Sixth grader writes environmental song — and gets children around the world sing it. Cool.
Aitan (Grossman) wrote “100 Generations,” a ballad he says is about “the integrity of nature we’re taking for granted,” and sent it to schools on six continents in search of children like him who wanted, through the power of music, to fight global warming.
Children from Botswana, France, Taiwan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, and the United States are singing the chorus and adding words in their own languages. Aitan hopes to sell copies of the song on KidEarth to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund, the Alliance for Climate Protection and other environmental groups.
The lyrics are here. In the English version, the chorus speaks to a hawk:
You and I, we share the same elation.
River run down from heaven’s hill,
Ever flow, I know you will,
Lasting for 100 generations.
Activists have persuaded children the earth is doomed, writes Ashley Thorne of National Association of Scholars.
According to a poll commissioned by Habitat Heroes (a.k.a. “the first social-networking site for young eco-warriors”), “One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won’t exist when they grow up.” And “more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath” by then.
. . . Children are environmentally aware — so aware that they are cringing in fear that the end of the world is nigh.
Kids talk about eco-apocalypse. But do they really believe they have no future?
About Joanne
When I was a kid, I was worried that the Cold War was the end of days. I suspect kids just don’t have a whole lot of perspective on big scary dangerous things, and global warming, etc., are what today’s kids are worrying about.
Very cool on the song.
> Activists have persuaded children the earth is doomed, writes Ashley Thorne of National Association of Scholars.
That’s a whole lot better than the pollyanna picture others would have them believe.
The world is in trouble on a number of fronts, not just global warming but also resource depletion and global conflict. Kids can’t just bury their heads in the sand, and telling them that things are OK, as the previous government did even as the economic system was crashing, does them a disservice.
Think of this as the modern day version of the Children’s Crusade. We are indoctrinating the children to get them to wrest the world from the comforts of modern day civilization and take it back to the misery of the 13th century. It is frightening how religious fanaticism in the guise of environmentalism has taken over the world. If we don’t get rid of all of our modern conveniences and start worshiping Gaia and her High Priest, Al Gore, we are doomed.
I’m with Richard.
I guess I’m one of those rare people who believes extremist thinking in either end of the spectrum (especially on issues of conservation and environmentalism) is dangerous – both the “shiny happy” picture of decades past and the “gloom and doom” forecast being painted by educators today run the risk of instilling apathy; fear does very little more to motivate than complacency (i.e. “if the world is going to burn up by the time I’m 30, what’s the point in trying to save it?”)
I agree with Ms. Downes in the sense that there are a lot of issues that in our world in need of addressing, but I see very little being done to instill responsibility – on any front – in our children. Scare tactics do not teach problem-solving or proactive thinking. We don’t need our kids overwhelmed with anxiety, up at nights wondering if they’ll live to see their 40th birthday; we need them to teach them to be resilient, optimistic, inventive and responsible.
Don’t be ridiculous Richard. You are using a strawman argument here, saying that the only way to be more cautious and wise in how we utilize natural resources is “to go back to the 13th century.” Really Richard (and Mia)? That’s the only way to solve any issues we might have today? Talk about childish! Al Gore may not be accurate about everything he pontificates about, but the vast majority of scientists do agree that we need to change the way we interact with nature and the environment. There are many reasonable and smart ways to do this without becoming Gaia worshippers, Richard.
I’m with Richard.
Me too.
Stephen is lamentably typical of the mostly well-meaning, but not well-informed, people the hard-core political left are always seeking to get riled up in order to further agendas having to do with the acquisition and exercise of political power – not the “saving” of Mother Earth.
There is no global warming “crisis” except in the minds of lefties who are always looking for reasons why they should get to take over and run everything. “Global warming” is just their latest con job. The science does not support all the fear-mongering and crepe-hanging.
I have no idea what resources Stephen supposes us to be in critical danger of running out of. Perhaps he will come back and enlighten us. But arm-waving about alleged looming shortages has been a standard feature of eco-alarmism for decades. According to Paul Ehrlich’s fevered writings of the 1960′s and 70′s, none of us should be here to make and read these posts right now because we were all due to die from famine back during the Carter administration. Wolf-crying is an old habit of the Red-Greens. And why not? The overly-credulous, like the poor, we seem always to have with us. As long as there are people willing to buy the Left’s line of crap, the Left will be out there, like good little capitalists, selling it just as hard as they can.
As to “global conflict,” I’m again a bit in the dark about what Stephen has in mind here. The world has been getting steadily more peaceful, not less so, for decades. Since World War 2, many once authoritarian peasant-agricultural nations have become democracies and majority urban-industrial societies (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, much of Latin America) or have made significant progress in this direction (China, India). The main areas of the world in which violent conflict is still endemic – though still much-reduced from historical levels – are those in which the dominant form of social organization is tribal barbarism. The Middle East, much of the Balkans and Central Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and all of Africa fall into this category. The key to eliminating conflict is to eliminate tribal cultures by actively helping them evolve into modern national societies. This will not be accomplished by yielding to neo-Luddites who want to repeal the Industrial Revolution and send us all back to the state of allegedly virtuous primitiveness now the norm in all those places where conflict, poverty and disease still hold sway.
If this be Pollyanna-ish, then guilty as charged.
Sorry Swede but deciding to put yourself half way between right and wrong doesn’t mean you’re reasonable. Either the world is a more peaceful place then it used to be or it isn’t, resources are drying up or they aren’t and the status of climate science is such that credible predictions can be made or they can’t.
Unfortunately for the romantics who see a world in desperate need of their moral guidance the human race has never had it so good. Even more unfortunately for them, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the human condition improves in inverse relationship to the degree to which those romantics have influence over the affairs of their fellows.
> Activists have persuaded children the earth is doomed, writes Ashley Thorne of National Association of Scholars.
It’s well understood that the earth is between 80 and 90 percent of the way through its habitable lifespan. Four billion down, at most one billion to go.
It always immediately drops to this level of a hate fight between left and right. I can never understand this. It isn’t left or right, it is just numbers and data. The numbers and data clearly support the proposition That global warming is happening and it is driving global climate change.
What’s so hard to understand here? I’m a biologist who has watched this for twenty years. I most fervently wish warming wasn’t happening. It spells misery down the road for a great number of humanity, mostly third world.
Sally Ride was on C-Span a few days ago and spelled it out very clearly. It is happening and it will accelerate since we add three ppms of carbon dioxide per year to the atmosphere.
It’s just numbers and data folks. Ain’t no right or left here.
atlas
“The numbers and data clearly support the proposition That global warming is happening and it is driving global climate change.”
Here again is another example of where our schools, and especially our colleges and universities, have failed. Schools simply do not teach students how to discern fact from fiction. There is no valid scientific data to support the notion that the climate is warming, that any warming (if it existed) is man made, and that any warming (if it existed) will have catastrophic consequences to the planet. This issue, like the environmental movement, is a religious crusade and nothing more. Researchers, not zealots or professors chasing after grants, such as Richard Lindzen at MIT and Ian Plimer in Austrailia have shown that this is a “man made” hoax.
Hummm Anon, sorry you choose not to look at the data but rant about how scientists only are chasing grants. Pretty sad. I’m sorry the schools failed you so badly.
atals
Atlas, you were right. It isn’t left or right, it’s just numbers and data. The numbers and data are quite clear–there is no “global warming” or indeed even “climate change.” Science advances on the principle of converging evidence. The evidence (data) has not converged around the three things I stated in my last post.
I’ll let Mark Steyn (from his recent column) have the last word on environmentalism as a religion:
“According to an Earth Day survey, one third of schoolchildren between the ages of six and eleven think the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and the eco-propagandists of the public-education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.”
So let me get this straight anon. You are taking Mark Steyn’s opinion over Sally Ride. Mark Steyn is dropped out of high school at age sixteen. Sally Ride has a PhD from Stanford in physics and is a former astronaut. What is the matter with you?
atlas
Atlas is correct. The rest of you are morons.
> Activists have persuaded children the earth is doomed, writes Ashley Thorne of National Association of Scholars.<
I think this probably has more to do with things like “Wall*E” than with “activists”.
Thanks Mike for that well reasoned comment. We can see the strength of your argument when you have to resort to making an ad hominem attack.
My advantage here is that nobody in their right mind would mistake me for a romantic.
It depends which part you’re talking about. Ask the whites in S. Africa or anyone outside the ruling party in Zimbabwe whether things are more peaceful now than 20 years ago.
They are most certainly drying up. Oil, especially. The world’s peak discovery of oil was in the mid-1960′s, and we have burned more than we found every year since the mid-1980′s. The “big finds” being touted now are in places like the extreme outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico, or in fantastically difficult areas under salt layers off Brazil. We had a huge price spike in oil as consumption ran up against the limits of pumping capacity, and our respite is due to the recession it produced. This respite is temporary.
The status of climate science was that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 was a worrisome prospect… back when Svante Arrhenius published his paper in 1896. We don’t know all the various feedbacks which influence climate. We don’t need to; until we know everything and can be sure it’s safe, tampering with the machinery is a risk we do not have the moral right to accept.
Look, the reality is that there *is* a far right/left divide. For those on either edge, the thesis is decided, and then it’s simply a matter of finding the necessary facts and experts to justify the thesis. The ice caps could melt (or expand to the equator) before they would be willing to renounce their thesis because the facts are essentially irrelevant. It’s the way a lot of humans work.
Witness, for example, the obscenity that is “Intelligent Design”, created for the sole purpose of allowing a justification for not believing in evolution outside of “my faith does not allow me to believe this”.
However, if denial is intellectually appalling, there are major problems with fighting Global Warming. The reality is that North America is not going to be nearly as badly affected by GW as the rest of the world. As well, the means to fight GW are quite possibly going to fail because of “tragedy of the commons” problems, and the rest of the world’s life style increasing industrialization.
So, the question becomes “Are North Americans willing to make significant cuts to their lifestyle to only possibly avert large scale death and destruction that is going to occur well outside of their normal interests?”
A 25% drop in GDP for a 50% chance of saving 2 billion poor farmers elsewhere?
There are lies on both sides. The deniers lie about GW’s existence because they don’t want to feel responsible (or don’t want to be accused of being responsible) for the destruction of GW. Some believers lie about the cost of prevention, the chance of success, and the cost of GW to North America because they don’t want people to decide to sacrifice the poor for their own luxuries.
Still, my own prejudice is to find the moral cowardice of the deniers to be worse. But then I have a thing about failing to admit responsibility for one’s actions, intentional or not.
Along with Mike’s well-reasoned argument leave us not forget Atlas’ contention that a PhD in physics from Standford and a career as an astronaut means that and unquestionable source of truth has been revealed and all questions, by virtue of the educational and vocational background of one of the pronouncers, answered.
Sorry Atlas, Mike, that’s not how science works but it is how religion works. Try to keep the two distinct in your mind if you have any such inclination.
Engineer Poet wrote:
> It depends which part you’re talking about.
I’m not talking about a part but about the whole.
Some while back the U.N., that source of all truth, probably because the U.N. has a PhD in physics from Stanford, published a study showing the percentage of the human race engaged in conflicts since WWII and the trend was pretty clear. Fewer wars that don’t last as long and involve fewer people. Sorry, no cite.
> They are most certainly drying up. Oil, especially.
Nope. Or at least not in any practical sense.
As Bart observed up the thread the Earth will be destroyed in a billion or so years. Should we start preparing for that eventuality?
Similarly, while the amount of recoverable petroleum isn’t a fixed quantity but a function of technology and economics.
Economics because once you’ve discovered thirty-five or so years of recoverable reserves there’s not much reason to look for more and technology because discovering that oil and accessing it economically are a function of the extant technology which, as I’m sure all us computer-using Internet-nauts know, is moving pretty rapidly.
> This respite is temporary.
It’s been temporary since about 1912 when the first warnings about Peak Oil were being issued since the supply of oil was clearly running out.
> tampering with the machinery is a risk we do not have the moral right to accept.
Of course it is. It’s the wealth generated by that “tampering” that funds the research and everything else including the monitor upon which you’re reading this response.
Beyond that, the “various feedbacks which influence climate” are just starting to be characterized and with all due respect to Arrhenius, he did discover carbon dioxide’s opacity to infrared radiation a good long time ago. What do you think Arrhenius would make of solar variability, coronal mass ejections, the climatic effect of the solar system’s location on the galactic plane, plate tectonics, the deep, hot biosphere and, to end on a flashy note, mega-lightning?
Also, the question of a moral right to tamper with the climate has to be measured against the condition of the human race. That “tampering” is responsible for the highest standard of living for the largest percentage of the human race since we could be identified as a new specie. I think you’ll need a more substantive case then the mention of Sally Rides’ alma mater to get the poor of the world to forgo a full belly.
When I was a child I believed the world’s resources were drying up. Anyone remember the “crying Indian” commercial regarding littering? I also remember a commercial from the early 70s in which a young boy, not much older than I was, lamented the fact that there might not be any oil left when he became old enough to drive.
Manipulating the fears of children is a horrible thing for adults to do.
I knew when I first posted on this topic that it would go nowhere in this forum. But as a science teacher it would be irresponsible of me to just walk away from this without saying clearly what the vast majority of the research says. Global climate change, driven by global warming is happening at an accelerated pace.
atlas
Atlas said, “Global climate change, driven by global warming is happening at an accelerated pace.”
A perfect illustration of why my children would never attend government schools. They would be taught religion in science classes. I would prefer they be taught religion in religion classes.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Where were you expecting to get, Atlas? A communal hug upon your casting of pearls before the swine?
I’d expect a science teacher to have a nodding acquaintance with the scientific method but that’s just me; I have all sorts of unrealistic expectations.
Say, here’s a thought. Maybe you could explain to your kids that the scientific method consists of a bunch of scientists taking a vote. That way what you teach and what you believe won’t have a continental divide between them.
Allen, I knew very well I was casting my pearls before you and Anon. I can’t resist throwing red meat at you. A character flaw on my part I guess.
One last time: glaciers are retreating at an accelerated rate world wide. The permafrost is melting at an accelerated rate. Arctic sea ice is both thinning and retreating.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 325 ppm to 387 ppm in the last fifty years at a nice even steady rate. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
Oh well, carry on. I do feel bad for anon’s kids though.
atlas
Allen, I knew very well I was casting my pearls before you and Anon.
Real cute atlas! Are you always so clever with your quips? I know my Ph.D. in physics can’t compare to your credentials as a Science Teacher, but it is the best I can do. Please explain to us the physics of global warming so that we can be as enlightened as you are.
Richard
Yes I am. Gets me into trouble.
Physics and global warming. Let me think. Humm, probably the opacity of the atmosphere to the reflected infra red part of the spectrum falls into your area. But maybe mot, biology is my area.
I mention Sally Ride as a person of formidable training and intellect who has studied the problem and come down on the global warming side. You may dismiss her thinking as biased and ignorant as you choose.
By the way, I haven’t seen in any of your posts that you deny global warming is happening.
Atlas
Quoth allen:
If that’s the case, why has world oil production been essentially static since 2005, while prices rose steadily until last year’s spike?
The oil price spike is all but certainly a large factor in the current recession. Worse, investment in oil production has fallen steeply, so we’ll see the next price spike at an even lower level of consumption. The world has peaked.
Do you seriously think that “technology” is going to re-fill all the empty holes all over the USA? If that’s the case, why all the hoopla over the “Jack” find in the Gulf of Mexico (a billion-dollar test hole that may or may not pay for itself), the Tupa find under 15,000 feet of water and a layer of salt off Brazil, and ANWR? If new oil is just a matter of “technology” instead of geology, we would not see survey companies going to the extremes that we see.
US oil production peaked in 1970, and even Prudhoe Bay (now itself down to less than half its peak) failed to get US production back up to 9.2 million bbl/day. ANWR, the Bakken shale… less than 1 million bbl/day each. The world needs FOUR new Saudi Arabias in the next decade or so just to keep up with depletion of existing fields. They do not exist.
Do you really believe that oil follows Moore’s Law? If so, you’re insane (heck, you’re insane if you listen to anyone who’s been wrong as much as the economists). Moore’s Law applies because we keep putting more and more on each square millimeter of silicon. If we could cut the amount of oil needed for every task in half every 2 years, we could have a Moore’s Law in economic output from oil. Instead, US automakers wanted to build guzzlers to “satisfy consumer demand”. Better silicon does nothing to reduce the amount of fuel required to power a drilling rig, or the increasing amount of steel needed to reach ever-deeper deposits of oil in ever-smaller pockets. Geologists like Kenneth Deffeyes will tell you why the oil the economists say “is just a matter of money” isn’t there. That’s true in a reductio-ad-absurdum sort of way; give me enough money and I’ll make oil out of dollar bills.
(I literally just got this e-mail: “*PETROBRAS SEES 55 MLN TO 65 MLN BBL/DAY 2020 WORLD OIL DEFICIT
2009-04-27 18:23:23.400 GMT”.)
Sure, I’m all for an ambitious space program. By the time the Sun heats the Earth to the point of inhospitability, we should have moved on to something else—just like we SHOULD have used the last 30 years to move off of oil (and coal).
Ghawar wasn’t discovered until 1948. East Texas, 1930; North Sea, 1970; Cantarell, 1976. That’s all over now. There are no more big easy-to-pump oil fields in the world waiting to be discovered. That’s why all the attention is on the extremes, like the outer continental shelf and the arctic. Once that’s been surveyed, there is literally nothing; the sea floor doesn’t last long enough to get deposits of oil before it subducts.
Really? That’s as ridiculous as Ayn Rand telling people to kiss the biggest, smelliest smokestack they could find, because all the benefits of civilization flowed from them. It was only partially true, and as events have proven, the smoke and smell were not the part that gave us the benefits. Far from it.
The world economy depends on energy, which is only indirectly dependent on fossil carbon emissions. We can stuff the carbon back underground after getting what we want from it or not use it at all. The former would eliminate most of the emissions problems (sulfur, NOx, and mercury as well as carbon), and the latter would eliminate the mining/drilling damage and ash/brine disposal as well. Acid mine drainage is certainly a byproduct of Business As Usual, but it sure doesn’t produce anything worthwhile.
That’s exactly what we’re doing; while I don’t care a great deal about the people who’d suffer the worst (e.g. the lowland farmers of Bangladesh), I also have to recognize that they have benefitted the least from BAU. I don’t particularly want to fix matters for their sake, I want them fixed for me and mine – but if it’s fixed for anyone, it’s fixed for everyone.
The sign of a failed argument is the use of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs. I never mentioned Sally Ride, and if climate change dries out Africa and causes the South Asian monsoons to fall at sea instead of in the mountains, several billion will be hungry in short order. I sure don’t see why my lifestyle would suffer by converting from coal to nuclear and wind power, from petroleum cars to electric with bio-fuel backup, but I sure see why Peabody Energy, Exxon-Mobil and the oil sheiks would do anything in their power to prevent the USA from going that direction. The question is, are you their paid shill, or just a useful idiot?
surely the latter.
atlas
Ok…to quiet the discussion on Sally Ride – Dr. Richard Lindzen. I dare say that if we’re going simply with experience and credentials on who to believe, Dr. Lindzen beats Sally Ride easily.
But the problem is that there are experts on both sides of the fence, and like previously politicized and faddish scientific endeavours like eugenics, scientists become much more attached to their hypotheses than objective conclusions. A consensus of “experts” means little.
I don’t have any problem with GW research, in fact I welcome it. Even should it eventually be proven to be false, there should be plenty of other discoveries it leads to assuming researchers keep the blinders off and can notice them.
As for taking drastic social change for the purpose of preventing it, that’s where I become hesitant. Look at the effect of the EPA on forest preservation. A political agency acted on what was believed to be the best science at the time and the overwhelming support of the public and government to protect forest habitats only to create more serious problems – raging forest fires.
Thinking about forest ecosystems and the Earth as systems of variables, the Earth easily dwarfs forests in the terms of scope ad complexity. We know so little about the Earth and the atmosphere, and to take significant measures that could violate our economic system in a profound way is scary.
Engineer-Poet
I do see why you may have to suffer by using inefficient technologies like windpower and biofuel – by paying ridiculous taxes to lower the market prices of these energy sources to something the market can bear.
I’m not going to get into a point-by-point since that would, well, pointless. Suffice it to say that Malthusianism has been around for a couple of hundred years and in that time there’s never been a resource that’s been depleted.
That’s not the sort of record that would normally inspire confidence but Malthusianism, in whatever guise, is no longer a way to understand the world, i.e. science but an intelligence test graded by those who’ve determined that the test is valid and that they’ve passed.
Oh, and don’t assume everything is directed at you. Atlas, not having any science to speak of on his/her side, has to wave around the impressive achievements of people who also don’t have the science on their side.
By the way, if you’re so sure carbon dioxide is the causative agent of global warming then kindly explain why the folks who make climate science their livelihood show such unaccountable interest in all sorts of other phenomenon like insolation, oceanic heat transportation, aerosols and lots of other stuff. If everything were driven by Arrehnius’ century-old insights why bother with all these extraneous investigations? Seems like a big waste of time doesn’t it?
nope
atlas
Personally, I love all the “the glaciers are melting!” chicken little chants. The melting is NOT occuring worldwide because some glaciers have actually grown.
Also, many of the studies that I’ve read have simply succeeded to show correlation and not causation… my father has lost his hair over the past fifty years, so does that mean that fossil fuel use caused it?
Temperature figures are questionable… when you can have a 10-15 degree F difference across 200 miles, how many data points are required to achieve a true global estimate? To show change in temperature from satellite data you can only go back what, 40 years? How is that a valid time span for a process that many claim has been going on for 150 years… and when other natural variables can act over even longer time spans?
The point is this – yes, this is an intriguing area of science that I believe should be fully funded, but no, there has been no evidence to convince me that we should take unnatural economic steps in an attempt to fix the ‘problem.’ A consensus of scientists mean nothing… at one point the consensus among scientists was that the Earth was flat or that the Earth was the center of the universe. At one point many believed that you could tell a person’s personality and potential simply by examining the surface features of the skull, or that man needed to eliminate bad genes from the population to survive. That’s the science that consensus gives you.
I think Atlas’ one-word response means discussion is now officially over. The pearls have been cast before the swine and nothing’s left to do but make it clear who’s in charge.
Yep, we’ve probably chewed this one over enough for the time being. I’m sure we will meet again on this field.
Meanwhile everybody take flu precautions seriously. You too Allen.
Atlas
CO2 lags warming by about 800 years. The cause is supposed to come before the effect. So we have a problem.
Anybody want to blame human activity for the Holocene Maximum, the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period? All warmer than today.
And, would anybody like to point out the catastrophes during those warm periods, as opposed to the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Little Ice Age.