What Do Americans Know about Science and Technology?

The National Science Foundation makes a semi-annual survey of what Americans know about science and technology.  The 2018 assessment gives the results of surveys made in 2016 and shows that when given statements to be answered true or false:

• 52% agreed that humans evolved from other species of animals, though 72% agreed that the altered statement that the theory of evolution held that humans evolved from other species of animals was true.  Apparently, 20% preferred their religious beliefs.
• 39% agreed that the universe began with a big explosion.  When that statement was altered to say that astronomers believe the universe began with a big explosion, 60% agreed that astronomers did believe that.  The 21% difference here is again mostly a preference for a religious belief.
• 48% agreed that electrons are smaller than atoms.
• 45% disagreed that lasers work by focusing sound waves.
• 51% disagreed that antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.

So about one out of five Americans disagrees with science when it comes in conflict with their religious belief on the questions of the origins of human life and of the universe.

If you randomly guess on a true or false question, you should be right 50% of the time.  Now consider the statement "Electrons are smaller than atoms."  Surely a few percent of Americans actually know the answer to that true/false question.  If only 48% of Americans answered the question correctly, then those who did not know the answer had an actual preference for the belief that atoms are smaller than electrons.  Where did they get that preference?  One is driven to make similar observations about how lasers work and what antibiotics kill.

Given that Americans know so little about science and some choose to disregard it, is it any wonder at all that they are easily frightened into believing that government must act as their savior because of myriad scary alarms that the media, injury lawyers, environmentalists, so-called green energy enthusiasts, and catastrophic man-made global fryers special interest groups conjure up?

Because governments are always seeking more powers and more control over their populace, is it any wonder that government schools do such a poor job in educating Americans in science and technology?  To be sure, government schools do an awful job in educating Americans in history and economics also.  Mathematics and writing skills are also poorly taught.

About the only issue that government schools are thorough in teaching is that the people are incapable of choosing their own values and managing their own lives and must turn to government to care for them.  That is such a self-defeating and depressing claim that it causes no end of harm to the American people.

Thoughts on Collectivists and Progressive Elitists from Notes to a Friend

In the reaction to President Trump's efforts to reduce the scope of government, some key characteristics of the collectivists, socialists, and Progressive Elitists are more openly clear than usual.

The socialists are going berserk.  Hysteria is a key component of socialism.  The madness of crowds, the imagined evils of business, the fears for the environment, the dislike for mankind and man's need to control his environment, the dislike for unequal accomplishment and award, fear of uncertainty, and the fear of being independent or of having to think independently.  Hysteria, alarmism, fear -- they all make the socialist want to trust his life and its care to government and to the collective.

Collectivists and Progressive Elitists are known to be less charitable than conservatives are and I am sure than libertarians are as well.  They look into their own souls and they see a lack of benevolence.  They are ashamed. They seek a cheap and easy way to convince themselves that they are benevolent.  By using the force of government, they can choose the causes of "benevolent" action and dilute the cost to themselves in time and money by making everyone contribute to their chosen causes.  Despite putting a gun to the head of others to achieve their goal, they convince themselves to an extent that they are now benevolent, but that conviction is most uncertain and uneasy.  It is difficult to completely evade the fact that they have done harm to some in order to fill the hole in their own souls.  They are cursed with at least the vague notion, that unlike them, the good man finds it easy and natural to view most other men in a benevolent manner because he sees introspectively his own good and noble soul and naturally tends to project that evaluation of what it is to be a man onto others.

The Collapsing Carbon Market

The Kyoto Protocol required developed countries which did not meet their carbon reduction quotas to purchase credits from clean energy projects in the developing world.  This created a carbon trading market, which meant that many people, including Al Gore, were able to make a great deal of money from the alarm caused by the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Those making such money became a powerful lobby with a strong incentive to further feed the man-made global warming frenzy.

The Guardian of the UK has now reported that the carbon market is no longer growing and may soon collapse.  The failure of the Copenhagen Conference to set new emissions standards to take effect when the Kyoto Protocol reduction schedule ends in 2012, is causing many banks to stop lending money for carbon-emissions offset projects.  These banks are not expanding their workforce on the carbon desks as anticipated and some people are already being released.  The financiers backing one large clean energy project in the developing world backed out this month.  The recession also contributed to there being lower emissions and hence less overshoot on quotas needing to be offset.  The price of carbon offsets has fallen, especially in the U.S. and Australia where attempts to pass carbon cap and trade legislation have failed.

The weakness of the carbon trading market, combined with the realization by many that the science behind the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming was fraudulent, is and will further result in a great weakening of the forces pushing for catastrophic energy use restrictions and the attendant destruction of the economies of the nations of the developed world. 

The Fatal Missing Atmospheric Hotspot of CO2 Alarmist Theory

Dr. David Evans has written a very good summary of the fatal problem of the climate computer models that claim to provide a good match to the increasing temperatures of the late 20th Century based on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  What the modelers have done is taken a theory of greenhouse gases and added theories of sulfate aerosols, ozone, volcanic aerosols, and solar irradiance to plot the expected temperature changes as a function of altitude in the atmosphere and as a function of latitude over the Earth.  In reality, they have tuned the many variables and theories to produce results which they claim are predictive of the land surface temperatures for the period from 1958 to 1999.  If these theories are valid, then the predictions of temperatures at various altitudes and latitudes must also be correct.  The following plots show changes relative to the baseline temperatures prior to 1958 as modeled by Santer et. al in 2000 and are taken from Fig. 1.3. of a report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in 2006, Chapter 1.  This data was also used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

It should be noted that the upper left plot is for the measured increases in CO2 concentrations and those increases in water vapor which Santer and others believed would result from the warming caused by the CO2.  Most of the actual warming in this model is actually provided by the increase in the amount of water vapor, which is greatest in the Earth's warmer areas.  The warming of this extra water vapor over the Equator and nearby latitudes produces the hot spot over the equator and near it.  The enhanced warming due to water vapor is what is termed a positive feedback and is a situation which is inclined to be susceptible to run-away events in which a vicious cycle of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere lead to more and more heating, then more and more CO2 and water in the atmosphere and more and more heating.  This is an important assumption of this theory and forms its primary basis for the claim that catastrophe may result.

We should note that only direct changes in the solar irradiance are modeled here.  The changing flux of cosmic rays as solar activity varies with changing affects on cloud formation and the ozone layers are not included.  Many other natural effects are also not included since little was known about them in 2000 and not much more is known today, thanks to the misspending of most of the climate research funds due to the alarmist scare.  But, if the factors modeled are the most important factors pertaining to climate change, such features as the very prominent hot spot near and above the equator at altitudes of 8 to 12 km with elevated temperatures of 1.0 to 1.2C should be measured by balloons equipped with transmitters to send back temperatures measured as the balloon ascends to high altitudes in the atmosphere.  There are good records going back to the 1960s with hundreds of balloon flights having the ability to measure temperatures with an accuracy of better than 0.1C.

The actual measured warming from 1979 to 1999 in the atmosphere by balloons is shown below.  This is Part E of Fig. 5.7 on page 116 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Report of 2006.

The lower atmosphere, or the troposphere, is relatively uniformly warmed compared to the Santer model results used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  Note that the entire range of variation in the plot with altitude and latitude is much less than in the alarmist model plot.  The cooling of the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, is also less severe and is also more uniform.  The hottest warm areas are mostly in the northern hemisphere and only reach up to about 0.3C warmings, not the 1.2C of the models touted as good matches to reality by the UN IPCC.  Also, very notably, the major hot spot over the equator and latitudes nearby is missing.  This area is largely warmed only about 0.1C and parts of this area are cooled by -0.1C!  The warming is at least an order of magnitude less than in the alarmist model at 10 km altitude over the equator!

So, the UN IPCC model result, which is said by them to verify the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming predicts much greater temperature changes due to their greenhouse gas theory in the atmosphere than is observed and the pattern of those changes is very different than that actually measured.  It is inescapable that the UN IPCC and Santer theory is wrong.  This is not a case of a theory that needs a bit of tuning yet.  This is clearly a case of a very wrongheaded theory.

So, if this theory is wrong, then there is no reason to believe that the rise in temperatures of the late 20th Century was caused in significant part by the increased concentration of CO2 during that period.  There is also no reason to believe that one of the affects of increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere must be an increase in water vapor which then causes more net warming than the CO2 increase itself did.  This means that the claim that increases in CO2 concentrations may cause runaway global warming are without basis!  In fact, this part of the model was clearly very dubious, since if it were correct, the Earth would have been likely to have had many such catastrophic run-ups of temperature in the past.  There is no evidence of this in the geological record.  In fact, recent work has established that the water vapor feedback to warming in general and to CO2 increases in particular is one of negative feedback.  The water cycle is a moderating effect on climate.

It is clear that the warming effect of CO2 is much, much smaller than that predicted by the Santer and other climate models touted by the UN IPCC.  In fact, it is very much more likely that it is not more than about a tenth as strong an effect as these models believed it to be.  In fact, now that we know that the land surface temperature data Santer, the UN IPCC, and other alarmists have been trying to explain was inflated with urban heat island effects and data manipulations, the CO2 greenhouse effect had to be exaggerated to match that falsely higher temperature data at the ground.  By manipulating data to create a sense of alarm due to large temperature increases, the alarmists also guaranteed that they could not explain real atmospheric temperature data with any theory that would match what they claimed the ground temperatures were.

Lies will always get you in the end.  It is especially foolish to lie about science.  Political lies may have a long lifetime, but science lies rarely do.  It is shameful that this science lie had as long a life as it did though.  It is painful that it has also had so much harmful impact on society and government.  Scientists will be paying a price in lost respect for a long time due to the lie that man's emissions of CO2 have created what is likely to be or might be a catastrophic climate future.  I know I am using strong language here, but any scientist worthy of the name should long ago have backed away from the embarrassing claims made by the anthropogenic global warming alarmists.  This episode has borne a strong resemblance to Stalinist science.

The Copenhagen Treaty Tax on America

Obama had his socialist heart, if a socialist has a heart, set on going to Copenhagen and showing the world that he, Obama The Great World Leader and Unifier, had dragged the U.S. under the Copenhagen Treaty world governance umbrella to both drastically reduce its irresponsible use of energy and to pay the little-advanced countries of the world a penance fee for their development.  It is now fairly clear the U.S. Congress will not give him the carbon cap and trade bill, which was to be his demonstration that he was a Global Warming Alarmist and World Governance leader, in time for the December Copenhagen meeting.

As I have often discussed, there is no Global Warming Catastrophe.  There is no reason to be concerned about the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.  There is every reason not to ration our use of energy.  There is no reason to allow the U.S. government or a World Government to tax or restrict our use of energy.

The draft Copenhagen Treaty proposes that every advanced country be taxed on its GDP.  The tax is to be 0.7%.  Such a tax on the U.S. economy with a 2008 GDP of $14.26 trillion would be $99.82 billion.  Being able to pay so much American taxpayer money to the less developed countries of the world would have made Obama feel like a very big man.  A big shot, a VIP.  Not to mention such a virtuous man.  Of course, the American People would have to pick up the tab and pay the bill for his wining and dining the rest of the world and impressing them with his leadership.

Except, of course, they would mostly really be snickering about how they pulled one off on the USA and those naive American People.  It appears that we have escaped this bullet for now.  We will have to keep a close eye on the would-be shooters for some time, however.  They have made it very clear that they are back-shooters.  We always knew the back-shooters were the bad guys in the American West.  We had better keep our eyes open.

India Disputes Man-Made Global Warming Alarmism

Back in June 2008, India produced its National Action Plan on Climate Change in which it disputed the UN IPCC and Al Gore claim that man has caused global warming and it will become a disaster. Sensibly, India believes it is important to save its people from poverty and to join the developed nations such as the United States of America in producing the per capita CO2 emissions that translate into the good life. Indian scientists looked for reasons for concern in the actual climate of India and found nothing unusually alarming. They found no evidence for man-made warming.

Indian scientists noted that in a century, the average surface temperature had risen 0.4 degree, but did not think that reason for alarm. They examined the quantity of rain, floods, droughts, and the growth and recession of Himalayan glaciers. Al Gore specifically claimed that the recession of Himalayan glaciers was catastrophic. The Indian scientists found that some glaciers were retreating, but that others were advancing. They concluded that a number of hypotheses about why some were advancing and some were retreating simply needed yet to be evaluated.

V. K. Raina is India's leading glaciologist and he says only 5o of 9,575 glaciers in India have been studied carefully. However, nearly 200 years of general data seems to indicate to him that nothing abnormal has occurred with respect to the Himalayan glaciers. He believes that a few sensationalists are hyping the retreat of some glaciers to cause alarm.

The President of the Geological Society of India, B. P. Radhakrishna, believes that global warming has occurred as part of the natural glacial-interglacial cycle of the earth. He believes that man can and will adapt to such changes of the earth's climate as will naturally occur. He does not believe man can control the climate by reducing CO2 emissions.

Even the Indian engineer and economist Rajendra Pachauri, the UN IPCC Chairman has said that he will look into the "apparent temperature plateau so far this century."

I believe there are some wise men in India.