Dave S.

I’ve been saying for a long time that the computer climate model predictions don’t match up to actual observations. The global warming hysterics have been in denial trying to find faults with the observations instead of admitting the plain truth that the models are flawed. Here’s an article by an Australian climate researcher that tells it like it is. Quite refreshing.

No smoking hot spot
David Evans | July 18, 2008
The Australian

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

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Roy Spencer is a global warming skeptic and the author of the hypothesis that the water cycle acts as the earth’s thermostat. In a previous article I attributed that hypothesis to “the father of climatology” and that was incorrect. The father of climatology is Reid Bryson. He is a global warming skeptic though.

Roy Spencer is just as qualified (if not moreso) as Bryson. From wiki:

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Spencer is a recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

Anyhow, I only knew Spencer from the climatology work and I just happened to see an article he wrote about evolution and ID. I reproduce it below the fold…

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Perhaps someone can explain to me what the science of design detection has to do with Nazis, the Holocaust, or Hitler. I sure can’t think of anything. Help me out here. It’s things like this that undermine ruin the effort to get ID accepted as good science. It gives our critics the ammunition they need to convince people that ID is nothing more than a tool being used to promote social reform. Science has left the building once the Nazi card gets played. As far as science is concerned it doesn’t matter if Hitler and Darwin were the same person. The only thing that matters is whether his theories can stand up to scientific scrutiny. It’s a crying shame that Read More ›

I wrote a longish reply to someone on an obscure forum about global warming and thought as long as I put the work into it I should reproduce it to a wider audience so here it is:

You didn’t figure out the shoe size/salary correlation. It’s a classic example in why correlation doesn’t equal causation.

On the face of it’s a strong correlation. The reason it’s strong is so many people with small shoes are children who don’t earn any salary at all.

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In the lastest escapades of Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers I found that all links to Pharyngula, where Myers recently promised to film and blog himself desecrating the Catholic Eucharist, have been hastily removed from the University of Minnesota (Morris) website.

Thanks to Google Cache and also The Wayback Machine we can see that these links were there not long ago. What we want to know is who removed them. Was it Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers himself who removed the links in an effort to protect his job or was it the University of Minnesota that removed them to protect itself from Myers? Either way, someone is trying to distance the University of Minnesota from Paul “Frackin’ Cracker” Myers’ personal blog.

Something else that should be investigated is if Myers is using the University’s computers and networks to manage his personal blog, to compose things like the desecration of the Eucharist blog entries, and otherwise leverage taxpayer and tuition funded resources to carry on these activities.

We here are supportive of Paul Myers’ right to use his own time and resources for any legal activities he cares to indulge in but when he begins using the resources of a public university to engage in these activities then it becomes something that he has no right to do. It then amounts to theft of services. The University of Minnesota’s computers and networks are paid for by various sources including the taxpayers but these resources are only to be used for things explicitely approved of by university administrators who are in turn accountable to said sources of funding. Employees of the university should not be free to use these resources for unapproved personal purposes.

Click below to see all the links showing what was recently removed from morris.umn.edu to coverup the university web server’s use associated with Myers personal blog scienceblogs.com/pharyngula.

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So Louisiana has a new law allowing science teachers to teach the weaknesses of time & chance evolutionary theory. What’s the big deal? Evolution by time and chance is as well tested as gravity for Pete’s sake. How long does take to convince a kid that when he throws a baseball into the air gravity will pull it back to earth? According to the theophobic evolutionists there are no weaknesses in their theory. So the teacher will quickly present just a small fraction of the “overwhelming evidence” that time & chance turned mud into Mozart, he’ll have a list of zero things to present to argue against it, and all will be well with nothing lost. The biology teacher can Read More ›

Psychiatrists in Australia have identified “Climate Change Delusion” as the latest mental disorder sure to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). That’s the head shrinker’s bible if you don’t know.

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change

Andrew Bolt
July 09, 2008 12:00am
For The Herald Sun

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.”

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this — and must — but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

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Man, this guy makes PZ Myers look calm, cool, and collected. Click here to read this hilarious exchange between David Heddle and John Kwok on a typical “science” blog. It’s funny until Kwok starts throwing ill-advised libels about. I wonder if Abbie “Potty Mouth” Smith will do him a big favor and flush this down the memory hole (in the words of Jerry Pournelle) “Real Soon Now”. Smithers, release the hounds. And will someone PLEASE do Kwok a huge favor and give him an Amazon gift certificate redeemable for a thesaurus of his choice. I’ve never read anyone who needs one more than this raving lunatic.

As I was catching up on reading back issues of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact I noted, for the first time in nearly 40 years of reading the magazine, not one but a pair of articles (one fact, one fiction) addressed the Intelligent Design controversy.

Both articles were written by physicist Carl Frederick.

The first (non-fiction) titled The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe is about the so-far fruitless quest by physicists to find an explanation for the fine tuning of the universe (basis of Cosmological ID) that doesn’t involve intelligent design. The article begins:

In the early 1990’s, a creeping realization swept through the theoretical physics community that the probability for the universe to even exist was vanishingly small. Indeed, the only “theory” around that seemed able to explain the universe’s existence was Intelligent Design. This was not something physicists and cosmologists liked to talk about.

Later on, after describing the “problem” in detail, he quotes what Lee Smolin considers the four possible solutions:

Which Way Out?

Lee Smolin considers that there are four solutions to the problem, schemas if you will.

[below are truncated for brevity -ds]

1) God tuned the parameters for our benefit.
2) There are a very large number of universes each of which has random parameters.
3) There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe”.
4) The parameters evolve in time – in the Darwinian sense.

[end truncation -ds]

A good number of very intelligent people have argued for schemas two, three, and four above. At the moment there is nothing resembling a consensus among physicists.

Interesting that Frederick fails to mention very intelligent people arguing for schema one. Maybe that’s so self-evident it hurts him to repeat it. 🙂

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Dichloroacetate (DCA) Promising for Endometrial Cancer DCA virtually disappeared from the news about a year ago when it was forced off the open market by the FDA and all research into its efficacy as a cancer therapeutic had to go through officially sanctioned channels. I’ve kept track of it all this time through Google Email Alerts. This is the first bit of news on it in relation to cancer in a long time. To see the history check out the list of articles I wrote here under the sidebar category DCA. I became interested in it because it’s another example of the science establishment exerting undue control over things they believe they “own” including science education in public schools and Read More ›

You know the old saying “If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas”. It seems Massachusetts has itself a case of sand fleas. I found this article from the Boston Herald linked on the Drudge Report. It’s way off topic but I’m so sure most of our readers will appreciate it I just had to give y’all a heads up. Be sure to read the comments, they’re the best part. 😆

Cool. This should be interesting when it gets to court. As I was reading the complaint it mentions Barbara Forrest’s talk was sponsored by the Austin Center for Inquiry. So basically Comer was using taxpayer funded resources owned by the Texas government to help the Austin Center for Inquiry advertise the event it was sponsoring. This raises the question of who exactly is the Austin Center for Inquiry and why should they be entitled to free advertising from the state of Texas? CFI Austin The Center for Inquiry Austin was created for people who call themselves Brights, Atheists, Secular Humanists, Skeptics, Agnostics, Freethinkers – you get the idea! It is a chance not only to meet other local people whose Read More ›

Searching news.google.com for “intelligent design” I happened across a recent article by a favorite author of mine, Jerry Pournelle. Click here for his biography on Wikipedia. Jerry has written a lot of science fiction, and I quite enjoyed some of it, but that’s not the writing of his that I liked the most. It was his many years of computer technology columns, Chaos Manor, in Byte Magazine that I most enjoyed. I also thoroughly enjoyed his many articles and short stories in Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact Magazine . I’ve read almost every issue of that cover to cover since I first discovered it in the school library in the 7th grade. I still subscribe to it today almost Read More ›

I don’t think she has a leg to stand on. The policy of her government employer was to remain neutral in any official capacity regarding the public controversy over evolution by chance vs. creation of life by design. The government should remain neutral on this subject by neither fostering or restricting differing beliefs on how life orginated and diversified. Clearly Comer, through her advertisement of Barbara Forrest’s lecture, using her employer’s computer network to broadcast it, and using her government email address and title to lend strength to the advertisement, violated a clear and constitutional government mandate regarding how employees are to conduct the government’s business. Forrest’s lecture, because it centers on creationism, even though critical of it, is still Read More ›

Vivendi Entertainment acquires home video rights of Expelled MUMBAI: Vivendi Entertainment has acquired home entertainment distribution rights to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, produced by Premise Media. The announcement was made by Vivendi Entertainment president Tom O’Malley and Expelled executive producer John Sullivan. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring journalist and actor Ben Stein, is an independent documentary film that explores the theory of Intelligent Design. The film examines the conflict between advocates of intelligent design and evolutionists, and the hostility of the scientific community towards scientists that embrace intelligent design. “Ben Stein brings his unique perspective to this controversial topic and creates an incredibly insightful and entertaining film. Expelled is one of the most successful theatrical documentary films ever released and Read More ›