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Memories of the 28th Century

Science Lies

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Mark Twain — 'A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.'

I think I should blame the popular press, but there may be blame for the education industry also. Within the last few days, two different people tried to “correct” a piece of science that I mentioned, but they were wrong, and my fact was the real fact.

The first time was with respect to “climate change”. The claimer insisted that the popular delusion that climate change is being caused by CO2 being provided by human activity; thus causing warmer temperatures, etc. The problem with that is that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, even though the popular press keeps calling it one. That is simple and direct, and it should finish the argument, if people were rational. Unfortunately, a lot of people make their livings off climate change, so they have to keep it alive, in any case. The people in the climate change industry might do better, it they went into construction and built in places that won’t be affected by climate change.

The conversation didn't go to the next step, but the assertions that other compounds produced by humans are also greenhouse gases is mistaken. Those compounds are quickly broken down by hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere. That breaks all of the long molecules into small one. That's why the smell of gasoline disappears fairly quickly, and it gets cattle off the hook, because of their belches. Methane is an excellent greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last long.

That reminded me that I hadn't heard about the hole in the ozone layer recently. Those hydroxyl radicals are also the reason why Freon and similar compounds are also broken down readily in the atmosphere. It is likely that no Freon ever got to the ozone layer.

The other attempt at correcting me was in regard to a response to an online article that referred to Neanderthals as a separate species. We all know that the definition of species is a set of organisms that can engage in sexual reproduction and produce fertile offspring. Neanderthals and modern types produced fertile offspring that resulted in Neanderthal DNA being in the modern genome.

There are similar problems in a number of species, such as canids (wolves and dogs), Brown Bears (including Polar bears, Kodiak bears, Grizzly bears, Alaskan brown bears, Eurasian brown bears, etc.) all of those can reproduce together, but they are defined as different species for traditional reasons. That is, they have been called different species since the present system of nomenclature was developed.

These are only a few of the kinds of pseudo-science that can be found in magazine articles and online articles. It appears that some people get their science information from online articles, and they believe them. And politicians are spending taxpayer funds based on popular pseudo-science. The worst offenders are the climate change professionals, because they actively assert their misinformation time and again. It has gotten to the point where I suspect that some of them actually believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that leads to problems. Just because lies are repeated does not make them facts, and following the money often leads to surprising results. the problem of clueless people disseminating pseudo-science is also common in the medical sciences, but there is enough information about that already.



Dipole moment and greenhouse effect
http://butane.chem.uiuc.edu/pshapley...15/web-L15.pdf

Hydroxyl radicals cleaning the atmosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical

Updated 09-05-2021 at 09:43 PM by PeterL

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