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.
The George C. Marshal Institute‘s 3rd edition of Climate Issues and Questions is a refreshing effort to provide a dispassionate evaluation of 29 major questions regarding the science of “climate change”, and to separate those from political agendas. Their method and effort is well worth considering in light of the current debate over origins of biological systems and of the universe. In particular, consider their examination of how “scientific consensus” is achieved (vs political hegemony by special interests). Their observation that climate science is relatively new parallels the current developments in origin theories. Note particularly the current explosion of knowledge about the genome and the incredible information rich complexity of biochemical processes. Compare that to the paucity of scientific hypotheses (let alone theories) that predict that knowledge and complexity. ——————————————-
Climate Issues & Questions
The debate over the state of climate science and what it tells us about past and future climate has been going on for twenty years. It is not close to resolution, in spite of assertions to the contrary. What is often referred to as a “consensus” is anything but. In many cases, this consensus represents the “expert judgment” of a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors, which other researchers can and do disagree with. For many, especially those engaged in advocacy, the claim of consensus is a device used to advance their agenda.
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I recently assisted my daughter with a most interesting project for her 8th grade science class. The assignment was to learn about a Biome, write a report on it, then design an animal to live in it.
The students were to provide a description of the characteristics of their animal which suited it to life in the Biome they selected, and make a model of the animal for display. My daughter selected arctic tundra for the Biome. We read up on it, she did the report, then the fun began.
She has a housecat, (felis-catus) named Chester of whom she is very fond. He seemed a good starting point. We designed several adaptations to Chester to enable him to thrive in the arctic tundra. First, and most obviously, we made him all white to blend into the snow. Then we regressed his legs to vestigial stumps and flattened him out dramatically so he could hug the ground and better avoid being picked off by predators, as well as stay low out of the wind. His species is therefore felis-flatus. (That’s “flatus” as in flat to the ground, rhymes with “catus” not the other meaning which my son already had fun with.)
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The Reason for God by Timothy Keller is No. 18 on the NYT bestsellers list. Over at First Things Anthony Sacramone has a great interview with Keller that includes this on the evolution debate:
In The Reason for God, you make a very brief argument for the validity of evolution within a limited sphere. It would seem to me that apologists for the faith must address this issue at some point. But doing so can call into question the historicity of the Fall and the very need for a savior. How do you talk about evolution without confusing people?
Oh, it’s a little confusing, but actually I’m just in the same place where the Catholics are, as far as I can tell. The Catholic Church has always been able to hold on to a belief in a historical Fall—it really happened, it’s not just representative of the fact that the human race has kind of gone bad in various ways.
Why do scientists sometimes ignore warnings that theories are wrong? Even great scientists can get it all wrong, and it is interesting to see how and when they do.
Here.
New Scientist February 16, 2008 Dan Jones Pg. 40-43 heavily edited. Full text here. “William Paley, who argued that the natural world is full of designed complexity which must have a creator, would have considered the bacterial flagellum an excellent example. The flagellum, with its intricate arrangement of interconnecting parts, looks no less designed than a watch. Modern biology, of course, has no need for omniscient designers. Evolution – Richard Dawkins’s blind watchmaker – is all that is needed to explain the origin of complexity in nature. The bacterial flagellum has become a focal point in science’s ongoing struggle against unreason. The study of complex molecular systems has been given added impetus by the ID movement. ID claims that such Read More ›
When I first wrote “My Failed Simulation” (now on the discovery.org main page here and at Human Events) it really never even occurred to me that anyone would think I had actually tried such a simulation, or that I was claiming to have tried it. I thought it was pretty obvious that it was just a thought experiment, designed to get people to think about the alternative to ID, namely that physics (the Schrodinger equation plus the elemenary particles of physics plus the four known forces of physics) alone can explain computers, libraries full of science texts and novels, and the Internet. My point was, not only is this the officially accepted view of science today, but anyone who doubts Read More ›
Finch and Knuther each received an award check for $15,000 plus a gold plated medallion for their evolution of “a man walks into a bar” jokes. Read their paper at TheBRITES.org.
Just plain big? How do animals get that way? Why the exploding palm tree explodes – or why it doesn’t Frog from hell? Well, that’s how Nature News is telling it. Apollyon, check your e-mail. The frog is loose again.
February 19, 2008 K.D. Kalinsky (Note from Denyse: An ID theorist asked me to publish this essay on detecting design in nature. It is exactly as the scientist gave it to me except that – I have linked the sections for easier Web handling – all the notes have been moved to the end. – I don’t see a font choice for superscripts or subscripts in Blogger, so have decided to enclose the element that would be super or subscripted in two periods. In the number 10.-64. assume that .-64. Is a superscript. In the equation, P.f. = M(E.x.)/N, assume that .f. and .x. are subscripts. A .pdf version of his paper exists but is not on line as of Read More ›
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.
A simpler cheaper system has been developed to code in DNA. This implicitly recognizes the more complex coding in native DNA. (The news article also assumes the evolutionary doctrine of “junk DNA”.) The contrast with hard drives, this low density coding method and natural DNA shows the very high coding density in DNA.
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. . .the researchers discovered a system to encode digital information within DNA. This method relies on the length of the fragments obtained by the partial restriction digest rather than the actual content of the nucleotide sequence. As a result, the technology eliminates the need to use expensive sequencing machinery.
David Berlinski is my favorite secular Jew and quintessential iconoclast. How could one not adore a guy who is a mathematician, no advocate of any religion, a Darwin skeptic, and phenomenally eloquent in both English and French, with a great penchant for ironic humor?
His latest opus is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, due out in April.
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