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Feds pay university $450K to scare kids about climate change

What are your tax dollars wasted on? Well, for one thing, this indoctrination:

The National Science Foundation gave the University of South Florida a nearly $450,000 federal grant to develop a low-budget video game to teach high school students that, essentially, the world will end in some sort of weather catastrophe if they don’t change their behaviors.

The federal grant was highlighted this week by Republican Senator and presidential contender Rand Paul through his “Waste Report” effort:

The game will involve a science fiction narrative of the effects of climate change on the students’ community as told by virtual persons from the future.

“[The] environment will help students attach a ‘human face’ and a sense of immediacy to hitherto abstract issues of global warming.”

The first part of the game will ask students to deal with simulations like severe weather and sea-level rise, while the second part of the game will group students in teams to create plans to “save the future.”

How far in the future? Well, 110 years. Recall that Doc Brown and Marty only went 30 years in the future; and while Back to The Future was a great movie trilogy, accurately predicting just 30 years in the future proved pretty hard.

Perhaps the government instead of Hollywood is better at predicting the future? Take for example Dr. John Holdren, who is the president’s chief science advisor and was a technical advisor on former Vice President Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.

In 1986, he predicted 1 billion people would die as a result of global warming by the year 2020. At his 2009 confirmation hearing he was asked if he still believed climate change would kill 1 billion by 2020. He said, “I think it could happen.” Scared yet?

Here’s a prediction: the real science behind this game is psychology and political science.

But those pushing the unproven notion that the world is on the brink of some massive climate disaster stand behind such expenditures.

“The White House and other advocates have touted games and interactive media as a way to enhance understanding of climate change,” The Hill reports. “According to the [grant’s] abstract, ‘This exploratory project helps high school students learn complex Global Climate Change (GCC) science by making it personally relevant and understandable.'”

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About the Author
Fix Editor
Jennifer Kabbany is editor-in-chief of The College Fix.