Al Gore Causes Lobal Warming in Middle School Brains

This was my last Budgeteer column... on to better things.
Originally published 4/15/07

When last I wrote about the our public schools’ middle school science curriculum it was over the issue of showing a group of seventh graders Hitchcock’s horror classic “The Birds.” Apparently, not much has changed in the year and a half since then, as I recently learned that another horror film was shown, this time to a group of Proctor eighth graders.

It’s hard to decide which case is worse; frightening young students with scripted terror from a horror master, or frightening students with scripted propaganda from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Let me be clear, I am not advocating that there have been no observable changes regarding climate patterns, nor that such changes shouldn’t be studied. It seems, however, that in light of all the observable data it behooves us to be cautious about teaching on the topic without a critical eye as to who is saying what. Showing a film, which is entirely questionable in its claims and scope, is hardly a cautious approach. Just the opposite, it is fear-mongering and foolishness; hardly what our school children deserve; need I add that no counterpoint was given?

Is there anyone who supposes that weather patterns are static, so that we will always know what the temperature will be on any given day? All one need to do is look at the historic highs and lows for any given day of the year to note that temperature fluctuates, sometimes in the extreme. Why should anyone be surprised then to note that (gasp) longer term climate patterns also fluctuate? How do we suppose we emerged from the last ice age, anyway?

Consider the moon, which has a 19 year cycle, over which phases of the moon land on the same dates of the year - almost. That means, even given 120 years of history (most locales have less) in which accurate temperature records were kept, we do not even have seven full lunar cycles of observable data. Yet Al Gore and friends want to convince us of a pending environmental disaster as if written in stone. As I recall from seventh grade science the moon has something to do with our climate. Consider, there is another lunar cycle known as its “weak periodic pattern” that repeats only about every 184 years. In other words, the data is a best incomplete; we don’t have one single weak pattern cycle of scientifically verifiable data, and yet Al Gore presumes to tell us he can see the future regarding our climate.

But what about the huge increase in carbon dioxide you ask. To which I respond, how about the 20,000 scientists, cited by Drs. E.C. Beisner, P.K. Driessen, R. McKitrick, and R.W. Spencer, in “A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor,” who have signed the following statement: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Furthermore, these same scientists note that the models which those who argue for global warming are seriously flawed. For instance, according the current model there should have already been a 3 to 11˚F increase in temperature, resulting from the increased levels of CO2 we are experiencing. Yet the actual temperature increase has been less than 1˚F over the last 100 years. Which begs the question, when does a new model get formulated, since the old one is demonstrably erroneous?

For all you middle school students, and certain City Councilors, who would like to be educated you may go to www.iceagenow.com for some easy read articles with links to references (I chose this particular site with middle schoolers in mind and what they would find appealing, not as a primary research site). Contrary to the many alarmist warming claims which call for increased Arctic temperatures and rising sea levels, you will find titles such as “Sea levels are falling” in the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. Other articles cite how the Antarctic ice sheet is actually growing, and the icecaps in Greenland and the Arctic are thickening, even though elsewhere there are other kinds of changes.

The best science shows a definitive correlation between current increased solar activity and the slight increase in temperatures we have seen. This data, of course, refutes the notion that man has much to do with it. I, however, would be willing to send a Congressional fact-finding delegation to the sun in order to investigate, preferably led by Al Gore.

Why Ichthyologic.com?

This one is one of my favorites and provided the impetus for the name of this blog site, enjoy.

Unable to evolve, Bubbles passes on.
Budgeteer News: Friday, January 06th, 2006

Looking back, it has been a hard year. First, I lost my pet rock Skippy, next my pet crow Scrappy nobly gave his life for medical science. And now my friend, Bubbles the fish, is gone too.

I first met Bubbles while at the office of my therapist, Dr. I. A. Muse, while we were both in the waiting room. I asked Bubbles what brought him to see the good doctor. He told me that the pressure his family was putting on him to evolve was proving very stressful, which he believed was the cause of his back problems.

He shared that no matter how much scientific information he used to persuade his family that evolution wasn’t possible, they just pressured him all the more to accept their beliefs or to keep quiet. This vexed him because they would never even look at all the data which clearly shows that the earth could not be as old as evolutionists say it is. He noted, because of the amount of mud and debris that rivers wash down each year, and other known rates of erosion, the floor of every ocean should have been filled with much more silt than exists, if the evolutionist view were correct. He added that, every year, over 450 million tons of sodium erodes into the ocean. If the earth was even a fraction of the billions of years evolutionists claim, the Dead Sea would be the closest thing to fresh water we would know: and already nothing can live there.

Despite the calculations, tables, and mathematical equations, his family said he was not a scientist, only a fanatic. Nothing he said could persuade them. He showed them repeatable experiments whereby petrified wood could be formed in a matter of days, in conditions which mimic those found naturally. He did the same with opals, which once were thought to take millions of years to form, but which we now know can be grown in just a couple of weeks time. He documented cases of stalagmites and stalactites which closed the mouths of mines only decades after they had last been used, proving how rapidly rock formations can grow, thus dispelling the myth of old age. These, and many other examples, fell on deaf fish ears.

No matter what he tried he was only pushed back down into the mud. The school of fish he had once happily swum with expelled him for his diverse way of thinking. They made him put stickers on the front of his research tomes which read “Caution: the Sturgeon General has determined that reading this material will increase your mercury levels.” Instead of reasoning with him they turned on him, and said he was nothing more than a bottom crawler.

Dr. Muse had been able to help him by showing him that like begets like. If his fish friends truly believed they were nothing more than modified pond scum, then we should not expect them to think too much higher than that. After all, a student is not greater than his teacher, and their name calling strategy was not of very intelligent design.

In the end, Bubbles was a giant among men and fish. Tragically, he suffered a brain aneurysm while working on an algorithm to power his new search engine for marine animals, Ichthyologic.com. He had hoped to complete this project sooner, but having a memory span of only three seconds tends to hamper such work. Nevertheless, his passing will be remembered by those who loved to be filleted with razor logic, and by Shore Lunch aficionados.

Bubbles' last wish was to be buried in the La Brea Tar Pits. In this he was of one mind with Richard Dawkins, a high priest of Darwinism, who said, "Only an extremely small proportion of creatures has the good fortune to be fossilized... I should consider it an honor." Bubbles thought Dawkins would be remembered as a fossil, but for very different reasons then he imagined.