Posted on 11/19/2007 2:08:21 PM PST by Joe Republc
All the answers you got are good but I’m not sure an elementary kid can handle the questions and the teacher’s response.
Try this. Ask your kid to ask the teacher what’s causing the warming, and no doubt the teacher will say CO2 from humans burning stuff. Then ask him to ask how much CO2 there is and how much should there be? The teacher might know the answer to the first but of course there is no answer to the second. Tell your kid that he heard the amount of CO2 was really really small like less than 1% (actually .037%). Then tell him or her to ask isn’t it true that all plants need water, and CO2 to live? And don’t animals need plants to live, so isn’t CO2 good?
Might work.
She apparently lacks any clue about correlation vs. causation. Did you try to get her to explain how SUVs on Earth warmed Mars up? Especially considering that Earth is nothing more than a little tiny blue dot in the Martian sky?
She also suffers from minority psychosis which is truly scary when it rears it's ugly head.
Yes, there is an answer to the second. The optimum situation would be that human activities would not be changing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere -- whatever it is -- and that the only change would be due to natural processes alone.
Great opportunity to teach the kids about liberalism gone wild.
Maybe not melted completely, but they they've melted a lot.
"An early study of the various components of the Greenland, Antarctic and Canadian Arctic ice-cap cores (Koerner,1989) suggested that during the last interglacial period, the Greenland ice sheet suffered massive retreat and Canadian ice caps melted completely. Since then, modeling has helped support this interpretation (Cuffey and Marshall, 2000). Ice-core records of stable isotopes, melt layering and chemistry from the same Canadian ice cores, and others from the Russian Arctic islands, Svalbard and Greenland are presented as evidence for a more modest, but still substantial, retreat in the early Holocene*. The sections representing the first half of the Holocene in many cores have less negative δ18O values (δ values) and a higher percentage of melt layers than recently deposited ice, suggesting that temperatures were 1.3-3.5°C warmer than today. Given that glacier balances are slightly negative today, they must have been substantially more negative during the early-Holocene thermal maximum, leading to retreat of the circumpolar ice caps. Evidence is presented to suggest that, with the exception of Academii Nauk ice cap, the ice in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard must have almost disappeared. In the Canadian Arctic, the larger Canadian ice caps retreated but survived. The cooling trend that followed this thermal maximum promoted re-expansion and new growth of most of the ice caps in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard."
* this is the period commonly referred to as either the Holocene Climate Optimum or the Holocene Thermal Maximum
1. Sun and global warming: a cosmic connection?
2. Point #2 in my profile.
Let me say that you sound as if you believe humans aren’t part of nature.
We have been creating CO2 since we learned how to light a fire. There is no credible scientific evidence that the human contribution to the complex chemical mix that is the atmosphere does anything at all. If the natural CO2 component causes global climate change there is absolutely nothing we can do about it either, and the geological evidence over the past 400,000 years shows that CO2 varies naturally without human activity. Was this cooling and heating OK because humans were holed up in refuges for millenia when the ice came?
I’d rather be warm than cold. I can live with no ice in Greenland.
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