Experience the great teacher, Chief?
” S’e thu fhein a tha tapaidh.”
H/T Alistair MacLeod ‘Clearances.’ )
Comment on Climate sensitivity discussion thread by Beth Cooper
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Comment on The Bias of Science by Paul Vaughan
Productive exploration needn’t be science and exploration doesn’t need more wasteful admin. The online climate discussion has attracted far too many admin types and there exists a severe shortage of productive explorers. Note to the capable few: Let’s get on with freedom & exploration, unconcerned with “science” and the red tape fantasies of administrators looking to further consolidate their stranglehold.
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Comment on The legacy of climategate: Part II by BaitedBreath
<blockquote>Now that the formal inquiries are closed</blockquote>
Widely recognized as egregiously mendacious and biased, they have themselves naturally become the subject of inquiry. To which end Andrew Montford of <i>The Hockey Stick Illusion</i> fame, is bringing out a new book. (<i>The Climategate Inquiry Illusion</i> I wonder?)
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Comment on The Bias of Science by manacker
WHT
Maybe I missed something (or maybe you did?), but I can’t recall Girma making a claim that the observed model curve would apply over the next 188 years – did you?
If not, your extrapolation to year 2200 is pure rubbish.
Max
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by P.E.
That’s a really good point. They can’t teach the real science, because it’s all college material. They can kind of fake it and teach paleoclimatology and some of those sideshow topics, but that’s hardly doing students any service. Besides, the paleo is probably more controversial than the physics. You can’t teach Mann’s hockeystick without opening yourself up for M&M’s critique. Which again, gets into college-level statistics.
I’m having a hard time thinking of anything that you can teach K-12 students, even the high achievers, that isn’t either oversimplified to the point of worthlessness or highly controversial.
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by climatereason
How old is grade 12 in the US?
Tonyb
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by darryl b
I taught physics and AP chem in high school. I am currently writing a book (which may never be read) which compares the absolute certainty of eugenics-as a science- and the absolute certainty promoted in all aspects of the science of climate change.
In the last years of teaching, I began first year chemistry with two general investigations, one with a determinate error, to introduce the concepts of precision, accuracy, standard deviations, and confidence intervals. (numerical class results were presented on the board). The first day of the year I used the end of a quote by Mark Twain…….’There is something fascinating about science, you get a wholesale return of conjecture on a minimum investment of fact’ (as I remember the quote). The point is good science and good scientists are always challenging results, in particular their own.
The general public always wants and the general media therefore always presents science in terms of certainty where none exits. Also bad news is good news and good news is no news. Most climate change news does not even scratch the surface of any technical knowledge. It is mostly he said, she said. I wonder how it would be presented in the class room? Walking into a school last year, I saw a picture of a polar bear climbing a pole as an acknowledgement of Earth Day. Such representations will eventually do more harm than good. I believe there are much greater environmental concerns than CC which will then also be deemed dubious.
Finally, I was in the position to teach the science portion of how to zap the ACT test, which is all about science reasoning and not scientific fact, It is as it should be. Invariably one question was of the type: (Which one the following is false?) Three answers will begin with sometimes or it maybe true
and one will begin with always, or it must be. In the real world, very little is always true. However, climate science never seems to address what Dr. Curry calls the Uncertainty Monster.
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2
17 to 18 years old
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Comment on The Bias of Science by willard
> Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice.
Alarmism (?).
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by sharper00
To introduce evolutionary theory without a rational basis for pupils/students to critically evaluate the material presented to them is just indoctrination.
Do you think students have a sufficient grasp of molecular biology to understand and challenge it?
To introduce the history of the United States without a rational basis for pupils/students to critically evaluate the material presented to them is just indoctrination.
Do they get access to the original documents and writings? First hand accounts? Newspaper reports?
You can apply that reasoning to everything taught in a school, you might as well say “We know nothing” if you’re not confident enough to teach it to a teenager.
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by darryl b
Actually, Bryan I (and colleagues of mine) taught well beyond the laws of Thermodynamics. I was in a small to medium size public school. However, it was definitely never taught to the majority of students and the general public would never fully understand it.
You might find one aspect of thermodynamics interesting regarding the internal combustion engine. Considering the hot and cold body temperatures, the upper limit of the efficiency of automobiles is about 15%.
–and that is before considering friction. In reality about 90% of the energy is wasted.
About two decades ago, Engineers in Japan were working on a ceramic with the malleability of cast iron which could withstand much higher temperatures. They were unsuccessful. .
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Comment on The Bias of Science by jim2
Thanks for that, Paul. It reminded me of my WTF moment when I was first introduced to delta-epsilon proofs and my appreciation of the beauty of it later.
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Comment on Climate sensitivity discussion thread by Terry Oldberg
NW:
Thank you for the excellent questions and for giving me the opportunity to clarify.
As you point out, the conclusion of the argument that is made by Bayesian parameter estimation (the posterior PDF) is consistent with one of the premises to this argument (the prior PDF). As Bayes theorem logically follows from the precepts of the probabilistic logic, if this premise (the prior PDF) is true, the conclusion (the posterior PDF) is true. However, under the law of non-contradiction the prior PDF over TECS cannot be true and thus the conclusion (the posterior PDF over TECS) is deductively unproved.
In the construction of a model, the resulting model is usually deductively unproved, as information needed for a deductive conclusion is missing. Thus, in this respect, there is nothing unusual about the deductive unprovability of the posterior PDF over TECS. However, when a model is “scientific,” it is by definition susceptible to falsification. In view of the unobservability of the equilibrium temperature, the posterior PDF over TECS is non-falsifiable and thus it would be improper to describe the posterior PDF over TECS as a “scientific” model. Climatologists err when they imply that it is one.
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by Brady Caldwell
I am a science teacher in Sweden. Sweden’s new middle school curriculum (class 7-9), starting in the school year 2012-2013 (.pdf English translation) -
http://www.skolverket.se/2.3894/publicerat/2.5006?_xurl_=http%3A%2F%2Fwww4.skolverket.se%3A8080%2Fwtpub%2Fws%2Fskolbok%2Fwpubext%2Ftrycksak%2FRecord%3Fk%3D2687
- has this, in the of Physics subject section (p 123), instruction to teachers on what to teach:”Models in physics to describe and explain the earth’s radiation balance, the greenhouse effect and climate change”. That’s it.
However on the next page we have: “Critical examination of information and arguments which pupils meet in sources and social discussions related to physics” – this critical thinking about evidence and arguments is all through the new curriculum. Great!
So the new Swedish school curriculum is easy to interperet in a more rational and evidence based manner. Good!
But the Swedish science textbooks sold here are very much biased to explaining just the alarmist side of the story. Most Swedish teachers, I gather, don’t know about or have no time to bother about the skeptical side of the man-made global warming argument, as required in the new curriculum. But at least there is a way out for science teachers who want to avail their students of a critical thinking approach to their study of the world 
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by jim2
Hopefully, the teachers will touch on fuel poverty as well:
Climate mania impoverishes electricity customers worldwide
Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.
America’s secret? Unlike leaders in other countries, which to their countries’ ruin adopted policies as if global warming mattered, U.S. leaders more paid lip service to it. While citizens in other countries are now seeing soaring power rates, American householders can look forward to declining rates.
The North American exemplar of acting on the perceived threat of global warming is Ontario, which dismantled one of the continent’s finest fleets of coal plants in pursuit of becoming a green leader. Then, to induce developers to build uneconomic renewable energy facilities, the Ontario government paid them as much as 80 times the market rate for power. The result is power prices that rose rapidly (about 50% since 2005) and will continue to do so: Ontarians can expect power prices that are 46% higher over the next five years, according to a 2010 Ontario government estimate, and more than 100% higher according to independent estimates. The rest of Canada may not fare much better — the National Energy Board forecasts power prices 42% higher by 2035, while some estimates have Canadian power prices 50% higher by 2020.
The story throughout much of Europe is similar. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain.
The result is chaos to the economic well-being of the EU nations. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty” — defined by governments as needing to spend more than 10% of the total household income on electricity and gas. Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/05/11/lawrence-solomon-green-power-failure/
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by Rob Starkey
Imo what is critical is to accurately teach that there is still much unknown and controversy in the science community on the topic of climate change.
Imo there is a risk of teaching kids a propagandized message if one presents the information as a certainty. Teachers have frequently been quick to accept and spread the positions of Hansen and Mann and to teach that disagreeing with those conclusions makes one an unscientific fool.
It would seem appropriate that whatever is taught is required to be approved by the local school board prior to being presented to kids. That will not prevent an inaccurate message from being taught, but it would ensure some degree of consistency of message.
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by Edim
Excellent!
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Comment on Climate science in public schools by Edim
Small countries just copy the big ones. They don’t dissent. Research is expensive.
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Comment on The Bias of Science by Edim
H2 is expensive and difficult. Makes no sense at this point.
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Comment on Climate sensitivity discussion thread by Girma
Bartemis
Very interesting!
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