Trashy Climate 'Science' Can Be Exposed in the Classroom: Watts Shows the Way

Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The title links to a post by Anthony Watts in which he describes the results he got when he tried to replicate a 'high-school physics' experiment promoted by Albert Gore as part of a recent propaganda initiative.

He writes:

'Readers may recall my previous essay where I pointed out how Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 Video, used in his “24 hours of climate reality”, had some serious credibility issues with editing things to make it appear as if they had actually performed the experiment, when they clearly did not. It has taken me awhile to replicate the experiment. Delays were a combination of acquisition and shipping problems, combined with my availability since I had to do this on nights and weekends. I worked initially using the original techniques and equipment, and I’ve replicated the Climate 101 experiment in other ways using improved equipment. '

This work by Watts was triggered by provocative remarks by Gore as well as by evidence that his video showing the experiment had been doctored:

'[Gore's] specific claim was:

“The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.” - Al Gore in an interview with MNN 9/14/2011

So easy a high school kid can do it. Right?
Bill Nye, in his narration at 0:48 in the video says:

You can replicate this effect yourself in a simple lab experiment, here’s how.

…and at 1:10 in the video Nye says:

Within minutes you will see the temperature of the bottle with the carbon dioxide in it rising faster and higher.

So, I decided to find out if that was true and if anyone could really replicate that claim, or if this was just more stagecraft chicanery. I was betting that nobody on Gore’s production team actually did this experiment, or if they did do it, it wasn’t successful, because otherwise, why would they have to fake the results in post production?'

 See the post for a great many details, easily sufficient for any physics teacher to replicate the experiment.  The post has many illustrations, including some videos, of the procedures, the equipment, and the results.

The conclusions?

Watts finishes his post with these remarks

'Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified, and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.
The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL.'

All italics and emboldening in the above have been added by me.

One day, school curricula will include such refutations of shoddy science and exposures of blatant manipulation to assure pupils that 'yes, people really did get up to such tricks back in those days, but we know better now'.