Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 08/05/2008 12:11:12 PM PDT by PROCON
ABINGDON, Va. – After an in-service training session last week, some Washington County, Va., school teachers are preparing to implement a curriculum on climate change and environmental stewardship.
Developed by a group of educators, the program is aimed at teaching children about the connection between their actions and the wider world – so they can help save the planet.
“More and more information is coming towards these kids every day,” said Deni Peterson, who runs the Learning Landscapes program that has brought educational gardens to county schools. “These are depressing issues, these are hard issues for these kids, so I just try to plant some hope in there.”
Her solution has been to focus on fun, simple ways kids can make a difference.
“This is a worm hotel, and it’s really cool,” Peterson said, pulling the lid off a three-legged gray bin about the size of a large soup kettle that belongs to Greendale Elementary fifth-graders.
“These are castings, this is the worm poop ... you’re taking food waste, you’re taking paper waste, and you’re creating fertilizer ... and a handful of this stuff, you can sell this for $3,” she said.
Tammy Smith, a first-grade teacher at High Point Elementary School, presented suggestions on talking trash. She pulled out items that would normally be thrown away and asked teachers to brainstorm ways to re-use them instead.
She said she wants to instill the concept that “thrown away” is not really “away;” items that are tossed instead of recycled or re-used ultimately occupy space in a landfill, where some of them take millennia to decompose.
A driving force behind many of the teachers’ lessons is a concern about rising global temperatures, a trend environmentalists hope to reverse.
(Excerpt) Read more at tricities.com ...
Ping!
The more I read stories like this, the more grateful I am to have already graduated.
Religion in the Public Schools.
Recycling has noting to do with global warming.
We’re willing to implement a green curriculum, to educate students to behave in certain ways to “save the planet”. Yet on other issues, such as sex education, we’re not supposed to “impose” beliefs or ideals into the curriculum. We don’t want to educate them about sexual matters while persuading them to avoid risky sex behavior. Instead we want them to make their “sexual choices”. Why can’t we educate the kids to make their “green” choices then, without pushing them in a certain direction?
And in a day and age where too many 12th graders graduate at an 8th grade reading level, why not beef up the reading and writing curriculum, and let young people watch “An Inconvenient Truth” on their own time???????
Actually, there are several Baptist groups who are using the same tactic (stewardship) in bringing their pew members around to the “new wave”. Based on peer pressure...this tactic will motivate and lightly push anyone in the midst toward the final goal. Pretty nifty concept...wonder how’d I take the same tactic and insert intelligent design straight into the same forum, and achieve the same results.
“Religion in the Public Schools.”
Yep. It sure isn’t facts or art.
Hey, Bert! Check this out! Looks like the global warming foolishness has finally struck some schools back home.
“The Planet isn’t going anywhere. We are”. - George Carlin
Now, who pays for the drugs these kids are going to need after they have been convinced that they are a burden on the Planet and that they should “do” something about it?
ABSTRACT:
"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well-known but under-appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2-rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere. Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation.
Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase.
If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
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The graph above represents temperature and CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. It is the same exact data Al Gore and the rest of the man-made global warmers refer to. The blue line is temps, the red CO2 levels. The deep valleys represent 4 separate glaciation periods. Now look very carefully at the relationship between temps and CO2 levels (the present is on the right hand side of the graph) and keep in mind that Gore claims this data is the 'proof' that CO2 has warmed the earth in the past. But does the data indeed show this? Nope. In fact, rising CO2 levels all throughout this 400,000-year period actually lagged behind temperature increases ...by an average of 800 years! So it couldn't have been CO2 that got Earth out of these past glaciations. Yet Gore dishonestly and continually claims otherwise. Furthermore, the subsequent CO2 level increases due to dissolved CO2 being released from warming oceans, never did lead to additional warming, the so-called "run-away greenhouse effect" that Al Gore and his friends keep warning us about. In short, there is little if any evidence that CO2 had once led to increased warming during the past 400,000 years. -ETL
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"The above chart shows the range of global temperature through the last 500 million years. There is no statistical correlation between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years and the temperature record in this interval. In fact, one of the highest levels of carbon dioxide concentration occurred during a major ice age that occurred about 450 million years ago [Myr]. Carbon dioxide concentrations at that time were about 15 times higher than at present." [also see 180 million years ago, same thing happened]:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M
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So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
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Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
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