Local weather reporting scares youngsters: Future web zero emissions, not local weather change – what’s occurring with that?

From the climateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A post on UK website Future Net Zero (FNZ) claims climate change is causing anxiety in children. This is false. Since climate change is imperceptible and weather is not becoming more extreme, it can only be the constant stream of scare stories in the media and schools spreading the false idea that the planet is doomed without immediate climate action that is traumatising children. This makes groups like FNZ and those who cite them for their story complicit in damaging children's mental health.

The article, “Climate change triggers fear in children,” looks at a “new campaign” by renewable energy company 100Green, which promotes survey results from a study conducted by Save the Children. The study found that 70 percent of children surveyed “struggle with climate anxiety.”

The post itself, while short, has the character of a climate alarm whiplash attack when reading it: It alternates between advising parents to “see the climate change issue in a positive light with their children” and a quote from Gwen Hines of Save the Children, who essentially says that children are doomed unless her preferred measures are implemented.

Hines said this generation of children “will inherit a deeply unequal world unless immediate action is taken” and that their fears are “well-founded” due to the so-called climate crisis and “growing inequality.”

In reality, the earth has never been a safe place to live.

Thanks to modern technologies made possible by the use of fossil fuels, both global deaths from temperatures and those from extreme weather have declined. The decline is also significant, at about 99 percent over the past 100 years, despite, and perhaps in part because of, the moderate warming that has occurred over the same period. (See figure below)

Hurricanes, forest fires, tornadoes and floods have not gotten worse either, so children cannot have “experienced” anything that would lead them to believe that the climate is getting worse. And contrary to repeated media claims, neither snow nor polar bears and islands are disappearing.

Despite all these facts, why are children afraid and worried that a climate apocalypse is imminent?

The answer is simple and obvious: media coverage and propaganda in schools.

As Climate Realism has discussed numerous times now, the constant barrage of media misinformation and fearmongering about every weather event, linking it to climate change without evidence, unsurprisingly has an impact on children. This is intentional. As is the push to include climate alarm in the curriculum of classes that seem to have nothing to do with climate, like ceramics and physical education, as is the case in New Jersey schools. I personally experienced this kind of “every-grade-is-climate” pilot program when I went to a public school in Illinois. This kind of coverage is not demanded of students; it is drummed into them before they are even old enough to understand what the decarbonization policies they advocate would mean.

As an aside, the FNZ article also claims that children today “will be exposed to seven times more heatwaves over their lifetime than their grandparents.” This is also false and a good example of how climate alarmists spread misinformation to scare people, especially children. Climate Realism has refuted the alarm bells around heatwaves many times, but basically weather history does not show heatwaves becoming more extreme or more frequent in the US or Europe.

FNZ, Save the Children and the media and educators who parrot and spread their climate misinformation are responsible for making children afraid of climate change. They are the ones telling children that the world will end if their parents and politicians do not implement the radical decarbonisation they are demanding. This language is so out of touch with reality and so grave that some media have even begun to question whether it is not counterproductive.

FNZ and similar groups profit from scaring generations of people, gaining financial support and political influence. It is disgusting that they would damage the mental health of children with their propaganda efforts, only to then use the fear they create in children as evidence that the world needs radical decarbonization – after all, it's the children who are at stake.

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