Global Warming

As you read this, ask yourself whether this sounds like another reflexively held scientific position (hint, it begins with “D” and ends in “arwinism”): Flawed climate data Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming Ross McKitrick, Financial Post … I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its Read More ›

I recently posted on op-ed in which I described that the concern in the 1970s was not global warming but global cooling (go here). Critics of that piece are now claiming that I’m misrepresenting the fabulous 70s and that “science” back then was not in fact claiming that the earth was cooling. I recall seeing cited some literature on global cooling from that time, so I wrote the op-ed from memory. I since went to that trusted source — Wikipedia — and looked up the article on “global cooling.” It begins (go here): Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never Read More ›

H. L. Mencken once remarked that “the urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” I made much the same point in a recent op-ed about our new science czar John Holdren (go here). I first became aware of the quote from a July 24th article in INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY on climate change. Here are some highlights:

Ignoring Science
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, July 24, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: A new scientific paper says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations. Maybe the only place it’s really getting hotter is in Al Gore’s head.

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century. Read More ›

Michael Ruse has a piece in Forbes magazine about the recent hype over the Darwinius masillae fossil. I’m not sure what a business magazine finds interesting about the 47-million-year-old primate fossil, but I’m sure it isn’t interested in promoting the religion that underwrites the theory of evolution. Like most evolutionists Ruse doesn’t hide his theological convictions. I once debated Ruse but it was hardly a debate. I explained that evolutionists mandate naturalism for religious reasons such as the problem of evil, and Ruse argued that evolution is mandated for religious reasons such as the problem of evil. Such convictions provide evolutionists with a metaphysical certainty that evolution is true. Read more here.

Nicola Scafetta has demonstrated that Diffusion Entropic Analysis can identify physical phenomena underlying complex time series, including non-Gaussian Levy and other series. This appears an important development in detecting complex physical phenomena resulting in time series measurements.

Scafetta’s work promises to be important in detecting and distinguishing Complex Specified Information from natural complex phenomena. e.g. for Jill Tarter of SETI to detect and distinguish extra terrestrial communications from complex natural phenomena. Read More ›

The National Snow and Ice Data Center had to pull down its January and February arctic ice extent data because a deteriorating sensor on a satellite was slowly changing ice to water. By mid-February when someone noticed the readings were off by a half-million square kilometers. That’s a lot of ice when you consider that the all-time low (at least since 1980 when measurement started) in 2006 was down by less than 1.5 million square kilometers from the average. Read more at NSIDC: Satellite sensor errors cause data outage In other “global warming” news, the NSIDC reports that antarctic sea ice is at a record high (at least since 1980 when measurement started). The new high is REALLY high. It’s Read More ›

The video below is U.S. Senator James Inhofe describing the letter he received from former NASA supervisor and senior atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon:

For the EPW press release on this

A physics professor at Princeton is the latest of hundreds and hundreds of scientists who’ve stepped up to the plate saying anthropogenic CO2 as the cause of global warming is bogus. Professor denies global warming theory “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.” In other news, what I said before is coming to pass. I wrote that when global cooling takes hold we’ll be left with only a fervent wish that more CO2 could warm it back up. Well, a newspaper editor in Flint Michigan has started praying Read More ›

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17^th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

Read More ›

Yeah, me too. Amazing how fast a red herring gets pushed off the front page when there’s a real problem to talk about. But just to keep you updated a little I offer these: Boise gets earliest snow on record Valley shivers as winter weather makes a premature appearance and related to the global cooling we are now experiencing is this: Spotless Sun: Blankest Year Of The Space Age ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2008) — Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, Read More ›

A friend writes to draw my attention to “Mark Lynas: the green heretic persecuted for his nuclear conversion” (Sunday Times, September 28, 2008) We are told that The climate change expert Mark Lynas has been scorned by eco-colleagues for daring to speak up for atomic power. Why? Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it. Prescription for the Planet, a new book by the American writer Tom Blees, opened my eyes to fourth-generation “fast-breeder” reactors, which use fuel much more efficiently than the old-style Read More ›

Source: Google Trends

Don’t blame ya. It’s easy to forget things that aren’t happening. Not much to report but here goes: Solar Activity Lowest in 100 Years. Sunspots still MIA. NAS reports 50 million year cooling trend.

A tough choice for teh environmentalist whackos if I ever saw one. Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News August 25, 2008 Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades. The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour. But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine Read More ›