Tag: School

Massive Curriculum Changes Required for UK School Geography After Met Office Climate Projections Ruled “Implausible”

The world of geography teaching in the UK is in crisis following guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a collection of assumptions used in climate computer modelling known as RCP8.5 is “implausible”. The ruling has effectively trashed the Met Office’s 2018 climate projections report (UKCP18) which only used this scenario to produce a variety of always ridiculous forecasts. To widespread mainstream media acclaim at the time, it was said that summer temperatures could rise by over 5°C in 50 years.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

The world of geography teaching in the UK is in crisis following guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a collection of assumptions used in climate computer modelling known as RCP8.5 is “implausible”. The ruling has effectively trashed the Met Office’s 2018 climate projections report (UKCP18) which only used this scenario to produce a variety of always ridiculous forecasts. To widespread mainstream media acclaim at the time, it was said that summer temperatures could rise by over 5°C in 50 years. Since 2018, UKCP18 has been embedded in UK school geography teaching as a core forecasting source. Its predictions are assessed, used for impact studies and underpin public examinations. The “implausible” ruling means that geography teaching materials particularly at A-level now require a major rewrite of core textbooks involving the removal of all the junk predictions.

Preferably by the start of the Autumn term in September.

It’s not as if teachers can argue that only the ‘high emissions’ pathway of RCP8.5 can be ignored. At the time, the Met Office only ran RCP8.5 assumptions through its super-computer, the results of which it then described as “plausible” as it promoted them in bold type. Using only RCP8.5 was justified on cost grounds since it enabled the available computer time to produce results – guesses might be a more accurate description – down to 2 kms. School resources do note that lower emissions results are available, but these were statistically derived by the Met Office from the RCP8.5 results. This means that all the Met Office projections are compromised and a thorough cleansing needs to be undertaken of all the flawed information wherever it occurs in the teaching environment.

Of course, as the Daily Sceptic has previously reported, the cleansing of UKCP18 is a major job since it has become a foundational source for much UK government and private company climate change regulation and spending. Similar cleansing also needs to take place in mainstream media, but this is a relatively easy job. Since almost every reported scare story over the last 15 years is based on RCP8.5, the climate catastrophising codswallop just needs to be taken down en masse. This will leave chastened, if wiser, journalists free to start again with a clean sheet.

Given the ubiquitous nature of UKCP18, it is curious that the Met Office has yet to comment on recent events, let alone apologise and withdraw the flawed report before it can do any more damage.

In a trawl of A-level physical geography textbook climate chapters, AI notes that statements are often made that draw on UKCP18. These include the 5°C warmer summer claim, wetter winters with 30% more rainfall and sea level rises of up to one metre by 2100 (current rise, three thousandths of a metre a year). Students are encouraged to evaluate future risks using UKCP18 projections. In many ways, UKCP18 is considered ideal because it is an official Government dataset, gives high resolution down to as little as 2 kms, and is ideal as core material for high impact and planning studies. To be fair, lower emissions scenarios are considered, but it’s unlikely that students will be informed that these are also based on RCP8.5. Even less likely will students be given the vital information that computer models assume that any future warming will be caused by humans using hydrocarbons. Guidance on trace gas influences and the distinctly unsettled science surrounding the matter is also unlikely to be available in the chemistry and physics departments.

These are not made available, of course, owing to the obvious brainwashing of children and young adults up to 18 years of age by Left-wing teachers desperate to invoke an invented climate ‘crisis’ in the interests of promoting a collectivist Net Zero fantasy.

It would be nice to think that the scenarios based on UKCP18 and RCP8.5 might be taught in UK schools as examples of what will not happen in the near future. Implausible occurrences, to coin a phrase. Fat chance probably sums up that wish. Indeed, it would appear to be very unwise for students to cast any doubt on the projections, their methodology or the science behind them in the exam room. In late 2024, the OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations) published a major curriculum and assessment review chaired by the former Labour education secretary Charles Clarke. It argued that climate change and sustainability topics must be made more explicit throughout the curriculum and within individual subjects and qualifications.

“Climate change is the biggest existential threat to the planet we face and, as such, we would expect to see a curriculum that supports young people in understanding the science behind it, the political dilemmas involved and the role they can play as citizens and as the employees and academics of the future,” it was said.

With young people facing an existential threat and the need to support – try indoctrinate – them in the political dilemmas involved (full steam ahead, Net Zero), it seems, alas, more than likely that students will continue be taught with implausible Met Office data come the new term.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

Dale Vince’s Ministry of Eco Education Preaches Climate Crisis to Seven-Year-Olds

We must not dwell too long on private misfortune nor ought we to speculate on Mr. Dale Vince’s alleged lavish lifestyle of fast cars, quaffing Dom Perignon, designer clothes, yachts and private jet travel. Mrs Vince is in a divorce court giving details of conspicuous consumption, with her ex suggesting he has been inspired by the “concept” of lower consumption since the 1980s. Such is the disputatious way with these trying family battles, it is good manners to stay silent.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

We must not dwell too long on private misfortune nor ought we to speculate on Mr. Dale Vince’s alleged lavish lifestyle of fast cars, quaffing Dom Perignon, designer clothes, yachts and private jet travel. Mrs Vince is in a divorce court giving details of conspicuous consumption, with her ex suggesting he has been inspired by the “concept” of lower consumption since the 1980s. Such is the disputatious way with these trying family battles, it is good manners to stay silent. Except perhaps to note that Mr. Vince has made his fortune from collecting over £110 million in taxpayer windmill subsidies and has been making a bit of a virtue of late about everyone cutting down on consumption to save the planet. Nobody it seems is safe from his proselytising. While Vince runs his onshore wind farms, children as young as seven are being educated in the technology of the past by his foundation-funded Ministry of Eco Education (MEE). Fed a diet of climate and ecological catastrophe, the children are also being encouraged to build their own model wind turbines.

At this age, children probably don’t understand what electricity is and a primer explaining the difference between an amp and a volt might be more useful. Or perhaps just learning to read and count properly. Times change, but probably not very much. When your correspondent was seven, the nuns at his Catholic primary school were very excited by something called the Second Vatican Council and scrapbooks were kept about something that in truth meant nothing to Dartford schoolchildren. I have it in mind that slightly older pupils were making models of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Get them young and you get them for life, as the Jesuits say. Meanwhile, any doubts about the existence of the Almighty would have been met with condign punishment similar in some ways to Vince’s recent suggestion that “climate denial” should be illegal.

Whether or not Vince has been glugging vintage shampoo and shopping at chic clothing emporiums, his Ministry of Eco Education is one of the finest moral fashion accessories money can buy. It recently said its ambition was to insert its curriculum into 1,000 schools with green messaging on transport, nature and society.

Its stories seem designed to scare the living daylights out of anyone lacking the intellectual ability and wider education to question the climate Armageddon presented. All seven-year-olds in fact. They would not, for instance, be able to challenge the claim made by MEE that around the world “diversity is being annihilated at a terrifying rate”. Population sizes of thousands of species of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles are claimed by MEE to have fallen by 60% since the 1970s. No source is provided for this imprecise claim, but variations of it are common in alarmist circles. Some of the evidence suggests otherwise. A bedrock scares repeated endlessly in the mainstream is that 69% of vertebrates across the planet have declined since 1970. The figures are provided by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. However, a group of Canadian biologists recently revealed that the figure was a statistical freak. They pointed out that the estimate was driven by 2.4% of wildlife populations, adding: “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”

According to a paper on MEE’s website identifying the foundations of its eco curriculum, the Earth’s environment is breaking down with warmer temperatures wreaking havoc causing an increase in ‘extreme’ weather and leading to a sixth mass extinction. It can of course be argued that slightly warmer temperatures bouncing back from a recent colder period have been almost entirely beneficial for life on Earth. Food supplies have risen, and famine is at bay in many parts of the world, carbon dioxide has significantly ‘greened’ the planet, mass extinction scares are the product of computer models, most ‘extreme’ weather events are not becoming more frequent or more severe and there is barely a scintilla of evidence to suggest humans have a hand in their frequency or ferocity. On this latter point, even the IPCC confirms, at least for now, this interpretation of the science. Presumably, such reassurance is not to be encouraged in the classroom – indeed it seems that according to Vince any ‘denial’ of climate science that is thought to be ‘settled’ should be against the law.

While primary schools seem to be the main target of MEE, there are hopes to extend it to the secondary sector, while the material is also said to be suitable for home educators. A recent MEE presentation highlighted the work of an MEE London-based home educator who was using MEE materials entitled ‘The future of electricity’. Those great unreliables wind and solar had pride of place but given that windmills first started operating in Britain in the reign of Henry II (1154-89), perhaps the materials should be called “The past of electricity’. Children as young as seven are encouraged to build their own wind turbines using Lego and the blades should turn when placed near a fan. Children are keen on animals, so it is just as well they are not told that wind turbines around the globe kill millions of bats every year. The giant turbines being planned to blanket Britain should make a good start on the next mass extinction. Blades almost as high as the London Shard will efficiently sweep the countryside of tonnes of wildlife from the smallest fry to the largest eagle. If the blades don’t get the bigger birds, the vast number of new high-capacity electric cables and pylons probably will.

What happens to the children’s toy windmills when the fan are switched off would be a good question for them to ask, although it might get a similar response to innocents in a former age inquiring of Sister Agnes if God actually existed.

Day-to-day running of MEE seems to be in the charge of Paul Turner. who styles himself a “Radical Geographer Paul” on his website. Among his noted activities is “teaching climate breakdown” along with providing material asking, “who owns England” and “should land be returned to the masses”. He claims to be inspired by the radical theatre collective called Three Acres and a Cow. The show’s cast includes a Kohenet Hebrew Priestess and a “radical queer Christian activist” who these days spends most of his time “gardening with asylum seekers”.

Turner’s site also links to the Radical Geographers’ Handbook, which provides a definition of radical geography. It is said to recognise the need for a “reclamation of geography from its imperialist past, showing how geographical knowledge and thinking could play a key role in radical, social, political and environmental activism”.

How school geography has come on from rocks, contours and map reading! Apparently, useful observational and practical skills are not nearly as interesting for some teachers as converting young children into parent-nagging activists. Let loose in schools, the radical geographer is charged to declare a climate and ecological emergency, sell his or her car and walk everywhere (not you Dale) and “teach what you love and not to the exam”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.