Terry Trainor - another creationist nitwit

I had written this up several months ago and forgotten to post it:
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Funny stuff…

This MSN discussion group is a gold mine of creationist silliness.

I’m sure I will be able to produce oodles of stuff from there, but I will start with a thread on Global Warming.

The main protagonist is the MSN board operator, one Terry Trainor, a young-earth creationist and engineer.

From his thread-opening post, emphases mine:

I have long argued that man is not causing global warming, if it even exists, and have given the reasons that I believe the scare was blown up; profits for the chemical industry, who needed people to switch from cheap Freon on which patents had expired to new, more expensive refrigerants on which new patents had been obtained.

Too many people believed the 'sky is falling' hype, and we are now paying the result in higher costs of refrigerants.

One of my objections involved the fact that Freon is heavier than air, while the Ozone layer is way the heck UP THERE; how could Freon raise high enough to damage it? I was assured that Ozone, even though heavier than air, did indeed raise
itself into the upper reaches of our atmosphere.
I tried to duplicate this by placing mercury and water in a glass and agitating it repeatedly. So far, the mercury is still on the bottom, though.

OK……. So the relationship between water and mercury is supposed to be a legitimate analogy for the relationship between Freon and the atmosphere?

Wait – it gets better.

Starting on this page of the thread, the poster “tedlusk1” challenges Terry on the applicability of his ‘model’:

I was assured that Ozone, even though heavier than air, did indeed raise itself into the upper reaches of our atmosphere. I tried to duplicate this by placing mercury and water in a glass and agitating it repeatedly. So far, the mercury is still on the bottom, though.

Tedlusk1:

I assume that this was a tongue-in-cheek snide remark, not any actual attempt to equate the two. Such a 'model' would garner a failing grade in even elementary school science.

Terry didn’t like that too much. Tedlusk1 expanded in a subsequent post:

Terry:

Do you think posting these questions here will somehow alter the fact that Freon is heavier than the normal mix of atmospheric gasses?

Tedlusk1:

Conclusion - you can't answer the questions.

Have you ever heard of, oh, wind? Updrafts? Currents? Diffusion? There are reports of solid objects - grasses, sand, particulate matter like smoke, even animals - floating about in the atmosphere. I cannot see how it is leaving you so flabbergasted that heavier than air gases and their breakdown byproducts might enter the atmosphere.

It is silly to suggest that dropping mercury in a glass of water is even close to being
analogous to the atmospheric mixing of gasses of differing densities. It is also silly to express disbelief that heavier than air gasses cannot mix with air or make it into the upper atmosphese. One can only draw such inferences if one ignores or is ignorant of basic meteorology and atmopheric science, or basic physical science.

Take a glass of water and put a drop of dye in it. Dye molecules are heavier than water and so should sink, and at first they do. But over time, the molecules diffuse throughout the water and produce a more or less equal distribution. And so with heavier than air gasses. Diffusion. Since CFCs are not water soluble, they are free to diffuse throughout the atmosphere for long periods of time.

Terry did not like that much, either. He later mentioned that volcanoes send more chlorine into the atmosphere than humans do. Ted asked:

And how did that chlorine get up there? It is heavier than air, isn't it?

Again, Terry did not like that. In fact, he ignored it, like so many of his erroneous, illogical, unscientific statements that he writes and are corrected by others. It appears that Tedlusk was later banned by Terry. That is also a recurring theme at that discussion board – and creationist-run boards in general – once someone starts pointing out the shallowness of the creationist position, they tend not to last long.
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And to think - Trainor actually graduated form an engineering school and was employed by an engineering firm of some sort...