In late 2011, I was hiking through rainforest in the hills above Chiang Dao in northern Thailand with a hundred or so twelve-year-old children, five or six other teachers and a Thai guide. The forest was quiet, apart from the whooping and chattering of kids happy to be away with their friends for a few days. The guide had told us that there were still a few wild tigers in this region. But the kids weren’t going to see any wildlife at all, with the amount of noise they were making. 

We were on a trip from the international school I was working at in Bangkok. They called this annual outdoor education excursion, ‘A Week on the Wild Side’. It consisted of staying in a beautiful resort and taking day trips to do stuff like white-water rafting or trekking. So, not that wild, really. The parents of the richest kid in the school had hired a medical team which followed us as far as it could in a small, well-equipped ambulance. Just in case somebody fell off an elephant or ran into a deaf tiger or something.

Arriving at the school four years earlier, I’d been impressed by the splendid atrium in the arts building, four stories high and hung with twenty-foot banners created by students, depicting polar bears huddled on shrinking ice-floes, sweating penguins and other victims of global warming and the melting ice-caps. Global warming was everywhere in the Science and Humanities curricula as well as the Service & Action programmes.

I’d come across Martin Durkin’s 2007 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, and had started reading everything I could on the subject, unravelling the convoluted epistemology of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory. At this time there was some good science coming out of India, challenging the Al Gore/ UN narrative

A few months later, all classes at the school had been instructed to take part in what was called ‘the first global election’, which was not an election but a propaganda exercise in which people across the world would simultaneously turn off lights and electrical appliances for fifteen minutes. I don’t remember being asked to take a vote among the students or discuss the issue; we were all simply expected to turn off the AC and sweat gently as we carried on with our lesson. That’s not what happened in my classroom: instead we took improvised set-squares to Al Gore’s graphs, and I started writing a letter to the school administration and to the Science and Humanities departments, headed ‘In the first global election I vote NO’, and accompanied by several pages of links. I criticised the school for promoting dubious science, and invited any colleague to debate the issue with me. I wanted to create a public debate in which students and teachers would take part, as a ‘teachable moment’, and a demonstration of the ‘culture of thinking’ and inquiry which we were allegedly trying to foster among our students.

There were no takers. No scientist or geographer wanted to debate me on climate change, even though I was just a literature teacher. Not one. Well, you know, when everyone’s on a two-year contract…

There was talk, though, I heard; word got around. “Just don’t get him started,” was the general advice. I also become gradually aware of a subtle progressive ganging-up on me – as the only straight white male in the English department, which consisted otherwise of women younger than me and one extremely popular gay man, I was the one getting stereotyped. If I had such strange ‘right-wing’ beliefs about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide, who knows, perhaps I also had a hidden contempt for women and homosexuals. And if I was this wrong about environmental issues, it could be assumed that my views on everything else, from the application of marking criteria, to ways to structure a literature course, were suspect too.

But during that trek through the forest, an interesting thing started happening. I was walking at the back of the straggling, elongated file of children and teachers, talking with one of my colleagues, a polymath who taught history as well as mathematics and physics. The wide-ranging discussions I always got into with Mick were for me the highlight of the annual trip.

As we walked and talked, a girl came back from further up the line and asked if she could ask me a question. “Is it true you don’t believe in global warming?“

Children in IB (International Baccalaureate) international schools get indoctrinated into the global warming cult very young, and never, it would seem, meet anyone at all who disagrees – or have even any inkling that there might be people who disagree – and the girl was curious about this strange new thing in her reality. I didn’t know this year-group at all since I was teaching only High School and Diploma level.

So she walked along beside me, and I explained in simple terms about the ice-cores — how temperatures rise or fall first, followed hundreds of years later by carbon dioxide levels going up or down. How CO2 is the result not the cause, and anyway it’s good. Plants build themselves from carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant but the basis of all life. As the seas warm up, they breath out carbon dioxide. Now more plants can grow, binding the carbon dioxide into living forms. With more warmth and more food, life flourishes across the planet. And that’s all that happens. 

When I’d finished, she smiled at me happily and said, ‘Thanks!’ before running forward to rejoin her friends and share the good news that the world was not ending.

And then another kid came and asked me the same question, intrigued by this new thing in his world, and the same thing happened again. During the afternoon, one by one, at least half a dozen of these twelve-year-olds came to ask me ‘Is it true? I’ve heard you don’t believe in global warming?’ and all listened and then scampered off to tell their friends. None of them seemed upset to learn that everything they’d been told was wrong. They were just happy and relieved to be told it wasn’t true. One girl told me that her older sister had been crying herself to sleep every night about the world coming to an end in 2012. Something about a Mayan prophecy… She couldn’t wait to tell her about this, because her sister was mixing these two things together in her mind, the 2012 movie and all the scary global warming stuff. Each belief was reinforcing the other; she thought this would help.

Imagine how it must feel as a child to be told over and over and over again that you’ve arrived in this world just in time for the end of it. All these kids had all been exposed to disturbing propaganda animations about humans being a disease on the earth, which was running a fever to get rid of us all, or websites where they could calculate their carbon footprint and work out the age at which they would have used up their share of the earth’s resources and should in all conscience kill themselves. Many had been profoundly affected. Now imagine how it feels to be told that it’s all nonsense. The cancer is gone, and you’re still here, a free expression of the will of this planet if you did but know it.

So I made some kids feel better that day. They all seemed to believe me and to understand what I was saying, but how long the effect would have lasted I don’t know, before they were overwhelmed by the continuous propaganda they were subjected to every day at school and through the media. But who knows? All you can do as a teacher is plant seeds. 

None of them asked me, ‘But why would they lie to us about this?’ — the question which makes many of their elders fall victim to the argument from ignorance. 

Why would they lie to us about climate change?

I don’t know.

Therefore they are not lying to us about climate change.

After speaking with me they were just happy, and it made me happy to relieve them, for a while, of their anxiety. But at that time, there were things I wasn’t aware of. Not as pertains to the carbon question, where the logic is clear. It was this ‘Why?’ question that I hadn’t yet adequately understood.

The answer I had at that time, and which I would have given to any of those kids if they’d asked me, would be primarily political: to bring the world under a centralised world government. Global problems require global solutions — and equally, global solutions require global problems. A global tax funds a global government. And, of course, a good deal of personal enrichment along the way through the setting up of a whole new market under cap-and-trade regulations.

Not wrong, but not right enough.

I remember a conversation with my mother, which must have been around the same time, maybe the following summer. We were pottering around in the garden my parents had created at their house in a village near Winchester in Hampshire. The subject came up, and I explained to her my discovery that the correlation between temperature and carbon-dioxide had been reversed in the propaganda. As with my young students, I told her not to worry.

She cocked a gardener’s eye towards the sky, and said, “I don’t know — something’s happening.”

And she was right.

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A few days after my walk in the jungle, on 20^th December 2011, thousands of crows, pigeons, wattles and honeyeaters fell out of the sky in Esperance, Western Australia.

By the end of the year, a record number of of whales – a hundred and sixty – had beached and died on the shores of Ireland. Sudden deaths of fish, birds and mammals were reported from India, Australia, America, Iceland, and Hong Kong.

On New Year’s Day, 2012, five thousand or more red-winged blackbirds and starlings fell dead from the sky, in Beebe, Arkansas. On the same day, at least two hundred thousand dead fish covered stretches of Arkansas River. In that month, there were a further twenty-three mass animal death events worldwide, a high proportion of them occurring in Louisiana and neighboring states. On 4th January, thousands of dead mullet, ladyfish, catfish and snook washed up in Volusia County, Florida, and three thousand dead blackbirds were found in Louisville, Kentucky. On the 6th, hundreds of dead grackles, sparrows and pigeons were found dead in Upshur County, Texas. On the 14^th, three hundred dead blackbirds were littered across highway I-65 south of Athens in Alabama. On 11th February, hundreds of dead birds were found in Lake Charles, Louisiana. On 23rd February, twenty-eight baby dolphins washed up dead in Alabama and Mississippi. By 3rd March, the total had risen to eighty baby dolphins found dead in the Gulf Region. 

In the same time period, reports of mass deaths of birds, fish and other sea-life, land and sea mammals, came in from New Zealand, England, Malaysia, Ukraine, Kenya, Canada, Turkey, Switzerland, Columbia, Ireland, Portugal, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Italy, Brazil, and Tasmania.

The rest of the year continued the same trend, with reports from around the world of the sudden deaths, in their hundreds, thousands or millions, of birds, fish, whales, dolphins, seals, porpoises, turtles, starfish, shellfish, squid, lobsters, penguins, gulls, sea otters, geese, waterfowl, swans, deer, antelopes, bison, crabs, frogs – it was happening everywhere, from China to Finland, New Zealand to Norway, from Peru to Taiwan, Alaska to Kazakhstan, Mexico to Burma. In 2012 alone there were four hundred and sixty-five known mass death events reported in sixty-seven countries.

And so it has continued.

Thousands of birds drop from the skies along the South coast of England.

Dead turtles wash ashore by the thousands on Paradip Sea Beach in India.

In remote waters off Patagonia, Chile, at least three hundred and thirty-seven sei whales beach themselves in the largest whale stranding ever seen.

In Montecito, California 750,000 bees suddenly die.

Hundreds of thousands of dead jellyfish line the shores of Cable Beach in Australia.

Thousands of earthworms are found dead in a parking lot in Komatsu city Ishikawa, Japan.

In Quang Ninh, Viet Nam, sixty million farmed snout otter clams die overnight.

Tens of thousands of dead murres wash up on the beaches of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, emaciated, their stomachs empty.

The inexorable devastation of bee colonies continues.

In 2014 the WWF announced 52% gross decline in animal life since 1970.

In the single year of 2016 there were four hundred and ninety-four known mass death events in seventy-seven countries.

Sometimes explanations are ventured. The die-offs are ascribed, often speculatively, to disease, pollution, pesticides, naval exercises, volcanic eruptions, unusual weather conditions, parasites, heavy-metal poisoning, plastic debris or marine biotoxins produced by algae. Often the events are described as shocking, unprecedented, and mysterious. Sometimes ‘global warming’ is vaguely invoked, despite the fact that no warming has occurred this century, and less than a single degree of net change occurred during the last. As Professor Gliaever points out, this represents a remarkable degree of stability.

Carbon dioxide isn’t doing this.

But something’s happening. 

_____________________

“Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organisation and political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.” From the Report from Iron Mountain: On the Desirability and Possibility of Peace (1967)

Mass animal die-off events log, with links: https://www.end-times-prophecy.org/animal-deaths-birds-fish-end-times.html