Get Your Kids Global Warming Savvy
If there's one single issue gaining international attention that may one day define your child's generation, it's that of global warming. And, because kids may be the most affected by climate change, the issue weighs heavily on many young minds. BrainPOP, a New York based educational provider, conducted a survey of more than 1,000 middle school students across the country and found that kids fear global warming more than war, terrorism or the health care crisis.
And who can blame them? It seems impossible these days to escape the bad news: the weather man is reporting drought in the southeastern United States, scientists are predicting that Montana's glaciers will have all melted by the end of the century and people in Ontario, Canada have seen polar bears digging in their trash cans looking for food. All of this while political pundits debate whether global warming even exists.
Does it have to be so scary and confusing for children? Not necessarily, says environmentalist Cambria Gordon and Laurie David, a global warming activist and the producer of An Inconvenient Truth. They believe the issue of global warming can be a source of inspiration for kids, not a reason to stick their heads in the sand.
According to these two “green” moms, in order to combat global warming, kids will need all the information they can get. Where to start? Gordon recommends teaching kids that thousands of scientists from all over the world now agree that global warming is due to human activity, that carbon dioxide emissions are the number one contributor to global warming and that, perhaps most importantly, the problem of global warming is solvable.
Gordon and David list a bunch of ways kids can stop global warming in their book, The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. Here's a list of Gordon's top 6 things kids can do to change their ever-warming world:
- Save energy by encouraging people to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.
-
Carpool.
- Unplug chargers.
- Raise money by selling lemonade, having a car wash, or whatever they like to do, and donate it to a climate change organization that gets the message out.
- Email their mayor, Congressional representative, or Senator and tell them to pass laws reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
- Go paperless as much as possible (wrap gifts in cloth, email instead of regular mail, use both sides of the paper for homework, put recycled paper in the printer, etc...)
Gordon says rather than scaring children, these solutions can offer kids hope. “I can’t wait to see where the kids of today end up... There are so many fascinating jobs to be had: glaciologists, solar panel installers, wind power engineers, cellulosic ethanol producers, carbon sequesters at coal-fired power plants, hybrid car designers. The future is theirs.”
One surefire way to keep the future bright is to make sure this generation of kids has the tools they need to protect the planet. And there's never been a better time to start.
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Comments from readers
Clearly, the author of this guide needs to educate herself about climate and climate science.
Here are the facts:
1. The human contribution to atmospheric CO2 amounts to less than 19 ppm. As a percent of total atmosphere, that is a miniscule 0.0019%.
2. The most dominant (by far) "greenhouse gas" is water vapor, accounting for 95% of atmospheric heat retention (CO2 and all the other greenhouse gases account for the remainder).
3. While CO2 may be an effective greenhouse gas, it is a minor greenhouse gas and its contribution to atmospheric warming diminishes as more is added to the atmosphere. This is a physical property of CO2 and radiated heat from the Earth via IR (infrared). A reasonable analogy is to consider the effect of adding additional blankets on cold nights -- the first blanket warms the most, then, as more blankets are added a point is quickly reached where all the heat that can be retained will be retained and adding more blankets does nothing to make you warmer.
4. The IPCC/Gore theory is built on an assumption about how much additional warming will come from water vapor if CO2 increases lead to a warming of 1°C. The unproven assumption (and scientifically refuted) claims a more than 3 to 1 positive "feedback" (or temperature forcing) -- which means that for every degree of warming from CO2, the additional water vapor that the warmer atmosphere could hold would lead to 3°-4°C of additional warming (since water vapor dominates atmospheric heat retention). That assumption was fed into IPCC general circulation models (GCMs) and to nobody's surprise, they got the result they wanted out the other end. Problem is, in the real world, the additional water vapor brings more clouds and more precipitation, each leading to cooler temperatures (negative feedback) rather than warmer temperatures. The net feedback, therefore, for more water vapor from CO2 balances the slight (and diminishing) additional CO2 warming and produces a net effect of zero (or slightly negative) "forcing".
5. Earth's climate is currently in an "ice era"! Ice eras last from 40 to 65 million years. There have been seven ice eras in Earth's climate history. The current ice era began about 65 million years ago. What can we conclude from that? The climate is also in a shorter cycle cold regime called an "ice epoch" (ice epochs last from several hundred thousand to several million years). These are relatively cold periods within an ice era. Within ice eras and ice epochs, we have ice ages lasting tens of thousands of years (cycles of glaciation and warmer episodes called "interglacials"). Earth is currently near the end of an interglacial period. Interglacials have smaller cycles, both warmer and colder periods, lasting hundreds or thousands of years. Within climate periods Earth experiences decadal cycles of warming and cooling.
6. Ice eras account for less than 10% of Earth's climate just since living organisms have existed (roughly 3.0 - 3.5 billion years). During Earth's more typical climate, global temperatures are about 15°F warmer than at present and there is no permanent ice anywhere on the globe at sea level (that includes the poles).
7. Earth is currently in a decadal cooling trend of a warm (post Little Ice Age) period embedded within an interglacial of an ice age cycle, within an ice epoch of an ice era. Climate is always changing from natural sources. These changes lead to temperature variations of as much as 20°F. When dinosaurs dominated animal life on Earth (prior to the current ice era) the climate was 15°F warmer.
8. If the next glacial period of an ice age cycle were to be upon us, the suggestion that we could fend it off by burning fossil fuels would be laughable.
9. Glaciers in Alaska, Norway, most of the Himalayans, parts of Greenland, and Antarctica have stopped their retreat (Alaska's began retreating 100 years ago!) and are now advancing. Record snowfall across Canada and the northern US during the past several years. New all-time coldest temperature (since recordings began) recorded in Maine this past winter (-50°F). Record Rocky Mountain snowpack leading to spring flooding in north central states as repeated spring blizzards pile on more snow. UK experienced very cold summer in 2008 with increasing winter snows, deeper southern penetration and cold this past winter. Coldest summer on record for Anchorage, Alaska, in 2008. Massive cold waves and deep southern penetration of snowstorms in Asia during past few winters. Middle East experiences 4" snowfall in areas where there isn't even a word for snow it is so rare.
10. Earth is in a cooling trend since the 21st Century began, according to the best temperature measurements from satellites. Ground stations are corrupted by improper measurement siting, urban heat island effects and, unfortunately, biased observers.
11. The IPCC global warming theory requires a tropical mid-troposphere warming "signature". Both satellite and radiosonde (weather balloon) measurements have failed to detect any such warming.
12. The IPCC global warming theory requires polar regions to warm more rapidly than other regions. Recent Arctic warming was the result of decadal cycles of atmospheric and oceanic circulations that have, in the past decade, switched from warm phase to cold phase. Despite a deeply flawed study claiming the contrary, the vast majority of Antarctica has been cooling for the past five decades. The ice shelves that break off from Antarctica are being forced seaward by additional ice accumulation inland (upland). The ice isn't melting, it's merely breaking off and then melting in the warmer ocean.
The author of this article needs to read a few good books. Suggest: "Red Hot Lies" by Christopher Horner, "A Primer on CO2 and Climate (Second Edition)" by Dr. Howard Hayden, "The Deniers" by Lawrence Solomon, "Climate Confusion" by Dr. Roy Spencer, and "Climate of Extremes" by Drs. Michaels and Balling, Jr.
Education is a wonderful thing. Propagandizing is the opposite of educating. Ignorance leads to spreading false nonsense about climate and climate change.
Quoting select "scientists" who are well out of the mainstream of scientific opinion is a tool of the deceivers. This author, either knowingly or unwittingly, has joined that group. There are over 31,000 scientists in the US alone who have signed a petition stating that humans are not causing global warming. These signatories have had their credentials verified and are in some field of science that would have a role in determining whether climate change is caused by humans or not (and not in fields dealing with the consequences of theorized warming). Consequently, these scientists are better suited to support their view of climate and climate change. There are only 2000 IPCC scientists contributing to working groups (the number is often inflated - deliberately - by merely adding all the scientists in all working groups, but many scientists participate in more than one working group!). Over 600 of those scientists refute the conclusions of the politicians writing the IPCC summary report!
I am a signer of the petition cited above (B.S., Mathematics with a life-long interest in meteorology, climatology, geology, and astronomy).
Bob Webster
Vero Beach, FL
PS: Vero Beach experienced the coldest winter its had in more than 30 years during 2008-2009.
On the positive side, once they reach adulthood and realize they've been duped, hopefully they will be innoculated against junk science such as this.
www.nofreewind.blogspot.com
The red portions of the first map on this page shows the natural habitat of polar bears in Ontario: http://www.rom.on.ca/ontario/risk.php?doc_type=map&id=133
Polar Bear Provincial Park is the largest of all our parks (equivalent to US state parks). It got its name for a reason.
According to the park website, as many as 200 bears may be seen in the park.
http://www.ontarioparks.com/english/pola.html
is that the world has been cooling for at least 8 years and stopped warming
a decade ago. We may well be headed for several decades of cooling weather,
not warming, and that would be MUCH worse for nearly all of us. Think
starvation.
The IPCC and other alarmist sources, are basing their scare
predictions.....sorry, "scenarios".....on ground-station temperature data
that have been shown independently (see www.surfacestations.org) to be
untrustworthy, with effects of urbanization and changes around weather
stations (pavement, BBQs, air conditioning outlets, etc.) all giving false
"higher" temperatures then have been reported as representative. The
temperature data can't be trusted!!
The major IPCC reports were not written by scientists. Only 65 persons (!!)
wrote the reports, and nearly all of them were political appointees with an
agenda, not objective scientists. Any information contrary to AGW was
censored out. The report for policymakers was written BEFORE the scientific
report, and the latter was written to agree with the document for
policymakers! Backwards "science"!! (Google "ipcc errors" for a look at the
actualities of the whole IPCC process.) The IPCC reports are worthless for
guidance in setting climate policy. Unfortunately, the relationship to the
UN gives it a halo that it does not deserve.
An Inconvenient Truth is full of scientific errors (a.k.a. "deceptions")
from start to finish. It should never be shown to children (or anybody, for
that matter), for it wil give them a completely wrong picture of reality.
Carbon dioxide has next to nothing to do with climate, and calls to reduce
CO2 emissions are without foundation. Climate changes naturally, up and
down. Always has and probably will. Man's emissions have nothing to do with
it.
There is nothing wrong with promoting practical ways to consume less fossil
fuel. But to tie it in to a mythical anthropogenic (man-made) global warming
is to promulgate pure deception and propaganda for ulterior motives.
I have two degrees in chemical engineering and have a fair knowledge of
science. I have spent between 2500 and 3000 hours researching climate. It
takes time to learn the true story of climate (it is EXTREMELY complicated),
and the piffle that is being passed onto the world public is worthless as a
means of educating them. It is most unfortunate that this organization,
while meaning well, is doing a grave disservice to anyone who reads this
blog.
Anyone who wishes to learn some facts about climate is welcome to contact me
at imcqueen@nbnet.nb.ca and I will be pleased to provide lots of good
references. (Start with http://wattsupwiththat.com/ )
Ian L. McQueen
Glenwood, NB [Canada]
*****