by MELANIE SUN – SCIENCE professor Ian Plimer has blasted Australia’s education system for “pounding” children with climate indoctrination and teaching them that they could soon be dead.
While well known for rejecting the Left’s consensus on climate change, the professor emeritus says he has good reasons to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.
- West facing major crisis as education systems taken over by Leftist thought.
- That’s child abuse and it’s been going on a long time
- Kids are now unable to critically think.
“More recently, I’ve been concerned about kids who are emotionally distraught about the climate crisis that they’re told is happening,” Prof Plimer told an audience at CPAC Australia in Brisbane last weekend.
He said his latest book, The End of the World, looks at the effects that climate change alarmism is having on children. The book has seven co-authors.
SINNING
“There’s a prominent psychiatrist who looked at the national curriculum, where from kindergarten to when they finished university, our children are getting pounded with ideas about how you are sinning, you’re creating the end of the world, you’re destroying the planet, it’s all your fault, you’re not going to live very long.
“Now, I think that’s child abuse and it’s been going on a long time,” Prof Plimer said.
He said that for many young adults, the information about climate change they’re learning in school is leading them to decide later on in life that they don’t want to have children.
“We have now a whole generation of kids who are absolutely terrified of the future,” he said.
“We have a new class of people out there who are suffering trauma from the activists, and they are being told that the world is ending.”
Prof Plimer said that, as a geologist who has had a life-long passion for education, he believes that the West is facing a major crisis because education systems were taken over by leftist thought – and kids now cannot critically think, they don’t know how to acquire knowledge.
“They don’t know how to filter and say, well, that’s not in accord with this,” he said.
He said that the activism surrounding the topic of climate change is ultimately about freedom.
“We have got a whole generation of compliant kids, which is a great step to destroy freedom. And if you can create a generation of people who cannot think critically, you can control them,” he said.
“These books are based on evidence that has taken hundreds of years to accumulate,” Plimer said of his writings based on published science about Earth’s geological record.
“For thousands of years, we’ve had shysters going around telling us that the world’s ending. And if just one of them got it right, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
WRONG
“So, you cannot be 100 per cent wrong on anything unless you’re predicting the end of the world,” he told the audience.
Meanwhile, there is a class of people taking advantage of the situation that has found “new ways of laundering money”, he said.
The professor – who has been persona non grata at the ABC since a controversial 2009 “ambush” interview following the publication of his first book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, that sold 150,000 copies – said he’s noticing some change in people’s understanding about the climate change issue, almost 15 years later.
“People realise that they have power – and I think we’re also seeing people searching for different sources of information,” he said.
“So, I think we are very much at a turning point. It is time now to go back to having cheap energy, reliable energy and not hurting our children with fears about the end of the world.”
One criticism against Prof Plimer over the years has been that he’s not a climate scientist. But he says that, as a geologist, he knows a lot about climate.
“Geology textbooks for the past 250 years have been dealing with climate,” he said.
For “moralising” teenagers, Prof Plimer has challenged them with a moral question about their use of mobile phones, which have “82 of the 92 elements in the periodic table.”
“Are you going to give that up?” he asked.
“Ten per cent of the world’s energy is used in data centres. Are you going to give that up?
“If you swan around in an electric vehicle feeling that you’re morally superior, kids your age are working in the cobalt mines of the Congo for the Chinese. These are slaves. So where are your morals?” he said.PC
I enjoyed Professor Ian Plimers speech at CPAC. He always delivers a no nonsense approach on this subject and does it with great humour. Well done Professor you are a national treasure in my book.