While 2005-2007 were years of record warmth, the overall trend since 2001 averages out to a nice flat line.¹ But while we could see this flat line continue, or even drop down into a period of cooling, you should not doubt that global warming is real, and is caused by us. It might take 30 years to show up again, but when it does, even though we do not know why things are cooling now, we are sure the warming will be “explosive.”²

Or, we could accept that what we really had was not “global warming” but “solar warming,” which affected Mars and Jupiter as well, and that as the sun’s activity level has dropped, so too has our temperature. Or we could accept that we really do not have all that much ability to influence our planet’s climate yet, and that the correlation of green house gases the last few decades did not equal causation. We could be honest and admit that we do not know all that much about climatology, not much more than we know about the weather next week.

But then we would have to admit that all this hype and all this worry, and all of the billions of dollars going into trying to stave off what is, under global warming theory, irreversible, is wrong headed.

We cannot do that. Why, some people make careers out of scaring the rest of us with how evil we are, and how much we are hurting the planet! They would be out of a job!

Periodically when I follow the RSS link to Dr. Mike Adams’ articles, I end up somewhere else. This time, I read the entire article before I realized it.

It seems that Dr. Dawkins has again accepted an invitation to debate a theist. This time, it further appears that he tried to rig the debate, and deny his opponent a real opportunity to refute his theory. Picking a columnist with this hope proves to be foolish. Mr. Dinesh D’Souza shows how Dr. Dawkins stumbled in thinking that Mr. D’Souza would not have a chance to refute his (Dr. Dawkins’) poor logic.¹ Dr. Dawkins excuse is probably that as this happened on Al-Jazeera, and not a more reputable news source, his slip will be missed.

PS: Judging from the datestamp in the URL, I would say that Dr. Dawkins was correcting in assuming his slip would be missed by most people.

I need to go back and finish reading this article, but the first page skimmed seems to indicate that there was more to Lamarck’s theory than we have given him credit for.¹

The quote¹ actually says

• science != consensus
• politics == consensus
• science == ∃ X such that ((X == investigator) && (X == “correct”); where (”correct” == “results are verifiable in reference to the real world”))

The problem is that skepticism does not reign throughout much of science. Rather, dogmatism reigns. Anyone who dissents is silenced. If the environment we have today existed, Einstein would not have been able to publish, he upset too many careers. But back then the science journals were not as tightly controlled as they are now, and it was more possible then for a radical idea to get published.

It is then asked, “what does it mean to say in reference to the real world.”² A valid question. What is meant here is that results have to bear out, taking relativity for an example again, we can see that the data fits better than Newtonian physics. However, Global Warming doesn’t account for a great deal of the data out there. Relativity fits the real world. Global warming is questionable at best.

As I understand things, even if it takes 10 million years to create the pattern that allows me to identify an error, it is still an error. Perhaps we are off by 100 years, perhaps by 100 million years, but when the article says that what was thought to be constant for the globe now has localized variations, and further more might not be at all correlated as the previous theory suggested, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that we do not know how old things are.

“I do not know” is a whole lot better than “I am going to believe something I know to be untrue just because you cannot offer a better theory” in my book.

I am amused to find myself quoted here as an example of what all creationists argue. I would have thought that he could have found a better source. I am not really sure what he was trying to accomplish by quoting me though.

Why is Jupiter getting warmer near the equator?¹ I thought all climate change was due to humans. It is not even worth considering whether nor not whatever is warming Jupiter might also be affecting Earth.

“This does not mean that we should never take action to prevent evil, or should sit back and wait for God to do something. It does mean that we should not panic, or become needlessly anxious, or jump to rash conclusions, which may cause more harm than good.” – Melinda Selmys¹

The “This” above refers to Christ’s command that we be not afraid.

The New York Times reports that there is a study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association stating that there are health benefits to being overweight.¹ Those classified as being “overweight” have a lower risk of death than any of the other 3 groups (”underweight,” “normal” and “obese”). Apparently such persons, at a Body Mass Index between 25 and 30, have a lower risk of death from some diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease, that outweighs their risk of death from other diseases. These results apparently persisted even after factoring out smokers, which I am under the impression are the bulk of lung disease deaths.

Some researchers apparently think this means we should redefine “normal.” Others think that the differences in health short of death outweigh the likelihood of dying sooner. Go figure.

“Scientism’s dismissals are … self-refuting.

Those dismissals are also vacuous, as if affixing the label non-science to an argument tells us anything meaningful about the strength of the argument. The “it isn’t science” response to contemporary design arguments is neither a reasonable nor a particularly stimulating reply. In such cases, the mathematical/empirical approach has degenerated from a way of thinking into a way of stopping thought, a Procrustean bed for chopping off and discarding whatever doesn’t fit within its narrow confines. ” – Benjamin D. Wiker and Jonathan Witt¹