I guess I should apologize to the Oregonian, eh? How about 2035 vs 2350?

WOW!

I just opened my daily Oregonian this morning. After searching through its august pages, I (Eureka!) stumbled across a column mentioning the phony Himalayan glacier melting projections published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. Those absurdly outer-space projections were the subject of my last post.

So, OK, I was wrong.

How so? In yesterday's post, I admitted that I expected to NEVER see a fair admission of AGW scientific misconduct (or just a screwup if you will) in the Oregonian. And there it was in today's paper - a short column hidden on page A-7, just inside the back page splashed with Macy's ads.

Funny, though. The AP report datelined in Geneva made the IPCC's "poorly substantiated estimates of the rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers" to be, well, pretty ho-hum. The tone was more appropriate to discussing a hangnail than a glioblastoma.

And, even after searching and finally finding the report in the Oregonian, if you did not read the OneNewsNow article, you would never know about the lame excuse offered that they switcherooed a few digits to get 2035 instead of 2350 for the projected Himalaya-glaciers-a-bye-bye date. So if you only read AP stuff bylined in Genevea, you may never get a glimmer of how over-the-top some of this "expert" issued AGW propaganda really is.

Is AGW likely? Yes, of course. In fact almost certain. Is it a dire threat to mankind on this third rock from the sun? A very thin maybe, but surely not so likely. Some global warming would appear in fact to increase global food production (as admitted by the IPCC). On the long-term, the smaller CO2 "trigger" to produce humongous and disastrous H2O greenhouse gas warming is far far far from clear. Check with meteorologist Professor Emeritus William Gray at Colorado State U on that one before deciding what you really know.
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2009/12/agw-best-place-to-hear-both-sides-is-in.html

I think all we the public ask is OBJECTIVE information. Then we have a much better shot at good sound decision making. That is the way democracy should work. The pseudo-science aristocracy that has brought us Copenhagen and the global warming hysteria (and "Climategate") clearly has not served us well.

So, Oregonian, there is my apology, such as it is. Maybe the Daily Columbian across the river could start running other news sources and make up for internet-induced advertising income losses by selling papers in north Oregon to a fact-hungry public.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

UN Report on Himlayan glaciers bogus. 2035 or 2350?

This one is just to good (or bad), too titillating (or too sad) to let it go by.

Here is a headline I just saw. Don't want you to miss it.

UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers

Read it here:
http://www.onenewsnow.com/AP/Search/US/Default.aspx?id=862752

And if you are wondering why your friendly Darwin despiser always manages to be on top of the global warming bubble, it is because I subscribe to a daily email from onenewsnow which provides links I can follow at my choosing. I see stuff which I will NEVER see in my local fishwrapper, the Oregonian.

Here is just a glimpse. The rest you can get at the link above..

UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers
SETH BORENSTEIN - 1/21/2010 12:56:34 AM

Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful.

The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body. All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 _ hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.

The climate panel and even the scientist who publicized the errors said they are not significant in comparison to the entire report, nor were they intentional. And they do not negate the fact that worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than ever.
But the mistakes open the door for more attacks from climate change skeptics.
"The credibility of the IPCC depends on the thoroughness with which its procedures are adhered to," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told The Associated Press in an e-mail. "The procedures have been violated in this case. That must not be allowed to happen again because the credibility of climate change policy can only be based on credible science."

The incident follows a furor late last year over the release of stolen e-mails in which climate scientists talked about suppressing data and freezing out skeptics of global warming. And on top of that, an intense cold spell has some people questioning whether global warming exists.
In a statement, the climate change panel expressed regret over what it called "poorly substantiated estimates" about the Himalayan glaciers.

"The IPCC has established a reputation as a real gold standard in assessment; this is an unfortunate black mark," said Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of this part of the IPCC research. "None of the experts picked up on the fact that these were poorly substantiated numbers. From my perspective, that's an area where we have an opportunity to do much better."
Patrick Michaels, a global warming skeptic and scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called on the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, to resign, adding: "I'd like to know how such an absurd statement made it through the review process. It is obviously wrong."

Well now, D.U suggests that if the IPCC's "gold standard" performance allows who-knows-how-many reviewers and editors to allow the year 2350 to be transposed to 2035 for melting Himalayan glaciers, it's just a fools-gold standard. Were they drinking Al Gore's intoxicating kool-aid? And note that it was three out of four digits misplaced, not a mere transposing of two digits out of four. Ummmm, how/why?

It's no longer time to ask for an apology. It is no longer time to accept a promise to be more careful. It's not even time to ask for explanations - unless it is before a criminal court. The time of "Oh, my bad" is long gone. It is time to issue pink slips. Maybe the big broom from the Massachusetts senatorial election can be used at NCAR in Colorado and GISS in New York - oh, and surely for the discredited and suspended Mann at Penn State as well. See
(http://toryardvaark.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/climategate-copenhagen-ends-and-discredited-climatologist-michael-mann-breaks-his-silence/).

The Brits can take care of their guy Phil Jones at East Anglia U themselves. Is "keelhaul" still an operational word in British English?

And is there any way I could do a short sale on carbon credits? I could use some spare change.

And now that I know whom I can not trust, could someone please tell me whom I can trust?

Submitted with overflowing gratitude to the East Anlgia mole, and overflowing scorn toward the cabal who have done unimaginable damage to the reputation of science in our time.

D.U.

Bad bed bugs more benign, but Alliterating "Boninite" Confounding

Yo y'all.

Just a couple of brief items today as I peek at the most recent issue of Science News, January 16, 2010. Both items are reminders and corroboration of longstanding creationist talking points.

First item relates to the resurrected bedbug population in the USA. Today's newbie generation has likely never heard the old grunt generation's oft-heard "Sleep tight, and don't let the bedbugs bite" - unless the young'uns are enrolled to live on campus at a university. It seems the increasingly international student population in US universities has brought stowaway bed bugs galore from around the world in luggage and clothing. Maybe the upside of the high-resolution airport body scanners would be to detect lurking bedbugs in an incoming visitor's underwear - or wherever.

Anyway ... in the Science News article "Dry ice in a jug attracts bedbugs", (Science News, January 16, 2010, p.8), ends a very humorous yet interesting article with this:
"In North America, bed bugs are back after being dead for decades. 'We have lterally skipped a generation of knowledge with this pest,' said Stephen Kells of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.
Long-ago studies may not help control today's pesticide-resistant strains coddled by centraol hating, said Andrea Polanco-Pinzon of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. But on the bright side, the modern strain she studies doesn't live as long without feeding as strains documented in earlier research, she said."

The point? For a long time, creationists have correctly been pointing out that mutation-driven population changes in an organism, for example in its ability to survive in a modified environment (for example with the introduction of an antibiotic), invariably result in a weakened and less viable organism. As Dr. John Sanford points out in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (FMS Publications, Waterloo, NY, 2008), a mutation-driven phenotype change (what the critter actually changes into) may be beneficial in a selected environmental niche while the genotypic change (what is the DNA change) will almost certainly be harmful in the overall range of all populations. This is precisely true in the note above - even for the lowly bedbugs who just can't go as long between meals as their forebears.

Second item: a spectacular underwater volcano eruption about 200 kilometers southwest of Samoa was caught in the act on video taken by a remotely operated submarine ("Sub records volcano video", Science News, January 16, 2010, p. 14). Especially interesting to your friendly blogger was the last paragraph:

"Rocks snatched from the volcano include boninite lavas, a chemically distinct type of lava previously found only around extinct volcanoes that erupted more than one million years ago."

Young earth creationists (YECs) have long pointed out discordant rock "ages" from recently appearing structures such as underwater volcanoes and island formations. So here is a lava type being formed even as the cameras were rolling, identical to lava types "known" to be a million years old. The question becomes, "since we know the age of the boninite formed today, can we really be sure the other appearances of boninite are really a million years old?"

Well, can we?

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

More on the recently outed pseudo-science phenomenon

Greetings dear D-is-D readers wherever you may be.

Several of my recent posts have lamented the apparent deprivation of integrity in science, both in "Climategate" and in the origins controversy. So I just received an email from Mark Cadwallader, Board Chairman of Creation Moments lamenting the same. If my rusty brain is working correctly, I believe Mark was one of the student shakers and movers at the University of Californa - Santa Barbara in the Students for Origins Research group about 25 years ago. They published some really great stuff for a bunch of newbie students. So I am confident that Mark has been well informed of the controversies of science for more than two decades. I provide most of his email below, verbatim. Enjoy!

Respectfully copied from and credited to Mark Cadwallader,

D.U.

"Another Pseudo Science ExposedThursday, January 7th, 2010.

January 2010. Dear Friend of Creation, What a revelation! Distorting science to promote a political and ideological agenda! We creationists have known this to be true for years. Scientists can certainly be biased, or even dishonest in some cases. By now the story is well known. In late November thousands of e-mails and many important documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Britain were exposed on the Internet. These documents revealed a determined effort by scientists to conceal data that undermined their hypothesis of man-made global warming, to blacklist other scientists who sought to test the theory or challenge their agenda, and to take control of and redefine the “peer-review” process for climate change research! The CRU has been a prime source for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which promotes and imposes the costly global-warming agenda upon the entire world. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE) have also based their regulations of carbon dioxide upon the IPCC’s reports. As with evolutionism, a pseudo-science is being used to support an agenda which grows out of the depravity of man. While evolution is a pseudo-science driven by man’s sinful desire to rid himself of accountability to his Maker, the pseudo-science that says we need to curb CO2 emissions (an atmospheric gas essential for life on Earth) comes from the lust for power, money, prestige and global control – as people turn their lives, liberty and wealth over to global power players. Billions of dollars are already being transferred as “carbon credits” with governments actively allocating tax credits and funds in attempts to supposedly manipulate Earth’s future temperature, creating what has become one of the world’s largest industries (and making Al Gore personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars). What I like about these “Climategate” revelations is that they give us credibility with people who may have had a hard time believing creationists when we claim the subversion of information by the so-called “scientific consensus.” With Climategate, they can see a modern example of a joint propaganda effort maintained by academics, government and media walking in lockstep to preserve a pet theory. It’s a great illustration for our case against evolution! In the case of Climategate, we have had the benefit of the Internet, so that the documents and correspondence between the key players have been made public to millions of people in a hurry. By contrast, the early frauds of Haeckel’s drawings, Piltdown Man, and other purported evidences of evolution remained hidden from the public for years, allowing the pseudo-science of evolution to become and remain entrenched. Now you can hardly read an official academic, government or media report in natural science without running into a just-so story of evolution being thrown in gratuitously and extraneous to the point. Scientists are human and, therefore, flawed and corruptible. They can be bought or intimidated. They can cleave to a pet ideology, special interest, club of coworkers or to the investment of time and money into their own training. They can manipulate their way through the Scientific Method to please the right people and qualify for funding, advancement, recognition and prestige. Let me quote Dr. William Gray, renowned hurricane forecaster and Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), who has devoted his entire career of more than half a century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events.Rising levels of CO2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be an honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO2’s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy…. The last century’s global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit is not a consequence of human activities….1 It is a problem, arguably beyond the reach of science, to try to reconstruct the history of things from evidences in the present day, without a true witness of the history – whether it be the history of average temperatures or the history of life on Earth. We have to make assumptions about the past that will automatically influence our conclusions about the past. And so people tend to pick the assumptions which give them the conclusions they want – consciously or subconsciously. Data has been discarded, ignored, cherry picked or modified to bolster claims. Dissenting scientists have been marginalized, ostracized and ridiculed. Scientific journals have been co-opted so that dissenting research can be excluded under the rules of “peer review” set by the scientists in the seats of power. Sounds just like evolutionism doesn’t it? Pseudo-science invented by the depravity of man. Creation Moments is putting forth the message of honest debate in science. As with global warming, so, too, do we need honest debate for evolution. We need scientists to admit their biases. What we do not need is intimidation and censorship. And yet, that’s exactly what is happening. Those who believe in global warming and evolution are doing everything possible to silence the opposition. And they are successful because they have far more funding than we do.
...
www.creationmoments.com