Taking Chemistry in High School

YOU BEGIN TO WONDER what part of it people don't understand, or refuse to understand. You start with basic chemistry, the periodic table of the elements, to which we were all exposed in high school, if not earlier. You note the basic elements nitrogen, osygen, and carbon, and their respective, well known chemical properties, including their ability to absorb heat, and retain or release it back into the environment. From there its a matter of moving on to observable reality, measuring the content of earth's atmosphere, the amount of various elements in it, and calculating what chemical impact humans have had on it, how much of what elements, if any, humans have added or removed from it. Any high school or college chemistry teacher can tell you how to measure to content of the atmosphere, with what equipment. Its right at about seventy eight percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and tiny amounts of a few trace elements, including carbon. Been that way for millenia, but has evolved over time, adding nitrogen, cutting back on carbon. Sometimes we wish there were more oxygen in the air; humans do really well, at everything, with an enriched oxygen air content. But There is no conspiracy to deceive anyone about the content of the earth's atmosphere, anywhere in teh world, at any time. High school chemistry teachers just do not have time to engage in conspiracies to keep atmospheric content a secret, or to lie about it. Any of these teachers knows how much carbon is in the atmosphere naturally, how much is there right now, and how much of it was put there by human industry. Then, independently, people around the world, with no conspiracy or evil intent, can measure how much heat is being absorbed and retained becsause of the added carbon, how much heat is being absorbed and retained which would not be, were it not for the extra carbon. The results are pretty much teh same enywhere, which does not mean that there is a conspiracy, but only that the measuring is rather simple, straight forward, verifiable, like good science should be. Again, one begins to wonder why there is any disagreement about whether humanity is bringing about a warming of the earth's atmosphere. If you want to stop there, all you hvave to do is ask yourself whtehrt teh added atmospheric heat would have any impact on climate over time. Simply paying attention to the weather in your hometown isn't good enough, because you have no idea what the weather would be like without the added carbon. But high school chemistry is another matter. High school chemistry reveals reality, it tells the truth, in simple, easy to understand fashion. What we need is a world full of high school chemistry students.