Hi my name is Collin Bell. I am currently a Sophomore at Andover High School and I recently made a video about climate change for my World Geography class. Tell me what you think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WG7fpta8zI
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Hi my name is Collin Bell. I am currently a Sophomore at Andover High School and I recently made a video about climate change for my World Geography class. Tell me what you think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WG7fpta8zI
Edit: Whoops. Didn't notice that this is your first ever post, Collin.
I'm not going to go through my remarks to make them less direct. Just remember, I'm old enough to be your grandmother and I set fairly strict standards for students. Now read on .......
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OK. I'm speaking as a teacher here. Not a geography teacher, mind you, let alone your geography teacher, but a teacher nevertheless.
The presentation.
1. If the topic is global warming, using statistics from just one country in the world is not very helpful. It's entirely possible that one country or region could cool a bit while the rest of the world warms more so that the global average result is warming. You didn't qualify or explain why you were using this particularly restricted set of examples.
2. The subject is geography not politics. If I were marking this assignment, you'd get pretty good marks for presentation, but I'd give negative marks, not just low or no marks, for using irrelevant and distracting material. In other words, you had very few minutes and you wasted 20+% of time and effort on things other than the set topic.
3. I don't know what standards are required at your level, but I didn't pick up the sources for the graphics. I'd want to see references for the sources of the graphics or of the datasets used for the graphics if you've done them yourself.
The science.
1. Water vapour. I realise this is geography, not physics, but you really should have found out why the greenhouse gases are presented in the usual way.
The reason is very simple. The gases in your graphic are the non-condensing greenhouse gases. Water vapour is different because it condenses out of the atmosphere within a few days. And ..... ....... it can only increase its presence in the atmosphere depending on temperature. Warmer atmosphere, more water vapour. Cooler atmosphere, less water vapour. The other gases are not dependent on temperature to attain or maintain their atmospheric concentration and they don't condense out.
2. Right at the start you've made an elementary error. The defining characteristic of greenhouse gases is that they are transparent to shortwave radiation, sunlight, but absorb longwave radiation and are therefore opaque. The earth's surfaces absorb the shortwave and then emit longwave. The bouncing-straight-back-to-space scenario is how albedo works - snow, white roofs, pale rather than dark foliage or soil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
3. You're a sophomore. At this stage in your education, you're supposed to be demonstrating that you have an understanding of the current state of knowledge in your areas of study. It's a bit arrogant to start out by claiming that people who've got 20+ years of demanding study and multiple published scientific papers to their credit have got it all wrong and have missed data and concepts obvious to someone who's not got even an undergraduate level of physics knowledge. There's a reason why "sophomoric" is used so dismissively. Sophomoric - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary You'd be wise to avoid inviting people to use the word in this way.
Enough of that.
One thing I'd be keen to pick up on if I were running this class and
a) I wanted students to use USA specific material,
b) I wanted the most recent information,
c) I wanted something not-too-sciency and easy to relate to people's daily lives.
Weather reports. Garden plants. Both have excellent publicly available graphics you don't have to faff about with yourself.
Global warming felt in gardens - Chicago Sun-Times I've not done the follow-the-links for you. But there's some good stuff here if you just follow it up. The maps themselves are terrific for a clear display of what the Dept of Agriculture is talking about.
CapitalClimate: Heat Records Demolish Cold Records for 13th Consecutive Month;January Ends With Incredible Ratio of [Update] 29 to 1 in Contiguous U.S.
or for an overview of the last few decades for the USA, the centre graphic on this page CapitalClimate: U.S. Heat Records Continue Crushing Cold: Incredible 22 to 1 Ratio in August
Thank you for the constructive criticism, in my defense:Quote:
Originally Posted by adelady
The Presentation
1. I used statistics mainly from the US, which if the theory of man-made global warming were true, wouldn't that be a very good location to get statistics from?
2. Unfortunately the topic of "Global Warming" has become political and I choose not to ignore the real reasons of why we are being told these lies.
3. My teacher told me to just list the domain names of the websites I used, and all the graphics were on those websites I listed.
The Science
1. Ignoring water vapor, humans still only contribute 3.225% of CO2 in the atmosphere. I'm pretty sure volcanoes, animals breathing out CO2, and the Ocean emitting CO2 has been around ever since the Earth was created. There's also a lot of other statistics that prove your theory wrong in the video. Also can you explain why scientist are faking numbers and there are emails to prove this?
2. Sorry I guess I'm too young and stupid to be making decisions on my own, unless I'm a good, well-behaved liberal student, then I could make decisions. Never had a teacher personally attack me for the name of the grade I'm in. You've were once a sophomore before, right?
You're a typical left-wing teacher. The only people who believe in man-made global warming are either benefiting from the scam, are ignorant of the facts, or feel good about them selves because they are "going green".
Oh dear.
Not at all. You've simply not yet got enough education under your belt to challenge well-established science.Quote:
I guess I'm too young and stupid to be making decisions on my own
Have you done any history of science units? I presume if you're interested in geography you've learnt about tectonic plates as being the well-documented understanding of how continents and mountain ranges form and move (ever so slowly) and why volcanoes and earthquake regions are where they are. Did you learn that this theory wasn't finally accepted and confirmed until the 1950s?
The radiative physics of greenhouse gases (or CO2 at least) was established a whole century earlier. And the effects of increasing GHG concentrations was calculated (with ink, inkwell, pen and laborious hours and hours of tedious work) by a bloke named Arrhenius in 1896. Despite all the argy-bargy about statistics and science (and an occasional burst of psuedo-science) global warming is really pretty simple conceptually. Same heat in from the sun, occasional minor variations. Blocking by gases, less heat escapes, more blocking, even less heat escapes. The oceans and atmosphere have no option, they keep getting warmer. It's only the details of what happens where and when that are contentious. The underlying physics is straightforward.
Politics. Left-wing or otherwise.
I'm afraid I can't do anything about the politics and the name-calling that has grown up around this issue in the last 5 years or so. Until fairly recently (that may include the whole of your lifetime I suppose) the issue was just another concern that everyone expected to get sorted out in much the same way as the acid rain and ozone hole problems were. Tedious, repetitive, boring, technical, year after year, apparently never-ending international negotiations yawn, yawn, until ..... agreements eventuate. At last. Implementation hits a few snags. It's all sorted out in the end. Acid rain declines. Ozone holes stabilise. Life goes on.
But climate change politics has taken another course. Being a baby boomer, that's rather taken me by surprise. We're the generation that sincerely believed we could use technology to solve all the scientific and technical problems that had arisen through previous generations actions. (Asbestos and leaded petrol as examples other than acid rain or the ozone hole.)
And we could do marvelous, wonderful, exciting things, like landing men on the moon because we were so clever and competent and nothing, absolutely nothing, was beyond the reach of our technological wizardry. When solar power was first proposed in the 1970s, we thought, "Aha! What a good idea." Personally, I honestly expected that we'd just gradually shift over to such power sources in Australia because it was a) sensible, and more importantly b) new and exciting - and totally unlike the dirty, old-fashioned power stations our parents and grandparents generations had erected. The idea of having your own, personal power supply on your own roof was terrific.
And then the political landscape changed in the USA. And the wheels fell off. I'm not really sure why. For all you or I know the political hysteria will subside as quickly as it has arisen.
Politics. Sticking with your preferences.
If you worry that scientific information can be "tainted" by people's political leanings, you might want stick to scientific information from people you trust politically. In climate science, you'll find Richard Alley, glaciologist, and Kerry Emanuel,meteorologist, are two of the best known registered Republicans who are also leading climate scientists.
In fact, they're among the most respected scientists in their fields. (I realise there are many more such scientists but these are 2 of the ones I know of.) And Richard Alley's video on CO2 is widely acclaimed as 'one of the best'. It may be because I'm not American or that I'm female or I'm over 60 or not a scientist, something, but I find his style a bit hard to take.
Richard Alley on Earth's Biggest Climate Control Knob
You may not even notice the particular things that irritate me so I won't mention them.
Barry Bickmore, another Republican, presents his approach for conservatives to understand the science - regardless of what they think of the political implications or consequences. Rustlings From Republican Environmentalists « Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah
And a seriously long presentation from him. It's good but it is loooong.
Climate Change: What We Know and How We Know It « Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah
Whoops again.
I missed your specific question.Not necessarily. The USA is 1.6% of the world's surface. The oceans are 70%. There are issues about using either of them. It's entirely possible that the USA could be unrepresentative of the global picture. Its particular geography leads to unique characteristics. For instance, the relationship between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rockies is the reason why the USA has a tornado 'season' - I don't know of anywhere else with this particular phenomenon. Monsoon, hurricane (cyclone, typhoon), flood, snow seasons all occur on other continents, but who else has a predictable tornado season?Quote:
1. I used statistics mainly from the US, which if the theory of man-made global warming were true, wouldn't that be a very good location to get statistics from?
As it happens, the USA is not leader of the pack in showing direct evidence of warming, but it's not bucking the trend either. (Leaders of the pack would be the Arctic, Africa, the Amazon, Australia. Mainly because they are extreme environments in the first place. When the average changes, the extremes change even more.)
If you have a look at those CapitalClimate links I gave you in my first response, you'll see the data showing changes in extremes for the USA. Extreme cold records are declining, extreme heat records are increasing. If the climate was stable, you'd expect such records to balance each other out on decadal or longer timescales, but they've been out of whack for 4 consecutive decades - and the discrepancy is increasing rather than fluctuating.
If you want to keep up to date with this stuff, I'd recommend CapitalClimate because it doesn't just report what happens in the USA, it always has nifty graphics to illustrate the points.
For science in digestible lumps, try looking in on ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News every couple of days. Sometimes it's all deeply uninteresting. Other days you wish you had more time to track down all the details of every single item. (And that's why I link to the 'Earth & Climate' page. If I went to the home page I might never get away from the computer. With topics under the 'Health', 'Mind' and 'Fossils' pages also showing up, there's too much likelihood of even more fascinating stuff to investigate. )
Hey, kid, this guy is a bona fide Ph.D. from M.I.T. with and oldie but a goodie:
Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus
And something more recent as well, enjoy:
Richard Lindzen: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
Excerpt:
"That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.
It turns out that there is a much more fundamental and unambiguous check of the role of feedbacks in enhancing greenhouse warming that also shows that all models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity. Here, it must be noted that the greenhouse effect operates by inhibiting the cooling of the climate by reducing net outgoing radiation. However, the contribution of increasing CO2 alone does not, in fact, lead to much warming (approximately 1 deg. C for each doubling of CO2).
The larger predictions from climate models are due to the fact that, within these models, the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever CO2 does. This is referred to as a positive feedback. It means that increases in surface temperature are accompanied by reductions in the net outgoing radiation – thus enhancing the greenhouse warming. All climate models show such changes when forced by observed surface temperatures. Satellite observations of the earth’s radiation budget allow us to determine whether such a reduction does, in fact, accompany increases in surface temperature in nature. As it turns out, the satellite data from the ERBE instrument (Barkstrom, 1984, Wong et al, 2006) shows that the feedback in nature is strongly negative -- strongly reducing the direct effect of CO2 (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) in profound contrast to the model behavior. This analysis makes clear that even when all models agree, they can all be wrong, and that this is the situation for the all important question of climate sensitivity. Unfortuanately, Lindzen and Choi (2009) contained a number of errors; however, as shown in a paper currently under review, these errors were not relevant to the main conclusion."
But WHY?
"The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, their psychic welfare is at stake."- Ibid.
AA have you thought to see the rest of what science is about and review the past peer-review literature about Lindzen's works?
Here's the original paper by Lindzen and Choi. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...PS1bnMHRzUT-7w
Here's just a sample: Constraining climate sensitivity with linear fits to outgoing radiation
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Much of his work follows a pattern of troubled publication followed by often many papers by others pointing out problem in his work. But sights like Watts---up with won't bring up the reviews of his work.
It's good to have people like Lindson around, since at least he's still getting published and helps the scientific community refine their own analysis. The bad point is people who think mistakenly think his work is high quality, think he represents honest and significant part of the scientific community or don't look any further.
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As for the vid. An A for presentation. D for scientific content from numerous problems, some of which are already mentioned. Why use only 2% as "evidence" against the global warming, when we've got pretty good coverage of the entire planet over land and sea for at least the past 250 years? Why only show temperature since 1400 to argue against hockey stick...when we've got multiple lines of evidence from at least the past 2000 years on multiple continents? If those points weren't so obviously cherry picked you'd have more legitimacy in selecting your data or sources. Why the unnecessarily political slurs, unnessarily polarizing and unsupported language in the vid having nothing to do with science--for example the claims about liberal agenda? If it was meant to be political, than why did you post it to the science sub-forum; here you once again removing the appearance of scientific objectivity and it hurts the overall presentation if scientifically minded people were meant to be your audience.
Then there's just lots of etc. They discredit your presentation by showing strong bias without any proof.
global warming in the world is not very helpful. it is not the issue for the one country...its the issue of the whole world so that i think the whole world is entered in to the global warming....huge research is present to the scientist or reducing the the global warming but can anyone tells that how we can reduce it...other post are very informative.i need more.