Kids Worried About Climate? Grifters Have Child’s Garden of Climate Denial

Mike Huckabee’s The Kids Guide dot Com – (no I won’t link to this grifter):

Our kids are terrified that the planet is facing a death sentence due to climate change, and they’re hearing that it could happen in their lifetime! As their teachers and the media are pushing an agenda that promotes fear and panic, kids need to understand the facts behind climate change so they can feel safe.

That’s why we created for The Kids Guide to The Truth About Climate Change. This important guide gives kids the facts about climate change, all while spotlighting the failed doomsday predictions throughout history.

Inside Climate News:

The guide argues that the climate crisis is not as dire as mainstream media would have you believe, but it does not list its authors or what their credentials might be. And though its title claims to present the “truth,” science educators and climate researchers have found the guide to be full of factual inaccuracies. 

“It’s propaganda,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting fact-based science education, including about evolution and climate change. “It’s highly slanted with a clear ideological message, and it’s very unreliable as a guide to climate change for kids.”

As climate debates remain polarized and politicized, Huckabee’s guide is part of a small but determined contingency of climate disinformation materials marketed to children and families. It also fits into a new niche in the broader landscape of climate skepticism. In recent years, efforts to erode public confidence in mainstream climate science—which have long been orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry—have trended away from outright denial of the climate crisis to a more nuanced narrative that doesn’t deny that the planet is warming but instead suggests it’s been overblown by scientists, politicians and mainstream media, and advocates for continued use of fossil fuels.

Climate skeptics’ arguments have been consistently debunked by scientists, but misinformation from the oil and gas industry and its proponents has continued to proliferate and seek out new audiences. 

“Of course we need to protect our home,” the guide remarks on page four in an acknowledgement of environmental responsibility that advocates for recycling and energy conservation. But when it moves on to describing climate change, it asserts that “the climate has always changed — long before humans walked the earth — and it continues to change.” Such rhetoric, a hallmark of many media campaigns that minimize the severity of climate change, ignores the scientific consensus that temperatures in the past century rose almost 10 times faster than the average warming after ice ages during the past million years, and that the increasing heat correlates with global carbon emissions, which are higher than they’ve ever been in human history. Warming during the next century is projected to progress 20 times faster than it did in the last two million years.

The guide has little sourcing of the information it presents—the only citations offered are for graphics, and even these are often as vague as a file name or organization title, making it difficult for a reader to track down the original source. 

The visuals used in the guide are even more blatantly misleading than its text, Branch noted. One graph, titled “Thousands of Years of Carbon Dioxide Levels,” spans 400,000 years ago until “present day,” and is summarized with the conclusion, “looking back in time, carbon dioxide levels have always gone up and down.”

But the data the graph labels as “present day”—peaking at a little over 280 parts per million—actually represents levels from 2,300 years ago, around 391 BC, Branch pointed out. The vast majority of the carbon dioxide driving climate change has been emitted only since the Industrial Revolution, with atmospheric CO2 concentrations currently over 420 parts per million, higher than any data point included on the graph, which has a scale that only goes up to 300 parts per million.