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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 112801 to 112850:

  1. Of satellites and temperatures
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/18/giss-divergence-with-satellite-temperatures-since-the-start-of-2003/ For the satellite/Hansen data divergence, check this out. Both the UAH and the RSS data show divergence with the GISS/NOAA ground station ADJUSTED temperature stations. GISS/Hansen has serious warming going on. About 0.3C* of it, out of 0.7C*. This makes the global warming part of the 1850-1982 "normal" warming, not the pCO2 induced hyperbole.
  2. On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    @barry at 13:56 PM on 13 August, 2010 Why are all the lines crossing at the same(?) point at about 1935?
  3. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    @RSVP, at 02:48 AM on 14 August, 2010 RSVP, I do not follow you, the volcano eruption came early this summer and can not possible have affected last winter. Therefore I do not understand the relevance of your comment to my question.
  4. Berényi Péter at 03:51 AM on 14 August 2010
    On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    #53 tobyjoyce at 03:12 AM on 14 August, 2010 there is software that will fit as many as you like I happen to know the algorithm itself, which is pretty straightforward. But what's the point of this exercise? There is no unique solution to this problem anyway. And tails do matter. Those are the parts of weather that can get costly (both in terms of money and human lives).
  5. Of satellites and temperatures
    BP, this chart compares the bands on MSU and AMSU instruments.
  6. Berényi Péter at 03:41 AM on 14 August 2010
    Of satellites and temperatures
    #7 Alexandre at 03:14 AM on 14 August, 2010 How high is this layer?
    It is channel TLT (Temperature Lower Troposphere, MSU 2 and AMSU 5). It's up to about 5 km, but the intensity measured by the satellite in this band also depends on absorptivity of the layers above (e.g. clouds, humidity, aerosols, etc.) and vertical temperature distribution. I don't know the actual frequencies and bandwidths. Anyone?
  7. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    If one compare figure 1 with the areas of upwelling it seams like there is relation between heating and upwelling areas. Is this observation correct?
  8. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    re Thingadonta "You refer to a comment above-global warming makes more rain and worse droughts, but you cant have it both ways..." Then you fail to understand the nature of energy and the impacts it has on weather and climate. You get rain because of an energy input, that is how the water gets into the atmosphere to create rain. Increased energy indeed does result in worse rain, drought and more wind. The fact is mate, if you have more energy in a system and it is unevenly distributed, you can expect a lot strange stuff happening to the weather.
  9. More evidence than you can shake a hockey stick at
    The cyclicity of H2O evaporating or sublimating into the atmosphere, then recondensing as liquid or solid is why water is not regarded as a forcing in climate warming. The time period for this cycle is measured in terms of days and the net energy balance is zero. To my understanding enhanced greenhouse warming is driven primarily by the enhanced absorption of IR radiation by the increasing quantities of GHGs in the atmosphere, especially CO2 & CH4, plus the additional water vapor content due to warming (i.e. the notorious, and still disputed, water vapor "feedback"). Water vapor feedback is complicated by the fact that water vapor can condense to solid or liquid to form clouds, which have their own characteristics in terms of absorption or reflection of incident radiation. It was my impression that the water vapor you were discussing is the incremental quantity that has been added to the atmosphere (on average) due to net warming of the atmosphere due to higher concentration of GHGs, which I still believe is negligible. Perhaps you could offer some quantitative support for whatever is your position on this. Better yet would be to cite a source in the peer-reviewed literature.
  10. Of satellites and temperatures
    Thank you, Ned! For folks interested in learning more about the NOAA constellation: The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) (complete information on orbiters including systems and subsystem status) NOAA Satellite Services Division (quick data product access) NOAA's "Satellites" page (a potpourri of links to satellite-related NOAA pages) NOAA "Image of the Day" (just for fun) Or, depend for information on websites making such broad and surprising remarks as "Official weather forecasting hasn’t improved since it began and is of insufficient accuracy to be useful."
  11. Of satellites and temperatures
    I assume those sattellite data we see around are usually the channel 04 - near surface layer. How high is this layer? How does it compare to the standard surface measurements like NCDC´s?
  12. On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    BP #52, I said "approximated", and there is software that will fit as many as you like (a finite number, obviously). There may even be an R package that does it. In many cases, tails (which contain the low probabilities) may not be important.
  13. Of satellites and temperatures
    Anybody remember the boy who cried wolf?
    Well, science denialism is more like crying "sheep" when there's a wolf at the door ...
  14. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    batvensson 22 We did have volcano erupting Iceland. Now was the volcano, or the fact that there were all those canceled flights spewing less CO2.
  15. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Rick1521 wrote : "The UHI effect can easily explain the change in record highs and lows." Easily ? I don't think so, unless you can provide evidence that goes against these studies : On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record 3.2.2.2 Urban Heat Islands and Land Use Effects Urban Heat Island Assessment: Metadata Are Important Perhaps Watts has finally brought that paper of his out ?
  16. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    And global warming afterall is quite subjective. Note the article... "we're looking at a system with enormous inertia" enormous interia? or simple ultra-stable and slow in changing giving the impression of enormous inertia. Does this mean a supernova has no inertia, since it disintegrates in three days?
  17. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Eric yes record high minimums are recorded and as predicted are rising. Probably more important is the general upward drift of nighttime minimum. Because of the nature of GHGs increasing nighttime minimum temperatures are a very useful confirmation of GHG forcing. Another statistical way of looking at weather. Asymmetric Trends of Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperature Maximum and Minimum Temperature Trends for the Globe Global warming: Evidence for asymmetric diurnal temperature change Asymmetric diurnal temperature change in the Alpine region
  18. Hockey stick is broken
    All of the threads from before March or so of this year are gone at Tamino's site. It's a huge loss, as there was a lot of very good information there.
  19. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Is there any findings on whether the unusual cold winter in Europe and US of A this year can be attributed to weather or climate?
  20. Hockey stick is broken
    John, I don't know what's happening with Tamino's blog, but links are not working anymore. Fortunately internet archive keeps his blog until the end of 2008. Here is the link for the post not alike.
  21. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Perhaps the people in Indonesia are very thin, so it just feels cooler than it really is :)
  22. Alden Griffith at 02:10 AM on 14 August 2010
    Of satellites and temperatures
    Also, UAH and RSS don't use MSU data from NOAA-16 anymore: http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#rss_msu_data_analysis ftp://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/readme.13Apr2010 (scroll to Dec 2006 updates) It's unbelievable how little it takes for some people to cry foul. I think we should compile a list of all the times that accusations of "conspiracy" and "fraud" have been shown to be either completely baseless or of little significance. Anybody remember the boy who cried wolf? -Alden
  23. Of satellites and temperatures
    So, now that Spencer and Christy have corrected the errors in the UAH satellite record so that it no longer shows cooling, the "skeptics", who were formerly deeply enamored of the UAH satellite data, are now claiming satellite data may be unreliable. I'm shocked, shocked!
  24. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Just a small comment on the UHI theme: It is just one reason to be very careful using max/min temperatures for climate indications. If, the variance increases with greater forcing (and, probably, mean temperature), it is the exact shape of the tails of the temperature distributions that determine the records, and they may actually go off in either or both directions without that much happening to the mean. Sampling, for instance, the highest and lowest 5% of all measurements, could give more robust measures. And then, UHI and other effects would play a lesser role.
  25. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Thingadonta, Can you refer to a measured temperature record that confirms what you claim? The graph you refer to is from measured data. Your claim (from only 12 months experience!) that "locals say" is what we call anecdotal. Since actual temperature records exist everywhere, it would be more convincing if you cited those instead. You might learn that it really is warmer where you are when you check! The data to support the graph is GISS data page here. You can probably find a local source of the data if you look.
  26. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Rick1521, do you think the UHI effect in Oklahoma City explains the magenta color over Russia? Can you explain how?
  27. Has Global Warming Stopped?
    Pete Ridley: And the upshot of all this is? Please state the relevance, or else go to a place devoted to discussing sensor details. We have had too much of this already. It MAY be important, but every single case I have seen investigated so far (cfr the weather stations) have ended up rather affirming than invalidating the consensus about the temperature series. The main trouble you run into, is that too many independent observations all confirm the same overall picture.
    Moderator Response: You're right that discussion of the technical details of satellite measurement of temperatures is off-topic for this thread. Fortunately, there is a new thread dedicated to clearing up the confusion over this subject: Of satellites and temperatures
  28. Has Global Warming Stopped?
    fydijkstra #64: There are certainly pseudo-periodic oscillations going on, as may be expected in a system well outside equilibrium. The simple Akasofu formula "anomaly = LIA recovery + MDO" predicts falling temperatures now - and therefore I wonder if it is not already partly falsified. The trend also seems rather speculative: What is the physical basis for this continuing "LIA recovery" in the 21st century? If, instead, that trend of 0.7-0.8 deg/century, today is part of the AGW trend, it can take quite some time to sort out the best model. Under the AGW assumption, with a 0.15 deg/decade warming trend, a model using just this plain trend, with no covariate corrections may "perform" worse for quite some time than a model with smaller trend and some corrections, like Akasofu's. It's really quite simple: In the short run, you can't beat ad hoc-arguments, and in the long run, the ad hoc-argumenters are gone, they are making new ad hoc arguments somewhere else. This is not a model fitting game, it is a process of finding the best explanatory variables for the long run.
  29. Berényi Péter at 01:01 AM on 14 August 2010
    On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    #51 tobyjoyce at 00:47 AM on 14 August, 2010 The odd shape of the distribution could probably be approximated by a mixture of Gaussians You would need a whole lot of them. The tail seems to decrease slower than exponentially.
  30. Of satellites and temperatures
    RSVP, you can see things like that in very high-resolution thermal imagery. But the spatial resolution of the systems used for global monitoring of SSTs (e.g., AVHRR, MODIS) is typically 1 km by 1 km. A ship's smokestack would fill no more than a tiny fraction of 1% of that pixel. More to the point, since metal has very low emissivity, the rest of the ship would probably lower the apparent temperature of the pixel more than the heated smokestack would raise it.... But at 1 km resolution, both effects would be trivial.
  31. Of satellites and temperatures
    Why wouldnt a ship's smokestack register as a very hot point on the water? And how does real data like this get filtered?
  32. On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    Berenyi Peter #40, The odd shape of the distribution could probably be approximated by a mixture of Gaussians e.g. a density function f s.t. f(x)= p1f1(x)+p2f2(x)..... +pnfn(x), where all the fi's are univariate normal, and p1+p2...+pn=1 In #50, I would not despair of finding a suitable distribution or combination thereof to fit to the data.
  33. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    thingadonta wrote : "You refer to a comment above-global warming makes more rain and worse droughts, but you cant have it both ways-in some or many cases these will cancel each other out. Current conditions in Russia are a good eample, the heat in Russia is balanced by the heavy rain and lower temperatures in SE Asia all through this year-they are almost certainly related, and some major benefits flow from it (water), it's not all doom and gloom." Can you think of a way to get all that 'beneficial' water from SE Asia (presumably only the bits that are a "benefit", i.e. that aren't destroying and killing) up to Russia, so they can "cancel each other out" ?
  34. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    I think I can officially say I have now heard it all!
  35. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    I'm sorry but I simply dont beleive some of your Figure 1 in this case. I have been living in Indonesia for the last 12 months and there is no way temperatures have been above average in hte last 6 months, as indicated in figure 1. We are in the tropics and right now we are wearing warm jackets. The locals say it hasnt been this cold in 35 years. It is also a really wet year, due to La Nina. Another point you already know, floods and rain and drought come and go, dont get in the trap of blaming everything on some mysterious 'other' factor. You refer to a comment above-global warming makes more rain and worse droughts, but you cant have it both ways-in some or many cases these will cancel each other out. Current conditions in Russia are a good eample, the heat in Russia is balanced by the heavy rain and lower temperatures in SE Asia all through this year-they are almost certainly related, and some major benefits flow from it (water), it's not all doom and gloom.
  36. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    The UHI effect can easily explain the change in record highs and lows. Last night the three Oklahoma City sites on the Oklahoma Mesonet recorded low temperatures of 82, 83, and 84 (Oklahoma City is in the center of the state). Only one other site in the state of Oklahoma recorded a value in this range (there are 122 sites statewide), the rest were lower. Yesterday, lows at these three sites were 81, 81, and 82. No other sites recorded low temperatures this high.
  37. Berényi Péter at 23:11 PM on 13 August 2010
    On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    #42 kdkd at 09:54 AM on 13 August, 2010 For reasonable sample sizes parametric statistics are usually good enough. Yes, but you have to get rid of the assumption of normality. Temperature anomaly distribution does get more regular with increasing sample size, but it never converges to a Gaussian. The example below is the GHCN stations from the contiguous United States (lower 48) from 1949 to 1979, those with at least 15 years of data for each month of the year (1718 locations). To compensate for the unequal spatial distribution of stations, I have taken average monthly anomaly for each 1×1° box and month (270816 data points in 728 non-empty grid boxes). Mean is essentially zero (0.00066°C), standard deviation is 1.88°C. I have put the probability density function of a normal distribution there with the same mean and standard deviation for comparison (red line). We can see temperature anomalies have a distribution with a narrow peak and fat tail (compared to a Gaussian). This property has to be taken into account. It means it's way harder to reject the null hypothesis ("no trend") for a restricted sample from the realizations of a variable with such a distribution than for a normally distributed one. Bayesian approach does not change this fact. We can speculate why weather behaves this way. There is apparently something that prevents the central limit theorem to kick in. In this respect it resembles to the financial markets, linguistic statistics or occurrences of errors in complex systems (like computer networks, power plants or jet planes) potentially leading to disaster. That is, weather is not the cumulative result of many independent influences, there must be self organizing processes at work in the background, perhaps. The upshot of this is that extreme weather events are much more frequent than one would think based on a naive random model, even under perfect equilibrium conditions. This variability makes true regime shifts hard to identify.
  38. Eric (skeptic) at 23:04 PM on 13 August 2010
    NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Are there separate stats for record high minimums? According to the "10 fingerprints" page, nights are warming faster than days and we should see even more record high minimums than record high maximums. Second question, are there ways to adjust for UHI in the records (similar to what is done with the averages)?
  39. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Thanks Toby and CBDunkerson, I was in zombie mode when reading the "article" and was not really putting it all together in my head.
  40. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Another great post Doug, very helpful. On the subject of attribution. How long will it take for scientists to analyize the weather patterns seen this year (and the recent past) and give some numbers on attribution? For example, if there is a 1:1000 chance of the Russian weather and a 1:500 chance of the Pakistan weather and so on for all these events, can a link to global warming eventualy be established? A comparision could be made to the graphic you have on temperature records. We do not know which records were set because of warming, but certainly the dicotomy of hot to cold records is caused by warming.
  41. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    There is another interesting point in the press release (and the submitted paper) i.e. the use of (only) station located in area below satellite's lights detection limits doesn't affect temperature increase: "The biggest change in the paper is inclusion of an additional analysis is which global temperature change is based only on stations located in "pitch dark" regions, i.e., regions with satellite-observed brightness below the satellite's detection limit (1 μW/m2/sr/μm). Our standard analysis uses stations with satellite-observed brightness below 32 μW/m2/sr/μm. This more strict brightness limitation has no significant effect on analyzed global temperature change, providing additional confirmation that any urban effect on the GISS analysis of global temperature change is small."
  42. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Englishborn, the reality of the situation is explained in the comments below the article. Basically, it was a cloudy day and the satellite wasn't able to take any accurate readings. That happens all the time and just means they don't have satellite data for that day. Thus no, it doesn't mean that NOAA is evil and faking their data to 'make up' global warming. At that, NOAA's global temperature anomaly set is based on SURFACE readings... their satellites weren't originally intended for temperature measurement at all, but some of them are now used to estimate such by UAH and RSS.
  43. Eric (skeptic) at 21:23 PM on 13 August 2010
    On Statistical Significance and Confidence
    I'm not sure I agree with the argument that having additional degrees of freedom beyond the one degree in the linear model "has to be justified". How is the single degree of freedom justified? That it allows us to answer an arbitrarily chosen question (linear trend hypothesis for CO2-based warming) does not seem like a strong justification considering that natural temperature cycles can last for years, decades, centuries, or longer.
  44. Abraham reply to Monckton
    I have looked into Monckton's "SPPI temperature index" and written a blog post on the findings: Evolution of the “SPPI global temperature index” It started out as a simple mean of HadCRUt3, NCDC, RSS, and UAH. However, NCDC and HadCRUt3 were soon dropped and right now the "index" seems to be down to just RSS. In addition, the "index" is shifted for each plot such that its minimum value within the given graph is 0°C. So the value of the "index" may change depending on the time period covered.
  45. Has Global Warming Stopped?
    Here’s the latest comment from John O’Sullivan on the response to his articles: “Since writing those articles concerned researchers have come forward to offer more shocking information regarding systemic failures in the satellite temp. measuring network. The following are what I have so far been advised are the key areas of concern. Please feel free to add this information to your communications with other interested parties-it seems as if the entire edifice of credibility in the satellite temp recording is about to collapse: * The NPOESS (National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite) will not have any sensors that measure the sun’s energy output on the 2nd and 4th satellites. * The GOES-R (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series) has had 14 sensors cancelled. No data for cloud base height, ozone layer, ocean color, ocean turbidity and cloud imagery, snow cover, etc. Effectively neutered. * Landsat 7 (currently in orbit) is broken leaving data gaps. Scientists do not get all the information they should. * No sensor for movement of greenhouse gases and pollutants. * No sensor to monitor temperature changes on Earth over time. * The sensor to measure how Earth’s temperature reacts to changes in Solar energy was cancelled by the Obama Administration at the end of June 2011”. John also advises that Dr. Roy Spencer says “"We always had trouble with NOAA-16 AMSU, and dropped it long ago. It had calibration drifts that made it unsuitable for climate monitoring. Obviously, whatever happened to NOAA-16 AVHRR (or the software) introduced HUGE errors.” [note: climate modelling and climate monitoring are two very different disciplines].” John will keep me updates so I’ll pass further information to. Best regards, Pete Ridley
  46. Has Global Warming Stopped?
    Admin, sorry that I hadn’t realised from the blog’s comment policy that even mention of the blog I linked to was “itself a violation”. I hope that you consider Climate Realists (Note 1) to be “a better source to cite for the satellite instrumentation issue” and I submit another modified version (the fourth) of the comment that you found unacceptable. Alden, on 3rd August NewYorkJ at 09:12 said “The statistical significance argument is also of limited value when you're dealing with a variety of indicators. .. Then there is satellite data, which is mostly independent. I believe these reach similar levels of confidence as HadCrut over this time period .. ”. I tried to post the following comment today on your “On Statistical Significance and Confidence” article but it was removed for some reason. Perhaps it was considered to be off-topic, which can’t be the case on this thread. You say in the “On Statistical Significance … ” article “So let’s think about the temperature data from 1995 to 2009 and what the statistical test associated with the linear regression really does .. ” but there is a much more fundamental test to be undertaken on those data. By far the greatest contribution to “Statistical Significance and Confidence” is the integrity of the raw data itself. There is much scepticism about this, only days ago highlighted by the revelations about another set of data purporting to be representative of global temperatures during a similar period. I refer here to the satellite data used by NOAA in support of its claims about global temperature change during the past decade. On 12th August the “Climate Realists” blog posted an article “Official: Satellite Failure Means Decade of Global Warming Data Doubtful by John O'Sullivan”. It provided links to two articles by John O’Sullivan. The first “US Government in Massive New Global Warming Scandal – NOAA Disgraced” reported on 9th August of significant errors in data collected by the NOAA-16 satellite. The second links to John’s follow-up article “Official: Satellite Failure Means Decade of Global Warming Data Doubtful” of 1th August in which he starts with “US Government admits satellite temperature readings “degraded.” All data taken offline in shock move. Global warming temperatures may be 10 to 15 degrees too high” and concludes “With NOAA’s failure to make further concise public statements on this sensational story it is left to public speculation and ‘citizen scientists’ to ascertain whether ten years or more of temperature data sets from satellites such as NOAA-16 are unreliable and worthless”. Everything in between is worth reading, as are the numerous postings about it flying around the blogosphere – enjoy. NOTES: 1) see http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6127&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ClimaterealistsNewsBlog+%28ClimateRealists+News+Blog%29 Best regards, Pete Ridley
  47. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    I had a look at the site referred to by Englishborn #1. It is the usual denialist tactic of seizing on an honest mistake as evidence of "fraud". WUWT had a similar post about temperature adjustments at Katmandu Airport (used by GISS). The tactic comes from a misunderstanding of science, the belief that it is a "chain of evidence" and if one link is broken, the whole case falls. But scientific evidence, and climate science is a good example, is multiple interwoven strands (more like a rope or cable). You need to break many strands before the theory starts to look ragged. Great post. Money quote from the paper: "What we can say is that global warming has an effect on the probability and intensity of extreme events."
  48. NASA-GISS: July 2010-- What global warming looks like
    Sorry to go off topic slightly, but I have noticed some blogs reporting (by that I mean copy and pasting each other) about errors found in the NOAA satalite data, and how they have taken them from public view. Reading the blogs I quickly got lost in the propaganda attacks and lost what really the NOAA is being accused of and what errors are really being admitted. one such blog (god I hope that link worked) There seems to be a lack of this being reported in any other media outlet, can any kind soul enlighten me on the issue? Is it a major error on the NOAA behalf, does it call into question their global temp data? or is it being blown out of proportion for the skepitical blogoshere? Thanks Also great post Doug, keep it up
    Moderator Response: We've added a new thread for discussion of this topic: Of satellites and temperatures
  49. Models are unreliable
    KR, on 30th July at 02:41 (#228) you said that “Regarding temperature data .. there are three independent data sets .. ”. NASA appears to think otherwise according to its 3rd August draft of paper "Global surface temperature change". It says “Analyses of global surface temperature change are routinely carried out by several groups, including the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and a joint effort of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT). These analyses are not independent, as they must use much the same input observations.” (See http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0803.pdf). Any comment? Best regards, Pete Ridley
  50. gallopingcamel at 14:51 PM on 13 August 2010
    Why I care about climate change
    Posts #131 through #138, Thanks for remaining so reasonable and so eloquent. I am impressed. It reminds me of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandrian Quartet. We are looking at the same Justine while drawing entirely different conclusions. I guess we will continue locking horns until Mother Nature reveals herself. I suspect we will not have to wait much longer. muoncounter (#137), Texas and California are indeed dominant when it comes to selecting which science text books will make huge sales. Your apology is appropriate and welcome John Hubisz details the "howlers" in the physics text books but the errors are seldom corrected when new editions are published. When a student finds something in a science text book that makes no sense he asks his teacher for an explanation. As long as the teacher knows the subject he will be able to set things straight. Unfortunately, most of the time in my state the teacher cannot say whether the text book is right or wrong and as a result many students are permanently "turned off". I hope we can agree that widespread scientific illiteracy is dangerous when our survival depends on sophisticated technology.

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