13 October 2009

Happy Earth Science Week (and Canadian Thanksgiving!)

Posted by Dan Satterfield

This week is Earth Science Week as the title of this post seems to suggest. Monday was also Canadian Thanksgiving Day, but a honey dipped from Tim Horton’s would be a lot better than turkey!

NASA has released 6 videos in support of it. The theme this year is understanding climate. Based on some of the junk I have seen online recently, a lot of people don’t!

For those who teach, getting science based info on climate can be difficult, so here are a couple of items that may help! Two videos from NASA on rising sea level and the carbon cycle. Click on the movie place holders to watch them!

NOAA also has released a booklet on climate literacy. This would make a great teaching aid or lab for an Environmental Science course.

Mouse on the image to get a high res. PDF of the booklet. great job NOAA!

Mouse on the image to get a high res. PDF of the booklet. Great job NOAA!

There has been a lot of junk science this week on the web and it did not help that the usually very trustworthy BBC even came out with a story that was unusually poor in science fact. The headline was the worst part of it, but the story itself was rather junky. It even went so far as to bring up the silly cosmic rays myths.

Richard Black of the BBC would have done a heck of lot better!

Just so you know. If someone tells you that the globe is not warming or that it stopped warming in 1998, you are being given a load of political bull ####.

The real climate scientists at REAL CLIMATE must be sick and tired of busting this myth over, and over, but they wrote a nice post on it last week.

Even better is an excellent piece produced by NASA/JPL explaining the UP’s and DOWNS of GLOBAL WARMING. Many thanks to my Twitter friend New Science 101 who tipped me on it!

Those who purposefully spread this junk, do not care, and more likely are incapable of understanding the truth.  It’s sad when this kind of junk propaganda confuses those who are trying to learn about science.

More the pity if they are students.