Climate Change - Absenteeism of Truth

In elementary school, “No more pencils, no more books. No more teacher’s dirty looks” was traditionally shouted out on the bus ride home on the final day of school. It was a one-mile route home with three stops, but it seemed to take about half an hour.

The last calendar day of high school meant thinking about a traditional friends camping trip before starting summer employment the following Monday, once with public works and the remainder of the summers at a local gold mine. A slightly more mature outlook on life meant no jovial rhymes on that day.

The winter weather in my Northern Ontario hometown could drop to -40°F (cold record -50.08°F - February 1, 1962, and high record 103°F - July 12, 1936), and heavy snow squalls and severe drifting were not abnormal occurrences. Arctic winds from James Bay would often rush down the Moose River and downward again along the Mattagami River, making the feel-like temperature seem even colder. February 1, 1962, was a Thursday, and despite the record chill, I would’ve been sitting in Mrs. Hamilton’s third-grade class at Whitney Public School.

Despite the winter extremes, the school buses ran every day – I don’t believe I missed a single day of school because of buses not operating. This sounds akin to the old parental adage, “I had to ski 2 miles to school and it was uphill both ways”, but I don’t remember a single day of missed school because of bussing.

I still have many ties to my Canadian hometown, and I know that schools get closed systematically when harsh winter weather warrants.

In a study performed by Stanford University and published by Phys.org, weather-related events, and in particular tropical cyclones caused by climate change, have generated a record number of school absenteeism. The stated locations of the research are “across 13 low- and middle-income countries hit by tropical cyclones between 1954 and 2010.”

However, as pointed out in Climate Realism’s article, “Wrong, Phys.org, Climate Change Isn’t Causing A Rise in Lost School Days”, “According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), there is no strong evidence of an increase in either the number or intensity of hurricanes globally due to human-caused climate change.” And further, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated a, “low confidence” in long-term (centennial-scale) increases in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes”.

Statistics may prove that school absenteeism has increased, but the blame on tropical cyclones induced by climate change is pure fiction. It should be noted that tropical cyclones are hurricanes normally associated with storms set in motion in the Pacific Ocean.

Climate Realism is an extension of the Heritage Foundation. Wikipedia, the left-leaning digital version of the old Books of Knowledge, states, “The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientifically proven consensus on climate change.” This statement literally asserts that their understanding of the science is fundamentally based, not on any evidentiary proof, but on their bastardized interpretation of consensus. The tale around the term “consensus” has a distinct failure in mathematics, as I explain in my article “The 97% Consensus or a 97% Contention”.

The leading cause of school absenteeism in the most recent past was the progressive embellishment of the dangers of COVID-19 and ineffectiveness of the disease’s vaccine, as being promoted by liberal governments. These forced school closures have students in some areas losing as much as two years of scholastic instruction. The legacy leftist media doesn’t want to talk much about that.