New Study Rejects Global Warming (from Noel Sheppard)

This from Noel Sheppard:

In the past several weeks as much of the nation suffered under a massive heatwave, global warming-obsessed media depicted the high temperatures as evidence of Nobel laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making scam.

A new study published in the journal Nature Sunday completely debunks all previous claims that temperatures in recent decades are in any way historic demonstrating instead that things were much hotter on this planet during Roman times:

"New evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicates that this cooling trend was stronger (−0.31 °C per 1,000 years, ±0.03 °C) than previously reported, and demonstrate that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records. The long-term trend now revealed in maximum latewood density data is in line with coupled general circulation models indicating albedo-driven feedback mechanisms and substantial summer cooling over the past two millennia in northern boreal and Arctic latitudes. These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times."

The website of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz published a more reader-friendly explanation of the study Monday:

Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods."

For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."

The UK Register observed Tuesday:

Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it - but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years.

A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.

This thoroughly debunks the claim that temperatures on the planet today are in any way historic or unprecedented.

The Register continued:

In the IPCC view, the planet was cooler during Roman times and the medieval warm spell. Overall the temperature is headed up - perhaps wildly up, according to the famous/infamous "hockey stick" graph.

The new study indicates that that's quite wrong, with the current warming less serious than the Romans and others since have seen - and the overall trend actually down by a noticeable 0.3°C per millennium, which the scientists believe is probably down to gradual long-term shifts in the position of the Sun and the Earth's path around it. 

Just as many climate realists have been saying for years.

The only question remaining is whether America's global warming-obsessed media will pay any attention to this new information.

Context, Numbers, and God

If somehow you were to extract the shadow of a table from a Rembrandt painting and simply to look at it on its own, devoid of its natural context, you would have a difficult time understanding its origin, its nature, its function, and its purpose, if any.  You’d be hard pressed, if you’d never seen a lock, to understand the design and function of a key, or that of a bow if you’d never seen a violin.  The same holds true for every created entity.  Without its proper context in relation to God, it cannot be well understood regarding its origin, nature, function, or purpose.  The same holds true for science and mathematics. 

As God’s creatures, numbers are both made and upheld by God.  From Him they received, and continue to receive, their being, their truth, and their significance.  Without Him, even mathematics itself cannot – and does not – escape the descent into contradiction.  Without God beyond and behind it to hold it up and to give it its proper creaturely context, meaning, application, and significance, the mathematical quest is doomed to final incoherence.

That, at any rate, is my contention.

Here’s what I mean:

In his effort to escape the bruising contradiction he discovered in Cantor’s influential set theory, atheist mathematician Bertrand Russell ran into the problem to which I now allude, though he understood and articulated it far differently from how I am doing it here, as you might imagine.

Russell noticed that in Cantor’s system, even though its premises were true and its conclusions were valid, the final conclusions to which they led inevitably resulted in contradiction, no matter how you worked them.  Because of his worldview, Russell considered that result flatly unacceptable.  So he determined to extricate set theory from it.  But try as he might, Russell and his colleague A. N. Whitehead failed.  Indeed, their failure was inevitable and inescapable, as Kurt Godel demonstrated.  Godel showed that any mathematical system, in fact any logical system whatever, must finally be inconsistent or incomplete.  If so, then Godel’s conclusion is devastating for physics and for any attempt to arrive at the much-vaunted and so-called “theory of everything.”  It cannot happen. It will not work.

Whatever else you think you might find at the end of mathematics, you don’t find final, comprehensive, or explanatory truth.  Instead, you find contradiction and incompleteness; not truth and not dependable logic.  Final, eternal, explanatory truth escapes mathematics, as it finally escapes all things without God.  That’s because things without God are devoid of their proper creatureliness.  They are devoid of their finitude and of their proper context in God, eternity, and creation.  Apart from seeing it in the context of God its Creator, mathematics loses its real status as a finite effect.  Rather, it poses and preens as final and full explanation or as ultimate cause, a posture it cannot long maintain without collapse.

Accepted humbly and understood wisely, that disorienting collapse of finite, mathematical explanations for the universe can prove liberating because by it we might begin to notice that such a collapse inevitably follows from God’s absence.  Only in Him is found mathematics’ properly limited explanatory context.

Taking God into account explains the creatureliness and dependence of all things, numbers included.  It explains their status as finite effect, and not as full explanation or as cause, roles for which they are ill-suited and cannot fulfill, something a “theory of everything” seems to require of them.

Put another way, science cannot be true to the world it seeks to understand unless it makes room for its own contingency, its own creatureliness, and that of its tools and of its objects of study.  Even the scientific pursuit itself, the pursuit to exercise dominion over nature, properly belongs to us and to science only by the grace and command of God (Gen. 1: 28).  If we examine nature apart from God, then in the end we uncover only nature’s inexplicable and intellectually self-stultifying limitations, not the eternal and the finally true, not the authentically and ultimately explanatory.

That’s because even at our best we are not objective and dispassionate observers of natural systems.  We do not employ objective means of analysis, even when we do simple calculations and observations because, even at our best, we always exert an effect.  We always bring about some altered particular state simply by our presence and our activity, simply by our experimenting.

At our worst, and by that I mean normally, we skew our task of understanding the world aright because we skew our conception of the world itself and our role within it.  That matters because the scientist’s theory and actions are interdependent.  Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad ones.  For that reason, if the scientist is deluded, then the scientist’s theories are likely to be deluded too.  Revelation says, with strong emphasis and effect, that the scientist is indeed deluded.  We are not passive; we are not objective.  We are creatively, cleverly, and wickedly distortive, sometimes to greater, sometimes to lesser, degrees.  We are prone to look at nature and to suppress the truth it reveals about God, truth for which we substitute a lie (Rom. 1: 19-25).

Even the best and most productive of our methods are fundamentally twisted because they assume all things are answerable to us, to our methods, and to our questions.  But in Revelation, we are questioned by God and are answerable to Him.  In modern secular science, however, He is not merely not questioned, He is banished from the discussion, both as a cause and as a conclusion.  For example, if the resurrection is true (and I have argued elsewhere on this blog that it is), if God raised His Son from the dead, if Spirit therefore effects matter and can even re-animate it, then science has ruled out from the beginning some of the most powerful forces and trueest explanations in or out of the universe.  If, as Wolfhart Pannenberg argues, God is a field, indeed the field, of force, one without the limitations of time or extension, one that gives rise to new creatures again and again, one that the Bible describes as multi-Personal and as fatherly love, then the scientists have been dealing with God all along and never knew it because their twisted and myopic notion that only material explanations are permissible bars them from the truth.

Yet, in His grace, our shrunken methods still prove quite serviceable, if that is the right word for it.  But serviceability and utility are not the same as truth.  Think of it this way:  Flawed and distorted as were their methods, ideas, and worldview, the three magi still arrived at the feet of the Messiah in Bethlehem (Matt. 2: 1-12), which I take to be the grace of God, and not evidence of their insights or proof that ancient Middle Eastern astrology is actually true.  Hence “serviceable” and “properly understood” are not interchangeable concepts.  You might achieve your purposes in impressive fashion and still be mistaken.  It might take a long time for your mistakes to surface, but they will, as scientific worldview replaces scientific worldview in a long succession of paradigm shifts reaching back past Ptolemy and forward beyond post-Einsteinianism to who knows what -- Who but God.

To paraphrase my late friend Thomas Torrance, in its depths the universe is characterized by openness and spontaneity, even surprise.  Nature seems explicable only from beyond itself, only from the inexhaustible possibilities within the Divine rationality.  The universe finds its final intelligibility only in references beyond itself, and not in the inappropriate rigidities and allegedly necessary truths of contingent human reason, which at its root, and all on its own, is worse than suspect, lacking as it does metaphysical warrant for its assumed role as arbiter of all things physical and non-physical, a role to which we often exalt it, as if Revelation were to stand before the bar of human intellection and not the other way round.

We find our proper place and role more accurately by holding always before us the contingent truths and contingent rationality that undermine universal mathematical formulation.  We absolutely require those higher levels of Reality -- God and His actions -- that are not readily reducible to the same laws by which lower natural particulars seem to operate but that give those lower levels their proper context.  Then we know, and then we remember, that lower things are open to explanation upwardly, and that Higher Things are not accurately reducible to the laws of reality downwardly.

The various levels of created reality do not and cannot contain within themselves their own sufficient reasons for their own contingent order. 

Evironmentalist Icon Says He Overstated Climate Change (from IBD)

Not many years ago, a celebrated scientist predicted a global warming disaster awaited humanity. Today, that same scientist admits his warning was too "alarmist." It's time Al Gore turned his limousine around, too.

James Lovelock, father of the "Gaia" theory that the entire earth is a single living system, was one of the many voices that's predicted environmental calamity will result from carbon dioxide emissions.

He claimed in 2006 that "before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

But he has told MSNBC that he overstated the case and now acknowledges that "we don't know what the climate is doing."
"We thought we knew 20 years ago," he said. "That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened."

The 92-year-old Lovelock notes that "the climate is doing its usual tricks" and concedes "there's nothing much really happening yet" even though "we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now."

Lovelock hasn't fully changed course yet. MSNBC says he still believes climate change is occurring, though not as rapidly as he once thought.

"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time," he said. Yet the temperature "has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."

As we have said before, linking human activity to climate and weather is a foolish proposition.

Researchers can theorize that an increase in human-caused CO2 emissions will heat the planet, but they haven't been able to prove it. There are too many forces outside of man that influence temperature, precipitation, clouds, humidity and wind.

Rather than continuing to contend that man is driving temperatures to dangerous levels, it seems that is the explanation that Lovelock is moving toward, though apparently quite slowly.

But give the independent scientist credit for admitting his mistake as well as pointing out that a university or government researcher might not be so inclined to admit error due to fear he would lose funding for bucking the alarmist narrative. His honesty in the midst of an issue so shrouded in deceit is refreshing.

 (From Investor's Business Daily)

Tiny, Happy People: C. Ben Mitchell on Global Warming, Human Engineering, and Ethics

Just when you think you have heard it all, someone pushes the envelope. According to three ethicists writing in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment, because geoengineering might be too risky a way to combat global climate change, we should alter the human species instead.

Here is the argument offered by Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache. Climate change is the result of human corruption of the environment—so-called anthropogenic causes. Climate change affects food production, access to water, health, and the environment. Since, in their view, millions could suffer from the consequences of climate change something radical must be done. Recycling, tax-incentives, and large-scale manipulation of the environment are, according to the authors, either too negligible or too grand to be effective. Geoengineering, in particular, is disadvantageous because “in many cases, we lack the necessary scientific knowledge to devise and implement geoengineering without significant risk to ourselves and to future generations” (p. 4). So, in one breathtaking leap, the authors argue that we ought to consider “biomedical modification of humans to make them better at mitigating climate change.”

To be fair, they do offer a caveat: “Our central aim [in the paper] is to show that human engineering deserves consideration alongside other solutions in the debate about how to solve the problem of climate change. Also, as we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity—possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care—rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”

The suggestion that we ought to modify the human species as a means of mitigating climate change is at once both naive and hubristic. If they think modifying the environment may be difficult, successfully modifying the extraordinarily intricate balance of human homeostasis is a pipedream at best. Here is what they think might be desirable.

First, humans might be altered to be meat aversive. All one would have to do is stimulate the immune system so as to “induce mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance)” to meat. Or, since the “human ecological footprints are partly correlated to our size,” we can just make humans smaller! “Reducing the average US height by 15 cm would mean a mass reduction of 23% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction of metabolic rate (15%/18%), since less tissue means lower nutrients and energy needs.” One way to produce these tiny people would be through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, say the authors. Just select the embryos for transfer to a woman’s womb that have the genes for compactness; toss the embryos will tall genes. Smaller humans could also be produced through hormone therapy and reduction of birth-weight.

Second, the number of humans could be modified through cognitive enhancement. Why cognitive enhancement? Because apparently only stupid people have more than two children per family. “There seems to be a link,” the authors maintain, “between cognition itself and lower birth-rates.” Since two children per family is lower than the replacement rate (of roughly 2.1 per family in industrialized countries), population would decline.

Third, pharmacological enhancements could increase altruism and empathy. The result: generous and happy people through chemistry. Modifying altruism and empathy “by human engineering could be promising.” Testosterone, by the way, “appears to decrease aspects of empathy,” according to the authors. So, to follow their logic, since testosterone prepares both males and female for reproduction, reducing its levels in every human body would both reduce the number of people on the earth and, at the same time, make them more compliant.

Why undertake the re-engineering of the human species? Because, say the authors, “human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering. Second, human engineering could make behavior and market solutions more likely to succeed.” In other words, we would be far more likely to create tiny, happy people than we would be to modify the environment or create incentives that would encourage environmental stewardship.

Most readers will find the suggestion that re-engineering the species to control climate change is simply ludicrous on the face of it. But it is worse than ludicrous, it is dangerous. Although the authors say these alterations will come about voluntarily, it would, in fact, be parents who would make these decisions for the next generation without consent. Our children would become guinea pigs in a massive genetic and pharmacological engineering experiment—which, in many cases, we would be unable to reverse.

In an interview with Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, one of the authors, Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy at New York University, said that making these sorts of modifications in our children is not morally problematic. After all, the tiny, happy child will thank you for making him smaller and more altruistic. And why shouldn’t he? You modified him to be generous and altruistic.

Well, what about an individual’s free will? Wouldn’t giving a child behavior modifying drugs to make her detest meat violate her freedom? Says Liao, “ . . . in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have a steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing.” So, by extension, a little doping of the water supply would help people truly express their will. The logic is simply perverse.

In this paper we see another example of the human self-loathing that is so much a part of both the environmentalist and transhumanist movements. For environmentalists, human beings are parasitic threats. For the transhumanists, human beings are maladaptive and need re-engineering. Instead of seeing human creativity, innovation, and market forces applied in stewardly ways for the sake of the truly human good, the technologist (the human) becomes the technological artifact (the modified post-human). Human re-engineering, it seems to me, is a far greater threat to our humanity than climate change.

C. Ben Mitchell is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University.

(from First Things)

Easter Dawns in the Laboratory

In the middle ages, we called science "natural philosophy" because we understood that science was the application of a particular philosophy to our understanding of the natural world.  The philosophy then employed was the philosophy of Aristotle, with its mixed bag of insight and nonsense.

Science still is natural philosophy, even though we’ve dropped the name.  The philosophy it now employs -- empiricism -- is exploded.  Even though the finest philosophers now rarely advocate empiricism, modern science still insists on being its laboratory application.  Someone needs to tell the scientists that the rest of the world has junked the scientists’ philosophy and might have been right to do so.

If bad ideas have bad consequences, and if empiricism is a philosophically bad idea, then one wonders what bad consequences flow from the bad philosophy that sits as the bedrock of modern science and is the engine of its movement.

Worth considering, that.

When challenged on the point, these otherwise empirical scientists often take resort to pragmatism:  “We use empiricism because it works.”  Pay no attention to the fact that as a worldview pragmatism has its own set of fatal flaws.  Simply notice that a moment earlier the scientists were talking as if science yielded truth and empirical facts.  Now they don’t.  They move seamlessly yet schizophrenically back and forth between supreme confidence and self-effacing mealy-mouthedness, depending upon which one serves their purposes best at the moment.   

The same nonsense holds true with the scientists’ faulty theology, which says that God, if He exists at all, is and ought to be irrelevant to scientific endeavor, that we can proceed quite nicely without Him, thank you very much.  Put on this lab coat and leave your Bible at the door.

That's perfectly bad theology, pure and simple.

It might be well for scientists to consider Wolfhart Pannenberg’s hypothesis that God is not only a field of force without limitations of time or extension, but that He is the field of force and, if so, then the scientists have been dealing with Him all along in one way and another yet never once realized it because their suffocating worldview made such recognition simply impossible. 

I'm not saying that the alternative to modern science is the bastardized nonsense that one gets at some Christian colleges, but neither ought it to be the bastardized nonsense one gets at shamelessly secular enclaves like Harvard or Oxford, as if Richard Dawkins, not John Lennox, John Polkinghorne, or Michael Polanyi were the master of interdisciplinary thinking on this subject (or any other).

All this academically myopic, self-congratulatory, under-informed, scientific delusion happens because we have divided human knowledge up into discreet and externally impenetrable academic disciplines, each with its own private set of presuppositions and methods, and each with the freedom to do as it sees fit without regard to the knowledge gained in other disciplines.

But it’s utterly unreal.  It’s utterly a rejection of things as they really are:  We don’t have, say, a mathematical universe alongside a historical universe, alongside a philosophical universe, alongside a chemical universe, alongside a theological universe, alongside a sociological universe, alongside a rhetorical universe, alongside a political universe.  We have but one world, and the answers we offer to life’s fundamental and enduring questions need to be true across the board.  Regarding origins, for example, it cannot be that (A.) the universe and matter are eternal and also that (B.) we have reached today -- any today.  Why not? Because it is impossible to traverse infinity, and if the universe is infinitely old, then you can’t get from infinity past to here.

Yet, here we are.

Some scientists, I am pleased to say, have escaped this prison and its “mind-forged manacles.”  They work at places like the Discovery Institute; they also have serious doubts about evolutionary theory and the very unpristine data concerning global warming.  

The prominence of contemporary scientific silliness is the by-product of academic segregation; it's just Jim Crow in charge of the curriculum:  “Separate (disciplines) but equal,” which means, we all know, separate but unequal.  No scientist I know thinks we ought to give equal weight to science and to Karl Barth’s intellectual earthquake, which brought down the towers of natural philosophy and natural theology, or to the first Christians’ discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning.  If, indeed, the tomb was empty, if Spirit reversed physical death -- doing what matter could never do -- then the scientific presupposition that only matter matters, and that only matter-based hypotheses are acceptable is simply false.  In such a world, science misses out on some of the most important, perhaps even the most important, explanatory principle in or out of the universe:  God.  Easter has dawned in the laboratory and no one there even noticed.

That’s because scientists don’t really think that Theology yields knowledge, that Theology is really an academic discipline that needs to be heard and taken into account.  But they do think the theologians ought to listen to the scientists.  They also think that the traffic between the two disciplines, if it exists at all, ought to be a one-way street from the laboratory to Jesus’ gravesite, not the other way round.

They think that Theology must sit in the back of the bus.

35 Inconvenient Errors in Al Gore's Movie (global warming)

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html

Global Warming and The East Anglia Email Scandal (Global Warming 5)

Adapted from James Delingpole, of  The Telegraph (UK), to whom full credit:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies, you should start dumping them now.  The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (AGW) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka  CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science".  These emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:  Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change skeptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting: "In an odd way this is cheering news."

But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters:

Manipulation of evidence:

          “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Suppression of evidence:

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.  Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.  We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists:

“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

“……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….”

How best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. (How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.):

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”.  Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”

“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

Delingpole finishes his comments on the East Anglia email scandal this way:

“I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming.  This was wishful thinking, of course.  In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media.  And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that's sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory . . . Unfortunately, we've a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight."

Gingrich Takes Gore to Task for Faulty Science and False Facts (Global Warming 4)

Newt Rips Gore's 'Facts' To Pieces

Ammunition for Andy Wiley

30,000 Scientists and the Founder of The Weather Channel vs. Global Warming

Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming fraud / John Coleman

Global Warming (2)

As a follow-up to my previous post on global warming, I want to draw attention here to French geophysicist Claude Allegre, who converted from a believer to a skeptic in man-made global warming.

Who is Claude Allegre?

He is a socialist, an ardent member of the French political left, groups typically known for their advocacy of the global warming agenda.  He is a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, a man who has published more than 100 scientific articles and 11 books.  He has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States.  His defection from the global warming camp reflects the influence of numerous scientific studies that both underscore the claims of climate skeptics, on the one hand, and that undermine the dire predictions the global warming alarmists, on the other.

          According to Allegre, the real cause of climate change remains resolutely unknown.  What is known is that not only has Antarctic snowfall remained stable over the past 30 years, but that continent is actually gaining ice.  That ice gain is significant because the Antarctic is one of the places where the hole in the ozone layer allegedly has its greatest effect.

Allegre also forcefully contends that too many advocates of man-made catastrophic global warming are motivated by money, not by truth or evidence.  Global warming, he says “has become a very lucrative business for some people!”

In America, those people include Al Gore and the folks in charge of government-backed companies like Solyndra.

Global Warming (by Roy W. Spenser)

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. . . My group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is man made. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.

         The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.

But first let’s examine the basics of why so many scientists think global warming is manmade. Earth’s atmosphere contains natural greenhouse gases (mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane) which act to keep the lower layers of the atmosphere warmer than they otherwise would be without those gases. Greenhouse gases trap infrared radiation — the radiant heat energy that the Earth naturally emits to outer space in response to solar heating. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal, petroleum, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is believed to be enhancing the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. As of 2008, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 40% to 45% higher than it was before the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800’s.

It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.

The “Holy Grail”: Climate Sensitivity Figuring out how much past warming is due to mankind, and how much more we can expect in the future, depends upon something called “climate sensitivity”. This is the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.

The ‘consensus’ of opinion is that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is quite high, and so warming of about 0.25 deg. C to 0.5 deg. C (about 0.5 deg. F to 0.9 deg. F) every 10 years can be expected for as long as mankind continues to use fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. NASA’s James Hansen claims that climate sensitivity is very high, and that we have already put too much extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Presumably this is why he and Al Gore are campaigning for a moratorium on the construction of any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

         You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.

The case for natural climate change I also present an analysis of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which shows that most climate change might well be the result of….the climate system itself! Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change. You don’t need the sun, or any other ‘external’ influence (although these are also possible…but for now I’ll let others work on that). It is simply what the climate system does. This is actually quite easy for meteorologists to believe, since we understand how complex weather processes are. Your local TV meteorologist is probably a closet ’skeptic’ regarding mankind’s influence on climate.

Climate change — it happens, with or without our help.

Science and Theology (5)

Fourth, we ought to be more skeptical than we are both of scientific taxonomy and of the translation of the world outside our heads into numbers.  That is, scientists do not simply deal with the world as they find it, they manipulate that world into words of their own choosing, into categories of their own making, into experiments of their own devising, and into numbers.  Forcing a creature into one or more categories based upon our intellectual manipulations and speculations regarding its body pattern and parts, or upon our understanding of its physical makeup and upon our conjectures regarding its biological descent, is at least partly arbitrary, partly subjective.  Such categories, though helpful and serviceable, are man-made.  They unintentionally, and sometimes unwittingly, collapse the distinction between what we discover and what we invent.  While the beings that populate such categories most emphatically do exist, the families, orders, classes and phyla into which we have pigeon-holed them do not.  Such pigeon-holings are a taxonomist’s useful fiction, but do not exist outside the taxonomist's mind.   That is, while those taxonomical categories are constructs based upon careful observation, they are constructs nevertheless.  Of course, I am not saying anything so silly as that there exist no genuine and recognizable differences between a dog and a man, or that “dog” and “man” are useless fictions devoid of all external reference or reality.  But let us not too quickly or uncritically identify “useful” as “true” or as “real,” categories that in many cases and ways are quite different.  

         Yet, not only are we required to accept the taxonomist's scheme of classification as both real and true, we are required to accept that the occupants of these various man-made categories are linked by a long series of non-living intermediate creatures (also duly classified and arranged), most of whom are not found to exist anywhere in the fossil record, a radically incomplete record we interpret according to the taxonomical grid provided for us.  (The circularity of this procedure seems to go unnoticed and unremarked.)  Furthermore, we are also required to believe that all the seemingly discontinuous and taxonomically divisible groups now alive are the descendants of a common ancestor, another phantom of which (or of whom) we have no direct evidence.  Please note that “ancestor” and “descendant” are part of a taxonomical scheme, and are no less so than is “phantom,” a word from which my scientist readers would naturally recoil.  Their own language, the scientists must remember, is the source of great recoil as well.  It rarely seems to occur to some scientists that the rapid evolutionary branchings posited in some theories are but a euphemism for mystical scientific leaps, though they are called by other names, such as Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium.”  Of such leaps I am more than a little skeptical.

         Further, not only is taxonomical classification significantly theory laden, it is context dependent and subtly subjective.  That which we classify as the observed in one case fails to be so classified in another, even though the thing itself is the same.  That is, what is foreground and what is background vary according to the judgment of the observer, an observer who is never context-free or presuppositionless.  Thus, scientists are driven back, whether they acknowledge it or not, upon the problem “What is context and what is content?”,  the answer to which seems to vary from situation to situation depending upon the experimenter and the experiment, even though the aggregation of things involved might be basically the same.  Nor are the experiments themselves pristinely empirical and objective, for experiments are highly stylized sets of phenomena, sets from which as many variables as possible have been artificially eliminated by the will and work of the experimenter, however well or however poorly.  Of course, I am not saying that the data yielded by such experimentation are therefore untrue, only that they are not pristine.  In other words, some scientists need frequently to be reminded of the significantly non-literal and pragmatic nature of their experiments, of their theories, and of the language in which those experiments and theories are conceived and articulated.          

         Like taxonomy, quantification might itself be a movement away from the world around us, not into it.  The translation of things into numbers is, after all, a translation.  Neither the words nor the numbers in scientific theories are complete and exact re-presentations of the constitution and behavior of the universe, much less are they the things themselves which they are intended to describe in words or embody in numbers and formulae.  Newton had his numbers; Einstein had his; post-Einsteinians have theirs.  Newton’s and Einstein’s formulae worked (so to speak) and were the basis for considerable correct prediction regarding natural phenomena.  Nevertheless, on many important points, Newton and Einstein were also quite wrong, something from which their seemingly correct numbers did not and could not save them.  I am not reluctant to think that the same fate awaits many of their scientific descendants. 

         The classification of physical phenomena as suitable and useable scientific data, the arrangement of that data into groups, the translation of that data into numbers, the manipulation of those numbers via computation, and the transformation of the results of that computation into more data and new conclusions are all guided by philosophical deliberations that are prior to and apart from science’s alleged empirical nature and militate against it, all of which ought to cause us to hold science’s supposedly assured results with less assurance.  Judging from the philosophical and theological naiveté of most of the scientists with whom I have ever spoken, those intellectual deliberations might not have been deliberations at all, but merely the unexamined and unacknowledged a priori assumptions of a mind utterly untrained in a number of difficult but acutely relevant fields throughout the humanities.   

         The related assertion that science is measurement is, of course, a philosophical assertion, an assertion that is flatly unprovable.  Indeed, as even a moment’s reflection will demonstrate, because it is not itself measurable, this assertion is unscientific on its own terms.  It is, in fact, autophagic -- it eats itself up.  Nor can we prove this assertion by invoking the principle of prediction and thereby assert that a scientific hypothesis is true if it can be shown accurately and successfully to predict the action of physical phenomena.  The principle of prediction, while clearly important and serviceable, is at least as closely related to pragmatism as to truth.  That is, to be able to predict more accurately than all other theories means only that one’s theory is pragmatically preferable, not that it is necessarily true.  We must remember that false, or partly false, theories have demonstrated impressive powers of prediction in the past.  The ancient Babylonian astronomers, for example, by no means shabby forecasters, were working from premises and principles quite off the mark.  In other words, while prediction seems to be a necessary attribute of a true scientific theory, it must not be considered a sufficient attribute.  Prediction is not proof, no matter how impressive it seems.  Too many scientists, nevertheless, still think, write, argue, and teach as if accurate prediction demonstrated truth.  How many times this has been done, is being done, and shall continue to be done, only God knows.  But it seems not at all likely to stop.  Or, to make the case in a different direction, if prediction were really the reliable indicator of truth that some think it to be, then physics itself, which has an abysmal record of prediction with regard to some individual entities, would be radically undermined.  Furthermore, as clear thinking philosophers and theologians understand, pragmatic preference is an utterly insufficient basis for determining the virtue of an action.  If pragmatic preference is an exploded mode of justification in ethics, I am inclined to regard it as such in scientific epistemology.  Its epistemological failures are not magically eradicated simply because we now concern ourselves with a laboratory.  

         Those, at any rate, are my observations and caveats.  That is how the laboratory looks from the seminary, or at least to this member of it.  Having watched many of them in action, I think the scientists would be better served (and would serve better) if they were more humble and more eclectic in pursuit of their worthy enterprise.  I should hope that when they do their work the scientists would listen at least as much to those outside the laboratory as they would like those outside the laboratory to listen to them.  This, after all, is the golden rule of scholarship.

         Finally, though it is clearly beyond both my intention and my competence to dictate to the scientists exactly how their jobs ought to be conducted and in what specific direction they ought to proceed, let me offer but one outsider’s opinion, an opinion motivated by sincere goodwill for my laboratory colleagues.  I believe that what we need now is not something akin to an aimless collection of more data, but research (of every sort) directed by principles, illumined by ideas.  Those guiding principles and those illuminating ideas must, by their very nature, come to science from outside science, at least until we figure out how science ought to be restructured and redefined in order to avoid its current myopia.  Science, to be kept serviceable and humane, must be kept humble and teachable.  And it must acknowledge its debts, debts it always has. 

         To the question “Is science enough?” the answer is emphatically “No.”      

Science and Theology (4)

Science is not an autonomous set of empirical disciplines.  Nothing about science properly, or actually, prevents philosophical or theological concepts from entering into it.  Science, like all intellectual disciplines, ought not to conduct its business in an imaginary, air-tight compartment, isolated from all other strivings of the human mind after knowledge.  Because too many scientists have cut themselves off from those other strivings, they condemn themselves to discovering all on their own many things already widely known by others.  For example, even though such ideas appeared new and revolutionary to some of the unphilosophical practitioners of science, most of Mach’s notions were already standard fare in the writings of a number of earlier philosophers.  The high price some scientists pay for their intellectual isolationism and prejudice is that they must repeatedly re-invent the intellectual wheel.

         But there’s more to theology in science than procedural agnosticism and atheism.  Our ape ancestors are treated with immense respect, even toadying homage, as the secular Adam and Eve.  No attacks upon their status, much less their existence, are tolerated.  Read Dawkins’ epigraph again.  (“It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane.”) Not to do obeisance to the fossil remains of ancient animals ranks as scientific sacrilege, as scientific heresy.  Religion, albeit pagan, has come to the laboratory, and the allegedly secular scientist has become its new high priest.

         Furthermore, many of those very scientists who insist on divorcing religion from science seem sometimes especially eager to use their science as a basis for theological (or at least extra-scientific) pronouncements.  The literature of science is replete with anti-theistic language and conclusions:  The universe was not designed; the universe has no purpose; human beings result from random and mindless natural processes, or so we are repeatedly told. 

         Put another way, to the adoration of God and of virtue, some moderns have added the adoration of science (or at least what goes by that name).  But you cannot deify the scientific method without at the same time devaluing or debasing both theology (the human understanding and application of revelation) and philosophy (the human understanding and application of reason).  Many scientists, therefore, without meaning to do so, undermine our only source of morality and freedom:  Revelation and the reason that springs from it it.  They do so by believing, writing, and teaching that only those things that are testable under controlled laboratory conditions qualify as hard knowledge; all else is merely opinion.  But even a moment’s reflection reveals that if every question of morality, of politics, of philosophy, and of theology is a matter of mere untestable opinion and not of fact because they cannot be tested under laboratory conditions, then they can be settled only by force, not by reason.  In that way (and in others) scientists sometime lead us to tyranny.  Fascism and pseudo-liberalism are the not-too-distant offspring of modern man’s widespread belief that science alone is trustworthy and that whatever lies beyond its pale is little more and little else than irrational prejudice, unsubstantiatable conjecture, and transitory emotion incapable of reasoned support.  This vision of life most modern and post-modern persons learned in the science classroom.  Too often scientists teach and write as if the only real options available to us are science or mysticism, empiricism or bias, fact or feeling. 

         Simply because no test tube yields either a “should” or an “ought,”  it does not mean that “should” and “ought” are thereby made suspect, much less banished; science is.  Moral questions -- questions about right and wrong or good and bad -- cannot be answered (or even raised) by the scientific methods now prevalent in either the natural or the social sciences.  That does not mean, however, that they cannot be answered, have not been answered, or have no answers.  It means only that with regard to the diagnostic and fundamental questions of life, science is impotent, though dangerous.  The one who has not learned to ask, much less to answer, the fundamental questions of life, is indeed no man at all, but still a child, still benighted.  To answer such questions, even to raise them, science is powerless.  Consequently, while technical schools and scientific laboratories are important and laudable things, to advertise them as colleges or universities, or to say that those who have passed through them are truly educated men and women, is a lie. 

         To put the point differently, God is the Lord of the entire world of knowledge, including science and technology.  Science and technology that are atheistic in both conception and conduct, that are consciously cut loose from all formal considerations about God and morality, are not your dream come true; they are your worst nightmare.  To utilize science and technology wisely or else to become their victims, that is the choice before us.  But the wisdom that saves us from our science and technology is no commodity derived from either of them or from both.  To paraphrase something C. S. Lewis said in another context, science ceases to be a demon only when it ceases to be a god.  It can never cease until it figures out a way to let God be God, even in the laboratory.                 

Science and Theology (3)

Third, scientists often fail to admit, sometimes even to recognize, that so many of the issues and findings of science are neither purely scientific nor genuinely empirical.  Because all empirical endeavors build upon, and proceed according to, various presuppositions, and because those presuppositions and procedures are inescapably philosophical, no scientist and no scientific procedure is truly philosophy-free.   Empiricism and the empiricalist procedures that arise from it are philosophy-laden world views and techniques, and not necessarily the best.  If ideas have consequences, and if (as some philosophers strongly argue) empiricism and empiricalism are highly suspect, perhaps even greatly flawed, then scientists are likely to be misled if they apply these notions uncritically to their work.  To put a point on it, if, as some scientists insist, real science is truly empirical and reduces only to empirical methods and to the conclusions reached by using them, then there is no real science, because the theory-independent observation, analysis, and conclusions needed to establish such empirical premises are simply not possible.  Because we are not, none of us, presupposition-free, and because (despite much contrary insistence) scientific theories often deal with the unobserved and the unobservable, the laboratory is no philosophy- or theology-free zone.  Scientific methods and conclusions cannot be purely empirical because the unavoidable philosophical and theological underpinnings upon which those scientific methods rely are not the result of those allegedly empirical methods. 

            Put another way, the claim to objectivity and empiricality falls down on both sides -- on the side of the scientist and on the side of science.  When eating their curry, many people like to build for it a nest of rice.  To employ a more American image, people like to mold a bowl in their mashed potatoes in order to hold their gravy.  Science, it seems to me, has its nest, its bowl.  Science always has its philosophical and theological underpinnings; physics always has its metaphysics -- always.3  To declare science a philosophy-free zone is to have a philosophy; to declare science a procedurally agnostic or atheistic endeavor is to have a theology; to claim that science ought to be value-free is to make a value statement.  The question is never whether or not the scientist in a laboratory has a philosophy, a theology, or an ethic when doing scientific work; the question is whether or not the philosophy, the theology, and the ethic the scientist has are any good and are worth having.  This problem they cannot escape.

            Even in the pursuit of something as fundamental as self-definition, science alone is utterly insufficient.  To the question “What is the proper definition of science?” one can give only a philosophical (and, by extension, theological) answer because the question itself presupposes and requires a vantage point from outside science.  Because we cannot tell who are the scientists and who are not until we know what science itself is, one cannot answer this question, as scientists too often do, by resorting to the tautology that science is that which is done by the scientist.  The question “What is science?” is a question about science, not a question of science.  Scientists want, indeed claim, to be empirical.  But please note:  “empirical” is a philosophical category.  Without the aid of the humanities, science cannot even identify itself, much less justify, or even invent, its procedures.

            To make the point in a different direction, science is not theology-free, and that is so precisely because science intentionally operates according to a procedural agnosticism, if not procedural atheism. That is, science operates as if God cannot be known or else as if He were altogether irrelevant, if not entirely absent.  By its means and its conclusions, science implicitly, perhaps even explicitly, denies that Christ is Lord of the universe, an inescapably theological denial.  What I, as a theologian, want to tell my scientific colleagues is that, as Lord of the universe and all that is within it, Christ is not something in addition to science, He is Someone in relation to it.  To operate as if He were utterly irrelevant to the laboratory is to answer, probably without careful analysis and theological acumen, the question raised long ago in the gospels:  “What think ye of Christ?”  Because Christ is foundational to the universe, He is foundational to science.  As Thomas Torrance once explained to me,

            . . . the countries of the Far East and of the Southern Hemisphere want our science and technology, but they have no doctrine of creation.  They do not realize that science and technology rest upon, indeed arise from, Christian foundations.  This is true both historically and epistemologically.  We must show them that it is the Creator God himself who stands behind everything, and that he provides the rational ground upon which the various sciences rest, as well as the world those sciences unlock and help to tame.   Theology and technology come as a pair.  We must be quite firm about both this and their function in serving and respecting the integrity of nature.4 

            Like it or not, the systematic and procedural denial, not to say the intended destruction, of metaphysics and of theology, is the death of scientific truth, if for no other reason than that it posits a dual or dichotomized universe, which we noted at the outset was untrue.  Answers to questions predicated upon that same bifurcated basis, while they are perhaps true as far as they go, do not go all the way, and are not the whole truth.  

            Perhaps an illustration will serve.  No physicist today can reckon with miracles and interventions from outside the material order, or with interventions that break that order open.  No theory they devise, no answer they propose, permits such ideas or recognizes such data, even though such data and ideas might be absolutely and comprehensively true.  That analytical inability reveals the limitations, indeed the willful blindness, of modern physics.  Modern physics does not reveal the limitations of God and his actions, much less God’s non-existence or irrelevance, assumptions implicit in scientific method as now understood and practiced.  God, if we need to be reminded, works in perfect freedom, and not according to the Kant-Laplace theory of determinedness, or to any of its current or future descendants. 

            Let me put it more graphically:  Any intellectual endeavor in which theology is segregated from the other disciplines and relegated to an intellectual ghetto is an instance of Jim Crow come again to the college campus because it explicitly asserts that the best intellectual paradigm is not well-informed academic integration but some framework of “separate but equal,” which, as we learned in the old South, meant separate but unequal, not because of actual inferiority, but because of bigotry.  By acting as if God Himself were irrelevant to the universe He has made and to our understanding of it, scientists, in effect, practice “disciplinism,” a widespread form of intellectual bigotry whereby the research and discoveries of other scholars are systematically disregarded simply because those scholars are members of another discipline.  The Queen of the Sciences has been banished to the back of the bus by her own bigoted descendants.  The fool has said in his heart that there is no God, and the scientist permits himself to operate as if the fool were right.