The better conclusion is that we should stop loading children up with the fears of psychologically disturbed adults.

Children aged 9 through 11 shouldn’t be losing sleep over anything. It is outrageous that we have allowed the global warming alarmist industry such unfettered access to our children. In many American public schools, Vice-President Al Gore’s propagandistic terror flick, An Inconvenient Truth is being passed off as a science movie, and children in elementary and middle schools are being forced to watch it. One wonders what such a survey would find here.

It is shameful that the school system continually reports the flavor-of-the-month scientific theory over and over again—but never reports back when the theories fizzle out fast.

The history of environmental alarmism is rarely examined, particularly in public school. Kids aren’t told that Rachel Carson’s much-beloved book Silent Spring and the backlash against DDT it caused may well have made it far more difficult to prevent millions of malaria deaths on the African continent. Or that it was based on unfounded conjecture that turned out to bear false conclusions.

While kids are still being pumped full of the notion that there is an “overpopulation” problem, no one ever mentions that the historical track record of such predictions is, to be kind, not stellar. Paul Ehrlich’s Sierra-Club-inspired pop science screed The Population Bomb (1968)--predicting worldwide famines that would starve hundreds of millions between 1970 and 1985--turned out to be total nonsense.

Environmental alarmists have consistently been wrong, but just as consistently have been rushed into print, lionized by a gullible media, protected by the liberal powers that be, and shoved down the throats of schoolchildren.

And, of course, the “hot” theory of the 1970s—that “global cooling” would usher in a new “ice age”—has been thrown over for the “global warming” Al Gore prophesies today.

This time, however, it is not merely adults fighting over the cover of Time magazine. Now children are being forced to live through the ravages of scientific emotional instability, the way a drunk’s family has to live with the effects of drinking without tasting a drop. Trapped in a world in which adults can no longer remember the distinctions between children and themselves, innocent children are being stuffed with inappropriate fear and insecurity.

They are told not only that their world is falling apart around them, but that the adults they depend on cannot be trusted to protect them. Children have a psychological need to trust their parents and the adult authorities to whom they look for protection. For the environmental extremists to have undermined this vital component of their emotional stability is despicable.

But, unfortunately, not in the least surprising.