40 charts that explain the world

By Dylan Matthews January 15 at 3:14 pm

 

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history.

1. Global inequality dwarfs anything we see in America.

Source: Branko Milanovic.

Experts disagree about whether inequality among all the world's individuals hasn't changed much in recent decades — as Branko Milanovic, the lead economist at the World Bank's research group, shows in the above graph — or whether the rise of India and China has caused it to decline significantly. In either case, however, global inequality dwarfs what inequalities exist within nations.
Read more here.
2. But the world wasn't always so unequal.

Source :Angus Maddison; chart by Kanguole.

This huge gap in the fortunes of people in various countries is a relatively recent development. Before the Industrial Revolution, there wasn't a whole lot of variation in living standards between, say, the United Kingdom and China. Afterward, the UK, soon followed by neighboring European countries, pulled away, while India and China (and, though not pictured above, Latin America and Africa) stagnated. This has come to be known as the "Great Divergence."

3. The richest people in poor countries are poorer than the poor of rich countries.

Source: Branko Milanovic.

There are still some poor Americans who make less than the richest Indians, but the poorest residents of egalitarian rich countries like Denmark make significantly more than the richest residents of poor nations like Uganda or Tanzania.

4. Residents of poor countries could make many multiples of their salaries if they moved to rich ones.

Source: Clemens, Montenegro, and Pritchett, with additional calculations by Clemens, 2014.

The above chart shows estimates of how much more workers in the U.S. make compared to identical workers in developing countries. Mexican workers makes 2.5 to 3 times less than they would make in the U.S. for doing the same thing — and that's among the least egregious ratios. Nigerians and Yemenis stand to gain upwards of 10 times as much from moving to the U.S. Put another way: we could have a policy where Yemenis are allowed to move to the U.S. if they pay $14 out of every $15 they earn in taxes, and it'd still be a great deal for them.

(Note - "best" here means someone who does well outside of directly observable things like income, education, etc. Read the full paper for more details.)

5. This kind of poverty causes bad health and early deaths.

Source: Gapminder.

The correlation between life expectancy and GDP per capita — depicted in the above plot of the nations of the world, sized by population — is exceptionally strong. That's no accident. With more income comes better sanitation, better health care, and other improvements that enable longer lifespans.

6. We are making progress, though, against global poverty.

Source: Laurence Chandy, Natasha Ledlie and Veronika Penciakova.

If curent patterns persist, the global poverty rate (defined as the percentage of people who make under $1.25 a day) is set to fall from 22.4 percent in 2008 to 5.4 percent in 2030. If it speeds up, we could even see extreme poverty like this eliminated.

7. And we're extending lifespans too.

Source: WHO.

What's more, the biggest extensions are occurring in low-income countries, according to WHO data.

8. Now, the way that people in rich countries die…

Source: Jones, Podolsky, and Greene.

At the dawn of the 20th century, infectious diseases were responsible for about half of deaths in the United States. By 2010, improved sanitation, access to antibiotics, and other advances had reduced the burden of infections and left heart disease and cancer as our main killers.

9. …looks very different from the way people in general die.

Source: Thomas Porostocky.

If you take a similar view of deaths worldwide, however, you see a picture that looks much more like the U.S. of 1900 — with plenty of infectious disease-caused deaths — than like that of 2010.

10. Literacy has also grown as countries get richer.

Source: UNESCO.

School enrollment has grown too, but it's more instructive to look at actual outcomes like literacy, given the poor quality of schooling in many parts of the world.

11. Much of recent economic progress in the world has happened in China and India.

Source: Martin Ravallion.

The above two charts use two different methods to find the same thing: poverty reduction has been very rapid in China, less rapid but still quite fast in India, and slower in Brazil.

12. Leaving most of the remaining poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: World Bank.

Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing extreme poverty rates fall, but not as quickly as the rates in India and China are falling. Indeed, while the poverty rate in Africa is falling, the number of poor people is still rising, just not as fast as the overall population.

13. Meanwhile, we're not killing as many people in wars as we used to.

Source: Steven Pinker.

After the astonishing toll of World War II, we appear to have entered a much more peaceful era in world history, at least in terms of casualties.

14. The wars we do fight tend to be within, rather than between, countries.

Source: Center for Systemic Peace.

And even intra-state (or "societal" in the above chart) wars are on the decline.

15. Homicide is down across the board too.

Source: Manuel Eisner.

Since the end of the dark ages, homicide rates in Europe have been falling steadily. The same thing happened in America; data that goes this far back for the rest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia is depressingly hard to come by.

16. If you're a man, your odds of being killed in war have never been lower.

Source: Lawrence H. Keeley.

We still have far too much war. But it's worth remembering that the advent of modern states has resulted in a marked reduction in its incidence.

17. It's not all roses, of course. Greenhouse gases are making the world hotter than ever.

Source: World Meteorological Organization.

Don't let this winter's cold snap fool you. It really is getting much warmer, and the consequences are going to be fairly devastating.

18. Leading glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise.

Source: Horton, Rahmstorf, Engelhart, and Kemp.

A recent survey of experts found that their average estimate of how much the oceans will rise by 2100 is 1.3 to 2 feet. Feet!

19. Good 'ol fashioned smog is on the rise, too, as China and India industrialize.

Source: OECD.

Indeed, the OECD estimates that air pollution will kill many more people in 2050 than malaria or unsafe water/sanitation, as the above chart shows.

20. And acid rain's making a comeback for the same reason.

Source: Smith et. al..

While emissions of sulfur dioxide — one of the main pollutants that causes acid rain — have fallen in the U.S. and Europe, they're rising in East Asia as China grows.

21. Deforestation is continuing apace.

Source: FAO.

While North and Central America had roughly the same forest area in 2010 as they did in 2000, every other continent — and especially South America and Africa — saw forest area shrink over that period.

22. But we're emitting fewer ozone depleting gases.

Source: UNEP.

As a result of the Montreal Protocol, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which contribute to ozone depletion, are on the way out. But their cousins, HCFCs, which also hurt the ozone layer, aren't going away as quickly.

23. Our endangered species problem, however, is getting worse.

Source: IUCN.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources calculates what it calls a "Red List Index," which estimates how threatened different taxonomic groups are. In recent years, the index has shown slight increases in the severity of threats to mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish, but truly dramatic increase in extinction risk for corals

24. Here in the U.S., our eating habits have changed considerably since the '50s.

Source: Planet Money.

Since 1980, we've seen more vegetable consumption relative to meat is interesting. Granted, a lot of that is stuff like potatoes that isn't exactly healthful, but shhhhh.

25. As are our transportation habits.

Source: Planet Money.

While there's been a very recent shift away from driving, the story of the past half-century has been people giving up public transit in favor of cars.

26. The global economic convergence is causing a lot of changes in already rich countries. Inequality is growing…

Source: OECD.

It's not just the U.S. Almost all other developed countries have seen inequality increase in recent decades.

27. …and the share of income going to workers is declining.

Source: Cleveland Fed.

For decades, it was commonly thought that labor and capital's relative shares of GDP stayed constant over time. No longer: The labor share has been steadily declining of late, and no one really knows why.

28. That said, most rich countries have never had as much leisure time as they have now, as demonstrated by the recent decline in hours worked.

Source: OECD.

"If leisure is considered as nothing more than the time spent away from paid work, then naturally any change in the amount of annual hours worked will be reflected in variations of the amount of available leisure time," an OECD researcher writes in a recent report on leisure. And if you look at annual hours worked in most developed countries, they're falling noticeably. The big exception is the U.S., where hours worked have been broadly stable.

29. They also enjoy the fruits of Moore's law in ever-cheaper electronics.

Source: Wgsimon.

Despite fears that we'd reach a point where silicon-based transistors just can't be packed any more densely onto chips that grow cheaper with every iteration, Moore's law is still very much in effect, as Wikipedian Wgsimon's plot of transistor counts over time shows. The result is ever-cheaper and ever-faster computers, phones, and other electronics.

30. Worldwide, access to the Internet is growing considerably.

Source: Sam Silverwood-Cope; data by World Bank.

Access to the Internet — which has existed for well under 40 years — is all but universal in the developed world, and while much is left to be done in developing countries, the trend is positive.

31. Global coal demand is rising.

Source: International Energy Agency.

It's easy to forget amidst the fracking boom here in the U.S. that the rest of the world still really, really wants coal. Like, a lot of coal. Too much coal, I'd say.

32. But it's true, natural gas is booming, particularly compared to oil.

Source: Vaclav Smil.

Let's not minimize what's happening with natural gas, though. Its price is falling very quickly and, just as interesting, has decoupled from the price of oil.

33. Rich countries in general are spending more on health care — but none as much as the U.S.

Source: OECD.

What's more astounding is that the U.S. actually spends more government money per person on health care than any of these countries. And they have universal programs.

34. The world's still mostly Muslim and Christian.

Source: Pew Research.

This is the only pie chart on here, but it's an important one. For further context, around half of the world's Christians are Catholic, making Catholics about as big a grouping as unaffiliated people (a group that includes atheists, agnostics, etc.).

35. But Islam and unaffiliated are growing in ranks.

Source: World Religion Database.

At least according to the World Religion Database — a peer-reviewed dataset put out through Boston University — Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are gaining followers the fastest, or at least were between 2000 and 2010. Partly that's because the most reliable way for a religion to gain followers is by having existing followers produce offspring, and so already dominant religions (like those three) are likely to see faster growth than other religions. But it's a reminder that we're still a long way from a secular world.

36. The gap between men's and women's participation in the workforce is shrinking.

Source: IMF.

While labor force participation among women has stayed roughly constant in recent decades, male participation has fallen, so the gap between men's and women's participation rates has shrunk.

37. Though huge gaps in pay persist.

Source: Gretchen Livingston, Pew Research.

The U.S. isn't alone in paying women significantly less than men. Many other rich countries — including supposedly egalitarian ones like Finland and Germany — have even more severe gender  pay gaps.

38. The center of the entertainment business is going eastward.

Source: Stav J. Davis. Data by Box Office Mojo.

The above chart shows the percentage of box office receipts emanating from each region. The U.S. and Canada are seeing their share of receipts falling, while Asia's share is rising noticeably.

39. And despite the rise of Internet piracy, the entertainment sector is doing okay.

Source: Cammaerts, Mansell, and Meng.

The entertainment industry — and in particular the music industry — underwent a collective freakout in the late 1990s and early 2000s as Napster, then Kazaa, then Gnutella and then BitTorrent made pirating songs, TV episodes, and movies increasingly easy. But their worst fears didn't come to pass. Revenue in the music industry — which, MP3s are so much smaller than video files, was hit first — remained roughly constant from 1998 to 2011, as you can see above. Sure, revenues from selling recorded music shrank, but that was offset by an increase in concert revenues.

40. Nuclear weapons are decreasing in numbers, but more countries than ever have them.

Source: Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

In the early 1960s, when American politicians worried that they suffered from a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, the U.S. stockpile was much larger than the Soviets Union's. In the 1980s, by contrast, the Soviets pulled way ahead. And once the Cold War ended, both countries started disarming.
 

Dylan Matthews covers taxes, poverty, campaign finance, higher education, and all things data. He has also written for The New Republic, Salon, Slate, and The American Prospect. Follow him on Twitter here. Email him here.

Antiscience bill in Oklahoma

National Center for Science education

January 16th, 2014 

Senate Bill 1765 (document), styled the Oklahoma Science Education Act, is the second antiscience bill of the year. As is increasingly common with antiscience legislation, SB 1765 would, if enacted, in effect encourage science teachers with idiosyncratic opinions to teach anything they pleased — proponents of creationism and climate change denial are the usual intended beneficiaries of such bills — and discourage responsible educational authorities from intervening. No scientific topics are specifically identified as controversial, but the fact that the sole sponsor of SB 1765 is Josh Brecheen (R-District 6), who introduced similar legislation that directly targeted evolution in two previous legislative sessions, is suggestive.

SB 1765 would require state and local educational authorities to "assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies" and permit teachers to "help students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught"; it would prevent such authorities from "prohibit[ing] any teacher in a public school district in this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught."

In late 2010, Brecheen announced his intention to file antievolution legislation in a column in the Durant Daily Democrat (December 19, 2010): "Renowned scientists now asserting that evolution is laden with errors are being ignored. ... Using your tax dollars to teach the unknown, without disclosing the entire scientific findings[,] is incomplete and unacceptable." In a subsequent column in the newspaper (December 24, 2010), he indicated that his intention was to have creationism presented as scientifically credible, writing, "I have introduced legislation requiring every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution using the known science, even that which conflicts with Darwin's religion."

What Brecheen in fact introduced in 2011, Senate Bill 554, combined a version of the now familiar "academic freedom" language — referring to "the scientific strengths [and] scientific weaknesses of controversial topics ... [which] include but are not limited to biological origins of life and biological evolution" — with a directive for the state board of education to adopt "standards and curricula" that echo the flawed portions of the state science standards adopted in Texas in 2009 with respect to the nature of science and evolution. SB 554 died in committee. In 2012, Brecheen took a new tack with Senate Bill 1742, modeled in part on the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act; SB 1742 likewise died in committee.

In 2013, Brecheen modified his approach again. Senate Bill 758 followed the lead of Tennessee's "monkey law" (as it was nicknamed by House Speaker Emeritus Jimmy Naifeh), enacted (as Tenn. Code Ann. 49-6-1030) over the protests of the state's scientific and educational communities in 2012. The major difference is that SB 758 omitted the monkey law's statement of legislative findings, which cites "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" as among the topics that "can cause controversy" when taught in the science classroom of the public schools. SB 758 died in committee. Brecheen's latest effort, SB 1765, is virtually identical.

Renewable chemical ready for biofuels scale-up.

12 minutes ago by Margaret Broeren

Enlarge

The flow-through reaction setup progressively dissolves biomass producing fractions that are rich in (from left to right) lignin monomers, hemicellulose and cellulose-derived sugars. Credit: Matthew Wisniewski/Wisconsin Energy Institute

 

Using a plant-derived chemical, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a process for creating a concentrated stream of sugars that's ripe with possibility for biofuels.

"With the sugar platform, you have possibilities," says Jeremy Luterbacher, a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher and the paper's lead author. "You've taken fewer forks down the conversion road, which leaves you with more end destinations, such as cellulosic ethanol and drop-in biofuels."

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the research team has published its findings in the Jan. 17, 2014 issue of the journal Science, explaining how they use gamma valerolactone, or GVL, to deconstruct plants and produce sugars that can be chemically or biologically upgraded into biofuels. With support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the team will begin scaling up the process later this year.

Because GVL is created from the plant material, it's both renewable and more affordable than conversion methods requiring expensive chemicals or enzymes. The process also converts 85 to 95 percent of the starting material to sugars that can be fed to yeast for fermentation into ethanol, or chemically upgraded furans to create drop-in biofuels.

To demonstrate the economic viability of this advance, Luterbacher needed to concentrate the sugar, remove the GVL for reuse, and show that yeast could successfully generate ethanol from the sugar stream.

"Showing that removing and recycling GVL can be done easily, with a low-energy separation step, is a little more of an achievement," says Luterbacher. "By feeding the resulting sugar solution to microorganisms, we proved we weren't producing some weird chemical byproducts that would kill the yeast, and that we were taking out enough GVL to make it nontoxic."

"What's neat is that we can use additives to make the solution separate," says Luterbacher. "It becomes like oil and vinegar." Their additive of choice: liquid carbon dioxide.

"It's green, nontoxic and can be removed by simple depressurization once you want GVL and solutions of sugar to mix again. It's the perfect additive," Luterbacher says.

An initial economic assessment of the process has indicated the technology could produce ethanol at a cost savings of roughly 10 percent when compared with current state-of-the-art technologies.

For the past several years, James Dumesic, Steenbock Professor and Michel Boudart Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UW-Madison, and his research group have studied the production of GVL from biomass, and in more recent work they explored the use of GVL as a solvent for the conversion of biomass to furan chemicals.

"The knowledge gained in these previous studies was invaluable to us in the implementation of our new approach to convert real biomass to aqueous solutions of sugars that are suitable for biological conversion," says Dumesic.

This research has contributed new knowledge to the biofuels landscape, resulted in four patent applications, and gained recognition for GVL's commercial potential from WARF's Accelerator Program. The program helps license high potential technologies more rapidly by addressing specific technical hurdles with targeted funding and expert advice from seasoned business mentors in related fields.

Under the Accelerator Program effort, Dumesic will serve as principal investigator for an 18-month project involving construction of a high-efficiency biomass reactor. The reactor will use GVL to produce concentrated streams of high-value sugars and intact lignin solids.

Carbohydrates and lignin from the reactor will be delivered to scientific collaborators, including fellow GLBRC investigators, who will optimize strategies for converting the materials into valuable chemicals and fuels.

"We're excited by the team's scientific achievements and we look forward to supporting the project's next steps through the Accelerator Program," says Leigh Cagan, WARF's chief technology commercialization officer. "If the project successfully achieves the anticipated cost reductions for production of the sugars, lignin and ethanol, we anticipate significant commercial interest in this novel process."

Explore further: Making alternative fuels cheaper: New synthesis could make biofuel more appealing for mass production
 

More information: "Nonenzymatic Sugar Production from Biomass Using Biomass-Derived γ-Valerolactone," by J.S. Luterbacher et al. Science, 2014.

Journal reference: Science
Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison

 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-renewable-chemical-ready-biofuels-scale-up.html#jCp

Lord Rayleigh Explains it All





  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, OM, PRS (/ˈreɪli/; 12 November 1842 – 30 June 1919) was an English physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He also discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering, explaining why the sky is blue, and predicted the existence of the surface waves now known as Rayleigh waves. Rayleigh's textbook, The Theory of Sound, is still referred to by acoustic engineers today.

Rayleigh scattering causes the blue hue of the daytime sky and the reddening of the sun at sunset.

Rayleigh scattering is more evident after sunset. This picture was taken about one hour after sunset at 500m altitude, looking at the horizon where the sun had set.

Rayleigh scattering (pronounced /ˈreɪli/ RAY-lee), named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh,^[1] is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. After the Rayleigh scattering the state of material remains unchanged, hence Rayleigh scattering is also said to be a parametric process. The particles may be individual atoms or molecules. It can occur when light travels through transparent solids and liquids, but is most prominently seen in gases. Rayleigh scattering results from the electric polarizability of the particles. The oscillating electric field of a light wave acts on the charges within a particle, causing them to move at the same frequency. The particle therefore becomes a small radiating dipole whose radiation we see as scattered light.
Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the sky and the yellow tone of the sun itself.
Scattering by particles similar to or larger than the wavelength of light is typically treated by the Mie theory, the discrete dipole approximation and other computational techniques. Rayleigh scattering applies to particles that are small with respect to wavelengths of light, and that are optically "soft" (i.e. with a refractive index close to 1). On the other hand, Anomalous Diffraction Theory applies to optically soft but larger particles.

The intensity I of light scattered by a single small particle from a beam of unpolarized light of wavelength λ and intensity I₀ is given by:

^[3]

where R is the distance to the particle, θ is the scattering angle, n is the refractive index of the particle, and d is the diameter of the particle. The Rayleigh scattering cross-section is given by ^[4]

The Rayleigh scattering coefficient for a group of scattering particles is the number of particles per unit volume N times the cross-section. As with all wave effects, for incoherent scattering the scattered powers add arithmetically, while for coherent scattering, such as if the particles are very near each other, the fields add arithmetically and the sum must be squared to obtain the total scattered power.

Reason for the blue color of the sky

Further information: Diffuse sky radiation

Scattered blue light is polarized. The picture on the right is shot through a polarizing filter which removes light that is linearly polarized in a specific direction.

A portion of the beam of light coming from the sun scatters off molecules of gas and other small particles in the atmosphere. Here, Rayleigh scattering primarily occurs through sunlight's interaction with randomly located air molecules. Exactly equivalently, but from a purely macroscopic point of view, the scattering comes from the microscopic density fluctuations which result from the random distribution of molecules in the air. A region of higher or lower density has a slightly different refractive index from the surrounding medium, and therefore it acts like a short-lived scattering particle. It is this scattered light that gives the surrounding sky its brightness and its color. As previously stated, Rayleigh scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength, so that shorter wavelength violet and blue light will scatter more than the longer wavelengths (yellow and especially red light). However, the Sun, like any star, has its own spectrum and so I₀ in the scattering formula above is not constant but falls away in the violet. In addition the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere absorbs wavelengths at the edge of the ultra-violet region of the spectrum. The resulting color, which appears like a pale blue, actually is a mixture of all the scattered colors, mainly blue and green. Conversely, glancing toward the sun, the colors that were not scattered away — the longer wavelengths such as red and yellow light — are directly visible, giving the sun itself a slightly yellowish hue. Viewed from space, however, the sky is black and the sun is white.
The reddening of sunlight is intensified when the sun is near the horizon, because the volume of air through which sunlight must pass is significantly greater than when the sun is high in the sky. The Rayleigh scattering effect is thus increased, removing virtually all blue light from the direct path to the observer. The remaining unscattered light is mostly of a longer wavelength, and therefore appears to be orange.

Some of the scattering can also be from sulfate particles. For years after large Plinian eruptions, the blue cast of the sky is notably brightened by the persistent sulfate load of the stratospheric gases. Some works of the artist J. M. W. Turner may owe their vivid red colours to the eruption of Mount Tambora in his lifetime.

In locations with little light pollution, the moonlit night sky is also blue, because moonlight is reflected sunlight, with a slightly lower color temperature due to the brownish color of the moon. The moonlit sky is not perceived as blue, however, because at low light levels human vision comes mainly from rod cells that do not produce any color perception (Purkinje effect).

In laymans' terms, by Analogy

Have you ever sent waves to a log floating in a lake?  If so, you probably (I hope) noticed a curious phenomenon.  Waves shorter than the log's width, even if fairly high, tend to bounce off the log, and scattered back and towards the sides.  Waves longer than the log's width, however, cause the log to bob up and down and go right through it, almost as though the log wasn't there.

In the world of light, blue waves are the shorter (by about a half) than red waves, and instead of logs we use molecules of air (mostly N2 and O2).  Air molecules are on the order of half a micron across (0.0000005 meters), as is the wavelength of white light.  As noted, however, blue light is some half the length of red light.  And yes, for similar reasons, the blue light will bounce and scatter off the molecule than the red, with a factor of 2*2*2*2 = 16 greater intensity ( the lambda to the fourth factor in the equations above).  When the sun is high in a clear sky, this is what you see; the enhanced scattering of the blue spectrum of the was (the solar disk is yellowish-white due to the deprivation of its blue light).

We've all noticed the sun grow deeper yellow, then orange, then red as it sets or rises.  This explained by the fact that, near the horizon, sunlight must pass through considerably longer and denser air.  The more air it must pass through, the more blue light is scattered completely out to space.  Only longer light wavelengths can still pass through (albeit attenuated), and you see from the top picture the top half of the sun is deep yellow, followed by orange beneath, then red, and then the red fades to darkness.  Again, it is all a scattering phenomenon, just to different degrees.  Red, having the longest wavelength, lasts the longest.  However, the mistake we must not make is to assumed the light is altered somehow.  If you have even watched a beam of white light pass through a triangular prism, you know that light is not changed, only separated into its constituent colors (via a different mechanism).

Jon Stewart On Iran Sanctions: 'Congress Is The Justin Bieber Of Our Government'

Jon Stewart On Iran Sanctions: 'Congress Is The Justin Bieber Of Our Government'         

The Huffington Post  |  By Ross Luippold Posted: 01/16/2014 9:23 am EST  |  Updated: 01/16/2014 9:23 am        

After seeing much of the news dominated by Justin Bieber's house raid, Jon Stewart was pleased that our government is responsible enough to help broker a deal that will bring peace between Iran and the U.S.
Except that it isn't.

"Congress is the Justin Bieber of our government, throwing away for no reason whatsoever a tremendous opportunity because of immaturity and a lack of self control," Stewart declared, pointing to many senate Republicans' hesitance to support the deal.

He was hardly surprised that Republicans wanted to put new sanctions in place, but the fact that 16 Democrats wanted to do it as well surprised him.

"I get Republicans," Stewart joked. "They would line up to oppose Obama on the Orgasms Cure Cancer Act."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/16/jon-stewart-iran-sanctions_n_4609526.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037&ir=Politics
Check out the full clip above to see Stewart's dismay with Congress' inaction, and the difficulties caused by various interests in the Middle East.

 

Climate change: The case of the missing heat

Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together (DJS-yet) an(other) explanation.

 

Jeff Tollefson 15 January 2014, Nature, Volume 505, Issue 7483

Tim Graham/Robert Harding Picture Library

 

The Pacific Ocean may hold the key to understanding why global warming has stalled.

The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. (Strumfels:  or was it '98, 05', 10'?)  These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled.  (Strumfels:  according to some climate skeptics, but not according to the non-skeptical.  And if true, why is Australia having one of its hottest summers on record?

(The first theory of warming abatement was the dispersal of CFSs in the Antarctic.  Then came the multi-part denial of abatement/possible cooling -- the time period was too short, 2012 was one of the hosttest years on record, etc -- and the '97 "beginning of cooling" was treated as ludicrous.  Now we have Australia's/ Indonesia's  heat wave whilst the warmer Pacific trade winds have concentrated near South America (and how are they doing?)  What will it be next?  Furthermore, how accurate are global climate change models if new data & factos, both by skeptics and supporters, are being discovered all the time?)

For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt.
Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that heat must still be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere. Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models.

Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.

“The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”

Stark contrast

On a chart of global atmospheric temperatures, the hiatus stands in stark contrast to the rapid warming of the two decades that preceded it. Simulations conducted in advance of the 2013–14 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the warming should have continued at an average rate of 0.21 °C per decade from 1998 to 2012. Instead, the observed warming during that period was just 0.04 °C per decade, as measured by the UK Met Office in Exeter and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.
The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. Much like the swings between warm and cold in day-to-day weather, chaotic climate fluctuations can knock global temperatures up or down from year to year and decade to decade. Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, and climate models suggest that either of these can occur as the world warms under the influence of greenhouse gases.

Nate Mantua/NOAA

 

But none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

But even those scientists who remain confident in the underlying models acknowledge that there is increasing pressure to work out just what is happening today. “A few years ago you saw the hiatus, but it could be dismissed because it was well within the noise,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. “Now it’s something to explain.”

Researchers have followed various leads in recent years, focusing mainly on a trio of factors: the Sun¹, atmospheric aerosol particles² and the oceans³. The output of energy from the Sun tends to wax and wane on an 11-year cycle, but the Sun entered a prolonged lull around the turn of the millennium.
The natural 11-year cycle is currently approaching its peak, but thus far it has been the weakest solar maximum in a century. This could help to explain both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the model simulations, which include a higher solar output than Earth has experienced since 2000.

An unexpected increase in the number of stratospheric aerosol particles could be another factor keeping Earth cooler than predicted. These particles reflect sunlight back into space, and scientists suspect that small volcanoes — and perhaps even industrialization in China — could have pumped extra aerosols into the stratosphere during the past 16 years, depressing global temperatures.

Some have argued that these two factors could be primary drivers of the hiatus, but studies published in the past few years suggest that their effects are likely to be relatively small^{4, 5}. Trenberth, for example, analysed their impacts on the basis of satellite measurements of energy entering and exiting the planet, and estimated that aerosols and solar activity account for just 20% of the hiatus. That leaves the bulk of the hiatus to the oceans, which serve as giant sponges for heat. And here, the spotlight falls on the equatorial Pacific.

Just before the hiatus took hold, that region had turned unusually warm during the El Niño of 1997–98, which fuelled extreme weather across the planet, from floods in Chile and California to droughts and wildfires in Mexico and Indonesia. But it ended just as quickly as it had begun, and by late 1998 cold waters — a mark of El Niño’s sister effect, La Niña — had returned to the eastern equatorial Pacific with a vengeance. More importantly, the entire eastern Pacific flipped into a cool state that has continued more or less to this day.

This variation in ocean temperature, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), may be a crucial piece of the hiatus puzzle. The cycle reverses every 15–30 years, and in its positive phase, the oscillation favours El Niño, which tends to warm the atmosphere (see ‘The fickle ocean’). After a couple of decades of releasing heat from the eastern and central Pacific, the region cools and enters the negative phase of the PDO. This state tends towards La Niña, which brings cool waters up from the depths along the Equator and tends to cool the planet. Researchers identified the PDO pattern in 1997, but have only recently begun to understand how it fits in with broader ocean-circulation patterns and how it may help to explain the hiatus.

One important finding came in 2011, when a team of researchers at NCAR led by Gerald Meehl reported that inserting a PDO pattern into global climate models causes decade-scale breaks in global warming³. Ocean-temperature data from the recent hiatus reveal why: in a subsequent study, the NCAR researchers showed that more heat moved into the deep ocean after 1998, which helped to prevent the atmosphere from warming⁶. In a third paper, the group used computer models to document the flip side of the process: when the PDO switches to its positive phase, it heats up the surface ocean and atmosphere, helping to drive decades of rapid warming⁷.

A key breakthrough came last year from Shang-Ping Xie and Yu Kosaka at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The duo took a different tack, by programming a model with actual sea surface temperatures from recent decades in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and then seeing what happened to the rest of the globe⁸. Their model not only recreated the hiatus in global temperatures, but also reproduced some of the seasonal and regional climate trends that have marked the hiatus, including warming in many areas and cooler northern winters.

“It was actually a revelation for me when I saw that paper,” says John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria. But it did not, he adds, explain everything. “What it skirted was the question of what is driving the tropical cooling.”

Univ. Washington/IPCC

 

That was investigated by Trenberth and John Fasullo, also at NCAR, who brought in winds and ocean data to explain how the pattern emerges⁴. Their study documents how tropical trade winds associated with La Niña conditions help to drive warm water westward and, ultimately, deep into the ocean, while promoting the upwelling of cool waters along the eastern equatorial region. In extreme cases, such as the La Niña of 1998, this may be able to push the ocean into a cool phase of the PDO.
An analysis of historical data buttressed these conclusions, showing that the cool phase of the PDO coincided with a few decades of cooler temperatures after the Second World War (see ‘The Pacific’s global reach’), and that the warm phase lined up with the sharp spike seen in global temperatures between 1976 and 1998 (ref. 4).

“I believe the evidence is pretty clear,” says Mark Cane, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York. “It’s not about aerosols or stratospheric water vapour; it’s about having had a decade of cooler temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific.”

Heated debate

Cane was the first to predict the current cooling in the Pacific, although the implications weren’t clear at the time. In 2004, he and his colleagues found that a simple regional climate model predicted a warm shift in the Pacific that began around 1976, when global temperatures began to rise sharply⁹. Almost as an afterthought, they concluded their paper with a simple forecast: “For what it is worth the model predicts that the 1998 El Niño ended the post-1976 tropical Pacific warm period.”
It is an eerily accurate result, but the work remains hotly contested, in part because it is based on a partial climate model that focuses on the equatorial Pacific alone. Cane further maintains that the trend over the past century has been towards warmer temperatures in the western Pacific relative to those in the east. That opens the door, he says, to the possibility that warming from greenhouse gases is driving La Niña-like conditions and could continue to do so in the future, helping to suppress global warming. “If all of that is true, it’s a negative feedback, and if we don’t capture it in our models they will overstate the warming,” he says.

There are two potential holes in his assessment. First, the historical ocean-temperature data are notoriously imprecise, leading many researchers to dispute Cane’s assertion that the equatorial Pacific shifted towards a more La Niña-like state during the past century¹⁰. Second, many researchers have found the opposite pattern in simulations with full climate models, which factor in the suite of atmospheric and oceanic interactions beyond the equatorial Pacific. These tend to reveal a trend towards more El Niño-like conditions as a result of global warming. The difference seems to lie, in part, in how warming influences evaporation in areas of the Pacific, according to Trenberth. He says the models suggest that global warming has a greater impact on temperatures in the relatively cool east, because the increase in evaporation adds water vapour to the atmosphere there and enhances atmospheric warming; this effect is weaker in the warmer western Pacific, where the air is already saturated with moisture.

Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

Journal name:

Nature

Volume:

505,

Pages:

276–278

Date published:

(16 January 2014)

DOI:

doi:10.1038/505276a

Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism

An investigation into charter schools’ dishonest and unconstitutional science, history, and “values” lessons.  By Zack Kopplin in Slate Magazine, Jan. 16 2014 4:30 AM

 

A Texas charter school group has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement.

Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker

When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.

The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
 

Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.

 

The opening line of the workbook section declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.

Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.

A favorite creationist claim is that there is “uncertainty” in the fossil record, and Responsive Ed does not disappoint. The workbook cites the “lack of a single source for all the rock layers as an argument against evolution.”

I asked Ken Miller, a co-author of the Miller-Levine Biology textbook published by Pearson and one of the most widely used science textbooks on the market today, to respond to claims about the fossil record and other inaccuracies in the Responsive Ed curriculum. (It’s worth noting that creationists on the Texas State Board of Education recently tried, and failed, to block the approval of Miller’s textbook because it teaches evolution.)

Charles Darwin, circa 1870.

Courtesy of the George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress

“Of course there is no ‘single source’ for all rock layers,” Miller told me over email. “However, the pioneers of the geological sciences observed that the sequence of distinctive rock layers in one place (southern England, for example) could be correlated with identical layers in other places, and eventually merged into a single system of stratigraphy. All of this was established well before Darwin's work on evolution.”

The workbook also claims, “Some scientists even question the validity of the conclusions concerning the age of the Earth.” As Miller pointed out, “The statement that ‘some scientists question,’ is a typical way that students can be misled into thinking that there is serious scientific debate about the age of the Earth or the nature of the geological record. The evidence that the Earth was formed between 4 and 5 billion years ago is overwhelming.”

Another Responsive Ed section claims that evolution cannot be tested, something biologists have been doing for decades. It misinforms students by claiming, “How can scientists do experiments on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s impossible.”

The curriculum tells students that a “lack of transitional fossils” is a “problem for evolutionists who hold a view of uninterrupted evolution over long periods of time.”

“The assertion that there are no ‘transitional fossils’ is false,” Miller responded. “We have excellent examples of transitional forms documenting the evolution of amphibians, mammals, and birds, to name some major groups. We also have well-studied transitional forms documenting the evolution of whales, elephants, horses, and humans.”

A replica of the Peking man skull presented at the Paleozoological Museum of China in February 2009.

Photo by Yan Li/Creative Commons

Evolution is not a scientific controversy, and there are no competing scientific theories. All of the evidence supports evolution, and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept the evidence for it. 

Another tactic creationists often use is to associate evolution with eugenics. One Responsive Ed quiz even asks students, “With regards to social Darwinism, do you think humans who are not capable should be left to die out, or should they be helped?”

“They imply that the control of human reproduction and the abandonment of people who might be ‘left to die’ are elements of evolutionary theory,” Miller said. “This is false, and the authors of these questions surely know that.”

Outright creationism appears in Responsive Ed’s section on the origins of life. It’s not subtle. The opening line of the workbook section, just as the opening line of the Bible, declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

Responsive Ed’s butchering of evolution isn’t the only part of its science curriculum that deserves an F; it also misinforms students about vaccines and mauls the scientific method.

A girl reacts to receiving the H1N1 flu vaccination in 2009 in San Francisco.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The only study linking vaccines to autism was exposed as a fraud and has been retracted, and the relationship has been studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent. But a Responsive Ed workbook teaches, “We do not know for sure whether vaccines increase a child’s chance of getting autism, but we can conclude that more research needs to be done.”

On the scientific method, Responsive Ed confuses scientific theories and laws. It argues that theories are weaker than laws and that there is a natural progression from theories into laws, all of which is incorrect.

The Responsive Ed curriculum undermines Texas schoolchildren’s future in any possible career in science.

Dan Quinn, the communications director for the Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog organization that monitors the religious right, said, “These materials should raise a big red flag for any parent or school administrator. It's bad enough that they promote the same discredited anti-evolution arguments that scientists debunked a long time ago. But the materials also veer into teaching religious beliefs that the courts have repeatedly ruled have no place in a public school science classroom.”

When it’s not directly quoting the Bible, Responsive Ed’s curriculum showcases the current creationist strategy to compromise science education, which the National Center for Science Education terms “stealth creationism.”

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creationism is unconstitutional. In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, Judge John Jones III ruled in federal district court that intelligent design is still creationism and equally unconstitutional.

One piece of campaign literature from the front-runner in the Texas governor’s race shows a gun and a Bible.

To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists resort to rhetoric about teaching “all sides” of “competing theories” and claiming that this approach promotes “critical thinking.”

In response to a question about whether Responsive Ed teaches creationism, its vice president of academic affairs, Rosalinda Gonzalez, told me that the curriculum “teaches evolution, noting, but not exploring, the existence of competing theories.”

Bringing creationism into a classroom by undermining evolution and “noting … competing theories” is still unconstitutional. What’s more, contrary to Gonzalez’s statement, teaching about supernatural creation in the section on the origins of life is doing far more than noting competing theories.

In a previous Slate column on the Texas textbook wars, I explained that Texas’ current science standards were designed to compromise the teaching of evolution. The standards require teachers to “analyze, evaluate, and critique” evolution and teach “all sides” of evolution to encourage “critical thinking.” These requirements are a back-door way to enable teachers to attack evolution and inject creationism into the classroom. If teachers are questioned on their materials, they can shift the responsibility for what they’re teaching onto the state.

I asked Gonzalez if these science standards played a role in Responsive Ed’s curriculum on evolution, and her answer was yes.

Last month, science won the day in the battle over textbooks, and Texas adopted texts that teach evolution. But schools don’t necessarily have to adhere to this list of textbooks. They can choose, as Responsive Ed does, to use alternative textbooks, which may teach creationism.

Policymakers must understand that on a fundamental level teaching creationism is still unconstitutional. The Texas Legislature could take action to regulate these charter schools. The state Senate Education Committee is currently investigating another charter program due to its ties to the Pelican Educational Foundation, which has been under FBI investigation for alleged financial improprieties and alleged sexual misconduct. Sen. Dan Patrick, chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee and a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, told the Austin American-Statesman that “legislative scrutiny is necessary to ensure quality in Texas charter schools.” 

It’s high time for Patrick to give some legislative scrutiny to Responsive Ed. But in reality, he is a big fan of the program, which he “lauded in particular” at the Responsive Ed Charter Conference. It’s no wonder; he’s also a creationist. In a recent debate, Patrick said that he would help pass a law to allow creationism to be taught in public schools because, "We need to stand for what this nation was founded upon, which is the word of God.”

Patrick, who has not responded to requests for comment on Responsive Ed, is not the only leading Republican in Texas ready to toss out evolution or the separation of church and state. In fact, every Republican in the race for lieutenant governor in Texas, the incumbent included, is putting a religious agenda ahead of public education. David Dewhurst, the current lieutenant governor, said he “happens ‘to believe in creationism.’”

Greg Abbott, the current attorney general and front-runner in the Texas governor’s race, seems to be of a similar mindset. One piece of his campaign literature shows a gun and a Bible and includes the phrase, “Two things that every American should know how to use … Neither of which are taught in schools.” Abbott’s campaign hasn’t responded to questions about Responsive Ed or creationism in schools.

* * *

Science isn’t the only target of the religious right. The movement also undermines the study of history. I received a set of Responsive Ed U.S. history “Knowledge Units” through my public records request and discovered problems there, too.

 

The West in the 1400s and 1500s was “quantum leaps” ahead of “native peoples,” including Ming Dynasty China.

In the section on the causes of World War I, the study materials suggest that “anti-Christian bias” coming out of the Enlightenment helped create the foundations for the war. The workbook states,
“[T]he abandoning of religious standards of conduct and the breakdown in respect for governmental authority would lead to one of two options: either anarchy or dictatorship would prevail in the absence of a monarch.” Responsive Ed also asserts that a person’s values are based on solely his or her religious beliefs.

A section on World War II suggests that Japan’s military aggression was led by the samurai. They write, “Following World War I, Japan attempted to solve its economic and social problems by military means. The Samurai, a group promoting a military approach to create a vast Japanese empire in Asia, wanted to expand Japan’s influence along the Chinese mainland including many Pacific Islands.”

I asked one of my former professors about this. Rich Smith, an East Asia scholar at Rice University, said,  “There were no samurai in Japan after WWI; the samurai class was effectively abolished in 1876, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.”

Responsive Ed continues to demonstrate its religious and cultural biases in a section on the Philippines, describing the population as made up of “Catholics, Moslems (Muslims), and pagans in various stages of civilization.”

When discussing stem cells, it claims President George W. Bush banned stem-cell research because it was done “primarily with the cells from aborted babies.” The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine debunks this on its website: “A common misconception is that the cells can come from aborted fetuses, which is in fact not possible.”

A colored scanning electron micrograph of human embryonic stem cells.

Courtesy of Miodrag Stojkovic/Science Photo Library

About LGBTQ rights, Responsive Ed says, “Laws against the homosexual lifestyle had been repealed in many states, but some states continued to ban the behavior.” The homosexual lifestyle?

About President Franklin Roosevelt, it teaches, “The New Deal had not helped the economy. However, it ushered in a new era of dependency on the Federal government.”

Perhaps the workbook’s best line comes when it explains that President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers out of “a misguided sense of compassion.”

One of Responsive Ed’s schools, Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, Texas, where Responsive Ed is based, uses a curriculum far worse even than the Responsive Ed Knowledge Units. The school teaches American history from A Patriot’s History of the United States. The patriots book is “required reading,” according to Glenn Beck, and it opens with an interview between Rush Limbaugh and the author. It is a book that, as Dave Weigel says, “will make you stupider.”

This book teaches the superiority of the West, which in the 1400s and 1500s was apparently “quantum leaps” ahead of “native peoples,” including Ming Dynasty China, one of the most prosperous Chinese dynasties. It explains that the West was superior to “native populations” in battles because “Aztec chiefs and Moor sultans alike were completely vulnerable to massed firepower, yet without the legal framework of republicanism and civic virtue like Europe’s to replace its leadership cadre, a native army could be decapitated at its head by one volley.”

Instead of being taught that 16^th-century Spain had a monarchy, students at Founders Classical Academy are incorrectly learning that it had a form of republican government that was superior to anything that “native peoples” had created.

On the feminist movement, Founders Classical Academy students are taught that feminism “created an entirely new class of females who lacked male financial support and who had to turn to the state as a surrogate husband.”

A Patriot’s History of the United States also addresses the “pinnacle” of the “western way of war” as demonstrated by the Iraq War and questions the legitimacy of Secretary of State John Kerry’s “suspect at best” Purple Hearts and Bronze Star.

* * *

Some of Responsive Ed’s lessons appear harmless at first, but their origin is troubling. Students also learn about “discernment,” which is defined as “understanding the deeper reasons why things happen.” In other sections, students learn other moral lessons such as “values” and “deference.”

These lessons were lifted directly from a company called Character First Education, which was founded by an Oklahoma businessman named Tom Hill. He is a follower of Bill Gothard, a minister who runs the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a Christian organization that teaches its members to incorporate biblical principles into daily life. IBLP is considered a cult by some of its former followers. Gothard developed character qualities associated with a list of “49 General Commands of Christ” that Hill adopted for his character curriculum. Hill then removed Gothard’s references to God and Bible verses and started marketing the curriculum to public schools and other public institutions.

The values taught by Responsive Ed can often be found word for word on Gothard’s website. The Responsive Ed unit on genetics includes “Thoroughness: Knowing what factors will diminish the effectiveness of my work or words if neglected.” The only difference is that Gothard’s website also adds “Proverbs 18:15” after the quote.

Many of Gothard’s teachings revolve around obedience to men, especially that of the wife and the children. Gothard has upset even other conservative Christians. In an interview for an article published by Religion Dispatches, Don Veinot, a conservative Christian and founder of the Midwest Christian Outreach, accused Gothard of “creating a culture of fear.” Gothard has been accused of emotional and sexual abuse by some of his former followers, “happening as far back as the mid- to late-1970’s and as recently as this year.”

Responsive Ed and Character First may have removed the references to God and Bible verses from the curriculum that is being used in public schools, but it is clear that the line between church and state is still being blurred. And nothing that Gothard has created should be allowed near children.

Responsive Ed has plenty of connections to other fundamentalist right-wing organizations as well. Its website’s “Helpful Information” section directs parents to Focus on the Family under the heading of “Family Support.” Under “Values” it steers students to the Traditional Values Coalition, whose website includes a header that says, “Say NO to Obama. Stop Sharia in America.”

* * *

In late October, I visited iSchool High, a Responsive Ed public charter in Houston, and asked the campus director, Michael Laird, about reports that the school was teaching creationism.

A few days before my visit, writing for Salon, Jonny Scaramanga, an activist who reports on Christian education, had exposed a section of iSchool’s curriculum that blamed Hitler’s atrocities on the theory of evolution. Scaramanga had been sent the curriculum by Joshua Bass, the parent of a former iSchool student. Bass rightly viewed this curriculum as an attempt to sneak religion into the classroom and teach creationism.

“Oh, you’re media,” Laird said, sounding strained as he scribbled a phone number on a pink sticky note for me. “You’ll have to talk to the main office.”

I was quickly shuffled out, but while I was not allowed to see any curriculum or talk to any teachers, I did get to look into a classroom from the outside and verified that the setup looked exactly like a picture of an Accelerated Christian Education classroom I had seen on Scaramanga’s website.

The ACE plant near the Responsive Ed headquarters near Lewisville, Texas.

Courtesy of Zack Kopplin

ACE is a popular Christian home-school curriculum that’s also used in many private schools and publicly funded voucher schools. It’s the most infamous Christian home-school curriculum and for years taught that the Loch Ness monster was real in its attempts to disprove evolution.

Bass discovered that Responsive Ed was founded by Donald Howard, who had also founded ACE.
But it wasn’t immediately clear exactly how interconnected these two organizations are.

 

ACE and Responsive Ed are both headquartered in Lewisville, just 4 miles apart, and staff members appear to rotate between the two organizations.

When I asked Responsive Ed’s Gonzalez about her charter network’s history with Howard and ACE, she said that none of the ACE founders, including Howard, had been associated with Responsive Ed for the past seven or eight years. But I found that five members of Responsive Ed’s current board and leadership group used to work for ACE (also known as School of Tomorrow). Responsive Ed's current CEO, Charles Cook, spent several years in charge of marketing at ACE before he joined Responsive Ed, and he designed the original curriculum that Responsive Ed used.

Raymond Moore, one of Responsive Ed’s earliest principals (at that time Responsive Ed was known as Eagle Charter Schools), explained that while Responsive Ed “took the Christian vernacular out” of ACE curriculum, they still “put in character traits that reflect our values.” He also noted that “almost everyone in the management has been in the ministry.”

Howard expressed this same sentiment about his charter schools in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 1998, saying, “Take the Ten Commandments—you can rework those as ‘success principles’ by rewording them. We will call it truth, we will call it principles, we will call it values.
We will not call it religion.” (Hat tip to the Texas Freedom Network and Scaramanga for locating this quote).

 

For years it taught that the Loch Ness monster was real in its attempts to disprove evolution.

One figure stands out when it comes to revealing the political and religious agenda behind the Responsive Ed charter schools. ACE’s former vice president, Ronald Johnson, founded a curriculum company, Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum, which also ran four public charter schools in Texas.
Paradigm’s curriculum teaches abstinence in English class. ChristianBook.com describes the science curriculum as teaching “evolution from a young-earth creationist perspective.” Paradigm’s website also says that the curriculum is “carefully designed to equip high school students to defend their faith” and is being used in public schools in 11 states.

Paradigm and Johnson are closely connected to Responsive Ed. In 2010, Responsive Ed absorbed Paradigm, taking over its schools and replacing its board. Paradigm noted in a press release that this allowed Responsive Ed to “incorporate the PACS system and curriculum across Texas and in other states.” The release described this as “a ‘win-win’ situation for both organizations” because Responsive Ed schools already use a “learning system based on a manual designed and written by Dr. Johnson while he was Vice President of [Accelerated Christian Education].” Before 2010, Responsive Ed and Paradigm operated on the same model, and now Paradigm and Responsive Ed are the same organization.

The release also added that Johnson would continue his role in marketing Paradigm curriculum (now for Responsive Ed) and would train Responsive Ed’s teachers and help design the curriculum used in their schools.

While Responsive Ed attempts to preserve a facade of secularism, on the Paradigm website, Johnson is far more explicit about his goal of subverting charter programs.

Johnson believes the public education system strips students “of access to the foundational Judeo-Christian moral and economic virtues.” Other problems with public education include “sex education classes and distribution of free condoms” and “tolerance of homosexual life-styles and Islam.”