The Heartland Institute recently concluded the first International Conference on Climate Change, where global warming was discussed, debated and debunked. This conference was a problem for sixth grade science teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School in Wildomar, California. So much of a problem that he took class time to have his students write letters to the Heartland Institute to tell them how evil they are.

It seems the children read ten whole articles which described the certain doom that global warming created, and were encouraged to write the Heartland Institute and express their concern. The Heartland Institute published the letters online (pdf), protecting the identities of the students by blacking out their last names in a very CIA-esque style.

Perhaps rather than filling the children’s minds with environmentalist propaganda, they should spend a little more time in English class:

• “I think your fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you’re just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it.”
• “We feel that it is wrong what you are doing. We know that you know that global warming is NOT we repeat NOT a myth, And we think it is selfish that you would take money over yours and your peers lives.”
• “I do not think that what you are doing is right because you are telling people that global warming is not a crisis. If this is not a crisis, how come floods have occurred in asia, Mexico, and India. Plus, how can you explain why the glacier glaciers are melting. they can’t melt themselves, because they are in the coldest region in the world.”
• “We feel that they are destroying our planet by saying G.W. is not a crisis. You think GW is not a crisis but it is; you know deep down that it’s a real thing that’s happening. Everyone has a part in helping GW, and you’re making worse.”
• (P.S. GLOBAL WARMING EXCISTS)

How nice.

My personal favorites are “We are going to tell you about global warming. I don’t care if you don’t want to read, but I’m making you read it you horrible people.” and “We’ve read article about global warming. And we know all the facts.”

I beg to differ, children.

Let’s take a look at some of the “facts” they have been “taught”:

“If this is not a crisis, why have floods occurred in asia, Mexico and India?”

According to NASA, the reason for flooding in China and India could possibly be the use of wood, coal, cow dung and other field residue for cooking and heating. The burning of these things create black soot, which NASA says “created a clear tendency toward the flooding scenario that has been occurring in southern China and the increasing drought over northern China that has persisted over the last several years.”

People in China and India burn these materials because they don’t have the standard of living that America has. While many in America burn wood for heating, they do so by choice, not necessity. When you have a billion or more people all burning these things, that creates a lot of soot. It seems this isn’t an incident of “global warming” but of localized pollution.

Also, India isn’t really known for taking care of its infrastructure. Global Warming Trends says that “flooding is inevitable, with or without global warming”:

The city is plagued with garbage that clogs sewage systems as well as unbridled construction and development of areas that previously served as water catchments. Add to this the fact that 40% of Jakarta is below sea level and that the government did not repair a broken sea wall and you start to get the picture. Rapid deforestation of areas for more development have destroyed natural breakwaters between the sea and the land. What a relief for the environment minister to have global warming as a popular scapegoat, an excuse that will not be questioned, especially as the UN climate change conference which will be held in Indonesia next week will find it extraordinarily convenient to their purpose.

Mexico is suffering from flooding also. eFluxMedia called Mexico’s November floods the “Worst Floods in Mexico’s History“:

The floods caused by the cold front that already left the oil industry along Mexico’s Gulf coast in ruins, determined the government to evacuate about 20,000 people in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco.

An interesting fact to supplement this article comes from Global Alliance for Disaster Reduction:

• Mexico’s state of Tabasco has a history of floods during November of every year.
• Many of Tabasco’s low-lying neighborhoods, such as Villahermosa, the state capital, have become accustomed to living with water in the first floor of their residence for about six months of every year.

In fact, a “Big Oil” company in Mexico was pouring hundreds of thousands into preventing flooding in the area. The money was wasted by the government. From the Washington Post:

From 1997 to 2001, at least $3 million was donated to build dikes, raise levees and move poor residents from low-lying areas, according to analysts and independent investigators. But a crescendo of questions about whether the oil money was ever used for the intended projects is raising the possibility that corruption and incompetence might have played as much of a role in the tragedy as historically torrential rains.

It seems there are other reasons for these disasters than global warming. Do you think the children were offered those as an alternative, or simply indoctrinated into the Church of Global Warming?

“Plus, how can you explain why the glacier glaciers are melting. they can’t melt themselves, because they are in the coldest region in the world.”

The world’s glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, the UN said Sunday, calling for immediate action to prevent further constraints on water resources for large populations. (Source.)

How do we explain this if it isn’t global warming? High Priest Al Gore used Mount Kilimanjaro as an example in his crockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” to illustrate how bad it actually is. American Scientist Online studied Mount Kilimanjaro to find out why it was shrinking. Their conclusions are very interesting:

The observations described above point to a combination of factors other than warming air—chiefly a drying of the surrounding air that reduced accumulation and increased ablation—as responsible for the decline of the ice on Kilimanjaro since the first observations in the 1880s. (Emphasis mine.) The mass balance is dominated by sublimation, which requires much more energy per unit mass than melting; this energy is supplied by solar radiation.

These processes are fairly insensitive to temperature and hence to global warming. If air temperatures were eventually to rise above freezing, sensible-heat flux and atmospheric long-wave emission would take the lead from sublimation and solar radiation. Since the summit glaciers do not experience shading, all sharp-edged features would soon disappear. But the sharp-edged features have persisted for more than a century. By the time the 19th-century explorers reached Kilimanjaro’s summit, vertical walls had already developed, setting in motion the loss processes that have continued to this day.

An additional clue about the pacing of ice loss comes from the water levels in nearby Lake Victoria. Long-term records and proxy evidence of lake levels indicate a substantial decline in regional precipitation at the end of the 19th century after some considerably wetter decades. Overall, the historical records available suggest that the large ice cap described by Victorian-era explorers was more likely the product of an unusually wet period than of cooler global temperatures.

Seems that warming temperatures are not to blame. In fact, the scientists noted “the air temperatures measured at the altitude of the glaciers and ice cap on Kilimanjaro are almost always substantially below freezing (rarely above -3 degrees).”

When glaciers in other areas have retreated, they have revealed some very interesting archaeological finds. A glacier in Switzerland retreated, and the scientists there found a silver mine:

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

Just getting back to normal. Indeed. There is more and more evidence every day that we are coming out of a little Ice Age and that these glaciers were not always where they are today. Perhaps the teacher could assign ten articles on that topic.

“Natural disasters quadrupling over the last two decades because of GLOBAL WARMING”

I can only assume this relates to an article Treehugger covered here. But Treehugger concluded:

This larger point was also aptly put across by the science writer Chris Mooney in his latest book, Storm World, in which he (uncategorically) declared at the outset that: “Global warming did not cause Hurricane Katrina, or any other weather disaster. Or to put it more precisely, we just can’t say scientifically that global warming either does or does not “cause” individual weather events.” (Emphasis mine)

In other words, while it’s fair to say that global warming likely contributed to the intensification of storms – by heating up the oceans’ surface waters – to say that it definitively caused events like Hurricane Katrina or Cyclone Sidr to occur is just wrong. You’re simply dealing with too many variables and outside factors to draw a direct connection.

It’s called scare tactics, and it is an easy tool for propagandists to use. Elicit an emotional response and facts are not necessary. We covered the contradiction here, noting that one set of scientists said warming waters increased hurricanes, while another set claimed it decreased hurricanes. It is just not understood that well, which is why you have such poor results in the hurricane forecasting for 2006 and 2007.

Three topics that these children have been taught to be settled, the science to be absolute, have been shown to be questionable, with just a few hours research and Google. Yet the “teacher” didn’t provide them with any of the articles I referenced, but provided them with the “scripture” from the “Church.” Are we to honestly believe that these children are being educated, or indoctrinated?

It seems the answer is the latter. As I have noted before, there are valid reasons to doubt global warming is man-made, but there is very good reason to believe this hysteria is about control.

While I doubt Mr. Steria will take advantage of these resources, you can find some great information in the Newsvine group I created called “Global Warming Heretics.”. On Free Republic, the user “Entrepreneur” has collected the best Global Warming videos on the Internet, and separated them into five different categories:

• Documentaries
• Lectures
• Debates
• Short Videos
• Humor

or you can check our “Skeptics Guide to Global Warming,” which shouldn’t be confused with Warren Meyer’s “Skeptical Layman’s Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming.”

Don’t take the debate as settled.