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Wyoming Is First State To Reject Science Standards Over Climate Change
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Time Magazine reports that Wyoming, the nation's top coal-producing state, has become the first state to reject new K-12 science standards proposed by national education groups mainly because of global warming components. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are a set of science standards developed by leading scientists and science educators from 26 states and built on a framework developed by the National Academy of Sciences. The Wyoming science standards revision committee made up entirely of Wyoming educators unanimously recommended adoption of these standards to the state Board of Education not once but twice and twelve states have already adopted the standards since they were released in April 2013. But opponents argue the standards incorrectly assert that man-made emissions are the main cause of global warming and shouldn't be taught in a state that ranks first among all states in coal production, fifth in natural gas production and eighth in crude oil production deriving much of its school funding from the energy industry.
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards. 'I think Wyoming can do far better.' Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a 'war on coal' and has said that he's skeptical about man-made climate change. Supporters of the NGSS say science standards for Wyoming schools haven't been updated since 2003 and are six years overdue. 'If you want the best science education for your children and grandchildren and you don't want any group to speak for you, then make yourselves heard loud and clear,' says Cate Cabot. 'Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.'"
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, says teaching 'one view of what is not settled science about global warming' is just one of a number of problems with the standards. 'I think Wyoming can do far better.' Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a 'war on coal' and has said that he's skeptical about man-made climate change. Supporters of the NGSS say science standards for Wyoming schools haven't been updated since 2003 and are six years overdue. 'If you want the best science education for your children and grandchildren and you don't want any group to speak for you, then make yourselves heard loud and clear,' says Cate Cabot. 'Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.'"
Yes, in particular, language like the word "believe" being used for scientific theories.
Don't forget ideology. Get ready to read a bunch of posts from people who pride themselves on being scientific, but reject a theory that enjoys more support in climatology than the Standard Model does in physics. Just because they're conservative and it would be inconvenient for their politics.
Yep .. that's what you get when you let corporations pay for the politicians bills. .. which they are not. .. rather .. it never existed. All an illusion.
They are owned by industry and will never side with the People they are supposedly there to represent
Democracy is dead in the US
Its too bad you learned from these new standards which pride itself on the band-wagon approach to science where the most popular theory is heralded as the correct theory and any other competing theories are dismissed out of hand.
"It might be bad for the coal industry" is not a competing theory on the cause of the present climate change.
Couple years ago the University of Wyoming took down a large sculpture on campus well before its planned exhebition run was done because the oil industry felt it was insulting. I'm pretty sure "don't bite the hand that feeds you" was an exact quote from a state official demanding it be taken down immediately.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
The main skeptic with whom I dialogue holds the following beliefs:
1. Warming is happening.
2. CO2 concentration is atypically high.
3. CO2 concentration is atypically high due to man-made emissions.
4. CO2 concentration has some upward effect on global temperature.
However, he also holds these beliefs:
1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.
Yes, but as David Hume would point out. The preponderance of evidence of apples falling from trees doesn't *prove* that gravity is real, just that its incredibly unlikely that its not.
We're at that point with man made climate change. We know that if CO2 doesn't trap IR heat, nearly 140 years of physics needs to be turfed, we know that we've put in a certain amount of CO2 that outstrips by a huge margin any natural source, and that x amount of CO2 will introduce Y amount of energy into the climate system. We can do rudimentary models that show a general trend and lately we've been doing more complex models track a more specific trend with astonishing accuracy when applied to historical data.
The odds of human induced climate change being wrong are so low that its simply not up for debate anymore in the sciences, just as evolution or gravity isn't because that would be silly.
The fact that outside of the sciences a lot of people seem to think theres scientific controversy isn't really important here.
Science isn't a democracy, its a dictatorship of evidence. And the evidence is in. AGW is real.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
What is the chance the current temperature rise is just natural variation (i.e. noise) ?
0.1% http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/Anthro.climate.dynamics.13.3.14.pdf
Next question?
No, you do your homework. Natural sources are huge, but so are natural sinks. Without the human contribution, they would balance each other out. Human CO2 production is tipping the scale, year after year after year.
Really? So, Anonymous Coward knows better than NASA and NOAA and the UN Panel on Cliamate Change? Oh, wait, maybe you don't have any f-ing clue what you're talking about, and the effects of Man-made climate change are radically different than natural variation.
Here's the thing, as you post on Slashdot, I'm going to assume you troubleshoot problems. Maybe it's network infrastructure, maybe it's software, maybe it's server administration. I don't know. But, do you really consider a problem "fixed" if you don't know the cause? If errors are getting thrown everywhere, do you apply band-aid fixes that "seem to work" but you don't know why? I do know those guys. You know what? They're fucking terrible at their jobs. Real troubleshooting is learning the root cause and fixing it. Even if you can't fix the root error directly, if you don't have a real understanding of it, you never know if your band-aids are gong to work.
When someone says "well who cares if it's man-made" or "it's really the alarmists that are the problem" or whatever, it's just another attempt to sow doubt on a model that is just as predictive as Evolution. It matters what caused it, because that influences how you fix it - for instance, if it's man-made, moving off coal power plants to solar, nuclear, wind, etc, is a huge help. So get a clue, stop sticking your head in the sand and changing the subject, and realize that man-made climate change is radically different than natural variation. Idiot.
You fucking idiot. You 'useful idiot', more like.
This particular troll listens to Glenn Beck, who invented the meaningless phrase "useful idiot". This is a particularly vile kind of troll.
As much as I hate Glenn Beck (and Fox News in general), this is not true. The phrase is a reference to Stalin, who referred to communist sympathizers in the USA as "useful idiots," recognizing both that they served a purpose for him and that they were morons for wanting wealth redistribution while members of the wealthiest nation in the world. So essentially, every time Beck used that phrase, he was associating the people he was insulting with communism, but in a way that wasn't easily called out and discredited based on, well...facts.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The question isn't whether "CO2 causes warming" but whether a change from 290 to 330 ppm in the troposphere can be the cause of a measurable change in the heat content of troposphere.
Well, we blew past 330 ppm in the 1960's and are now at 400 ppm. That causes a direct forcing (not including feedbacks) of 5.35*ln(400/280)W/m^2 or about 1.9 W/m^2. For comparison, the output from the sun fluctuates by as much as 1 W/m^2 every 11 years. CO2 is now causing a forcing that is double the increase in solar forcing - but the CO2 forcing is constant while the solar forcing only peaks once every 11 years.
I'm curious whether your undergraduate text explains why increased CO2 concentration in the stratosphere causes the stratosphere to loose heat.
Here is what the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry says: "Greenhouse gases (CO2, O3, CFC) absorb infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth and trap the heat in the troposphere. If this absorption is really strong, the greenhouse gas blocks most of the outgoing infra-red radiation close to the Earth's surface. This means that only a small amount of outgoing infra-red radiation reaches carbon dioxide in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere. On the other hand, carbon dioxide emits heat radiation, which is lost from the stratosphere into space. In the stratosphere, this emission of heat becomes larger than the energy received from below by absorption and, as a result, there is a net energy loss from the stratosphere and a resulting cooling." - http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/e...
I suspect a lot of AGW denialists are also Evolution deniers, and it's worth noting that a lot of the testing process for Evolution involves 'hind-casting' rather than forecasting. Every time we point to the fossil record, after all, we are looking behind, not forward. The same is true for Cosmology, and it's worth noting that growth in "Big Bang denialism" also seems to be happening, with a high (although far from universal) correlation. I'm wating for some people to start denouncing Contenental Drift as a liberal plot.
Who is John Cabal?
for me the greatest clincher for man-made global warming are these two graphs:
atmospheric CO2 450,000BC to present
atmospheric CO2 1000AD to present
the first graph shows that the CO2 level has hovered between 200 and 300ppm for 500k years. so our current co2 concentration ~400ppm is unprecedented in the history of mankind! The graph also shows that global temperature is highly correlated with CO2 concentration.
the second graph shows that for most of the past millennium the CO2 level has been hovering at 290 ppm, which is consistent with the past. But in the past 100 years it steadily shot upwards! My conclusion is that this is strong evidence that CO2 increases are due to the large scale burning of fossil fuels that began with the industrial revolution and kept going until today. my further conclusion is that if we reduce our CO2 emissions we can bring the CO2 concentrations back to historical levels.
this is my conclusion; you may look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusion. But the important thing is to teach our children the critical thinking skills to evaluate this data. If you white wash science classes then you lose the chance to develop these skills.
It's here in laymen's terms from the National Academy of Science: http://nas-sites.org/americasc...
1) Who needs a computer model when you can see the polar ice melting. Yes, its really melting - go see it for yourself it you don't believe it. Strike up a friendship with somebody in Iceland if you disagree and ask them what they are seeing.
2) Who cares, the house is on fire. Let's not waste time arguing about how it got started.
3) We only have one earth so there will be no control group or second chance. You don't need to be a medical doctor to know that a self inflicted gunshot wound is a bad idea. You don't need to be a climate scientist to see that the global climate is changing and that the logical explanation is mankind's burning of fossil fuel. The time for skepticism has passed.
4) The data has been readily available and its being ignored. Our innocent descendants need to be protected from the selfishness of our generation and the previous two or three. Even if global warming is a hoax, is it fair that our generation uses more than its fair share of the planet's resources so a few super rich multinational corporations can get super richer?
5-9) See #2
The vast majority of free thinkers who have reviewed the data agree that man is having an unprecedented impact on the atmosphere and the ocean. For better or worse we are reshaping the climate and there will winners and losers. The losers are innocent people and wildlife who cannot adapt to the changes and our descendants left with a planet stripped of its resources.
If we want to be selfish and immoral - fine - let's just don't be a hypocrites about it. As we all pump gas into our cars and adjust our thermostats we should recognize there are consequences of our actions.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Really? So, Anonymous Coward knows better than NASA and NOAA and the UN Panel on Cliamate Change?
while I get your point, what you are missing is that we have a real distrust of the government in general. If you replace NASA NOAA and UN panel with NSA CIA and TSA, people would respond differently.
I saw what you did there.
You're comparing scientists and engineers who publish in the open literature with spooks and security guards who keep secrets.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.