Dave S.

The Austrailian published a transcript of an interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril. Excerpt: Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?” Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve Read More ›

Listen to it here.

Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2003 completed the deployment of 3000 oceanic robots that dive 1 kilometer deep and record the water temperature. The unexpected result is that the robots have found that the ocean cooled slightly in the past 4 years. Willis also says that the oceans contain almost ten times the amount of heat as the atmosphere so the ocean temperature is much more critical to watch. Compounding the mystery is the fact that the oceans have risen by one centimeter in the past 4 years which is much more than was forecast. A cooling ocean should be falling not rising. He says the fall is offset by icemelt in Greenland and Antarctica but the Read More ›

Nepotism and dishonesty…

Climate panel on the hot seat
By H. Sterling Burnett
The Washington Times
March 14, 2008

More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a “comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures will increase dramatically, leading to the spread of tropical diseases, severe drought, the rapid melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels. However, several assessments of the IPCC’s work have shown the techniques and methods used to derive its climate predictions are fundamentally flawed.

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In a private forum a question was recently posed: At what point the police should stop investigating an unsolved murder and close the case, declaring that God must have simply wanted the victim dead? It is the same point at which it is appropriate to tell scientists to stop looking for explanations and simply conclude “God did it”. My reply Dear XXXX, Well, in practice they stop investigating when the evidence goes cold (the trail of evidence stops in an inconclusive state). In the investigation into the origin and diversification of life the trail of evidence hasn’t gone cold. The trail begins with ancient scientist/philosophers looking at macroscopic features of life like the camera eye and saying it looks like Read More ›

Quite often when confronted with the problematic nature of explaining the arrival of the first life capable of supporting descent with modification an evolutionary theorist will say the theory has no bearing on how the first life came into existence – the theory only explains what happened after that. Is this true? Well, yes and no. Evolutionary theory doesn’t explain exactly how the first life was created and doesn’t demand any particular modus operandi. However, that’s not to say it doesn’t make any assumptions at all. It assumes that the first life was a simple cell and the mechanism(s) described by the theory made a simple common ancestor (or perhaps a few simple common ancestors) into the complex and diverse Read More ›

Ben Stein Smart Bombs Darwinian Bunker A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, brought a Kansas City audience to its feet. And with good cause. Stein’s often funny, always engaging frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever. As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent. The winter started early when in November two separate labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells. Just Read More ›

Global average temperature in the past 12 months plummeted precipitously erasing all the global warming in the previous century. Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling Well now, this proves I do make mistakes. My mistake was thinking it would take longer than this for me to be proven right.

In another thread talking about engineers’ perspectives on the machinery of life the topic of entropy came up. Engineers have to deal with entropy in all their designs and the very best efforts at dealing with it only serve to slow it down and never stop it.

So one of my big questions isn’t why most cell lines sooner or later go extinct as that’s easily explained by entropy. Rather my big question is how a rare few of them have managed to persist for hundreds of millions or billions of years.

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Recently I wrote an article about where disbelief in Darwin leads. It generated a lot of good discussion. Now I’d like to pose the question where does the pursuit of science, in particular the quest for material explanations of life, lead?

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No Intelligence Allowed! By Tom Bethell Published 2/19/2008 12:07:57 AM It’s not often that I attend private screenings, so when I was invited to see the director’s cut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring our own Ben Stein, I jumped at the chance. It was shown in downtown Washington, D.C. at the Goethe Institute. I didn’t even know that such a place existed, but then downtown Washington has been rebuilt in recent years, with whole neighborhoods reconstructed. It’s actually beginning to resemble a real city. The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result. In a word, they Read More ›

In the thread I deleted “A Sterling Example of Anti-Religionists” one of the commenters noted that the URL linking to the offensive article had undergone a point mutation. One letter in it changed that made the link go somewhere else. He implied that this didn’t happen at random and that someone purposely changed it. Guilty as charged. I changed that one letter – a k to an h to make it difficult to see at a casual glance. But let’s look at how my design was detected. We all know that bits can flip at random in computer data from various causes just like they can flip at random in DNA from various causes. This wasn’t a complex mutation. A Read More ›

UD member Timothy in another thread writes

But in principle it is possible to arrive at this particular unique combination of symbols using a simple brute force algorithm (like, for example, an elementary counting algorithm) that works through all the possible combinations of symbols. Thus, given such a systematic algorithm, all the books of the world, those written and those yet to be written, are implied by it.

I thought this was important enough to deserve a thread of its own. Read More ›

I’m not sure what inspired Professor Dembski to quote C.S. Lewis on Bulverism at this particular point in time but the recent and somewhat unexpected rise of Barack Hussein Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the democratic primaries might have been it. I predict that whatever legitimate criticism is leveled at him the Bulverians will be out in great number rejoining with “You’re only saying that because he’s black.” Mark my words. That is going to become a household phrase before November. My support, of course, will be for John McCain. I preferred McCain over Bush in 2004 and nothing has changed. I hope to see him team up with Mike Huckabee as VP. I don’t envy them the task Read More ›