Page 12 of the new New Zealand teachers’ resource for child indoctrination has this conclusive experiment for children to learn about the evils of man-made CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
Our resident BFD ex-science teacher has posed some questions and further experimentation for the brighter students for homework:
- Has the CO2 in the sealed jar changed at all in the last 15 minutes?
- If CO2 has not changed, why has the temperature in the jar increased?
Repeat the experiment at home at night.
3. Does the temperature increase in the jar?
4. If not, why not?
5. Why does the jar heat up more in the day than at night?
On the tiny scale of a jar (even a jar ten metres tall), the infrared absorption effects of carbon dioxide are too weak to be measured using just a thermometer. This is true even if the jar is filled with pure carbon dioxide. There are other reasons why this experiment proves nothing at all, but this is the main one.
If you heat an enclosed jar with a lamp, (or the sun) the thermometer inside the jar will indeed heat up relative to the air outside the jar, but this is because the air inside the jar is trapped and cannot mix with cooler, surrounding air. But this has nothing to do with the Earth’s “greenhouse effect”, however. (Yes, it does describe why a plant greenhouse is warmer inside, though.) But, obviously, the earth and the atmosphere around it is not a closed system like the jar.
Will teachers with a brain be prosecuted if they refuse to take part in this charade?
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