10-minute trainer: walk your class along a bar chart of the atmosphere's constituents

The levels of alarm about energy production, and the urging of children to hassle their parents into driving less etc in order to save the polar bears (which happen to be doing very well of late), avoiding temperature rises (which would be beneficial almost everywhere), and reducing CO2 emissions (ditto), and of course reducing the incidence of whatever horsemen of the apocalypse currently appeals to those driven nearly demented by their permanent state of alarm about 'the environment', can all be put into a calmer perspective by constructing a bar chart of atmospheric composition (a stacked barchart, in the jargon) in order to display how little CO2 there is in the air, how little the human contribution is, and how little the difference of even a total cessation in our CO2 production would make.

To make it even more vivid, here is an appealing idea from a poster called 'Wendy', who put this up on a comment thread on Jo Nova's site (comment 64, http://joannenova.com.au/2010/11/mystery-solved-why-the-pr-hacks-exploded-their-credibility/#comments), where I have added some boldening at the end:

'Imagine one kilometre of atmosphere that you want to clean up. For the sake of the discussion, imagine you could walk along it.

The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.

The next 210 metres are Oxygen.

That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. Just 20 metres to go.

The next 10 metres are water vapour. Just 10 metres left to go.

9 metres are argon. 1 metre left out of 1 kilometre.

A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.

The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide.

A bit over one foot.

97% is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural. It has always been in the atmosphere otherwise plants couldn’t grow.

Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. About half an inch. Just over a centimetre.

That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.

And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.

Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre.

So in every kilometre of atmosphere, complete with green-house gases regulating the climate – in every kilometre reflecting back and retaining the sun’s heat on earth, just .18 of one millimetre is contributed by Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Now Julia Gillard’s Great Green Tax, the Emissions Trading Scheme is designed to reduce Australia’s contribution by 5%. That’s what it’s designed to do. Gillard wants to reduce our [point] .18 of one millimetre by 5%.

That’s what all the pain is about.

It is simply madness. It’s not based on science. It’s a tax. Finally, a tax on the air we breathe.'

Now that's clearly referring to Australia,  but it would be easy to customise this for each of our own countries, and thus provide an excellent '10-minute trainer' to have up our sleeves to use when opportunities arise.

Some niggles arise over the specific numbers to use, not least because of the huge variability of water vapour levels.  If I take, for example, the Wikipedia estimates of the composition of the dry atmosphere, and add in their estimated overall average of 0.4% for water vapour by adjusting all the other constituents in proportion to their quantities, and then round the figures again for simplicity, I get the following values:

N2                    778 metres 

O2                    209

Ar                         9

H20 vapour            358 cm

Trace gases             42 cm   (of which CO2 is 39cm)

So, be prepared to define and defend your own computations and assumptions.  The numbers used by Wendy assume 1m for water vapour, and this may be more typical for the troposphere ( the estimates given in the Wikipedia link today: 'Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1%'; elsewhere it states levels vary between 1% and 4% near the surface, with an overall value of 0.4%).  The Wikipedia data is imperfect in other ways too, for example there is an excess of something like 57ppm when you add up all the constituent ppms for the dry atmosphere.  I suspect someone merely bumped up the CO2 component to 390ppm from a value of around 333ppm in an earlier table without bothering to make any other adjustments.

A simpler alternative would be to do the example for the dry atmosphere, thereby sidestepping the troublesome water:

N2                    780.8 metres 

O2                    209.46

Ar                         9.32         (adjusted down by 0.02 by me to allow overall total to be 1000)

Trace gases             42 cm   (of which CO2 is 39cm)

Lest one be accused of trying to downplay CO2 by even a tiny amount, perhaps the best way is to start with the current estimate of the global ppm for CO2, and adjust the rest of the constituent ppms in due proportion to make up the totals for either the dry, or the 'average' atmosphere.  In any event, it doesn't really matter for the impact of this 10-minute trainer - the important thing is to know the assumptions or source of  your arithmetic.

Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth  

More Gore in the Classroom - Australian Educators Pushing Propaganda

Bob Carter exposes a sorry development in Australian education:

'AL Gore's flawed climate change film is to be included in the new English curriculum.

IN 2006, former US vice-president Al Gore made a movie and companion book about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. Gore undertook many speaking tours to publicise his film, and his PowerPoint slide show has been shown by thousands of his acolytes spreading a relentless message of warming alarmism across the globe.

But while audiences reacted positively and emotionally to the film's message - which was that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming - some independent scientists pointed out that An Inconvenient Truth represented well-made propaganda for the warming cause and presented an unreliable, biased account of climate science.

For nowhere in his film does Gore say that the phenomena he describes falls within the natural range of environmental change on our planet. Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.

In early February 2007, the Department for Education and Skills in Britain, apparently ignorant that the film was scientifically defective, announced that all secondary schools were to be provided with a climate change information pack that contained a copy of Gore's by then notorious film. Many parents were scandalised at this attempt to propagandise their children on such an important environmental issue.

One parent, school governor Stuart Dimmock who had two sons at a state school in southern England, took legal action against the secretary for education in the High Court, and sought the film's withdrawal from schools.

In a famous judgment in October 2007, Justice Burton, discerning that Gore was on a "crusade", commented that "the claimant substantially won this case", and ruled that the science in the film had been used "to make a political statement and to support a political program" and that the film contained nine fundamental errors of fact out of the 35 listed by Dimmock's scientific advisers. Justice Burton required that these errors be summarised in new guidance notes for screenings.

In effect, the High Court judgment typed Gore and his supporters as evangelistic proselytisers for an environmental cause.

Fast forward to this month and many Australian parents have been surprised to learn Gore's film "will be incorporated in the [new] national [English] curriculum ), as part of a bid to teach students on environmental sustainability across all subjects".'

The complete article is here:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/inconvenient-nonsense-infiltrates-the-classroom/story-e6frg6zo-1225951336015

I hope that the Australian legal system will permit a challenge to this.  'Shoddy science and politicians on the make' is one thing, blatant indoctrination of children is quite another.  Not only will they be misled, they risk being mentally abused by the scaremongering.  Unfortunately, the Australian Psychology Society is collaborating in this by failing to study the science, and devising instead ways to make the promotion of pseudo-science and alarmism a little more palatable.  See:  http://www.psychology.org.au/publications/tip_sheets/climate/

Or actually listen to what I can only describe as a speaker from the Pollyanna school of psychology, the Australian Susie Burke, during this radio programme: http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioshow/kids-and-climate-change-enlightened-or-frightened

Climate campaigners' classroom turpitude captured for future studies of depravity at work

'Why did they think ruthlessly killing children was funny? –

because in their heads, they weren’t killing children,

…they were killing deniers.'

Jo Nova has done sterling work in documenting and providing insight into what led to the 10:10 video in which the producers fantasise about utterly destroying, at the press of a button, those who show the slightest reluctance to toe the party line on climate.  Including young children in a classroom.  

The whole thing deserves deep study.  The paper by Jo Nova has been published by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), and can be downloaded as a pdf from here: (1) 

Kudos to the SPPI for publishing this.  Kudos to Jo Nova for creating it.  She gives a summary and background at her own blog (2).

It provides some provocative speculations as to what led to the creation of the video, speculations which deserve to be shared widely and investigated further.  Given that the scientific case for alarm about CO2 in the atmosphere is so shoddy, the motivation for such an arrogant, aggressive, and deeply malevolent video must come from elsewhere.  Is it the same motivation that drove Maurice Strong to call for the destruction of industrial civilisation? (more background on Strong here: refs (3) below).  Is it the same motivation that led James Lee to terrorise the employees of a broadcasting company  in the States?  (4).   Or, at the milder end of this sorry spectrum, was it what led three women to barge their way into the offices of a newspaper whose editorials they happened to disagree with? (5)  

Meanwhile, and more in the background, there seems no end to the initiatives aimed at pushing children into conformance to the party line on climate.  Here is a recent report of one in the States called ACE (6).  Links to many more can be found on the Page on climate sites aimed at schools (7).  Many of them do not hesitate to use scary imagery and doomladen notions to win attention and obedience.  


This is a veritable moral swamp that needs to be drained.  Standing at the edges of it, we can see unpleasantness, scaremongering, arrogance, ignorance, intolerance, brutality, destructiveness, and terrorism.  Quite a result to follow from the speculative insertion of a dramatic effect for CO2 into computer models of the climate!  Fortunately the real climate has displayed no such role for this beneficial gas.  In our world, the dramatic role for CO2 is found in its impact on plant growth.

References

(1) http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/mystery_solved.html

(2) http://joannenova.com.au/2010/11/mystery-solved-why-the-pr-hacks-exploded-their-credibility/

(3)  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250789,00.html, and here: http://www.taxtyranny.ca/images/HTML/Maurice-Strong/article1.html

(4) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100052207/james-lee-is-al-gore-is-prince-charles-is-the-unabomber/

(5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/oct/11/climate-rush-daily-express

(6) http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2030099,00.html?xid=rss-topstories


(7) http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/p/climate-sites-aimed-at.html

Gore out the door in one school, but Nye clouds the sky in his place

What's in a name?  That which we call Al Gore
By any other name would be more discreet
And thus by stratagem we may play our part
And let our children Bill Nye to meet.

In England a court of law found that
The Inconvenient Truth has many lies
And must be shown with caution
Lest it mislead about our skies.

In the New World some teachers have decided
That Gore is not good news
But they found a ready substitute
To promulgate his views.

Extract (I put it in italics, and bolded one paragraph) from a post by Jeff Wiita on the site Minnesotans for Global Warming           :
'My daughter's 8th grade Earth Science teacher showed her class a video on man-made global warming by Bill Nye, The Science Guy, and kids consider him a science guru; thanks to PBS.

I wrote a letter to the teacher and specifically addressed climate history, including the 1975 Newsweek article, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the Holocene Climate Optimum. I even addressed the Roman Warm Period and the Dark Ages Cold Period.

At the parent/teacher conferences, I asked the teacher if she was going to show Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth." She shook her head "no" and said, "We wouldn't do that." She told me that she was not supposed to interject any bias in the science class. I then told her that was exactly what she did when she showed the video of Bill Nye, The Science Guy.

Bill Nye is part of Repower America (Alliance for Climate Protection). Here is a short video.

Repower America - Bill Nye, The Science Guy

During the video, Bill Nye turns man-made global warming into a generational war. Categorizing global warming skeptics as old and intellectually challenged while believers are young and intellectually enlightened.

The founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection is Al Gore. Bill Nye is clearly acting as a surrogate for Al Gore in the public schools system. The public school teachers are still promoting man-made global warming, but they understand that Al Gore's movie is radioactive; so, they have reverted to covert warfare with Bill Nye, The Science Guy.

We must not confuse our kids with science fiction in a science class that is supposed to teach scientific fact. How are they supposed be able to distinguish between the differences? Their future relies on their trust, and their trust is fragile.

I have requested some time to present an opposing point of view to the Earth Science class based entirely on scientific fact. I am still waiting for the teacher's response.'

Source: http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2010/10/bill-nye-the-global-warming-guy.html#more

The Tangled Web they weave as they practise to deceive children on climate

There are dozens of sites, possibly hundreds, that are pushing out information and grounds for alarm to children and young people in and around our climate.  The variability of this climate poses problems, not least from the inevitable 'extreme values' that must occur from time to time in any particular characteristic subject to this variability, such as temperature or rainfall.  But these sites are not so much about climate as about 'blame' and political action, often using frightening images or language to engage with their targets and persuade them to hassle their parents, to change their lifestyles, and generally be scared witless about the future.  The complete lack of observational evidence to justify such treatment of the young does not deter them.  They have been told by the IPCC that the world is doomed unless we act soon, and they believe it.  The 'evidence', such as it is, is entirely based on the projections of computer models of climate specifically designed to give CO2 a large, indeed driving effect, a role which it steadfastly refuses to adopt in the real atmosphere.  Very commonly, these sites compare the atmosphere to a greenhouse - an all but entirely fatuous analogy, but one which has caught on very widely.  One day, pupils will laugh at any teacher who tries to explain why greenhouses get hot through 'trapping infra-red'.  But Miss, they will chuckle, greenhouses almost transparent to infrared would get just as hot as ordinary glass ones.  And unless 'Miss' has a red button on her desk, she will have some explaining to do.

I have put a partial listing of such sites on this blog.  It can be found as a 'Page', and can be reached via the link near the top right corner of the homepage.  Dave W has provided further information on some of these sites, and I am most grateful for his help.

If anyone out there would like to help with this, please email me (JSclimatelessonsatgmaildotcom) with the name of the site you plan to check out, so that we may reduce the chances of people working on the same one at the same time.

Please also email me with any errors or omissions you come across on the Page.  Thanks!