I was brought up in a family mix of scientists and entrepreneurs. There has to be a reason for everything. We never just blindly accepted, authority or otherwise. That is how I am with my kids. They understand why I say yes or no and respect it. I used to say they should not have sweets (candy to you) because it would rot their teeth, but the odd one wouldn’t hurt. More recently, I showed them pictures of rotten body parts caused by type 2 diabetes and tell them that is sugar rotting the body from the inside out and I leave it up to them if they eat sweets or not. The older one can take her money and buy sweets. You know what? She doesn’t. The younger one had some given to her at a party. She could take them if she wanted. They are still in the cupboard, untouched and forgotten about. I don’t buy sugary junk and they don’t ask for any. They never grew up with sugar so are not addicted to it. It’s not about accepting authority. It’s about understanding.
Edit: I didn’t spring the Holocaust out of the blue. My daughter had covered it in her History lessons at school. So we can wonder why certain things don’t add up. Just because we question doesn’t mean we expect credible answers - we’re scientists, not politicians or Historians. It’s ok to say we don’t know.
One area of recent history would be a good avenue to explore: What good is NATO doing?
NATO was formed to prevent an onslaught of USSR forces. It’s been almost 30 years since the USSR crumbled. Why is NATO still there? Do we really need to fear a second conquest of Europe by Russia, a country with a GDP smaller than Canada’s? Without a ruthless totalitarian ideology, could Russia even succeed in keeping the Baltic states under an occupation?
It’s not a black and white question, but I’m inclined to think it persists because often we do what we’ve always done, without asking why are we doing it.
The area of inquiry that colored my skeptical outlook was pseudoscience, the 1970’s was full of them. Perpetual motion machines, quack cures like psychic surgery, reading auras, dowsing. Give your daughter a full dose of that and have her compare the common features of all of those things with “climate science.”
James Randi made a career of debunking pseudoscience and wrote some classic books on it. He started out by debunking a famous psychic, Uri Geller, who made a decent career of using magician’s tricks to pretend to be psychic.
The State of Israel is likened to a three-story building with a basement:
Top floor is occupied by Ashkenazi ■■■■■
Second floor by Mizrakhi ■■■■ (from Iran, Arab countries)
Ground floor by Arabs with Israeli citizenship
Basement by Arabs in Gaza and West Bank who have no rights whatsoever.
I don’t really know anything about the Cold war myself. NATO - not really enough to debate it. Quackery is not science, just wishful thinking so we don’t go there. We talk a lot about “climate change.” We have taken every claim made by the so called scientists and debunked them. Why would sea levels rise? How can they? Most of the iceberg is under water. Ice has more volume than water. As ice melts, water then decreases in volume and is at its most dense at 4 deg C. The expansion coefficient of seawater is far, far offset by evaporation at higher temperatures. Why is evaporation not mentioned? Because it isn’t helpful in their argument. So in fact, with rising temperatures, sea levels will go down, not up. We ask the kids, if you have ice cubes in a glass of water, does the water level rise when the ice melts?
If the ice is above sea level, like on Antarctica, melting it will only add to the volume of the oceans.
Pseudosciences are instructive, because they all have the same features: claims that can’t be tested, appeal to authority, ad hominem attacks on skeptics, errors that only go in one direction, impossibly complicated systems that facilitate data manipulation.
If you let ice cubes float in a big enough bowl, the water level will not change when the ice cubes melt.
Same for icebergs.
However, if the glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt, the ocean level rises.
Ocean levels rose drastically about 13,000 years ago when glaciers and ice sheets melted in Greenland, Antarctica, Tibetan Plateau, Scandinavia, North America, etc., and connected the Mediterranean and Sea of Japan, which had been both big lakes, with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans respectively.
The melting of the ice on the Rockies in North America was so drastic that the massive amount of water carved the Grand Canyon in a matter of days.
When glaciers and ice sheets melt, ice tongues are formed at various elevations which are dams that store large amounts of water. When the melting proceeds further, these dams break and cause enormous torrents to rush downstream.
Questions:
Does water escape the magnetism of the earth and dissipate into the outer atmosphere and space? Can water, at the hottest days of summer, be molecularly broken down to hydrogen and oxygen and escape the magnetic pressures of earth? Does temperature play no matter and some molecules from the earth float away beyond it’s pull anyway? Can there be some form of decay causing some form of molecular leakage that hasn’t been addressed?
First question, I think yes. The law of diffusion says that material tends to go towards an area of lower concentration, so we are probably losing material into space. I have no idea to what extent that it’s happening. There are other forces holding it back, but I doubt that it’s 100% effective, nothing in nature is.
Second question, also yes, but to an insignificant extent. A hot day isn’t much different from a cold one for this. To give you an idea how unfavorable this is, an analogous thing is liquid water behaving like an acid, losing one of its hydrogens and becoming OH- and H+. The equilibrium constant for this is 10 to the minus 14th power, meaning the OH- and H+ recombining to make H2O is extremely more likely.
Another sign of sloppy science: These “scientists” make measurements and calculate a global average temperature, express it to two or or three decimal places and treat it as golden. Just one point, averaged over a day, anywhere, varies 10 or 20 degrees. If they gave the error bars along with this average it would greatly discredit their whole exercise. These averages are essentially meaningless numbers.
Then they try to deduce it for 10,000 years ago. They come up with numbers, again expressed to two decimal points, and it’s probably 10x less meaningful, at best.
There probably have been warmer periods and ice ages, affecting sea levels. Pretending that we know it to any quantifiable level, like the sea was 10 feet lower or higher, is pretty dubious.
Switching the term of magnetic force to gravitational force doesn’t answer the question though.
Can water vapors or molecules float out to the vacuum of space? You see in movies how untethered astronauts float away. There is, at some height above sea level, an equalibrium where a slight push/pull a particle or body will break free from the earth’s force. Perhaps a volcanic erruption, a hurricane, a solar flare, solar winds, cosmic winds, meteors or comets do weaken or shift the force at times. They claim space is mainly a vacuum, so there’s no particles at all. Then they claim the particles that are there are mainly hydrogen and helium, which form a plasma called the Intergalactic medium. Hydrogen is hydrogen and helium is helium. We got those.
I don’t think so.
It gets pretty cold at high elevations and water vapors condensate and form clouds, coming back to the surface as rain or snow. If the condensation process occurs closer to ground level, you see fogs.
(Or so, I learned in school and I don’t see anything wrong with such recycling of water in nature)
During the heights of Ice Age glacials, the sea levels were thousands of meters below the current level and the edges of continental shelves formed the shorelines. Virtually vertical drops thousands of meters, likes of which do not exist on dry land now.
Earth temperatures for Ice Age can be quantified by measurements at Russian stations in South Pole (Vostok Station) etc.
This kind of date provide information as to ancient temperatures etc hundreds of thousands years ago.
Mars had plenty of water and a large ocean but most of the water evaporated, which can be explained only in terms of a catastrophic event.
Mars was nuked in a war.
Dr John Brandenburg
Strange shape of Iapetus. The equatorial ridge
(one of Saturn’s moons)
You get this kind of weld seam if you put together two metal cups to form a ball.
Iapetus as well as our Moon were artificially built billions of years ago by unknown civilizations.
