Most Teachers Don't Teach Climate Change; 4 in 5 Parents Wish They Did (opens in new tab)

Difficult one! How do you get people like Bengtsson, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction, and Richard Lindzen, ex-Professor of Meteorology at MIT, Freeman Dyson plus a couple of physics Nobel prize winners and a score more, to see sense? If only they'd listen to Greta Thunberg!

Because despite our best efforts, emotion is a far stronger motivator for people than reason. A cartoon like this can deeply ingrained the fear of global warming into a kid in a way that will subconsciously motivate future decisions, way more than the simple facts of the situation would.

For a proper Fourier transform you need to wait until the first years of the university, perhaps the lasts year of secondary school in some places. Anyway, it doesn't look like a nice function for a Fourier transform, because the border effect will be huge.

In the middle of secondary school, if you are lucky you can try fitting the function line a polinomial plus a trigonometric function with Excel. You have to pick an initial value of the parameters that is close to the function, otherwise solver will never get a good fit.

I'm not sure how many math teacher are prepared for this. I have more faith in physics teachers that have a better training in dealing with noisy real word functions that have to be fitted to a model.

> see if the second derivative means we're all gonna die,

I think that even the worst model don't predict the humanity extinction, perhaps a huge amount of displacement and the following wars, problem for crops and food production and the following hunger, change of rain pattern, sea level increase, and other very nasty stuff, but not extinction. Also, the timeframe of most of the catastrophes is more than a century, so there is plenty of time to dance on the Titanic.

> It would be interesting to look at the Keeling curve in mathematics. Plenty of fun stuff there, you can see the seasons with a Fourier transform....

Wait how?