Global Warming Indoctrination
One of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".Dr. William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."
click here for the story
It's happening right now in public schools all over the country, I can assure you.
My daughter arrived home from school just last week, skipping down the sidewalk after getting off the bus. The first thing she asked me when she came in the door was "Daddy, do you believe in global warming?"
Fortunately, I had long been expecting such a question, so I had already prepared my answer.
"That depends," I said.
Before I said another word, I could already see the distrust and disappointment in her eyes. I'm sure she had hoped that I would simply reinforce the lessons she had learned in class that day and we would soon be off on a door-to-door crusade spreading the word to our neighbors about the dangers of this impending tragedy, saving the world one house at a time. Alas, it was not to be. The job of a parent is to help the child interpret what they have learned in school, and perhaps to see things from a broader perspective. And I enjoy being a parent.
"Do I believe that global warming exists? Definitely. The earth does in fact get warmer at times, but it also gets colder at other times. Do I believe that the current trend means that the earth will only get hotter and hotter until we are all crispy critters rotting in the street? Definitely not.""But we are causing global warming, aren't we Daddy?"
"We might be causing some changes, but the Earth is much more powerful than humans will ever be. And despite our best intentions, no human being has ever been able to change the weather. We can't prevent an earthquake, we can't deflect hurricanes, and tornadoes pretty much pwn us like noobs whenever they occur. Our only hope is to run and hide if they come around. So even if we were in fact causing the Earth to get warmer (which has never been proven, by the way), why would anyone think that we could possibly change the weather to make it cooler? We can't even stop a tiny little rain shower. Besides, I like my car."
"But what about the floods? My teacher told us that the icecaps were melting and that the water was going to rise up and flood all of our houses."
Now this made me a little upset. Spreading your misinformed political agenda is one thing, but lying to little kids and scaring them unnecessarily is quite another.
"Even if your teacher was right about the concept of global warming (which she is not), water levels wouldn't rise up that much for hundreds of years. You and I will both be long dead by then, and our great great grandchildren will be rich from their new oceanfront property. Aren't they lucky?"
"But I want to do something about global warming. What can we do?"
"Here's the deal. Al Gore flies around in a ridiculously expensive private jet, spewing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that our relatively insignificant efforts to reduce our own waste would make as much difference as taking a spoonful of water out of the swimming pool. But I did notice that you left the light on in your bathroom this morning. When Al Gore gets rid of his private jet and when you turn off all of your lights and the TV, I might think about trading in my obnoxiously loud, gas-guzzling sportscar for a Prius like your uncle Shadowfax.
Oh wait, that was uncle GruntDoc with the Prius. The heat must be getting to me.
UPDATE: List of crackpots for the moonbats to reflexively dismiss.
Labels: global warming
posted by scalpel at 9:45 AM
46 Comments:
I suspect this post was designed primarily to inflame. Since I've enjoyed reading your blog, I'm disappointed.
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the earth is warming at a rapid rate, and that industrious little homosapiens are a major causal factor. That really is the consensus. In medicine people like William Gray are called "quacks," and physicians like yourself hate them for telling and selling people what they want to hear.
Everyone is, of course, entitled to think and and hold their own opinions. But with regard to the question posed in your previous post: am I willing to let you substitute your judgment for current medical consensus in order to cut costs? I think your take on global warming shows why that would be very, very poor idea.
Hey, if this past summer in South Texas was caused by global warming, I'll take it. I'm in agreement that I believe global warming happens, but I don't believe it's something we can prevents or change. I don't believe humans have been around long enough and we haven't been able to accurately study weather long enough to say say that global warming is fact. It's been proven that the world warms and cools over century and millenia long periods. This is just another cycle. I wasn't around 30 years ago, but weren't scientists freaking out about a cooling trend back then?
Lol. I knew you were seriously conservative, but I didn't know you were a crackpot. I look forward to part two in the series, "Daddy, do you believe in evolution? Because the teacher told me that grandma was a monkey."
Actually, the socratic format works well for this sort of thing. How about "Daddy, my teacher told me I would go to jail for praying. Why did the Supreme Court throw Jesus out of school?"
I personally don't believe that the concepts of evolution and creation are mutually exclusive, and I resent your name-calling.
I bet Scalpel farts in elevators too; either way, what's spewing out of his tailpipe ain't no concern of his. ;)
Actually, I tend to agree with him that our planet is far more capable of maintaining atmospheric equilibrium than we give her credit for. As for Al Gore, I admire him and his cause for at least convincing people to pay attention to the invisible waste products we mindlessly dump into our communal habitat. Once that mindset is established, we as a species will, hopefully, be less inclined to soil our own nest.
I hate seeing people suffer, so I try to time it for right before I get off.
I don't know why people bother to argue this one way or the other, there's just too much data to try to process.
But I do know this -- what this world really needs is more cowbell.
Hehe. You rock Scapel.
Global warming taught to small children can never be anything more than political indoctrination unless the data are so overwhelming that it's considered a scientific truth, which it is not. I'm sure Scalpel's little girl doesn't possess the skills to critically analyze meteorological data and evaluate alternate theories.
Britain is starting to stamp out some of this nonsense, at least.
Scalpel,
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
When you remove the auto-ranting moonbat from your sidebar, I will worry about your sensitivities regarding ad hominem attacks. Till such time I will assume that you are a grown-up in the rough-and-tumble world of the internets and that you can withstand the slings and arrows of personal comments, both the good-natured and the ill-intended.
And with the "colorful" nature of your blog in general, I can't imagine "crackpot" is even in the top 50 insults you've gotten.
Cheers,
SF
Essentially it's just a stylistic preference of mine, and I probably shouldn't expect everyone to wield the keyboard as delicately as I (wink).
I like to consider internet comment sections as perhaps more like boxing rings than street fights; certainly it is easier to use a baseball bat on an opponent than to spar with him, but it sort of takes the skill (and the fun) out of the endeavor.
I always appreciate your comments, but they are infrequent enough that I must still rely upon the autorantic robot to keep me company in between your visits.
I'll buy your boxing metaphor with the caveat that the venue varies. At our dojo, we spar with protective gear and avoid full contact. So it might be with a low-traffic individual blog. The comments over at DailyKos or Malkin, however, are televised octagons where the MMA guys beat each other senseless.
We're somewhere in the middle, I think. We're both in the 100,000+ club, traffic-wise. And we both post on hot-button topics. So I kind of expect that the give and take is going to be a little more spirited. Also, I did a semi-malignant residency, so I am more or less immune to personal insults -- nothing like getting screamed at in the nursing station by the attending vascular surgeon in full view of all the nurses and families and patients to give you alligator skin.
Also, there's nothing like a Liberal for bringing a knife to a gun fight. I try to confound those expectations as much as possible.
Cheers,
SF
I can understand getting upset because people are force-feeding global warming rhetoric at young people; I would get equally upset if the what-warming? crowd was doing the same thing. But, in your article, you make one point that I would take issue with: that human beings' efforts are too tiny to be noticed by this big ol' earth we live on.
Seems to me, there used to be a nice green prairie out around Oklahoma, North Texas. Kind of like Kansas, only more southerly. And then folks just farmed the heck out of it in the 30s, you can look up the "Dust Bowl" in your most right-wing American History book. The land around the Indian Nation turnpike still looks pretty poor, but, it's coming back. Not like big parts of Africa, which have just been farmed into desert: even if you get a few million starving people off there, you think grass is going to grow in the blowing sand, the next year? or decades?
I worked a stint in radiation chemistry: I was always fascinated by the work that went into the most sensitive detectors. See, the "virgin steel" in the old WW2 battleships is becoming more and more scarce (and expensive), but you have to have it: all steel produced after the 1950s has at least a 10x higher level of radiation. The whole world is soaked with this fallout: it's miniscule, it's irrelevant to anything but the most sensitive detectors. But you can't insist that people have no ability to affect the world.
And I don't know where you live, maybe in a big city somewhere. We live here near Pensacola, FL. I grew up on Perdido Bay, and I remember gigging crabs and fishing out of the bay. Well, they kept pouring crap into the water, and there were fewer fish, and now there's no fish, 30 years later. The water is nice and clear, because nothing much that matters can live in it. Not even those nasty coliform bacteria.
Human beings can change the earth, all right. And, like your ER patients, they aren't very thoughtful about how they go about it. Do you really have faith enough to trust the ol' earth to recover from anything 7 billion human can throw at it, each one of them just looking out for number one?
Yup, eventually.
But assuming you are correct, the question I would ask you is "do you really think that we would be willing or able to make meaningful reforms in our behavior sufficient to alter the damage we are causing?"
We aren't going back to the pre-industrial age, and even the most aggressive attempts to regulate either individuals or industries seem to be based more upon political expediency than scientific evidence that such changes would have any significant effect on the ultimate outcome.
Might not be a damn thing we can do about it. Might not need to, the whole global warming thing might be a cycle, a part of some big trend we don't understand yet. Might be easily fixable with some technology, that we won't have for 20 years yet. But look at it this way:
You notice a brand new unmarked bag of IV fluid on a patient, whose blood pressure has taken a turn for the worse. It's in one of those pump things, you can't shut it off (think PIXIS, ten years in the future). Do you: [1] ignore it, because humans are pretty self regulating, and most of the stuff you put in them won't hurt them, [2] pinch the hose if you can, slow it down, so you can figure out who hung what in the bag, before it gets to the point where the bag is already IN the patient, and then you find out if some nurse might've skipped a decimal point on the insulin injection?
The Al Gore folks are just as nuts as the "it'll never happen" folks: you know as well as I do, you most hear from are the zealots on either side, these days. But a summary of the more serious global-warming crowd might go more like: Let's do some investigating now, because it's a heck of a lot easier to fix problems early in the process. If there does turn out to be a problem you can fix, might not be a big help a couple hours later, when they call the code.
I squeeze the bag until it's dry, then come up with an alternate plan after that bag is empty. Any fluid is better than no fluid.
That's what we will do with fossil fuels anyway, regardless of government restrictions.
And the fossil fuels aren't really running out, either. There's trillions of barrels of oil that hasn't been touched: it's all heavy crude and tarry stuff, that won't be economical to get out of the ground until gas costs $5 a gallon, maybe $8. Won't it be great when we are beholden to Venezuala and Malaysia for our fuel, instead of those wacky Aayrabs?
But tell me you don't think we could get nuclear fusion off the ground, in a decade or so, if the gov'mint spent as much as they spend on oil subsidies in some sort of manhattan-project effort? Every time I see one of those "green-ethanol" BP commericals, you have to think they are only supporting the environmental projects they are, because they know it's a joke, and will put more money in their pockets while the average American just spends more of his life working to pay his fuel costs.
It's a shame they are scaring little kids in school... but it's nothing new. When I was a kid it was the mountains of plastic bags and the tin-can rings. We snipped and thought we were saving the world.
When my mentor was a kid it was the a-bomb. He was taught to hide under his desk with is arms over his head.
(??? cause that's going to help ???)
When either the weather goes back to normal or we are looking at a new tropical vacation paradise up here in Canada... I wonder what we'll use to freak out the next generation.
Unsubscribed.
You have a very interesting post. I'm on the fence about it being worthwhile to try to reduce manmade CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. It will definitely cause economic harm. Economic harm kills people, something a lot of people choose to ignore. It starts to look like a NNT/NNH thing.
As an engineer (appeal to authority FTW), I see ethanol as a dead end for many reasons. Nuclear reactors should be much more prevalent than they are today, but that still doesn't fix the individual's need to travel. Electric cars that don't suck + high efficiency power plants that have a low total operating cost could be a solution, but we won't know for a while. Hydrogen cars are essentially the same answer as electric cars since hydrogen will need to be produced by a some thermodynamic process (the same as electricity is) which will more or less be a similar efficiency.
I think we should let the markets sort it out. Until we have better ways to fight the problem (read: more efficient). We may already be too far gone, but I believe in human ingenuity. Who knows? Maybe someone will come up with a CO2 scrubber that is economically viable or something that hasn't even been thought of. In the end we are fighting entropy though, we will lose, just a matter of when and how. Brainwashing children is deplorable. Teach them the science first, then let them apply it.
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the earth is warming at a rapid rate, and that industrious little homosapiens are a major causal factor.
That “anonymous,” “shadowfax,” and others of their persuasion (and that’s what it is—a belief system) need to cite the “scientific consensus” on global warming is a tip off that the evidence paints a much more complex picture than they admit (or comprehend).
Popular mythology notwithstanding, “scientific consensus” is not necessarily a data-driven phenomenon. If these people would take the time to read Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn (among others), they would realize that the scientific community is just as susceptible to the herd mentality as any other group.
And global warming is not analogous to evolution. The latter is a data-driven theory, while the former is a political movement.
Catron,
I appreciate your comments, and I just linked you in the beautiful minds category.
It is hard to respond to anonymous commenters, and I don't allow them on my blog.
http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2007-02/al-gore-utility-2.gif
Enjoy.
Sorry the above link was incorrect. Here's the right one...
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/01/al-gores-own-inconvenient-truth-he-uses-lots-of-electricity/
That's right your MD makes you an expert in environmental science. How stupid of me.
Here's an idea: I won't tell you how to take out my thyroid. You don't tell me to ignore the scientific consensus b/c some 78 year old professor emeritus doesnt agree.
Next you'll tell me smoking doesn't cause cancer and that's just that crazy left wing talk. Or I bet you'll tell me seatbelts don't save lives and Ford Pintos are perfectly safe.
"We might be causing some changes, but the Earth is much more powerful than humans will ever be."
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, nuclear weapons...Are you denying that we have enough weaponry to destroy life on Earth as we know it?
If yes, then aren't we more powerful than the earth?
Don't worry abu, the commenter after you will not only solve global warming, but fix your thyroid problem at the same time.
Win Win!
Amazing comments! After the brilliant anonymous contributor unleashes the nuclear arsenal, only the cockroaches will have to deal with nuclear winter and the thousands of years of icepack reflecting most of the solar energy reaching the earth.
Incidentally, in medicine, people like William Gray are called "Professor", and people who mindlessly accept the political consensus of the day are called former students, unless they live in Cuba, China or North Korea. But that would just be my perspective, as a retired professor and department chairman from three different medical schools in the US.
joints, I'm afraid our friends "anonymous" and "abu g" are impervious to objective data. If it weren't so much fun, it would be an utter waste of time arguing with such people.
Thanks for the link.
Great post. I recently blogged on a related topic:
http://rebeldoctor.blogspot.com/2007/10/winning-nobel-prize-doesnt-make-you.html
I like your blog and am very disappointed that you are following the ideas of a very small minority of scientists, including Gray. I know that the science is complex and many of us don't have the capacity to analyze all the pros and cons, but siding with the anti-global warming crowd is no different from siding with the "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" side. When you are not an expert in a field you should go with the minority science opinion, and its that global warming is real and is being caused by human activity. You might want to look at www.realclimate.org.
There are apparently quite a few people with a huge emotional and political investment in this topic. I, however, am not one of them.
I care no more about global warming than I do about who wins the Red Sox/Indians game tonight. I'm a casual observer. I couldn't care less whether humans are causing climate change either. Whether we are or not, the jury is still out on the significance of our contribution and our ability to change the outcome. It's not a black or white issue in the sense that one is either a "global warming believer" or not.
If burning huge piles of baby seals and spotted owls would halt the progression of global warming, I'd be all for it. But I think that humans would be better off using our brains and technology to adjust to the higher temperatures than to try to change the climate itself.
When I was in high school, the fear of of an ice age (and I don't mean the original one!).
The Earth has a way of maintaining homeostasis.
Don't ask me to expound on that, I haven't had my coffee yet. It just sounds like a cool thing to say :D
Scalpel, all you have to do is find out which school this kid goes to and enroll your daughter there. Problem solved!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWdiHtv6T6s
Bravo, Doc!
I have no doubt humans are spewing too much crapola into the ecosystem, but we are not so deleterious to the earth's ecosystem that we've destroyed it in the last 200 odd years of industry. There's more to it than simple fossil fuels and car emissions.
I believe I'll start taking global warming a mite more seriously when Gore and his cronies start actually LIVING greener, rather than telling the rest of us to do so. Buying "carbon credits" and continuing to fly your own personal jet hither and yon to exhort the Great Unwashed to do without is douchebaggery of the highest order.
Is the Earth warming? Almost certainly. Is it solely man's fault? Nope -- Earth has these things called "climate cycles." Now, do we have some influence? Probably. But the hype and hysteria is nauseating.
As far as indoctrination in schools -- I've had no problems meeting with my child's teacherts and telling them to knock that crap right off. It's amazing what a little parental involvement will do -- once they realize there's actually a parent who pays attention to what is being taught in their classrooms, they tend to back off.
Yeah that huge increase in CO2 compared with anything in the last 800,000 K years (according to scientists, scalpel which you are not) is just another smoke and mirror. Look scalpel I am not saying we need to run off, join Kyoto and destroy our economy. But the fact is the evidence is disturbing and no other reasonable
explanation has come about. Bush's ostrich imitation (ie head in the sand) is as wrong as rushing headlong into Kyoto.
Ever seen ice in a drinking glass? No matter how high the ice cubes are stacked in the glass, it won't overflow when the ice melts.
Perhaps a bourbon and ice will help the data make more sense.
It is important to be aware of what our children are being taught and to give our opinions/reasoning when necessary.
It can't hurt to try cleaning up the planet and taking care of what we have but don't fly around wasting millions of gallons of fuel resources while simultaneously polluting the environment and then tell some one else not to drive their SUV or whatever. Or blame global warming on the president and it is therefore his fault that we have hurricanes.
Scalpel,
The anonymous contributor who advises us that you are not a scientist forgot to show his credentials (other than D.A.). I happen to know that you have an earned doctorate in a scientific discipline, so I would call you a scientist until it is proven to me that one earned doctorate in a scientific discipline is superior to another earned doctorate. There is a true consensus among scholars on that issue, unlike the global warming one, and yet, one could find dissent. That is how it works, in a free society.
"I happen to know that you have an earned doctorate in a scientific discipline, so I would call you a scientist until it is proven to me that one earned doctorate in a scientific discipline is superior to another earned doctorate."
Sorry Joints you don't have a clue (I have a Ph.D and an MD). An MD (and residency) makes you a clinician period. There is nothing wrong with that. I never did understand this idea an MD makes you something more than a clinician. What is med school? Memorizing masses of facts and learning how to be a clinician. What is residency? Grinding hours of learning how to a a clinician. It is the rare med student/resident who goes into the lab (or other research). Note I didn't say one doctorate was superior to another. I stated having an MD does not make you a scientist. I am a doctor and and a molecular biologist. I don't claim to be a nuclear physicist. Because you are an MD does that make you a nuclear physicist joints? Global warming has been politicized by the left AND the right. But that does not change the fact that there are concerning findings that point to the involvement of human interaction. Note again I didn't say we jump into Kyoto. But we shouldn't also minimize or make light of the finding's out there just because we don't like the findings. If you wan't to puill a BUSh (head in the sand), that's fine. But do you really think scientist reacts?
Anonymous,
The roles of medical school department chairs are clinician, scientist, educator and administrator. No one succeeds without contributing in at least three of those areas. By your ungrammatical and illogical rant, you confirm that your DA is an earned degree, but cast doubt on your MD and Ph.D.
I never claimed to be a nuclear physicist, but among the graduate students I mentored for their MS and Ph.D theses and dissertations, there were anatomists, pharmacologists, physiologists, biomedical engineers, and radiation biophysicists. I have over 100 peer reviewed publications in the scientific literature as principal investigator or senior author. Show us what you have in the way of scientific credentials, or back off.
A friend forwarded me this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI
It seems logical and the premise of the argument seems rational: nobody can really know whether global warming is true or false, but if we do nothing and it actually turns out to be true, it will be unfortunate if we did nothing to try to change our actions.
I agree that global warming has become the hot topic du jour (get it... hot), and that it doesn't sit well with me when people use scare tactics or blow things out of proportion. However I think there are plenty of reasons to reduce our carbon emissions aside from global warming, and I don't think all of them have to be particularly drastic. You can choose alternate energy sources, walk or bike somewhere instead of driving, buy locally whenever possible, and try to reduce consumption of unnecessary goods.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and thank you for the interesting post, scalpel.
Here's an interesting article on the issue, it talks about the effect of water vapor and global warming among other data.
http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Today global warming news is very danger news for earth life. Now this global warming issues takes big picture for this world. Now we are aware about this issue.
Ironically, I think that most of these comments would still be left by and vigorously supported by these people who all likely have already forgotten that much of the data supporting many of these posts was falsified. And I'm sure none of them would acknowledge the data gathered from the global warming of other planets (who presumably don't have "industrious little homo sapiens" on them ruining everything)
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