Climate change for toddlers

Is your toddler environmentally unaware? Does your 4 year-old ask you to drive your SUV to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal? Are you worried that your child might be opposed to freezing in the dark this winter?

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Never fear, Netflix is here!

Perusing the New York Times looking for stories to complain about (I read them so you don’t have to!) I noticed on the front page a story that looked cringeworthy enough to complain about: Meet the Band of TV Animals That’s Talking to Preschoolers About Climate

Of course. It was bound to happen. Netflix is now streaming a BBC cartoon series designed specifically to propagandize your kids about climate change. In the series your kids will learn that the apocalypse is nigh and that they should spend every waking moment either terrified of what is to come, or, more importantly, haranguing their parents into compliance with the will of our Davos overlords.

Four-year-old Francis Gaskin, who lives with his family in Houston, has a favorite episode of his favorite new Netflix cartoon: When the Amazon rainforest canopy dries up from too much heat, the manic howler monkeys must move into the lower realms of the forest, creating havoc among the other rainforest residents. “They had to find a new home,” Francis explained during a video interview.

“I noticed something else,” the preschooler added. “The frogs were going to lay their eggs in the water, but there was no water in the stream because there was zero rain.”

“Sometimes the Earth warms up,” he said.

Francis’ favorite show is “Octonauts: Above and Beyond,” the recent spinoff of a long-running BBC program, and one of the first television shows directed at very young children to explicitly address climate change. The program attempts to strike a delicate balance: gently showing three- and four-year-olds that their world is already changing, without frightening them with the consequences.

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Oh, that’s nice. Apparently they are trying to strike a balance by making it more likely that they harangue their parents than quiver in fear.

You can tell that the show is very science oriented. I read in the last IPCC report that the Amazon rain forest was going to dry up, pushing howler monkeys into the lower realms of the forest. It was in Appendix D, if I recall.

Ironically the New York Times makes the claim that the show is largely scientifically accurate, despite the fact that not one of the problems the heroes of the show are fighting is actually happening. “We gather a lot of our story ideas directly from the news, and are vetted by science.”

“Octonauts” is heavy on adventurous heroes. A pair of pirate cats travel the world to rescue animals from islands that are being swallowed by the rising seas. A macaque hydrologist delivers water to a herd of elephants on the Namibian coast as worsening drought dries up their drinking water.

As the thawing permafrost of Siberia thwarts a canine scientist from conducting her research, she observes; “Temperatures have been rising all over the world. It may just not be cold enough for the ground to stay frozen anymore” without explaining the connection to greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

In a way, the series is part of a long tradition of children’s programs that employ animal characters to teach about the natural world.

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Going after our children is a theme for the Left. They have a difficult time convincing adults to abandon civilization, natural law, property, and free speech rights–so they decided the best way to expand their power is through brainwashing children and recruiting them into bizarre cults. You can see the results in school.

This is propaganda, nothing else. Even some scientists who believe in climate change aren”t convinced it is a good idea to go down this path:

“Nobody really knows yet at what age kids can understand climate change,” said Gary Evans, an environmental and developmental psychologist at Cornell University who is conducting a study of children in kindergarten through third grade to find out what they know about climate change and how it makes them feel. “Anyone who tells you that they know the best way to talk to young kids about climate change is doing so without the guidance of data.”

Data, schmata. The point is to get them young.

“We are intentional,” Ms. Stanton said. “We’re considering how much is too much, how complex is too complex? But it all goes back to the creatures. They’re cute, they’re going on a roller coaster ride of adventure, and it always ends with the resolution of the creature in peril, and all is right with the characters.”

The program also shows preschoolers how climate change could affect their own lives. In one episode, the Octonauts experience a shortage of their essential beverage, hot cocoa, because heat is making the cocoa plants wither. The team sings, “Changing climate makes the temperature high, and in the heat the trees are thirsty and dry.”

Netfilx has released the show in 19 languages and in 190 countries. While the company declined to provide numbers, executives said that its viewership was among the top 10 children’s programs in 44 countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia, France, Spain, South Korea, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates.

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Think about this: “in the heat the trees are thirsty dry.” Where the hell do they think the Amazon Rain Forest is? Canada? It’s already hot there and that is why there is a huge rain forest there, idiots.

But the point of this is clear: if you don’t get involved your hot cocoa will be gone.

The Times keeps insisting that everything in the show is scientifically vetted–with the exception that animals can’t actually talk and use machines to achieve their goals. But that is deeply deceptive. The Amazon rain forest is not drying up, and there is no prospect that it will. For that matter, if they wanted to do something to protect the rain forest I would suggest focusing on deforestation, not CO2. CO2 is plant food, and the smaller the forest the less rain there will be, because the forest helps create the conditions under which rain is plentiful.

Oh, who am I kidding? Nobody cares about the science. It is too complex and uncertain.

Bottom line? This is just one more example of how the cultural elite is manipulating us through our kids. Undoubtedly there will be transgender recruitment videos as well…wait, didn’t Blues Clues go down that path already?

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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