Jonathan Abbot writes in comments on 2013/07/23 at 12:59 pm
My 10 year old daughter just read an article in National Geographic Kids about global warming. ‘The world is getting warmer, daddy! See?’ She wouldn’t believe me when I said it wasn’t.
I told her that data is more important than written words, and showed her this page as an explanation.
We discussed how temperatures had increased but were now flat, and so when the article made the usual claims about the hottest temperatures being all in the last 10 years, we agreed it could be true but it still didn’t mean the world was still getting warmer.
She had no idea she could go online to see the actual numbers for herself, they don’t mention that sort of thing at school.
I don’t know if you ever find time to read these comments Anthony, but thank you and all at WUWT for being there and doing the work you do. It changes people.
Thanks Jonathan, that made my day, as well as lifting the spirits of those who have contributed to the many reference pages that WUWT offers.
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This post is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.
Besides which, the hottest temperatures have not all been in the last 10 years, not in nature, that is, whatever the cooked books from GISS, et al, say.
If climate be the average of weather over thirty years or more, then 1984-2013 may well have been warmer than 1954-1983, but probably not than 1924-1953, using unadjusted data. To say nothing of 964-993, 994-1023 & 1024-1053.
R. Smalls at 1:16 p.m.: Do you find it depressing when a young person learns that nothing one reads should be taken at face value and that such person learns that you can go gather data and do critical thinking for herself? I found this post incredibly uplifting. It reminded me of when my son realized he could look through the box scores each day and gather more information than if he read the stories of the baseball games. He stopped reading the stories and began assessing the significance of contributions and timing by closely studying the data collected on the game. From that moment on, he never was anyone’s fool; if he wanted to know anything, he knew he had merely to look for the underlying data and perform his own analytics.
I fondly recall the old “schoolhouse rock” PSA fillers from 1980s Saturday morning cartoons, so looked them up on Netflix. I wanted to play “Conjunction juunction whats your function” and “Still just a bill” for my kid. The whole collection has been updated, and the first one served up was a cartoony planet with a fever. Followed by several other green themed musicals. I sadly turned it off and said “nevermind”.
I’ve also been repeatedly disappointed that my favorite childhood Nature/National Geo shows from PBS have been remixed without the parts where anything larger than a bug gets graphically eaten by another creature. Apparently, the land dries up, and everybody converges at the waterhole. Lions roar a little, aligators look out of the water, then it rains and everyone leaves fat and refreshed.
They totally wiped out the scene where a gator grabs a baby elephant, then its mother grabs the gator with her trunk, swings it over her head a few times and stomps it to red-green pulp.
This comment has wandered from AGW, but it fits the theme. Truth that does not fit a specific narrative is discarded for the greater good.
I showed my kids this page: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ so they would know not to believe everything they read.
I didn’t find it particularly depressing. What’s depressing about figuring at (fortunately, at a young age) that people who refuse to use their own powers of observation and mental faculties are easily played for a fool by those who can spin a flashy yarn?
Don’t kids still like to learn a “secret”? We parents still have the freedom to share wise “secrets” with our young’uns.
I have had Fellows of the Royal Society in my kitchen who are not as willing to look at the data as Jonathan Abbot’s ten year old daughter. That is what I find depressing.
No, depressing is seeing a teen snarl at you when you try to mention data, etc.
I think the depression felt by D.Smalls is perhaps because of the indoctrination of this guys daughters teacher? Also, please bear in mind that many ordinary parents have neither the actual capacity or time to spend ‘helping’ with their childrens more ‘complete’ education.
I am the first to call out bad parents – but this guy (Jonathan Abbot) needs some congrats for taking the extra effort. All too often (and I’ve done it myself) it’s too easy for a parent (who knows more information/truths) will simply say ‘You will find out when you’re older!’, etc. Kudos for catching the miseducation early!
I have 4 grand kids in Australia oldest 18 she is going to uni youngest 7 our school system is controlled by left wing unions and a lot of teachers are greenies so they are brain washing students in global warming it is sad but I keep telling them the truth, what you are being told is not true . every parent must try and stop this brain washing
I recently had a conversation with a colleague of mine who works as a very senior scientist at a mid-size pharmaceutical company. He is a very accomplished man of great intelligence; hard-working, disciplined, yet open-minded — you name it, he’s got it. During our conversation, he needed an example of how people fail to accept the most basic and self-evident facts of life and science, and he came up with—you guessed it—global warming. I struggled a bit for composure, as did he when I outed myself as a d….r; he did admit that he had spent little time on reviewing the evidence himself but had, like so many others, simply taken it all in good faith on the authority of the specialists.
The brain-washing campaign of the warmists has been staggeringly successful.
—
Just saw Mariwarcwm’s comment above, which resembles my experience. I have even had a senior colleague (a different one; very knowledgeable, but not much of an original thinker) mindlessly use the “d…alist” word. That really shocked me.
Sorry, I should have gone and asked WordPress for the preview option.
It seems the internet isn’t perfect, after all.
My biggest mistake as a parent was letting my children attend public schools. They can all read, write, add and subtract (of course I taught them that). In fact two are post-graduate engineers and one is a molecular biologist The problem is that they are members of the Church of Ecodruidism. They harbor guilt and are depressed for being normal humans with normal human desires.
Public education is child abuse. Save your kids! Get them out of public schools!
My little girl is 3.
Since they can’t convince enough thinking adults to believe their cr@p, plan B is to brainwash the kids.
Its going to be a battle – I’ve got to not only teach my little girl the truth, I’ve got to teach her to lie to her teachers, so she isn’t discriminated against.
D. Smalls says:
July 23, 2013 at 1:16 pm
This post is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Try reading anything about econominic news regarding Obama.
That will take this post of the list
Dennis York says:
July 23, 2013 at 2:24 pm
My biggest mistake as a parent was I taught them that). Inletting my children attend public schools. They can all read, write, add and subtract (of course fact two are post-graduate engineers and one is a molecular biologist The problem is that they are members of the Church of Ecodruidism. They harbor guilt and are depressed for being normal humans with normal human desires.
Public education is child abuse. Save your kids! Get them out of public schools!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I can’t afford to send my daughter to a non government school, but I am lucky that the grade school she is in is NOT flaming leftist.
To Jonathan Abbot :
the best thing you can do for your children is to purchase a few different kinds of thermometers, calibrate them, and have them record temperatures for a few days/weeks and see what the data looks like.
Explain the concepts of instrumental limits of observability, instrument error, variance, mean, standard deviation, observation error, and some introductory statistics.
Then have them go back to WUWT temp page, see the actual data from your local weather station, and see just how bogus the historical data is and how arbitrary the “global temperature” anomaly really is.
Actually, this would benefit the scientists blowing smoke up our collective butts too !!
[snip – wildly off topic, plus denigrating – Jai I’m not going to let you threadjack again. – Anthony]
@KevinM –
The old ones are still around & can be found. Just skip anything made since ~2000.
@Matthew W –
Please give serious consideration to homeschooling. That’s what we do. Yes, it’s tough, but it’s worth it. And there are some good homeschool programs around that aren’t very expensive if you need a more formal curriculum.
I think the first comment I ever made on WUWT had to do with kids. (Anthony had seen something in a textbook at a parent-teacher conference or something like that.)
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOUR KIDS ARE BEING TAUGHT!!!!
(Were the exclamation points superfluous?)
They are YOUR kids. Not the School System’s. Let the school teach them the facts. You teach them how to think and evaluate.
You know what your values are. Do your kids?
Here you GO, Kevin M. (re: 1:27PM). ENJOY!
“Oh, I’m just a bill… .”
“In 1787 I’m told… ” [U.S. Constitution Preamble]
“Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?”
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MODS! I was using my real first name then. My real first name is not “Gunga”.
“He alone who controls the youth controls the future.” – Adolf Hitler. I would love someone to sue the education department, Teachers Federation and some teachers personally for using public education(paid for with our taxes) to plug personal agendas and not the educational curriculum. Perhaps a “class” action.
I take every opportunity to tell people they can go look at the data themselves. I don’t even particularly mention this site, I just tell them to go look at the data sets at NOAA, HadCRUT, UAH, etc. Then I mention that they’re all gathered at one site (here) so that one can see them more easily.
Most of the people I talk with about this have never looked at the real data, and have just taken the media’s word for granted. I’ll mention my degree in geology, and what we know about the Earth’s ancient climates from the geologic record, and usually have them nodding in agreement about the natural swings in temperature long before there were humans.
If that implants even a seed of doubt in the average Joe’s mind, I’ll take that as a success. I haven’t run into any hard-core CAGW’ers yet, but most of them haven’t looked at the data either. I did have one Facebook commenter handwave Bob Tisdale away as being a “known denier,” which was easily countered by pointing out the ad hominem fallacy. Data is data, regardless of who points it out.