Such was Che Guevara’s advice to Evita Peron, at least in her story as told by two Conservative songsters, Sir Tim Rice and Lord Lloyd-Webber. Anyway, the next generation of totalitarians have taken this advice to heart, as we well know. The staff of Sen. Inhofe’s Environment and Public Works committee who are attending the latest meeting of the Kyoto parties in Nairobi, Kenya, have encountered a piece of didactic drivel aimed at warning the children about global warming:
The book is about a young kid named Tore who lives in an Arctic village. Tore loses a dog sled race because he crashes through the thinning ice allegedly caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions. The book features colorful drawings and large text to appeal to young children.
After the boy loses the dog sled race, he is visited by “Sedna, the Mother of the Sea” in a dream. The “Sea Mother” Goddess informs the boy in blunt terms that the thinning ice that caused his loss in the dog sled race was due to manmade global warming.
“I’m the one who created and cares for the sea creatures – whales and walruses, seals and fish,” the “Sea Mother” explained to the boy. The “Sea Mother” then tells the boy she will educate him about the reason the ice is thinning.
The morning after his dream, Tore sets out on a quest for knowledge about the dangers of catastrophic manmade global warming. A “snowy owl” informs Tore that “the planet’s heating up” and that both the Arctic and Antarctica “are warming almost twice as fast as elsewhere.” [EPW Note: The Arctic, according to the International Arctic Research Center was warmer during the 1930’s than today and both the journals Science and Nature have published studies recently finding – on balance – Antarctica is both cooling and gaining ice.]
The “snowy owl” tells Tore that winning dog sledding races “might not be your top worry” and the owl instead tells the boy that “lots of things are changing fast. Some people who hunt for a living are already going hungry because a lot of seals and walruses are heading north.”
The “snowy owl” also asserts that “the great ice cap here in Greenland—mountains of snow and ice up to about four kilometers thick—is thawing.” [EPW Note: A 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice and mass.]
Next, a polar bear informs Tore that it is hungry because the ice is too thin to stand on and hunt and the bear says that other bears have “starved” because the sea ice went out to sea. The polar bear adds, “We may not have much of a future.” [EPW Note: In May of 2006, biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut, a territory of Canada, noted that “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”
One would hope the representation of a creator Goddess will keep the book out of US schools on First Amendment grounds…