Belated post I was supposed to write weeks ago about something that happened years ago

Some background to this. I'm friends with my dad on Facebook, but I ignore almost everything from him because it's mostly old jokes I've already seen or political posts that don't interest me. A nonzero factor in my avoidance of whatever crap my dad is posting on Facebook is that a lot of the time, it's been stupid posts about global warming. This was a topic I used to argue with him about a lot, and I got sick of it.

For whatever reason, Fesler is also friends with my dad on Facebook. And he sent me some text messages about how bad the misinformation was that my dad was posting on Facebook. I forget if I saw the stuff my dad was posting, but given the timing, it might have been misinformation about SARS-CoV2. Anyway, I responded with something like, "You follow my dad? Why?" And I was going to follow it up with something longer, but as I started it realized that I didn't want to try to type it all out on my phone. So I just dropped it. This was sometime last month. Well, now I'll say what I was supposed to say back then...

Let me tell you a story. But first, I have to give some background on one of my idols: Harold Urey. I've always been interested in the history of science, and Harold Urey caught my interest back when I was in high school. I think he's probably one of the most important scientists of all time. Even though his accomplishments are generally well-documented and not obscured, his name doesn't seem to come up much at all  in popular culture, which is just a shame. Harold Urey was a badass. He separated deuterium from hydrogen back before anyone really knew what isotopes were or even understood how neutrons worked in the first place. He also worked on other projects to separate isotopes, and data from his experiments was useful to other scientists around the world, some of whom were more famous. Still, his work on deuterium did win him a Nobel prize. He skipped the ceremony because he wanted to be with his pregnant wife. Just snubbed the whole Nobel thing. Incidentally, they'd been refusing to acknowledge his mentor, Gilbert N. Lewis, so there was a kind of justice to it, whether or not he intended it that way.

For whatever reason, Harold Urey is only a footnote in popular history material about the Manhattan Project, but he basically laid the groundwork that made the whole thing possible. Other researchers knew that in order for a uranium bomb to be possible, they'd have to get samples of uranium with more U-235. Natural uranium has very little of it, and not enough to sustain the reaction. It was a problem that no one in the whole world knew how to solve yet. But Harold Urey was the person who'd done the most separating isotopes out of anyone and he'd published papers that made them think maybe he could do it, so they came crying to him. He not only taught them how to enrich uranium, but he taught them multiple pathways to do it. Like, no one else on the planet was able to figure this problem out, so they asked him for help and this one guy starts coming up with different ways to solve the problem. They put him in charge of a bunch of stuff. He actually did work on the Manhattan Project, but left before they'd gotten to part where they could build a working bomb.

Not content to kickstart just one of the most famous research projects in history, Harold Urey also did much of the foundational work on the Apollo Program. 

The place where I've seen his name the most might be the Miller-Urey experiment. And on that one, the real work was done by Stanley Miller. Some of it was based on Harold Urey's work, but Miller had designed and performed the experiment and wrote the paper. So Harold Urey took his own name off of the paper because he wanted it to be better for his student's career.

So in 2007 or so, I was at Green River Community College and had the question come up of how data collected from ice cores could possibly reveal anything about atmospheric temperature: surely the air pockets in the ice were cold as hell and had been the whole time. Getting a record of carbon dioxide concentration seemed reasonable enough, but there'd been a lot of talk about correlating that with temperature. How? I was baffled, so I looked it up. The answer was that air temperature affects the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the air: heavier oxygen gets pooled toward the surface a bit more than lighter oxygen, and the more the atmosphere warms up, the less pronounced this effect becomes. It turned out that this concept was not new and had been understood well before the high-tech ice core analysis stuff that was going on in the 2000's. It was borrowed from work some old-timey scientist did on ocean sediment beds, animal fossils, and on more crude versions of ice cores, all developed based on work that this old-timey scientist had done in the 1940's or 1950's taking barrels of freezing water and measuring oxygen isotope ratios in air bubbles that he'd set up under different conditions. That old-timey scientist was, of course, Harold motherfucking Urey.

I found this all enthralling. And it coincided with the time when I was playing around the most with GRCC's database access to scientific journal articles. So I accidentally wound up reading more scientific papers about ice cores than I did about pretty much any other topic. I probably didn't grasp everything I read, but it might have helped me later on with concepts in chemistry and physics classes.

A few years later, I was riding in a car with my dad. He got on the subject of global warming somehow. Maybe it was something on the radio, but I forget. He had always been vague and inconsistent with his rhetoric about global warming: that it wasn't real, that it was real but it was outside human influence, that it was real but also a good thing. Many of the things I'd heard him say over the years didn't really make sense, and it was a subject I didn't usually try to talk to him about. Once or twice, we'd just argued and shouted over each other. But on this occasion, he brought up the idea that it was impossible for us to know what the climate was like thousands of years ago. And this happened to touch on a subject I was a bit obsessed with, something about which even though I wasn't an expert, I knew far more than most normal people.

So I thought I'd try to explain to my dad about isotopic ratios of oxygen trapped in air bubbles in ice cores. He interrupted me and shouted so loudly that I couldn't hear myself talk. He ranted that no magical pixiedust bullshit was going to prove what the temperature used to be like thousands of years ago, that it was impossible. Well, I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like that. And this time, I was determined that we wouldn't just shout over each other. So I resisted, refusing to interrupt him the way he'd interrupted me. I waited for him to stop, then said that I wanted to explain something to him. I tried to bring up isotopes again, but before I could get anywhere, he started shouting over me again, going into a nearly identical rant. He didn't say anything new exactly, but there was a little variation on the same theme that it was all bullshit.

Somehow, uncharacteristically, I remained calm and tried again, slightly changing my own approach and gently trying to get him to acknowledge that I wanted to talk. That sort of thing usually worked with him. He could be rude sometimes in shouting over people or not listening, but he tended to let people speak if they specifically asked him to let them speak. Only it didn't work, and right as I was getting to the same part of just trying to mention isotopes of oxygen, he was at it a third time, shouting about how it was impossible for mere humans to know anything about this. I tried again a few more times with the same result. It might seem crazy in hindsight, but at the time, after four or five instances of him shouting over me when I tried to talk, I thought that he'd get tired of it and that he might actually listen. Nope. He won that battle.

For one thing, he was loud. I mean, I inherited that from him, but he was getting painfully loud. But mostly, the actual words that he was shouting were pretty limited, all along this theme of outright denial. He was completely unwilling to hear me out. So I just gave up. I stopped trying to talk.

Obviously that wasn't the last time I had a conversation with my dad. But it was the last time I tried to respectfully present facts and reason to him like that. Afterward, when we had an argument and he was being a willfully ignorant dumbass, I'd call him a willfully ignorant dumbass.