Why we do what we do – 'It changes people.'

This post is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.

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 showed my kids this page: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ so they would know not to believe everything they read.

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.

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 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.

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.

[snip – wildly off topic, plus denigrating – Jai I’m not going to let you threadjack again. – Anthony]

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.

Sorry – should have been @Brent S

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
– Vladimir Lenin

>> Matthew W says:
>> Save your kids! Get them out of public schools!
I don’t think private schools here are any better. I do wonder what I’m going to do when my toddler reaches school age and teachers start serving him left wing, government sponsored, alarmist rubbish.

milodonharlani says:
“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, etc”
What is really depressing is that WUWT and many other scientific sites still uses GISS, HadCrud etc as some sort of data which is in some way relevant to reality, when they KNOW that is not the case. 🙁

Janice Moore, Thanks!

I had the conversation many years ago with my daughters about what they will hear at school and need to repeat to get good grades. That in science class and history class, what they hear may not be true or factual but answer as the teacher presented the information. The green agenda and the political correct agenda has taken over the schools. The green agenda is pushed in science, social studies and even subjects such as reading and vocabulary. As was stated above discuss with your kids what they are learning in school and skim their text books so you can point out the lies. Now my kids now 13 and 11 come home and tell me the bs that the teachers are saying.

Great post by a thoughtful and caring father.
As for contemporary teachers, I had lunch yesterday with an old friend who has done a lot of work in urban planning. We were both bemoaning the universal mantra of getting rid of cars, which has turned many vibrant areas into windswept, boarded-up muggers’ paradises.
He commented that young to mid 40s urban planners all went through the same education system, which has at its core assumptions like public transport = good, private transport = bad; public space = good, private space = bad; and so on. We sat there wondering how this essentially Marxist view of the world had so permeated something like urban planning, chock full of unsubstantiated and unquestioned assumptions.
Teaching is much the same in most (perhaps all) Western countries.

Wow. I had no idea that my comment would even get read, let alone splashed up front and centre like this. You made my day, too. I’m sorry I didn’t take a bit more time to polish the prose a bit more.
Thanks for all the positive comments from everyone else. A few points I’d like to make:
1. Jai Mitchell and the like: I have no idea what conversation you think I had with my daughter in your head, but the real conversation was brief, and touched mainly on the uncertainty of our knowledge about the climate, past present and future. We didn’t even mention CO2. The point I made was about the importance of checking data and thinking for yourself. The data I showed her was the UAH Lower Atmosphere Temperature Anomalies, which when it was still rising every CAGW alarmist on the planet was shaking under our noses. Now suddenly it’s the wrong data to look at. You’re more sad than funny.
2. I would never, ever attempt to indoctrinate my child or anyone else’s. My children know the positions I hold on all sorts of scientific, political and philosophical issues but all I will say is ‘Here’s what I think, and here’s why. No go and think it out for yourself.’ The best possible way to turn any child away from a particular stance is to try to ram it down their throat.
3. I wouldn’t say that my children are ‘indoctrinated’ at school, it’s just that CAGW is still taken as the scientific mainstream position at the moment. What else are the teachers to say? It’s up to the scientific community to clean their own mess up first. I have yet to see either of my children bring home any assignments that suggest that CAGW is anything more than a very minor part of their science lessons. I am actually quite impressed with the science they do, and it is a very good (state funded) school in many other ways.
4. I was taught that a new ice age was impending when I was at school, but I got over it.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Dihydrogen monoxide comprises 95% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere

It still doesn’t fail to sadden me how must leftists have corrupted once great, non political institutions. My NG subscription came to a hard stop in December 2007, and even that was probably a couple of years past the sell by date. I do still miss what it once was.

What will kids think of their teachers IF global mean temperatures start heading south? What will they think of climate scientists when they leave school in a cooling world? The good news is that they will become ultra sceptics. 🙂 Just like me when I remember the 1970s global cooling scare.

Mr. Watts,
I cannot express how much I am in your debt for all that you have done to counter the forces of ignorance and hysteria that came horrifyingly close to stampeding the U.S. into ill-considered, harmful actions. If I may say so, the country owes you a hearty THANK YOU!

I’m sure you gave equal weight to the views of most climate scientists on the matter, yes? Certainly you told her that most of them tell us that warming continues within predicted rates, just not at a significant rate in one section of the biosphere for a short period of time. Wouldn’t want to lie to your own kids, right?

Ryan the Facetious,
Perfect screen name, by the way. My own personal answer to your question is:
“I would rather lie to my own kids than have someone else do it for me!” That way, at least I know that the lies my kids are hearing are the ones I WANT THEM TO HEAR and not something else that I would rather they not hear!
However, the most important skills we can teach our children are independent thought and critical thinking. I went to one of the most Liberal of Liberal Arts schools in the world, but I was very lucky in that they highly valued independent thought, critical thinking, and honest debate and disagreement, and thought that these were an absolutely critical part of the learning process, and as such were taught to us and were highly encouraged. I could completely, utterly, and totally disagree with a Political Science professor, and as long as I could back up my points properly, I would still be awarded an “A” on a paper.
Far too many places now will simply give a bad grade to a paper which disagrees with “orthodoxy” even if the disagreement is backed up cogently, logically, and concisely, and that is a tragedy.

John Garret, may I expand your statement to include the (English-speaking?) world owing the WUWT volunteers a debt of gratitude for aggregating so much data and resources. From Anthony to RGBatDuke, Ric Werme to Willis, Bob Tisdale to Roy S., Leif S. to Vukovick(sp?). Even Mosher, if he’ll take the time to explain his thoughts (same for Leif).

This crap about global warming is part of the “common core” propaganda now being “taught” (i.e., indoctrinated) in US schools as part of the “sustainability” meme, which additionally tells kids they will have to give up their civil liberties so that the world can be made safe.
The people purveying this obscenity ought to all be locked up for abusing kids by scaring them with lies.

Brian D Finch
Thanks
Dihydrogen Monoxide is a perfect example on a small scale of what the CAGW cult is doing.
When I was looking up Dihydrogen Monoxide I found a couple of radio announcers John and Scott Fish were suspended this year and face felony charges for advertising the Dihydrogen Monoxide prank against the uneducated.
In other words you can get felony charge slapped against you for making a prank solely directed at our uneducated society. CAGW cult is much worse. They are in it for a profit and doing a very good job at it.

Power Grab says:
July 23, 2013 at 1:48 pm
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?

Totally. Like telling people that some guy a long time ago, without any corroborating evidence, walked on water, turned loaves into fishes, water into wine, and cured the sick just by touching them.

It is insanity to call carbon dioxide pollution, it is the building block of all Carbon Life.
We are Carbon Life forms, comprising 20% carbon and the rest mostly water, and we get our carbon from plants and from the critters which eat those plants.
Without carbon dioxide there would be no life on Earth as we know it.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas which is practically all hole in the atmosphere. It is physically incapable of raising the temperature of the Earth. There is no sense of scale or understanding of heat energy and heat capacity in the AGW Greenhouse Effect.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect is an illusion, there is no “33°C warming by greenhouse gases without which the temperature would be minus 18°C”.
Traditional science contradicts this and comparison shows the AGW GHE to be exactly what it is, built on sleights of hand manipulation of real physics changing properties and processes and producing a nonsense through the looking glass with Al world, where any number of impossible things can be thought before breakfast..
From traditional physics:
Temperature of the Earth with atmosphere, mainly nitrogen and oxygen, 15°C
Temperature of the Earth without any atmosphere at all, minus 18°C
Compare with the Moon without atmosphere, minus 23°C
Temperature of the Earth with atmosphere, but without water, 67°C
That is the temperature of the Earth without the main “greenhouse gas” water – 67°C – think deserts.
Where is the AGW Greenhouse Effect claim of minus 18°C without its “greenhouse gases”?
It does not exist. That 33°C “warming by greenhouse gases” is a science fraud.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect has excised the Water Cycle, and it has no rain in its Carbon Cycle. The residence time of water in the atmosphere is 8-10days, carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle.
The real thermal blanket is the heavy volume under gravity of the real gases nitrogen and oxygen.
These also help regulate temperature from the extremes of cold and heat of the Moon.
In heat transfer by convection as their individual volumes expand when heated and so less dense and lighter than air they rise taking away heat from the surface, where they cool and condense and now heavier than air sink back to the surface flowing into the less dense hotter low pressure area, in convection currents, winds.
Hot air rises, cold air sinks & Winds flow from high to low. Basic real world meteorology.
Then the fake fisics of the AGW Greenhouse Effect gets even more absurd in the claim that we get no direct radiant heat energy, longwave infrared, from the Sun.
Claiming thermal infrared is either stopped by some invisible unknown to traditional science barrier “like the glass of a greenhouse at Top of Atmosphere (TOA)” and/or, “the Sun gives off insignificant amounts of longwave infrared and we get insignificant of insignificant”.
The last from the claimed temperature for the Sun of 6000°C, calculated by some planckian sleight of hand on the thin 300 mile wide atmosphere of visible light around the millions of degrees hot surface of the real Sun.
Absurdity piled on absurdities. In place of the direct radiant heat we actually physically feel from the Sun, which is longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared which in traditional physics is simply called Heat to differentiate from Light from the Sun, AGW Greenhouse Effect fake fisics claims shortwave, mainly visible light, heats the Earth’s surface of land and water. This is a physical impossibility in real physics.
Visible light from the Sun is not a thermal energy, it impacts matter on the much smaller electronic transition level which does not heat matter.
The electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen bounce visible light around the atmosphere, for example, hence our blue sky, and, water is a transparent medium for visible light, it does not get absorbed at all, not even on the electron level but is transmitted through unchanged.
We would have no life if the ocean was heated by visible light from the Sun.
It takes the bigger energy of longwave infrared heat to move whole molecules of matter into vibration, which is heat.
How is it that so many “climate scientists” have not seen the absurdity of these claims? How come they are all, apparently, ignorant of the basics of real gases with mass therefore weight under gravity, and volume and attraction? How can so many calling themselves scientists claim our great, blazing millions of degrees hot Star which we call the Sun, is a cold 6000°C, – roughly the temperature of the Earth’s innards?
Whatever they are, these people claiming to be climate scientists while pushing these fake fisics basics, are not scientists.
Who created the fake fisics for the KT97 and ilk to claim we get no direct radiant longwave heat from our millions of degrees hot Sun and so attribute real world measurements of this to “backradiation by greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA?
The Solar Constant is the real world physics measurement of how much heat energy, longwave infrared, heats the Earth at the surface.
AGWScienceFiction fisics in its comic cartoon energy budget has attributed this to shortwave from the Sun at TOA. This is science fraud.
Why has the AGW Greenhouse Effect claimed this? Because, it is a scam. I repeat, AGWScienceFiction uses real world physics measurements of the direct longwave infrared heat we get from the Sun to claim this comes from “backradiation by greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”.
Look at these comic cartoon energy budgets – notice how KT have more heat radiation upwelling from the Earth then they have shortwave entering at the surface..
How many examples of the science frauds in the AGW Greenhouse Effect do you require to see the con for what it is?
What you have is the creation of a ridiculous fantasy world of a fictional Earth and its cold 6000°C star with no heavy voluminous real fluid gas atmosphere, but instead, empty space populated by the imaginary ‘hard dots of massless not subject to gravity ideal gas travelling at great speeds under their own molecular momentum miles apart from each other bouncing off each other and the sides of an invisible container to thoroughly mix’.
And yet another imaginary “invisible container” around this pretend Earth. Maybe its the same invisible one preventing the heat from the real Sun entering, this time to keep these fictional ideal gas molecules from diffusing at great speeds to the ends of the universe.. This imaginary “well known radiation physics” from AGW GHE goes straight from the Earth’s surface to empty space.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect has excised the whole of our heavy ocean of real gas atmosphere around the Earth.
And apparently, none of those calling themselves climate scientists have noticed they do not have sound in their world – can you hear this?
You have been had.
If that does not make you angry as scientists then you are not scientists.

Tilo Reber says:
“The formula for the energy of a photon is E=hv. Or energy equals planks constant times the frequency of the photon. This mean that a high frequency photon, like X-ray or UV has much more energy than low frequency longwave radiation.”
What does this E=hv really mean, what is it saying? To the majority of the people reading such blogs these formulae are meaningless, they convey no pictures to the mind about what is happening physically.
Can you explain this simply?:
http://www.expertsmind.com/course-help/?p=heat-transfer-laws-assignment-help-98734287858
“Planck’s law Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiations are not emitted or absorbed continuously but in energy associated with each photon is
E = hv
Where h is Planck’s constant (= 6.625 x 10-34 j – s). On the basis of quantum theory Planck showed that
ER(λ) = 2πhc2 / λ5 /1 [ehc / λKT – 1] ”
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” Einstein http://www.phnet.fi/public/mamaa1/einstein.htm
Imagine I am your grandmother..
So your: “This mean that a high frequency photon, like X-ray or UV has much more energy than low frequency longwave radiation”
What do you mean by “more energy”?
Heat and light are distinct categories in traditional physics, heat is not light and light is not heat. They are different wavelengths, they impact on matter in different ways.
Light from the Sun impacts matter on the electronic transition level, heat impacts matter on the whole molecular vibrational level.
Why when all the different wavelengths are travelling at the same speed, heat and light from our millions of degrees hot Sun reaches us at the same time, in around 8 minutes?
Because there is a great difference in size. Visible light from the Sun is not big enough to impact on the whole molecular vibrational level, it does not have the power to move the whole molecule into vibration which is what it takes to heat up matter.
Rub your hands together, that is mechnical energy moving the molecules of your skin into vibration, heating them up, you can feel the heat. Heat is invisible.
Stand in front of a fire, the invisible heat you feel radiating out from the fire is longwave infrared, called thermal infrared because it is the wavelength of heat. Near infrared, shortwave infrared is not called thermal, it is classed in with light.
There is a huge difference in size between the wavelengths of gamma and radio waves, for example, radio wave can be as big as a house and several football fields long. The smaller visible light wavelength impacts matter on the smaller electron level. It is much tinier than the wavelength of heat because it is moving more rapidly within the same linear speed. So what does “more energy” mean? Are are rapid series of microscopic pin pricks to your skin carrying more energy than one impact by a dagger?
All these references to “more energy” and complicated, meaningless to most people mathematical formulae are for one reason only, to confuse the difference between the bigger heat waves and the much, much tinier light waves.
The difference in size between the invisible thermal infrared, longwave infrared which is heat energy, and the invisible shortwave infrared is great – heat energy is around the size of a pin head and bigger, if it was not invisible it would be big enough to see, near infrared is microscopic, even if it was not invisible it would be too small to see.
Visible light is even smaller than near infrared.
So what does more energy mean between these?
This meme from the AGW version of ‘physics’ is to make you think that visible light from the Sun is powerful enough to heat matter, because it has taken out the real heat energy direct from the Sun and claims shortwave light heats matter so that you do not notice the real heat energy is missing.
This is in order to pretend that there is such a thing as “backradiation heat from greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”, it uses real world measurements of the direct longwave infrared downwelling from the Sun to pretend these are from “greenhouse gases backradiating longwave infrared heat which is upwelling from the heated Earth’s surface of land and water”.
Visible light from the Sun cannot heat land and water, because it is much tinier it impacts matter on the electronic transition level, the level of tiny electrons of the bigger whole molecule.
Because AGW claims “shortwave in longwave out” it does not explain what impact visible light from the Sun actually has on meeting matter, as it makes the false claim that it heat matter in its meme “all energy is the same and all heats matter on being absorbed”.
In the atmosphere which is mainly the real gases nitrogen and oxygen, visible light is reflected/scattered by the electrons of these molecules. The electrons absorb visible light and are briefly energised by this and move in their orbit, always wanting to return to ground state they do and emit the same energy they absorbed, blue being more energetic than the longer wavelengths of light, tinier moving more quickly than the bigger slower wavelengths of visible, gets reflected/scattered more – think more nervy pin ball – so we get our blue sky as blue light has more encounters with the electrons. This does not convert to heat energy, it is non-heat energy in and non-heat energy out.
In sight visible light converts to electrical energy, in nerve impulses, this again is not converting to heat energy. In photosynthesis in which plants create carbon matter out of sunlight, water and the building block food of all carbon life forms, carbon dioxide, visible light in mainly blue and red is converted to chemical energy, in the creation of sugars. Again, this is not converting matter to heat energy. Our eyes and photosynthesis are using visible energy for quite distinctly different processes to that required to heat matter.
The AGW meme “all electromagnetic energy from the Sun is the same and all create heat on being absorbed” is clearly seen to be a science fraud. Visible light does not heat matter, it cannot because that electronic transition level is too small to impact on the the bigger whole molecule. It takes bigger energy to move whole molecules into vibration. Vibration, internal kinetic energy, which is movement of the whole molecule, is heat.
Further, AGW claims that “visible light from the Sun heats the ocean”, but here from traditional physics which has already understood the way visible light impacts matter, it classes water as a transparent medium for visible light. Which means it is not absorbed at all by the electrons and is therefore transmitted through unchanged.
If visible light from the Sun heated the water in the ocean, if its energy was being used to heat up the water, there would not be any photosynthesis.., there would not be carbon life as we know it.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect and its energy budget is trickery.
If you can see why they have needed to take out the real direct wavelength of heat energy from the Sun and so needed to put in its place the physically impossible claim that visible light heats matter on being absorbed, for its fake “backradiation by greenhouses gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”, then you will be able to see the other sleights of hand they use for this – like attributing the Solar Constant to shortwave at TOA, when it is actually the measurement of how much direct thermal infrared heats matter at the surface, how much the Sun’s great thermal energy transferred by longwave infrared radiation actually is, by how much it heats the surface matter.
C.O.D. physics n. Science dealing with properties and interactions of matter and energy.
An x-ray is not the same as a radio wave, they are distinctly different. Light from the Sun is distincly different from Heat from the Sun.
Visible light from the Sun is benign, it is non-ionising which means it does not move the electrons which absorb it out of their orbit, it is too weak to do this – uv is in both sets, some is ionising and some not. Bear in mind the difference in scale.. Ionising uv scoring a direct hit on an electron will send it out of its orbit, this is destructive to the molecule.., which is why our bodies produce melanin to absorb it, to stop it destroying our skin molecules, which is how we get our tans. Uv is also non-ionising, our outer layer of skin uses it much like plants use visible light, but to convert to vitamin D, essential for our good health.
This science fraud of the AGW Greenhouse Effect effectively hides the wonders of our natural world of which we are fully part. The real physics is now very well known, we have come a long way since Herschel’s first amazing discovery that the great heat from the Sun was invisible…, and is still taught traditionally. Alhough now you will have to got to the different science disciplines to discover what these different energies are like, their different properties like size and so on, and what happens when they impact matter. And no doubt we still have more to discover.. If you want to learn about radiant heat, longwave infrared, go to Thermodynamics not Optics or, as we have now advanced in knowledge even further, Biology.
And note, AGW tries to hide there is a difference in the actual wavelengths by their meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all create heat on being absorbed” is further bolstered by the “meme” that “thermal means the source, the Sun”. Deliberately lying to hide that in real traditional physics thermal, meaning of heat, is a description of the actual wavelength. So shortwave infrared is not called thermal. See the NASA traditional physics which used to taught through general education because the difference between invisible heat and visible light was expected to understood at primary/ young secondary level: http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html
“Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in our skin can detect the difference between inside body temperature and outside skin temperature
“Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.”
Note the difference in size.. Remember this, this is traditional physics teaching and still taught to some and importantly – it directly contradicts the claim from AGW’s Greenhouse Effect that “there is an invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse at TOA preventing the direct longwave infrared heat from the Sun entering the Earth’s atmosphere”. Such an “invisible barrier” is not known in traditional physics.
NASA’s traditional physics is saying here that the Heat we feel from the Sun which reaches us at the surface is the invisible longwave infrared, which is why it is caleed thermal, and that it is different from shortwave infrared which is not thermal, which we cannot feel as heat (because it is too small to impact us on the whole molecular vibrational level) – you decide which makes logical, physical sense.
The memes of “formulae” and “more energy” are simply magicians’ distractions to stop us seeing the trick.