“That’s the Earth now,” Alex says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then it’s just starting to fade away.”
Looking up to make sure his mother was following along, he tapped the end of the drawing: “In 20 years, there’s no oxygen.”
Then, to dramatize the point, he collapsed, “dead,” to the floor.
And these are not just two freak stories. In a new survey of 500 US pre-teens, it was found that one in three children between the ages of six and 11 feared that the Earth would not exist when they reach adulthood because of global warming and other environmental threats. An unbelievable one-third of our children believe that they don’t have a future because of scary global warming stories.
We see the same pattern in the UK, where a survey showed that half of young children between the ages of seven and 11 were anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern. This is grotesquely harmful.
And let us be honest. This scare was intended. Children believe that global warming will destroy the planet before they grow up because adults are telling them that .
When every prediction about global warming is scarier than the last one, and the scariest predictions — often not backed up by peer-reviewed science — get the most airtime, it is little wonder that children are worried.
Nowhere is this deliberate fearmongering more obvious than in Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, a film that was marketed as “by far the most terrifying film you will ever see.”
Take a look at the trailer for this movie on YouTube. Notice the imagery of chilling, larger-than-life forces evaporating our future. The commentary tells us that this film has “shocked audiences everywhere,” and that “nothing is scarier” than what Gore is about to tell us. Notice how the trailer even includes a nuclear explosion.
The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive and less frightening dialogue.
Bjorn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.
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