Dave S.

A recent survey of climate change articles in science journals finds fewer than half of the authors endorse anthropogenic global warming theories. The so-called consensus has now collapsed to a minority position. I love being right. Linked by The Drudge Report:

Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

DAILYTECH

SURVEY: LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

Michael Asher
August 29, 2007 11:07 AM

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

While they don’t call it intelligent design research… that’s in fact what it is. In the article a scientist is quoted saying once a container (cell wall) is synthesized and nucleotides are added in the right proportions then Darwinian evolution will take care of the rest. Yeah, right. Darwinian processes won’t do jack diddly squat. It’ll require intelligent design every step of the way. Mark my words. ID will be proven in concept and Darwinian evolution will (again) be disproven in concept.

Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years

Aug 19 11:52 PM US/Eastern
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.

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Even when we don’t do anything: In the post-imperial age, powerful nations no longer have to invade and kill. Simply by driving a Chevy Suburban, we can make the oceans rise and wipe the distant Maldive Islands off the face of the Earth. This is a kind of malignant narcissism so ingrained it’s now taught in our grade schools. -Mark Steyn Bill Dembski asked me to do a riff on this but I think the points are so self-evident commentary isn’t really needed… Mark Steyn: Warm-mongers and cheeseburger imperialists MARK STEYN Syndicated columnist Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the “U.S. surface air temperature” rankings for the lower 48 Read More ›

Hey Newsweek: Why not just call us heretics? by FRANK MIELE If you wanted to see an example of biased journalism, a good place to start would be the Aug. 13 cover story in Newsweek about global warming. The issue’s cover says “Global Warming Is A Hoax,” but there is an asterisk, which leads to the statement “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change.” In other words, Newsweek has an agenda to promote global-warming hysteria, and they don’t feel any need to give equal time to a point of view they disagree with. Indeed Newsweek’s author Sharon Begley denounces global warming skeptics as “deniers,” a term which I think establishes the pseudo-religious quality Read More ›

If you observe something that has many of the same properties as an apple but you don’t know where it came from, you have observed apples growing on apple trees, then the most reasonable scientific hypothesis about the origin of the apple-like object is that it was produced by something like an apple tree. Indeed, to hypothesize that what you found just spontaneously formed on the ground from inanimate matter would be entirely unsupported.

For the ID hypothesis stated in terms of Karl Popper’s scientific hypothesis of white swans Read More ›

This of course comes as no surprise for those of us who hold that evolution was front-loaded (anatomical complexity in later animals was present but not expressed in the ancestral animals) by an intelligent designer. Nothing in macro-evolution makes sense except in the light of front loading! Excerpts with my emphasis: Surprises in sea anemone genome By Melissa Lee Phillips, The Scientist, 5/7/07 The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved. It’s surprising to find such a Read More ›

Please read the whole article at the source. There’s a lot more detail, diagrams, pictures, and basically just a lot to learn there. The excerpts below are just a few highlights I snipped out.

Global Warming and Nature’s Thermostat
by Roy W. Spencer

Roy W. Spencer received his PhD in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. He has been a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2001, before which we was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. Dr. Spencer is the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. His research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE.

A Summary, and the Future

It is now reasonably certain that changes in solar radiation cause temperature changes on Earth — for instance, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused a 2% to 4% reduction in sunlight, resulting in two years of below normal temperatures. It is not so obvious, however, that small changes in the Earth’s infrared cooling from mankind’s burning of fossil fuels will do the same. This is because the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is mostly under the control of weather systems: specifically, precipitation systems. Either directly or indirectly, these systems determine the moisture (water vapor and cloud) characteristics for most of the rest of the atmosphere.

Precipitation systems thus act as a thermostat, causing cooling when temperatures get too high (and warming when temperatures get too low). It is amazing to think that the ways in which tiny water droplets and ice particles combine in clouds to form rain and snow could determine the course of global warming, but this might well be the case.

I believe that it is the inadequate handling of precipitation systems — specifically, how they adjust atmospheric moisture contents during changes in temperature — that is the reason for climate model predictions of excessive warming from increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

I predict that further research will reveal some other cause for the warming we have experienced since the 1970’s — for instance, a change in some feature of the sun’s activity. In the meantime, a high priority research effort should be the study of changes in precipitation systems with changes in temperature — especially how they confer moisture charateristics to the atmosphere as air is continuously recycled through them.

Fortunately, we now have several NASA satellites in Earth orbit that are gathering information that will be immensely valuable for determining how the Earth’s climate system adjusts during natural temperature fluctuations. It is through these satellite measurements of temperature, solar and infrared radiation, clouds, and precipitation that we will be able to test and improve the climate models, which will then hopefully lead to more confident predictions of global warming.

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In an interesting bit of news Senator Inohofe stated he overheard Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) saying they wanted to stifle conservative talk radio via legislation. Now where have we seen this tactic before – when people want to criticize something and you can’t counter it with facts you turn instead to legal chicanery to silence their criticism. Just lovely. I guess for the left the only important thing in the first amendment is something it doesn’t even say: freedom from religion. Freedom of the press, something the first amendment explicitely spells out, apparently isn’t nearly as important as the left wing agenda. SENATOR CLAIMS: Clinton, Boxer Conspiring to Rein In Talk Radio HT to the Drudge Read More ›

China Overtakes U.S. as No. 1 Emitter of Carbon Dioxide By Audra Ang June 21, 2007 7:54AM Excerpt: A new study by a Dutch research group said China, which relies on coal for two-thirds of its energy needs and makes 44 percent of the world’s cement, produced 6.23 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006. In comparison, the U.S., which gets half its electricity from coal, produced 5.8 billion metric tons of CO2, it said. China has overtaken the United States as the world’s top producer of carbon dioxide emissions — the biggest man-made contributor to global warming — based on the latest widely accepted energy consumption data, a Dutch research group says. According to a report released Tuesday Read More ›

Read the sunspots The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change – and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON, professor and director of the Geoscience Centre, Carleton University Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 Excerpt: Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called “proxies”) is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change. However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, Read More ›

A commenter in another thread prompted this. I didn’t approve the comment because it was so impoverished but thought the discussion warranted a thread of its own. The commenter basically said that 30,000 proteins w/regulatory regions is enough – a mere fraction of the DNA in a human egg – implying that plenty of DNA can be functionless junk. While that number of regulated proteins might possibly be enough to define myriad cell types and tissue types there is an awful lot more required. The list of things I can think of (which is likely not complete) includes: 1) cell types 2) tissue types 3) organs 5) body plan 6) autonomic control system 7) instinctive behaviors Since complex system design Read More ›

High price for load of hot air by Bob Carter, June 18, 2007 12:00am Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change. Here’s some of what he has to say: The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since Read More ›

The whole review can be found for free here.

One of the first things to note is repetition of a common fallacy about ID being illegal to teach due to the Dover decision. Michael writes:

IDT has been remarkably successful. George W. Bush is one among many who have stated flatly that it should be taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology. Although it is illegal to do so – another court case in Dover, Penn., in 2005 ruled that it, too, violates the separation of church and state – estimates are that at least 20 per cent of American schools already teach it. One suspects that it is not entirely unknown in biology classes north of the border, either.

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Jerry Coyne in his disastrous attempt to educate laypersons in evolutionary dogma has this to say: If evolution is a car, then natural selection is the engine and mutation is the gas. … Although Darwin had no idea where this variation came from, we now know that it is produced by mutation–accidental changes in the sequence of DNA that usually occur as copying errors when a molecule replicates during cell division. And if Henry Ford were Jerry Coyne he’d say that assembly line mistakes turned the Ford Quadricycle into the Ford GT What a maroon. I’m not complaining mind you. The likes of Mark Chu-Carrol, Sean Carrol, and Jerry Coyne are certainly entertaining in a slapstick kind of way but Read More ›