We are weeks past Hurricane Ian making landfall and it’s time to begin questioning your students on what they are being taught about climate disasters by their teachers in our local schools.

The Fayette County Board of Education has a duty to our taxpaying parents and their students to insure that false political climate narratives are not being spun in our local classrooms. It is imperative that the BOE require our teachers to use evidence-based scientific data on climate disasters.

Perhaps Ian can convince us to pledge to the greatest service which can be rendered any country — stop frightening and lying to our children.

Educators mimicking the news media as agents of propaganda

As 150 mph winds ravaged the coastline, left-leaning news organizations were making a pathetic attempt at pushing the climate alarmist narrative regarding natural disasters.

At a time when the need for straightforward, composed deliberation has never been greater, the craziness comes pouring forth. Literally, in the same week, cultural authorities were claiming there is no such thing as biological sex, the vice president declared on international television that the U.S. has had an outstanding working relationship with the People’s Republic of North Korea, urban politicians said not punishing crime will lead to less crime, and the Democrat candidate for Georgia governor declared that a fetal heartbeat is a myth.

Unfortunately, many news outlets will present pundits who will cover for those lies just as they are doing for climate alarmism.

Beleaguered CNN anchor Don Lemon tried to frame Hurricane Ian around climate change during his show on Tuesday and his guest was a federal government hurricane expert (see: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11258583/Don-Lemon-reduced-silence-CNN-guest-trying-blame-Hurricane-Ian-climate-change.html).

“Can you tell us what this [hurricane] is and what effect climate change has on this phenomenon?” Lemon asked his guest, Jamie Rohme, the acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hurricane Center in Miami.

“We can come back and talk about climate change at a later time,” Rohme said. “I want to focus on the here and now.”

“You said you wanted to talk about climate change, but what effect does climate change have on this phenomenon that is happening now?” Lemon asked again. “Because it seems like these storms are intensifying. That’s the question.”

“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Rohme explained. “On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse, but to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.”

Major politeness points for NOAA’s Jamie Rohme, refraining from telling Lemon outright that he was full of horse hockey on national television.

Teaching our students to follow the enormous Green New Deal money

Brad Polumbo, co-founder Based-Politics.com, describes climate change propaganda as “a concentrated effort to exploit the natural disaster to push a Green-New-Deal-esque climate change agenda. The most prominent example of this blatant politicization is a now-viral interview in which CNN host Don Lemon repeatedly attempts to get an expert to blame Hurricane Ian on climate change.”

No one can smell easy money like the bodacious duo of John Kerry and Al Gore. There are trillions of government research and industry incentive dollars behind the push for climate alarmism. (Note: Members of Congress also want a piece of the pie and have been stalling the “Combatting Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act” bill that would prevent congressmen, spouses, and dependent children from insider trading with buying, selling, and trading individual stocks.).

Kerry and Gore are attempting to strong-arm the World Bank into throwing money at their climate schemes. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it this way, “When Al Gore, John Kerry, and the New York Times gang up on someone, you know a political hit is on. That’s what happened last week to World Bank President David Malpass, for the sin of not turning the international lending institution into an arm of Democratic Party policy on climate change.”

The ultra-high-carbon-footprint Kerry “claim[s] that the bank isn’t doing enough to combat climate change, which really means the bank isn’t taking dictation from him.”

Natural disasters are the ultimate marketing propaganda for creating public fear and wringing money out of governments. Kerry and Gore prostitute fear of climate to the detriment of the world’s developing nations which must have affordable energy to succeed.

The Editorial Board concluded, “[Climate Czar] Kerry may even be consigning poor countries to needless hunger from rising prices and perhaps a global shortage of natural gas for fertilizer. Climate monomania is easier to preach with a sea-side view from a bluff in Martha’s Vineyard than it is from a village with unreliable electricity in the Congo.”

Our local students deserve to know the global ramifications.

What does the scientific data say?

Our science teachers should not be afraid of citing scientific data that defies the political narrative. Chris Landsea, head of the tropical analysis and forecast branch at the federal National Hurricane Center in Miami, and Tom Knutson, senior scientist at the government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. wrote a paper entitled “Can we detect a change in Atlantic hurricanes today due to human-caused climate change?”

The two top scientists concluded, “The bottom-line answer to the question in the title is: No, we cannot confidently detect a trend today in observed Atlantic hurricane activity due to man-made (greenhouse gas-driven) climate change. Some human influence may be present though still below the threshold for confident detection.”

Three books our teachers and students should be debating

Before you and your public school system begin creating intense fear, anxiety, and physical harm to your children, read these three books:

1. “Apocalypse Never, Why environmental alarmism hurts us all” by Michael Shellenberger, a Time magazine “hero of the environment” and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

2. “Unsettled, What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters” by Steven E. Koonin, former Obama Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy, more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the field of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science.

3. “False Alarm, How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet” by Bjorn Lomborg, named one of the “100 most influential people of the world” by Time magazine, a “Top 100 Global Thinker” Foreign Policy, and “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by The Guardian.

First, reassure our children that the number of people dying in natural disasters has declined dramatically over time, (see figure one below).

“Despite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. And there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency of Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down, (see figure two below).

 A July [2021] Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are ‘not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s,’” (Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ, September 15, 2021).

Shellenberg cites that, “While Florida experienced eighteen major hurricanes between 1900 and 1959, it experienced just eleven from 1960 to 2018.”

Koonin laments that many government scientific reports are geared toward supporting the political climate alarmism narrative to appease the activists while providing the truth buried deep in the report documents.

For example, the 2014 National Climate Assessment, Key Message 8, claimed the number and severity of hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s. However, on page 769, buried in the text of Appendix 3, Koonin found the clear conclusion, “There had been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”

Koonin says, “The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report (AR5), available in late 2013, states clearly that there is low confidence in any long-term increase in hurricane activity.”

Koonin points out that Section 9.2 of the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) shows low confidence that a durable trend with hurricanes exists and that “we certainly can’t confidently attribute one to human influences.”

The force of hurricanes appears more dangerous because the coastal population has grown more dramatically in the last half-century. Many more people live in the paths of these destructive storms than did so even a few decades ago.

Lomborg is quick to point out that societal adaptions such as better infrastructure and building codes protect lives while the scaremongering reports cited in the news media assume no adaption at all.

A disappointed Koonin says, “As for the media, pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”

Albert Einstein said, “The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.” Our BOE and our teachers must take the politics out of our science classrooms and deliberate on authentic scientific data.

The radical climate alarmists and the climate profiteers are powering a false narrative through a complicit news media. The result is anxiety and depression in our young people who needlessly fear an Earth-ending climate catastrophe.

The time to stop misleading our students is now.

[Brown is a former mayor of Peachtree City and served two terms on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners.]