Off Topic

It seems Intelligent Design isn’t the only thing that Wikipedia distorts and censors…

Wikipedia’s zealots

The thought police at the supposedly independent site are fervently enforcing the climate orthodoxy
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Saturday, April 12, 2008

As I’m writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position,” Oreskes concluded.

Read More ›

Researchers publishing in Nature report that parts of North America and Europe are expected to cool over the next decade.  See the story here.   But the author of the report remains a global warming zealot and fears that his science will be used to undermine his religion: “We thought a lot about the way to present this because we don’t want it to be turned around in the wrong way,” Keenlyside said. “I hope it doesn’t become a message of Exxon Mobil and other skeptics.”

Go here On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film [An Inconvenient Truth] was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow.” And here it is!

One of the worst things about one side making connections to Hitler is it invites return fire of the same kind. This should be filed under the category “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

How many of you knew that beloved evangelical Christian minister Jerry Falwell shared Adolf Hitler’s views about the importance of maintaining the purity of the white race?

I’m not saying “modern” evangelicals feel this way, any more than “modern” Darwinist are that way, but… as long as we’re dredging up the past of one side it’s only fair to dredge up the other’s too.

Addendum: No one seems to have picked up on the point that Falwell, as an evangelical Christian biblical literalist, did not believe in “Darwinism” yet he still shared his racial thinking with Hitler. Further proof that you don’t need Darwin to be a racist.

From The Nation “Agent of Intolerance”

Read More ›

Please note this is categorized in off-topic philosophy. Does Darwinian Nobility, capitalized no less, sound like a contradiction in terms? Not really. In the Descent of Man, Darwin talks about the noble nature of man like it was a tangible thing. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” Who’s responsible for eugenics? Simple. People who don’t have the noble nature of man that Darwin mentions like a physical thing. If you don’t instinctively know that the right thing to do is help rather than harm those less fortunate in life than you are then you lack Darwinian Nobility. Is Darwinian Nobility due to nature or Read More ›

I hate being right about this but I warned y’all it was going to happen. God help the billions already hungry if the globe starts cooling. It probably will begin cooling soon as it always does on cycles of two to four decades. Pray to whatever gods you believe in that it’s a small cooling. Global warming rage lets global hunger grow By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits. “The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, Read More ›

Clarke’s Three Laws Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think I’ve read almost everything written by Arthur C. Clarke. For the last 35 years usually shortly after he wrote it. I often quote the third law but I’d forgotten about the other two. All three laws color my perspective on ID and a lot of Read More ›

Author of the theory that global warming breeds stronger hurricanes recants his view Noted Hurricane Expert Kerry Emanuel has publicly reversed his stance on the impact of Global Warming on Hurricanes. Saying “The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us,” Emanuel has released new research indicating that even in a rapidly warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity will not be substantially affected. “The results surprised me,” says Emanuel, one of the media’s most quoted figures on the topic. Read more… I love being right.

This article makes a lot of points I’ve made here in the past. The main one being that global warming is a net GOOD thing. Even the IPCC admits that it will be a good thing for at least the next several decades. Food production will increase and cold-related deaths will decline far more than heat-related deaths will increase. If the planet wasn’t warming we’d want it to be warming. If CO2 levels weren’t growing we’d want them to be growing.

The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change

By NIGEL LAWSON
The Daily Mail 4/5/08

Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation.

Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age.

But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.

The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions – at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children’s generation, too.

That is why I have written a book about the subject.

Read More ›

I read somewhere about a guy in Florida some years ago who was winning races in an offshore speed boat powered by hydrogen/oxygen by water electrolyzed on demand. He used a conventional piston engine modified slightly to run on hydrogen/oxygen (which is one of the most efficient fuels you can get). Normally there’s no way to store hydrogen and oxygen that’s lighter than a tank filled with gasoline. High pressure or cryogenic tanks are HEAVY and DANGEROUS. This guy had developed an extremely efficient method of rapidly electrolyzing water at a throttled rate where the combined weight of the batteries and electronics were much lighter than a tank of gasoline. He won races by having a superior power-to-weight ratio in Read More ›

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 ›

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.

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.

 The second part of the headline is false.  The first part is true.  See the article in the Daily Tech here.  Excerpt:  All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.