You really have to laugh at some of this stuff. When the AGW do-gooders manage to accomplish spending beaucoup bucks, and talk British Children’s Secretary Ed Balls into advocating every new school to be “zero-carbon” from 2016, studies show kids falling asleep in the “eco-friendly” classrooms from poor ventilation.
Builders have created air-tight classrooms which are intended to reduce heat loss but also stop carbon dioxide escaping.
Higher CO2 levels in newly-built schools are leaving children drowsy and less able to concentrate, researchers from University College London and Reading University found.
The studies will come as a blow to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, who wants every new school to be “zero-carbon” from 2016. UCL researcher Dr Dejan Mumovic said ministers had “rushed” their sustainable schools programme. He monitored 10 schools built 50 year ago and nine erected under the Government’s £45 billion Building Schools for the Future programme. “The ventilation rates were equally appalling,” he told the Times Educational Supplement. CO2 levels are exceeding targets, and that can affect the learning performances of kids.”
Kim Knappett, a science teacher from Forest Hill School in Lewisham, said her new classrooms were either far too hot or freezing. Stiflingly hot classrooms lead to an increase in disruptive behaviour as pupils become “irritable”, she said.“It’s just too hot and everybody falls asleep or gets ratty,” Ms Knappett told the Standard. “They can’t work properly.”
The school’s new buildings cost more than £20 million but one window which broke the week after the classrooms opened in January has still not been fixed, she said. A separate study by Reading University tested the reaction times and memory of pupils in rooms with high levels of CO2. Professor Derek Clements-Croome, who led the research, said: “When the CO2 was very high, the reaction times would slow and memory would be affected. The kids would also get drowsier.
“You may not even detect that it’s getting stuffier in the room but once higher CO2 levels are breathed in it gets into the blood and goes to the brain.”
Now the ministers want to renovate, or rebuild every secondary school in the country. It turns out they discovered that fresh air is quite beneficial..
duh wuh
Maybe all those eco-wackos have been deprived of vital fresh air in their past, and that’s why they get all these idiotic ideas.
Vietnam era Navy wife, indy/conservative, and an official California escapee now residing as a red speck in the sea of Oregon blue.
Couldn’t that gradually cause brain damage? Good Lord! They’re trying to create more liberals! DAMN YOU EVIL B*STARDS! DAMN YOOOOOOOUUUUUU!
Uh, has anyone paused to consider that atmospheric (as in outdoor air) CO2 levels are going straight up and have been going straight up, especially since the end of WWII and are now higher than they have ever been since the origin of humans (homo sapiens) one million years ago? We literally did not evolve to cope with this level of atmospheric CO2. Our body’s buffer system is CO2-based. Exposure to higher ambient levels of CO2 literally changes the body’s bioenergetics, and we have no clue what the long term consequences will be.
Forget about climate change, which may or may not exist. What’s going on in our atmosphere is the most radical human guinea pig experiment in history. In my opinion, it is anything but “conservative” to allow this experiment to continue.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA
Larry W., please read this:
Pre-Industrial CO2 Levels Were About The Same as Today. How and Why We are Told Otherwise?
Excerpt:
“In a paper submitted to the Hearing before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski explains:
The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false.”
Read the rest here:
http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/2008/12/have-we-been-misled-about-past-carbon.html
Larry: Do you intend to keep making absurd claims such as above regarding CO2 and not back them up? Am I wasting my time by responding?
Just as your claim that sea levels were rising (using a chart which conveniently chopped off the preceding portion that disproved your claim) the arguement that CO2 levels have never been higher since man walked the planet is also false:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/Bad_Honnef/bhonnef1e.htm
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/180_years_accurate_Co2_Chemical_Methods.pdf
Also, we could go into the evidence that shows that CO2 increase may be related to a rise in temperature and not the other way around.
But I don’t see any point in wasting more time with this issue if you are just going to dump your talking points then stalk off and sulk.
The idea that man is somehow able to damage the climate by our current activity is not only totally unfounded in science it is absurd.
But for people who have dethroned God and put liberalism in his place I guess it would make sense.
Watch it and learn Larry:
Link:
Isn’t that video great, Mike! I have listen to it a few time since it was out last year. And since you have posted it, I will wacht it for the 4th time… it is so well documented.
Larry, this video is long but it is worth listening to. Maybe it will wash away your leftist Obama admiration.
Oh common, Mike. I don’t “go off and sulk.” I don’t make a compulsive effort to follow every last thread through to the bitter end. I’m happy to let others have the last word, after I’ve made whatever point(s) I’m trying to make. Some people get a lot of satisfaction out of arguing things back and forth until one of them gives up. That’s fine; but that’s not what I’m interested in.
In the present case, I was simply making a simple point: the implications of rising CO2 levels (if they exist) go beyond climate change to human health. I’m confident that I did not misrepresent mainstream conventional wisdom regarding historic CO2 levels. You certainly have the prerogative to challenge this mainstream notion.
I watched the first 2 minutes of your video. It was about climate change. I’m not arguing climate change. If I’m “arguing” anything, in the present thread, it’s CO2 levels.
I read the Tom Ball essay. Tom Ball is no more objective than the “no funding without a cause” scientists, roundly criticized as being non-objective by climate change skeptics. Google Tom Ball and you’ll see he’s had a busy speaking schedule.
Just regarding one point:
This misses the point. It’s the legal principle of “best evidence.” The best evidence is careful readings from the same location with carefully calibrated instruments, over time. Whether the methodology used on Mauna Loa or the location of Mauna Loa is the same as other methodologies or whether it is representative of other locations around the world is not nearly so important as what the data itself show, using its own historical record as a gold standard control. What these internal data clearly show is a relentless upward rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, since measurements began.
You cited a blog and a Youtube. Here are my “cites:”
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
This is consistent with a much larger body of data (I link the EPA’s website on this):
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentac.html
This is also consistent with the acidificiation of the ocean:
http://www.ocean-acidification.net/
Now, I am by no means an expert on any of this research. In fact, if it will help moves things along, I’ll stipulate that you (Mike) have a better knowledge base than I do. But your suggestion that my claims are “absurd” is ideological overkill.
I do have an understanding of the history of research, moreover. This sort of thing comes up all the time in medicine. Someone comes up with a new idea, which rocks the existing boat (e.g. smoking causes cancer; stomach bacteria cause ulcers; you can treat cancer by preventing the tumor from growing new blood vessels; and that all time favorite, cholesterol causes heart disease). In all of these situations (and continuing to the present day with the last), there have been legions of critics, every bit as well informed as the good Dr. Tom Ball, who can find flaws with the theory and holes in the data.
Anyway, I made my point. The implications of increased atmospheric CO2 go beyond climate change to health and that, if CO2 levels are, indeed, increasing, it is the most radical human guinea pig experiment in history.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA
Good grief Larry, watch the fuck… video. Are you so intellectually lazy? I just finish watching it for the 4 or fifth time since it has come out . It will answer all of your idiotic questions. Make that intellectual effort or shut up on the subject. If you do not watch it till the end, I will conclude that you are just like the moonbats here: “You do not want to know, you just want to keep believing what you are already falsly believing.
On this video you have the best scientifists of the world. They will explain you everything you have to know about CO2. Don’t be so lazy intellectually, make an effort to understand. You think you know better than these experts in the video? Well think again my friend, you know nothing on the subject… nothing. You are just like Obama’s thugs that do not want to know the truh about reality. Watch the video! Watch the video and get some education.
Craig, it’s an hour and 14 minutes and it starts out like a sensationalistic propaganda piece.
If you can give me, let’s say, three links to written stuff that I can then use as a jump off point for independent fact checking (it’s much easier to do this with written stuff, where I can clip words, phrases, names, etc. as I’m reading, and check out references), then, in the interest of meeting you half way, I’ll read them. But I don’t have any interest in watching “Sicko” and I don’t have any interest in watching other sensationalist propaganda pieces.
I’ve suggested several times watching the McCain/Obama PBS election eve special, which also has the great advantage of being online, with everything broken down into neat chapters, so that you can just read about/watch whatever interests you most, and which also has written transcripts, many clickable to make independent reading easier. I’m guessing that you haven’t taken my suggestion, either.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA
So, Mr. Larry… the “Conscience Rule” post is up. Where are you?
Larry, the information that you get in this video is so huge, so tremendous, that it would take a thousands pages in writing. No excerpt would do the trick, because it is all inter-connected thru one scientifists to the other. Just watch it! It is so interesting that you do not feel you have been watching for one hour and fourteen minutes… it feels like 20 minutes.
Craig & Mike – Thanks for posting The Great Global Warming Swindle video. Lots of great information there.
You know what would be great… that grammar schools and high schools be required to show The Great Global Warming Swindle in conjunction with Al Gore’s nonsensicle global warming scaremongering movie. Instead of indoctrination and scaremongering, the kids would be able to see all sides of the issue and make up their own minds.
@Larry Weisenthal:
Anyway, I made my point. The implications of increased atmospheric CO2 go beyond climate change to health and that, if CO2 levels are, indeed, increasing, it is the most radical human guinea pig experiment in history.
Larry – If you watch the video, it mentions that CO2 levels follow temperature levels. Since the global temperature has been going down the last decade or so, CO2 levels will eventually follow.
Also, compared to the amount of CO2 emitted by dying foliage, animals, volcanos and the oceans, what humans emit is almost inconsequential. So I don’t get your comment “…it is the most radical human guinea pig experiment in history.” Unless you are referring to God participating in an experiment, since it is the Sun which drives climate and CO2 levels.
Humans have little to no effect on climate change and CO2 levels. It is kind of like the statement made in the movie Deja Vu: it’s like dropping a rock into a body of water to affect its flow, only the rock is a pebble and the body of water we’re talking about is the Mississippi River.
If you wonder why so many people get so jazzed about this issue and are completely fed up with global warming scaremongers, it is because we see the issue as it is: humans’ contribution to climate change is the equivalent of throwing a pebble into the Mississippi River, yet the global warming scaremongers want to destroy the world’s economy and take people’s money and radically change their lifestyles… for/over nothing.
Michael in MI, it’s not for nothing. It’s for the children! Seriously, it’s so they can force socialism on everyone, grab more power for themselves, and more money while telling themselves THEY saved the world. And people say the left has no religion. Sure they do. It’s called AGW.
Larry, your reasons for not watching seem like nothing more than a cover for not wanting to potentially change your beliefs.
@Hard Right:
Yeah, after I re-read that after posting, I realize that saying “…the global warming scaremongers want to destroy the world’s economy and take people’s money and radically change their lifestyles… for/over nothing” was not exactly what I was trying to express.
What I was trying to say is that they want to do all that when it will have absolutely no effect on climate change nor CO2 levels, but it will have a HUGE effect on their own bank accounts and a HUGE negative effect on the lifestyles and bank accounts of everyone else in the world.
And this is what angers most of us who see the AGW swindle for what it is. We know that the scaremongering is just that… scaremongering. And we know that the ‘solutions’ they propose are not solutions to anything, since nothing we do really can affect climate change nor CO2 levels at all. So their ‘solutions’ are nothing but a big swindle and hoax in order to have world government control over the people of the world and take our money and radically change our lifestyles.
The fact that so many people have bought into this swindle and hoax is downright scary. And it is even more angering that these scaremongers are going after children and scaring them into believing this nonsense as well. It is flat out indoctrination for the sake of global government control. The fact that so many people do not see this is downright worrisome, to say the least.
Larry: I wonder how much of your time you have devoted to reading propaganda from Al Gore and the alarmists yet find you cannot spare more than two minutes for another point of view.
As I pointed out in the links provided we are NOT currently experiencing historic high CO2 levels within the span of man’s time on earth. And, it should also be clear by now that CO2 is not the cause of warming but an effect.
Go beyond man’s time on earth and ponder how one would explain the Ordovician Period 460 million years ago when CO2 concentrations were 4400 ppm while temperatures then were about the same as they are today?
Even is it was true that manmade CO2 was the culprit of any undesireable warming, there is NO international solution out there that would have the slightest impact. As long as the China and India are exempt it would make no difference if the U.S. totally capped our carbon output. And since the latest International conference in Poland failed to address that issue there is not likely to be any change in that reality.
Your earlier talk about using the global environment was some sort of “guinea pig” was alarmist and abusrd.
Mata, I’d love to get to your excellent post on the conscience rule, and I’ll do so after I can extricate myself from this can of worms.
I don’t want to debate climate change. I’m not a climatologist. I’m a physician and much more worried about biological questions, particularly those concerning human physiology and pathology.
I don’t like being paraphrased and misquoted.
Here’s what I said, not what Mike says I said:
I stand by this quotation 100%, and it is neither alarmist nor absurd. With respect to Michael in MI (Go Blue/&#$% Rodriquez), I don’t think that you are correct about the human contribution to CO2 being inconsequential. Until humans started burning sequestered fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 levels were at an equilibrium. Living organisms absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and give it back up when they die. The problem comes when long-sequestered carbon is burned over a short geological time frame. Another piece of important data is that it is possible to calculate how much of a rise there should have been in atmospheric CO2, based on calculations of how much sequestered carbon has been burned, and these match up pretty well (the actual and the theoretical). Also, it’s possible to estimate how much more atmospheric CO2 levels will rise, given the eventual burning of all known carbon reserves, even though this projection is complicated by unknown effects on climate and green plant growth.
You guys are really going to force me to sit through an hour and 15 minutes of obvious propaganda. Watch the first 2 minutes and tell me that this is not a highly biased piece of propaganda. Well, OK, you win. I’ll watch it. But it better be something which I can can easily source and verify. If it’s just a bunch of interviews with so-called authority figures showing non-referenced charts and graphs, then it’s going to be a total waste of my time.
With regard to chart from E-G Beck of Freiburg; this is contrary to and not nearly as credible as the data on official, Bush administration, US government websites (linked by me, above). The gold standard is the 50 year Mauna Loa data. Same location. Same research group, which has been audited and site visited regularly over the years. Best evidence principle. It’s a relentless curve, straight upward, without important deviation.
http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/datasets/mauna/image3_full.jpg
Quote from a different website (referenced below):
>>The data in the above chart is not in question. Still, many people claim that the facts are not all in. Aren’t volcanoes the source of the CO2? Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980. Pinatubo went off in 1991. Neither of these events caused any noticeable effect on the curve. The minor flattening from 1991 through 1993 corresponds to the worldwide recession. We burned less coal and oil in those years. So, economic events do show up. None of the other objections I have heard, including sunspot cycles, wobble in the Earth’s orbit, natural short-term climate cycles, and so on, appears in the data. Again, this data correlates perfectly with the history of worldwide fossil fuel use. The rise in atmospheric CO2 levels is caused by the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas and by other human activities including deforestation and slash-and-burn agriculture.<<
http://earsi.com/ggp01.htm
I think that the above data and observations are entirely clear and difficult to refute. I think that these data and observations constitute the best evidence regarding the assertion that atmospheric CO2 levels are, indeed, rising, and that the most likely cause for these rising levels is human burning of carbon which had been sequestered for tens to hundreds of millions of years.
But I’ll watch the hour and 15 minute video, which is going to be a major sacrifice on my part, as I now have my kids home for the holidays. I just hope that it’s worth it.
Would you guys be willing to reciprocate and watch the PBS election-eve special on Obama and McCain? Didn’t think so.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA
I’m sorry, but suffocating children in airtight schools, so that the CO2 they exhale through normal breathing does not add to a school’s “Carbon Footprint” is an appallingly idiotic idea. From a certain whacked-out environmental angle, yes it proves something we already know, that excessive exposure to CO2, without any plant-life to complete the cycle can kill. But why do they want to risk the deaths of elementary school children to prove that point?
The problem is it ignores that though the Earth can be thought of as a “bio-dome”, it is not a closed system. 20 years ago, the environmental whack jobs were complaining about rain-forests disappearing. Well, the relative ambient CO2 in our air is directly proportional to how well plantlife thrives and spreads as they wash the carbon out via photosynthesis. Turning it back into oxygen. As long as one only looks at carbon emissions and wears blinders to or ignores the other side of the lifecycle, you will get erroneous information.
Mauna Loa is an ACTIVE volcano, it has been active since 1984 and as all volcanos do, when they are active, they pump CO2 into the air. A single volcano can put out more CO2 than the activities of all of mankind world-wide. But the charts and links Larry supplies of a single volcano’s output is not really that important in the full scheme of things. It’s only an example of more disinformation to prove a point. It’s akin to testing ambient CO2 levels in a forest sampling a with a probe, then shoving that probe up a vehicle’s tailpipe and slowly depressing the accelerator. Of course you’re going to get higher levels. There will always be times where one volcanic area is more active than others. The ecosystem that is the Earth provides it’s own solution and without the complication of an extreme extinction event arising, will continue to do so.
Standard human CO2 contributions is insufficient to cause such an extreme. What would have to happen to cause such a drastic change to our ecosystems ability to regenerate would be on the scale of a nuclear winter or an asteroid collision punching through the Earth’s crust at one of it’s weakest links. Such an event is known to have occurred once before and the Earth eventually recovered from that pretty well. There are 2 sink-holes off the coast of Charleston where an asteroid impacted and tore through the seam between the oceanic plates. There is geological evidence this set up chain reactions of volcanoes from Greenland to the tip of South America and suppositions are that this was THE extinction event that sealed an end to the era of large predators. It shifted the axis enough to fast-freeze mastodons, still with food in their mouths, burying them in sheets of ice. Man was around at that time too, amazingly survived, and the earth recovered from that quite nicely.
http://www.atlantisquest.com/Paleontology.html
Geological findings give a similar date for this extinction event and the sudden drastic incredible increase in CO2 as a result. Other Global Warning theorists also point to the Pleistocene Extinction event CO2 levels when making arguments in order to try to frighten people. That Larry, is just one reason why the Global Warming alarmists agenda can hardly be considered serious. They are talking changes in fractions of parts per million/percentage points of CO2 concentration, when this world has gone through, and self-corrected with no help from mankind BTW, at times where the CO2 levels changed by several full percentage points. Yet your precious EPA ignores the post-Pleistocene era, because it doesn’t fit within their rhetoric. In their statement from your sited source:
That’s because the EPA and other environmental scientists have a vested interest in making the world believe the Global Warming charade. As I went into in the other thread, which Mata cites above, you have to follow the money Larry. Climactic scientists and the university education system makes a lot of bank on all those research grants.
Larry said: “I don’t want to debate climate change.”
Then why do you keep coming here and dropping a load of unsubtantiated talking points?
Again you are cherry picking Larry. Considering data from only 50 years from only one source when we are discussing climate change that has been ongoing globally for eons is ludicrous. But that kind of cherry picking is typical in the “scientific” observations of global warming zealots. You might as well use one of those surface temperature stations that the zealots insist prove the earth is warming and yet are located next to a heat source:
The above is just one example, there are many more:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/test/
Apparenlty Larry is not alone in not wishing to debate climate change. Al Gore has refused to debate the subject with eminent authorities like Lord Monckton. Probably because Monckton has so well documented the errors in the alarmists presentations:
http://www.ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070226_monckton.pdf
And a judge in the United Kingdom found that many of the points Monckton made merited a legal finding:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gore's-'nine-Inconvenient-Untruths‘.html
And as for concerns about human health, I might remind Larry that Al Gore found inspiration for his efforts in the work of Rachel Carson (“Silent Spring”) whose personal crusade against DDT lead to it’s being banned in 1972. As a result malaria continues to sweep over Africa killing millions every year.
Only in the last few years has the World Health Organization realized what a genocidal blunder that was and reversed course.
How many millions will die as a result of bad environmental policies forced on us by the global warming zealots? Will disease, poverty, hunger and illiteracy around the world be ignored while $trillions are redirected to fight a non existent problem that we can have no impact on even IF we tried (and the Chinese and Indians will NOT try)?
Yes, do watch the video Larry. The information is presented by experts, not politicians. And many of them were part of the original UN climate change panel but quit after they realized what the real goal of that effort was:
Link:
Even Larry’s initial talking point – human susceptibility to variances in atmospheric CO2 – seems to make little sense considering how small a fraction of the atmosphere CO2 is and the wide variation in atmospheric ‘microclimates’ that humans tolerate – in various locations, buildings, buses, trains, I won’t even bring up the crap we breathe on commercial aircraft – in one way or another every day.
The simple fact is this – the climate-change bunch are drawing conclusions based on crap data, data that is at best insufficiently scrubbed and at worst fabricated to fit their agenda. There isn’t any science left, it’s all lawyers and pot-bangers.
Larry this is great. Using your logic I’ve been following the rapidly diminishing daylight in the eastern part of the country and calculate that we will be in total darkness by June or July 2009.
To cope with this phenomenon I am covering our roof with solar panels and putting a wind turbine in our backyard.
Notice how Larry later expressed a concern for health issues due to CO2 increase in the atmosphere in general yet totally ignored the point of this post which was to chronicle direct localized health concerns for the school children imprisoned in state “green” schools.
Looking at the bulk of Larry’s comments it seems he only uses the “health” concern as a last ditch attempt to avoid backing up the rest of his globaloney.
Watch the video Larry. You might learn something.
And Larry proves that when their is direct proof contrary to his belief he will avoid viewing it, making whatever excuse he can. He does not want to face opposing viewpoints. He does not want facts. He wants to stay in his comfy bubble of denial.