Science – Page 2 – Blogs For Victory

Global Warming Hoax Update

October 14, 2012Mark Noonan45 Comments

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years…

Just to re-state my views:

1. It is not certain that average global temperatures have been rising. They may be, but we lack sufficient exact data over a long enough period of time to make an absolute assertion one way or the other.

2. If average global temperatures are rising we do not have sufficient data to know if they are rising towards some historic norm or rising higher than a historic norm.

3. If average global temperatures are rising above an historic norm then we do not have sufficient data to determine if this will be a net negative or positive for the species inhabiting the planet.

4. If global temperatures are rising we do not have sufficient data to determine what would be the primary cause of this increase.

5. It seems to me that the tiny fraction of a fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere which is caused by human activity is unlikely to be the culprit if, indeed, average global temperatures are rising.

6. Given all we don’t know, any plans to deal with an alleged increase in average global temperatures are not based upon hard science but upon the merest guesswork.

7. I refuse to massively change the way we live based upon mere guesswork.

The reason I call it a hoax is because it is always Number 7 which is the real bone of contention – with all we don’t know, the global warming alarmists yet insist upon massive tax and regulatory changes to society (all of them tending towards an increasingly undemocratic form of government). As this works out to a massive power and wealth grab by a self-selected group of global elites, it has in my mind the mark of a hoax – a scam, if you will. The day I see jet-setting global warming enthusiasts move in to a mud hut after leaving one last warning for me, then I’ll sit up and take notice.

Global Warming Catastrophe

August 29, 2012August 29, 2012Retired Spook24 Comments

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a Global Warming update, and it appears that we failed to act soon enough, and now we’re all going to drown.

There are no comparisons to be made. This is not like war or plague or a stockmarket crash. We are ill-equipped, historically and psychologically, to understand it, which is one of the reasons why so many refuse to accept that it is happening.

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet. Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007. The daily rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year. The daily sense of loss – of the world we loved and knew – cannot be quantified so easily.

The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat that would previously have been reflected back into space is absorbed.

This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster than most climate scientists predicted that one of them reports: “It feels as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete.” In its last assessment, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century”. These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel’s range. Some scientists now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea-ice in late summer could occur in this decade or the next.

As I’ve warned repeatedly, but to little effect, the IPCC’s assessments tend to be conservative. This is unsurprising when you see how many people have to approve them before they are published. There have been a few occasions – such as its estimate of the speed at which glaciers would be lost in the Himalayas – on which the panel has overstated the case. But it looks as if these will be greatly outnumbered by the occasions on which the panel has understated it.

The melting disperses another belief: that the temperate parts of the world – where most of the rich nations are located – will be hit last and least, while the poorer nations will be hit first and worst. New knowledge of the way in which the destruction of the Arctic sea ice affects northern Europe and North America suggests that this is no longer true. A paper published earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters shows that Arctic warming is likely to be responsible for the extremes now hammering the once-temperate nations.

I’m really sorry we didn’t listen to our obviously wiser Liberals while we still had time to do something. And even though it’s probably too late, I’d be interested in hearing from our resident Progressives, after the well-deserved I-told ya-so’s, just exactly what we should or could have done to avoid the impending climate Armageddon. A big mea culpa is all I have to offer at this point. I don’t even think we need to bother with the election in November. I mean, what does it matter in the overall scheme of things?

Neil Armstrong, RIP

August 25, 2012Mark Noonan60 Comments

From ABC News:

Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who became first to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 11, has died. He was 82 years old.

He was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, on Aug. 5, 1930.

On July 20, 1969, half a billion people — a sixth of the world’s population at the time — watched a ghostly black-and-white television image as Armstrong backed down the ladder of the lunar landing ship Eagle, planted his left foot on the moon’s surface, and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”…

Symbolic of a nation which used to be able to do everything – Armstrong’s death reminds us of what we used to be, and should inspire us to be that nation, again.

Climate Change Update

February 26, 2012February 26, 2012Retired Spook74 Comments

It looks like another semi-prominent member of the Climate Alarmist community has gotten caught with his whole arm in the cookie jar. I’ve been waiting to see how the story that has become known as FakeGate (bet you haven’t seen any mention of that in the MSM) would play out before posting a summary, but The Weekly Standard has saved me the trouble. Wattsupwiththat has also been keeping the story at the top of its site since the first revelations about 2 weeks ago, and is up to their 58th update as of today.

The Weekly Standard article ends with some interesting comments and revelations:

More than a few observers have asked why anyone should trust Gleick’s scientific judgment if his judgment about how to deal with climate skeptics is so bad. -Gleick’s defense of his motives would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Let’s take these in order. Anony-mous? True, Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”

The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources—and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do.

Finally, “coordinated”? Few public policy efforts have ever had the massive institutional and financial coordination that the climate change cause enjoys. That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

As most regular readers here know, I’ve followed this issue for a long time, although after the second release of emails known as ClimateGate 2 a few months ago, my interest in what will eventually become known as the greatest scientific scam of all time began to wane. FakeGate may well be the final nail in the AWG coffin. One can only hope.

Climate Change Update

December 18, 2011December 18, 2011Retired Spook59 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good, old-fashioned, knock-down, drag-out discussion about the whole topic of climate change. My own feeling, as many regulars on this blog know, is that the issue of global warming/climate change is one of, if not THE greatest scientific frauds ever foisted on mankind, and now information is becoming public at an increasing rate that backs up that assertion.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s (R-CA) speech on the House floor on December 8th, re-printed at Watts Up With That yesterday, addresses just about every aspect of the debate covering the last couple decades, including numerous new revelations that cast serious, if not discussion-ending doubt on the whole issue.

I realize this is not a problem that ordinary bloggers are going to solve, but it doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it.

Global Warming Hoax Update

September 15, 2011September 15, 2011Mark Noonan134 Comments

From Climate Depot:

Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears…

…Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group’s belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”…

I know, I know – our liberals will swiftly discover that Giaever is just a shill for Big Energy, or some such…never mind facts and logic; Al Gore says anthropogenic global warming is true, and so it must be…

But, it isn’t. If the world is warming, then it is almost certainly not primarily caused by human CO2 emissions. Additionally, if it is warming there is no conclusive evidence that it will be a net detriment to life on earth. The whole thing of global warming is a double-edged scam…for leftists to gain political power in the name of saving the planet, and for con artists like Gore to make bags of money. That is it – never has been anything else, never will be anything else.

Liberal Fascists Strike Again

September 5, 2011Mark Noonan14 Comments

From the Powerline:

About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.” Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior…

…Well, you can imagine what happened next. Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing…

The BBC also finds another problem with Dr. Spencer – seems he’s a committed Christian! Well, that tears it – when Christians are involved you know that something is fishy! Can’t have Christians casting doubt upon climate change orthodoxy, now can we? In classic Stalinist mode, liberal fascists have not only got the editor to resign, but got him to state that he shouldn’t have published the article.

Some years back I wrote an article entitled The Death of Science…about how politicized scientists, themselves, were destroying the respect science had among the public. For well more than a century, if you put the label of “science” on an assertion, belief among the public was automatic…but now we’ve all seen just too much nonsense dressed up as science. It just makes matters worse when we see dissenting scientists persecuted for speaking up.

The really bad news here is that we do need science – we need, that is, to be able to use our human reason to discover what we can of the truth. God made the universe intelligible and gave us reason so that we may explore the universe. From what we can see, God wants us to learn the truth…but we can’t learn the truth if we are forever cutting ourselves off because of some prejudice. It used to be that religion was, at times, a bar to free inquiry…now the ostensible advocates of free inquiry are standing athwart the pursuit of truth yelling, “stop!”. If these people get their way, we’ll shortly be back in a dark age…free inquiry will stop, innovation will dry up and we’ll even start to forget things we’ve already learned.

Everyone who is in favor of the truth – who is fearlessly determined that the truth be known, come what may, should be frightened about this sort of action. A few corrupt purveyors of an ideology are trying to shut down debate…shut down the search for truth. They are doing it because great, big gobs of money are at stake, as are the reputations of those who have most ardently advanced the notion that human CO2 emissions are a primary culprit in global warming…an assertion which is at the least entirely unproved, and at worst is outright false. If we want to be a people of truth, we’d better darn well put a stop to this.

Global Warming Hoax Update

September 1, 2011August 31, 2011Mark Noonan8 Comments

From Investors Business Daily:

Experiments performed by a European nuclear research group indicate that the sun, not man, determines Earth’s temperature. Somewhere, Al Gore just shuddered as an unseasonably cool breeze blows by.

The results from an experiment to mimic Earth’s atmosphere by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, tell researchers that the sun has a significant effect on our planet’s temperature. Its magnetic field acts as a gateway for cosmic rays, which play a large role in cloud formation.

Consequently, when the sun’s magnetic field allows cosmic rays to seed cloud cover, temperatures are cooler. When it restricts cloud formation by deflecting cosmic rays away from Earth, temperatures go up…

Who woulda thunk it? That big, bright, hot yellow thing in the sky is responsible for the temperature? I’m telling you, this is the shock of all shocks…to think that for years we’ve been thinking it was driving cars which determined temperature! How did our brave men of science like Al Gore miss this? How are we going to save the polar bears, now? For crying out loud, the Goron is quite a potentate, but I don’t know if even he can turn off the sun…

Hey, Guys, How About Another Evolution Thread?

August 20, 2011August 20, 2011Mark Noonan62 Comments

We always seem to have fun with these – and the set-up asking Perry about evolution is an excellent place to start.

Perry answered the question well – no one knows how old the earth is, kid. Rather disgusting that you can hear mom trying to prompt the kid to ask gotcha questions. This is the level of the debate we’re going to have in 2012.

But, that aside, one of the more amusing aspects of the whole debate is the way the other side gets itself tied up in to knots. Demanding that unless hard, provable science, it just has no place in the debate. Missing is any understanding – any reasonable thought – about the fact that the person demanding that science be the measure of all things does not even begin to put the marvel of man in to the equation. As G K Chesterton put it in The Everlasting Man:

It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.

Try as they might, the fundamentalists of evolution cannot get ’round the fact of man being what he is. We don’t naturally follow from what came before. We are similar to chimpanzees in a large number of ways except in those ways which make a man a man. Elsewhere, Chesterton notes that it isn’t a matter of a chimp doing something badly and man doing it better – man does things that no chimp ever did, or ever could do. Go back a million years and there is nothing in the simian species you can find which indicates that at some future date, quite by accident, one of them will randomly evolve a capability and a desire to decorate his body with paint or clothes…there is nothing in the animal world or the concept of evolution which prepares for the time when a creature will suddenly spend time and energy making art, that indelible signature of Mankind.

And as the evolutionists refuse to consider this – a plain fact – the debate grinds forward in a rather sterile manner, and ever more clearly becomes not a defense of science and truth, but a mere desire to suppress an uncomfortable thought: perhaps it isn’t all an accident? Maybe there is a design and a purpose in the universe? Maybe there is even a Designer who wants something of us?

My thinking on this subject is rapidly leading me to the conclusion that, at bottom, this rigid, hysterical demand that we turn away from what common sense proclaims is, in the end, no more than a fierce desire to defend adherence to a lie. As it turns out, the lie being adhered to is the first lie of hell – “you will be like gods”. Beings who evolved by accident from a senseless universe of no purpose owe nothing to anyone…they need not serve, and they are free to rule as far as their own power and inclination leads them. Introduce even the possibility of God and purpose in to the universe, and all of a sudden you become a debtor who owes someone every last thing you have. Some of us react with joy to this discovery and eagerly seek to thank our Benefactor…others furiously reject this and demand not only their right to believe differently, but further demand that no one else even bring up a question which casts doubt upon the evolutionist viewpoint.

To me it is a matter of perfect indifference whether the world is 6 billion or 6 thousand years old. It doesn’t alter in the least the actual facts I have to deal with every day. I don’t care if someone teaches about a 6 billion year old world and a slow, purely accidental evolutionary development. I also don’t care if someone teaches that the world sprang directly in to being as it is at the command of God in 6 literal days. Far more important, to me, than the mechanism of existence is the fact of my existence, and what I shall do with it. But regardless of what I think, the fact is that those who hold to a rigid, ideologically blinkered view of the creation of the universe are trying to advance a particular agenda – an agenda which doesn’t so much question God but seeks to ban His presence from the public square. My view is that the fight between Evolution and Design is not about the relative merits of the viewpoints, but about the right of people of different views to engage in the debate.

The gotcha questions to Perry are part of that larger design – that effort to de-legitimize a different view. The attempt was to try and trip Perry up and hold up Perry and the whole concept of a Divine order to ridicule. And, so, we have to fight this out – if for no other reason than to defend human reason and liberty. Reason because people who think can come to widely different views; liberty because if those widely different views cannot be brought in to the public square, then none of us are free.