wildlife“.

Here are a few choice quotes from the museum’s web site. Firstly, about the new Climate Change Wall:

The 12m-wide interactive wall of screens show 100s of images and films about the beauty and diversity of the natural world.

As you approach or move past the wall, it responds to your presence with a dramatic transformation of colour, light and sound.

Watch the colours and images change to show the consequences of human impact on our climate. See ice melt, vegetation thrive, oceans surge, then land dry out, forests flame red, and animals disappear. (source)

And on their Climate Change pages:

The climate has changed continually throughout Earth’s history because of natural causes. But today’s climate change is different – it is caused by humans.

Find out how scientists first discovered that human activity was causing global warming, what consequences they think this will have over the next century, and what the international community is doing to limit the damage. (source)
…
Today, the levels of carbon dioxide produced by human activities have upset the Earth’s climatic balance.

Many of our activities release carbon dioxide. When we burn fossil fuels, we release this greenhouse gas. When we cut down forests, we remove the trees that once soaked up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. (source)

There is clearly no doubt in the museum’s curators’ minds: global warming is caused by humans, full stop. I don’t know about you, but this kind of bias makes me furious. Science is supposed to be apolitical, but here is one of the most (formerly) respected museums falling hook, line and sinker for the alarmist AGW agenda, and indoctrinating countless children to close their minds, parrot “the science is settled” and that we need to “tackle climate change”, and never investigate the real, and far more complex, debate. There really is little hope.

Read it here.

Not for those with weak stomachs, Krudd spouts all the usual nonsense about “tackling climate change”, including putting way too much faith in solar, wind and geothermal, and witters on about the two errors in four words “carbon pollution reduction scheme”. Just in case I haven’t made this clear before, IT ISN’T CARBON and IT ISN’T POLLUTION. But hey, just details, right? It’s nauseating.

Watch it here (sick bags at the ready)

P.S. Post lots of negative comments, but don’t expect any of them to be published – they’re all censored… Here’s mine, for what it’s worth (note “Pending Approval” – ha ha):

Climate madness from the Greens in NSW [Sorry, did you expect something different? This is the Greens we’re talking about – Ed], who are always good for a laugh, as they urge the scrapping of new coal fired power stations until carbon capture technology is available:

Greens’ MP John Kaye says plans for future coal-fired plants should be abandoned.

“The Rees Government’s pushing ahead with the myth of carbon capture and storage to try and disguise the fact that their coal-fired power station building program will push up the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by a massive 57 per cent,” he said.

“The only way they can justify that is by saying that some day soon they will be able to bury the carbon from those power stations.”

Scrapping new coal fired power stations, required to service economic growth and maintain standards of living, when there ain’t any alternative is pure barking madness. Furthermore, the Greens would never, ever concede that their hippyish 1970s bumper-sticker opposition to nuclear power might be contributing to rising emissions from coal.

Unfortunately, however, in Greens MPs’ brains, the lights went out long ago, much as they will in NSW…

Read it here.

From the UK Daily Mail (via The Australian):

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity.

And they are succeeding. Few areas in Britain are now unthreatened by deranged projects to install intrusive, gigantic wind-farms on prominent sites.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem?

Read it here.

And also via The Australian, British Green Party leader Caroline Lucas spells out the real agenda at the party conference on Friday:

A transition to a post carbon world is about jobs, it’s about a more equal society and it’s about a way of life with a potential to be far more fulfilling than the turbo-charged consumerism that is being pedaled by the other politicians today.

Nothing to do with saving the planet, and all to do with socialism. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Read it here.

Unlike the previous government, which was marginally more sceptical of the AGW hype, the incoming one appears to have fallen for the whole thing, and is advocating huge cuts in emissions by 2020.

Japan’s next prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, yesterday vowed that his incoming centre-left government would pursue a greenhouse gas reduction target of 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. [Note that they are using 1990 as a baseline, meaning the 25% reduction is far more than that when compared to 2000 levels – Ed]

The new target is far more ambitious than the 8 per cent reduction advocated by the outgoing conservative government of Prime Minister Taro Aso, which lost parliamentary elections last week.

“As a mid-term goal, we aim at a 25 per cent reduction by 2020 from 1990, based on the levels demanded by science to stop global warming,” said Mr Hatoyama, who is scheduled to take over as prime minister on September 16.

“Our nation will strongly call on major countries around the world to set aggressive goals,” said Mr Hatoyama, 62, who last week suggested Japan would seek a greater voice in international diplomacy.

What is it with the Left and climate alarmism? Is it because the Left loves taxing and regulating people out of existence and AGW is the best way to achieve that goal by the back door? You decide. All I know is that China must be rubbing its hands with glee, as yet more of Japan’s already depleted electronics industry will be heading their way in the near future…

Read it here.

You can almost hear the heads popping… New Scientist, that oh-so-alarmist of publications, is having to face the inconvenient truth at last:

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

“People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.

“I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”
…
Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when [Vicky] Pope [of the UK Met Office] warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

Read it here.

Always an interesting read, despite Bjørn being convinced of the reality of AGW:

OUR present approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically, because negotiations to reduce CO2 emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the present approach is also flawed technologically.

Read it here.

A warmer than average winter in the Eastern states has had the ironic effect of reducing emissions:

Greenhouse gas emissions reportedly fell about 4 per cent across Australia’s eastern states over the winter.

The Climate Group’s Greenhouse Indicator Report has found a drop of more than 3 million tonnes compared with the same period last year.

The figure is the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road for the season. [So driving around in Prius is really a pointless gesture – Ed]

However, they can’t resist making the link with global warming:

Climate Group Australian director Rupert Posner said the drop in emissions was mostly due to winter temperatures matching climate change predictions, making people less inclined to turn on their heaters.

Strange, because global temperatures are still steady, or even falling. But hey, who cares about accuracy or truth when we’re talking about “saving the planet”?

Read it here and here.

On Friday I compared the UK’s Daily Telegraph to Hello, and whilst that is generally true, there are a couple of columnists who keep the flag flying. One of whom is Christopher Booker, who regularly takes apart the climate nonsense fed to the public by an ignorant and biased media. This time it’s Ban Ki-moonbat’s trip to the Arctic:

BBC viewers were treated last week to the bizarre spectacle of Mr Ban Ki-moon standing on an Arctic ice-floe making a series of statements so laughable that it was hard to believe such a man can be Secretary-General of the UN. Thanks to global warming, he claimed, “100 billion tons” of polar ice are melting each year, so that within 30 years the Arctic could be “ice-free”. This was supported by a WWF claim that the ice is melting so fast that, by 2100, sea-levels could rise by 1.2 metres (four feet), which would lead to “floods affecting a quarter of the world”.

Everything about this oft-repeated item was propaganda of the silliest kind. Standing 700 miles from the Pole, as near as the stubbornly present ice would allow his ship to go, Mr Ban seemed unaware that, although some 10 million square kilometres (3.8 million square miles) of sea-ice melts each summer, each September the Arctic starts to freeze again. And the extent of the ice now is 500,000 sq km (190,000 sq m) greater than it was this time last year – which was, in turn, 500,000 sq km more than in September 2007, the lowest point recently recorded (see the Cryosphere Today website). By April, after months of darkness, it will be back up to 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq m) or more.

Mr Ban seems equally unaware that, even if all that sea-ice were to melt, this would no more raise sea-levels than a cube of ice melting in a gin and tonic increases the volume of liquid in the glass. If he is relying for his “100 billion tons” on land ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, he should note that much of their ice sheets are growing rather than shrinking. His “100 billion tons” is fantasy.
…
According to Government figures, however, we in Britain are already committed to spending, under the Climate Change Act, £18 billion every year between now and 2050 on this nonsense – daft light bulbs (see below), electricity blackouts and all. In other words, we are only beginning to see some of the nastier consequences of this crazy make-believe, based on nothing more substantial than the kind of gibberish we got last week from Mr “Light Bulb” Ban and the BBC.

Read it here.

One rule for the rulers, another for the ruled. Gross Hypocrisy Alert as a bunch of US pollies spend half a million studying “global warming” – nice work if you can get it, and by the sound of it, pretty tough I think you’ll agree:

The 10 members of Congress dived or snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef, visited a Queensland rainforest, observed a penguin rookery on the South Pole, watched a New Year fireworks display in Christchurch and finished the trip on Hawaii’s famous Waikiki Beach.

They flew from destination to destination on a specially-equipped $US70 million ($83.38 million) US Air Force C-40 jet, described as the military’s business-class version of a Boeing 737.

The 11-day mission was designed to study climate change, but the globe-trotting politicians are now feeling the heat after the Wall Street Journal exposed the expensive expedition [click here for the full gory details – Ed].

The politicians have been in the firing line of numerous editorials and stinging articles in the US media.

Anyone hazard a guess at the size of this jolly’s carbon footprint?

Read it here.