Reddit reviews Quantitative Chemical Analysis

> Also what do you think is their motive behind lying to us about this

I don't think they are lying about it -- "they" being the vast majority of alarmist or alarm-leaning scientists in general. They mean well and are doing what the vast majority of everyone else in society does, which is to "go with the flow". There are certainly a few who are absolutely lying about it, but I'd estimate those are only 1 out of 10,000 or possibly even much less. Presumably they are motivated by greed and or power, but who really knows? They have prepared a very tricky path that is difficult to step off of.

Here is an example of what I mean by that in this book you can preview on Amazon, called Quantitative Chemical Analysis. (I am not suggesting the author is a liar or purposely misleading students, BTW) Read section 0-1, which is near the beginning. It is well written, easy to read, very interesting, enlightening, informative, technical, and mostly, educational. Put simply, it is great shit. This is what freshmen(ish) in college learn. Here's a quote near the end of the section (please excuse my typos and editing for brevity):

> The significance of the Keeling curve is apparent by appending Keeling's data to the 800 000-year record of atmospheric CO2 and temperature preserved in Antarctic ice. ... Temperature and CO2 have followed each other for 800 000 years. Burning fossil fuel in the last 150 years increased CO2 from its historic cyclic peak of 280 ppm to today's 380 ppm. ... which might significantly affect climate. The longer we take to reduce fossil fuel use, the longer this unintended global experiment will continue. Increasing population exacerbates this and many other problems.

Who is going to go home and truly contemplate the depth of what they learned from that? I'd say it'd be much easier to just take it at face value, not question the professor, and ace the test and move on with your life. It's not worth the fight. Is some freshman student going to research the validity of comparing against this "800 000-year record" that was mentioned? There is a deep rabbit hole to explore there. What about the more fundamental question of whether temperature follows CO2 or the other way around? The book says, "Temperature and CO2 have followed each other". That is a very clever dodge of a fact that has been long debunked. I mean, seriously, how much weirdness can we dig out of just this tiny broken excerpt of only ONE college textbook I extracted for you?

All I can do is offer you what I know as a middle-aged man who did college 25 years ago and have learned a lot more about society in general since then, and continue to learn daily: Your professors are people with opinions, just like everyone else, and the facts they present which are the basis of their opinions, while almost always factually based, are not necessarily based on the truth. That is, scientific fact and the truth are not always the same. I'm not saying scientific facts are lies, I'm saying they aren't necessarily the truth. If you forget about everything else, it is really important to remember that. For good measure, I should also mention the Dunning-Kruger effect, which tends to help college professor's and other "iamverysmart" people seem like they know more than they do (especially in subjects they are not educated in, for some reason), and Hanlon's razor, which tends to make the world a lot dumber when you think about it too much. Good luck!

What kind of information are you looking to bone up on? Do you have instrumental operation questions, are you looking for a clue on data interpretation, or are you wondering more about sample preparations? Do you want to know how people used to do chemical analysis before ICP-OES/AA or are you content in knowing that it used to be a fucking chore? Or are you more concerned with how to prepare the statistics for a background curve, or the proper way to apply a least-squares regression? A general analytical chemistry/instrumental analysis book (like Harris in the sidebar or Skoog ) would give you an overview but I doubt that you'll get much depth into any one of those topics. (I have used both, and would recommend them.)