SkepticLance

Prime Evil I ask you not to pursue your line of argument. Trying to discredit scientists whose opinions you disagree with is, at the least, in very bad taste. Mud slinging tends to leave everyone splattered. Matt C. Your statement that more greenhouse gases should, in theory, lead to more warming is not one I, or any rational skeptic, will disagree with. Yes, in theory, you are right. However, the global climate is a very complex thing, with lots of factors inputting to determine outcomes. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases are not, by any measure, the most powerful influence on global temperature. Water vapour, for example, contributes 75% to total greenhouse effect. Other, 'natural', greenhouse gases contribute more than those released by humans. And other factors also exert powerful influences. eg. the effect on the albedo of the Earth of clouds. There may well be unknown feed-back effects that change the models. One computer model I am aware of, predicted a rise of 3 Deg. C. for the 20th Century. The actual increase was 0.6 Deg. C. Predictions for the 21st are equally likely to be exaggerated. I agree with you on your comment about pollution. If we clean up our act with respect to greenhouse gases, a substantial side benefit (maybe the major benefit) will be reduced air pollution. In places like China, this would lead to massive improvements in human health. I am not opposed to efforts to clean up greenhouse gases, as long as these attempts do not carry a prohibitive humanitarian cost. Most proposals so far, such as Greenpeace's, require that we accept a massive global economic depression. This would have a devastating impact on the world's poor, including millions of deaths from malnutrition. Hunger follows poverty with grotesque inevitability.

Reyam. Your Atlantis idea cannot be correct, since there have been glacial periods interspersed by interglacial warmings going back the best part of a million years - to well before humans existed. When there were no humans around, they could not have been responsible for global warming. Herpguy. For your information, snowball Earth, or its ending was not responsible for our oxygen atmosphere. That was released by cyanobacteria, who were the first living things capable of photosynthesis. Remnants of cyanobacteria have been dated back to 3.5 billion years BP. The entire run of snowball Earth was between 500 and 800 million years BP. What caused the interglacial warmings, including our most recent one 14,000 years ago? The leading theory (for which there is significant evidence) is periodic shifts in the Earth's orbit. Incidentally, the previous interglacial, 120,000 years BP, led to global temperatures 5 Deg. C warmer than we have today. So there is plenty of scope for further warming by purely natural mechanisms in the present interglacial. Some of you are getting to the end of the Earth. For your information, the most likely end to life on Earth is set for 400 to 500 million years hence. Not being engulfed by the sun (that will happen in about 5000 million years), but falling victim to the simple fact that the sun is slowly getting hotter and bigger. In 400 million years, the sun will be hot enough to raise the Earth's surface temperature to 100 Deg. C. I doubt there will be too much life left! Of course, there might be a wild-cat event, like an asteroid strike, before that.

Just to repeat my suggestion that you get your information from professional groups, rather than less than professional ones. Below is a quote from the American Dental Association web site. "In addition to the ADA, nearly 100 national and international organizations recognize the public health benefits of community water fluoridation for preventing dental decay. They include the World Health Organization, the U.S. Public Health Service, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the International Association for Dental Research, the National PTA and the American Cancer Society. And just last month, Surgeon General David Satcher wrote in his report, Oral Health in America, "Community water fluoridation is safe and effective in preventing dental caries in both children and adults. Water fluoridation benefits all residents served by community water supplies regardless of their social or economic status." " The ADA cannot be accused of venality in recommending fluoride. They stand to lose badly, when peoples teeth are healthier.

I was talking to my dentist a wee while ago. He had returned from practising in Queensland, Australia. That state does not permit fluridation of the water supply, while other Australian states do. According to my guy, Queensland is a dentists dream. Teeth are dreadful. Blackened, cavity filled, filled with infection, compared to New South Wales, for example. If you are concerned about your daughter's health, make sure she gets some fluoride; either from water, or toothpaste. The anti-fluoride lobby are NOT basing their information on good science. They selectively use information from tests, and discard the majority of the data that does not match their views. If you want the truth, as opposed to the dogma perpetrated by nutters, do a google search for the main dental organisations world wide, and get some proper science without the dogma.

Cthulhu. Computer climate models are, indeed, tested against the real world. And fail the test. So far, there is not a single computer model that can retroactively predict 20th Century climate change. For example : the 36 years cooling which began in 1940. Testing against 21st Century climate change will, of course, happen, but not for decades.

Cthulhu. I will cease to be skeptical when the proponents of the current paradigm meet the requirements of good science. That is; their hypothesis must be confirmed by solid, repeated, real world testing, and pass the falsifiability test. Computer models are not real world tests. Any other scientific idea must meet this standard. Why not the "anthropogenic greenhouse gas causes global warming" hypothesis? Incidentally, I am not alone in my skepticism. Plenty of climate scientists are leading the skeptics pathway. Try http://www.climatescience.org.nz

bjaminwood. You say evolution has only been observed within species? You clearly did not read my post. There have now been many examples of changes observed that lead to new species. My African cichlid example is one of the best. You claim no intermediate fossils. Sorry, there are literally thousands of examples of intermediate fossils. For example, we now know that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The first intermediate fossil was Archaeopteryx. This was clearly a dinosaur, but had feathers, including flight feathers very similar to those found on today's birds. Until recently, there was a big gap in the fossil record after Archaeopteryx. However, the opening up of China to the world led to studies of fossil beds there, and the discovery of a wealth of intermediate fossils, such as Confuciousornis, which had lost more dinosaur features and gained more bird. There are now at least 10 intermediate fossils between dinosaurs and birds, which show a clear path of evolution. This was all written up in a very nice Scientific American article a couple of years ago. The dinosaur to bird pathway is just one example. Intermediate fossils have been found for whales, horses, apes etc.

This is such a tired old argument. We have religious types trying to support outmoded means of thinking, versus science. Evolution is NOT a theory. It is a mainstream principle of modern science. It is as much a theory as the idea of atoms is a theory (people have photographed atoms with scanning tunnelling microscopes). It is as much a theory as the idea of germs as causes of infectious illness (and they have been seen in normal microscopes). Yes, evolution has been witnessed happening. In Africa, cichlid fishes, over a period of 100 years have been seen, and reported by teams of biologists, to evolve into different species. Fruit flies, in the laboratory, have been seen to evolve into different species. Bacteria, in the laboratory, have been seen to so evolve. Come on guys. If I hit you fair square in the eye, you end up with a black eye. Are you going to pretend it is mascara!!!! If we see evolution happening, are we going to call it accident? Get real!!! You wanna quote the bible? Let me quote : New English Bible. OEP 1961. Matthew : 27, 3 - 8 "When Judas the traitor saw that Jesus has been condemned, he was seized with remorse, and returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, "I have sinned" he said; "I have brought an innocent man to his death." But they said, " What is that to us? See that to yourself." So he threw the money down in the temple and left them, and went and hanged himself. Taking up the money, the chief priests argued : This cannot be put into the temple fund, it is blood money. So, after conferring, they used it to buy the Potters Field, as a burial place for foreigners. This explains the name 'Blood Acre' by which that field has been known ever since." Compare this to : Acts 1, Verse 18 to 20. "This Judas, be it noted, after buying a plot of land with the price of his villainy, fell forward on the ground, and burst open, so that his entrails poured out. this became known to everyone in Jerusalem, and they named the property in their own language Akeldama, which means Blood Acre." Now either Judas hanged himself, or fell and burst out his entrails. Not both!!! Clearly, the bible contrdicts itself. This is typical of the religious view. You can tell the same story several ways. No problem. The same 'double-think' works for opposing evolution. Face it. The bible is a load of $%#@!!!

YT. Vitamin A is essential to health. If you do not get enough in your food, you die. Full stop!! On the other hand, it is a very toxic chemical. If you made a meal of cooked polar bear liver, you would die. Polar bear liver contains heaps of vitamin A. If you eat it, you get too much vitamin A and you die of vitamin A toxicity. Fluoride is similar. It is a toxic chemical. if you consume too much, you die. On the other hand, like vitamin A, it is an essential nutrient. In this case, for your teeth. If you consume the right amount, it strengthens your teeth, and is 100% safe. The companies that make fluoride toothpaste are very aware of this principle. They are extraordinarily careful to make sure that the dose you get is healthy. Because, if not, they get sued for millions!

It's a wee bit difficult to say too much about life on other worlds when we have a sample of just one to go on. However, to extrapolate way beyond what I should, we arose in orbit around a third generation star. First and second are relatively deficient in heavier elements. Thus it is quite possible that life can appear only in third generation stellar systems. If so, we are looking at a maximum of about 6 to 8 billion years. Not the 14 billion that represents the age of the universe. If we look just at our Milky Way galaxy, the oldest stellar systems are about 2 billion years older than ours. These older ones make up about 10% of the galaxy. Thus, life could have arisen 2 billion years before it did on Earth. If it did, some should by now be super-beings. They should have visited the Earth (at 0.1c it takes 1 million years to cross the entire width of our galaxy, and 0.1c is theoretically possible). However, it appears they did not.

Prime-Evil The two sides of science are skepticism and testing. Testing is vital, and it must be thorough, rigorous, and based on real world studies. The current paradigm on global warming fails on this count. Computer models do not count as empirical tests. There are no thorough, rigorous, real world testing programs that demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between the global warming of the last 250 years, and human released greenhouse gases. I believe that my skepticism is fully justified. Doesn't prove I am right. But I am correct to question the paradigm.

Demosthenes. "Shooting waste into space." The answers are less clear than immediately obvious. First : Quantity. Total nuclear waste each year is hundreds of thousands of tonnes. Obviously not possible to lift all that into orbit, much less fling it into the sun or other safe repository. However, most of that waste is impurity. The actual tonnage of radio-active isotopes in that waste is a little over 100 tonnes per year. If it were practical and economic to purify it all here on Earth, and remove all the isotopes, leaving the rest purified, then it might be possible to lift 100 tonnes per year. Sadly, we currently lack the technology for that level of purification. Second : How to lift lots of mass into space. Again,current technology is inadequate. However, this may not always be the case. There is a team working on development of a carbon nanotube 'cable' into space. They CLAIM it will be done by 2018. I seriously doubt that. However, such a 'cable car' into space may be ready in a few more decades. The team recently built a one mile cable, which they lifted by balloon, one mile into the air. That is a long way from the approximately 80,000 kilometer cable they will eventually need, running vertically from the Earth into space. If and when it is actually done, we can predict we will have advanced maglev propulsion. At that point it would be feasible, at least in theory, to accelerate a mass of 100 tonnes or more over the full length of the cable, and fling it into space with no more cost that the electricity required. If the timing of the release was right, it would continue to a 'safe' destination, such as escape from the solar system entirely.

Swansont. We could end up arguing semantics here. I defined 'worst' as being those that have greatest short term radio-toxicity. True that long term isotopes have more 'long term' problems if we define long term as more than 20 years. However, they also cause less damage when well diluted, due to their smaller radio-emissions over a short period of time.

Disposing of nuclear waste is a political problem, not technical. There are already several quite acceptable methods available. The trouble is that agitators will not permit these methods to be used. For example : The worst isotopes in waste have short half lives (that is why they are so radio-active.). If nuclear waste is stored in a secure warehouse for 20 years, these short half life isotopes will then have decayed. What is left can be dissolved in acids and pumped into the ocean. The dilution factor is so immense that the remaining radio-active isotopes will almost immediately reach a concentration lower than that of the Uranium 235 naturally present. If this answer is considered unacceptable (politically) then all we need to do is dig a big enough hole in the right place and leave it there. Choosing the right place is the key. It should, ideally, be extremely arid, geologically very stable, and unpopulated. Australia has many ideal sites. South Africa ditto. Even some parts of Siberia are not too bad, though my first choice would be Australia. Again, the reason it is not happening is political; not technical or environmental. Agitators will not permit this to happen.

daneeka. Thank you for your Michael Crichton paper. I have seen it before, but had lost the reference. We all need to read that kind of criticism occasionally to get us back onto an even keel. I call myself skeptic. Not for no reason. People often fail to realise that skepticism is an absolutely VITAL part of science. If we do not treat everything with skepticism, the nutters will always win. Science, more than anything else, consists of being skeptical about ideas, and testing everything most rigorously.

Prime-Evil. It is all evolution. There is no such thing as devolution. Even a move to a simpler form is still evolution. As far as we can tell, after 200 years of serious research, all life began at the same time, and possibly from a single ancestral species, about 3 to 4.5 billion years ago. Every organism, even if described as 'primitive' has had the same period of time to evolve. Truly, there is no such thing as a 'primitive' life form. Even bacteria are enormously complex.

Prime-Evil. Don't know about non living material. However, certain viruses have now been associated with some psychiatric illnesses. I suspect that we are due to discover a large number of viruses that inhabit the human brain, and cause all sorts of interesting behavioural changes.

bascule. The degree to which global warming did or did not accelerate after 1920 (with increased greenhouse gases) is rather debatable. It largely depends on the methods used to measure warming. This is not as easy or as obvious as it appears, since gaining the signal out of an awful lot of noise is tricky. If you look at Professor Michael Mann's work, and his "hockey stick" graph, it looks as if there is no case to answer. Look a little closer and you see problems. 1. His upward surge in temperature begins about 1890, well before greenhouse gases start their major increase. 2. His upward surge in temperature coincides with a change in measurement technique. At that time, thermometers became more prevalent, and he uses direct temperature measurements from 1890. Before that, he uses primarily tree ring data. Most thermometer readings are carried out in cities, and as cities grow in size, they warm up, with a local micro-climate effect. I have seen records of temperature in rural areas, and they do not show the same upward surge in temperature. Just a more gentle rise. 3. Mann's graphs do NOT show the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm period. Glacier studies world wide show the Little Ice Age is real. If Mann's work fails to show it, we must treat his work as suspect. If you leave out Mann's work, or that of others who copied him, then there is no extraordinary temperature rise in the last 100 years. I would also ask you why, if human released greenhouse gases dominate global warming causes, that between 1940 and 1976, the world passed through a cooling period?

Prime-Evil. I have never argued that humans have no influence on global warming. Increasing carbon dioxide since 1920 could well be playing a significant role. My argument is more about the degree of ignorance we all suffer in relation to this subject. Your wikipedia reference is not much help, since it is just a summary of the process of deduction used to support the paradigm. I am not a great fan of deduction. It has been described as the best way of making gross errors with total confidence. I am far more interested in objective empirical evidence, which is seriously missing in the argument. Yes, heaps of evidence for both greenhouse gas increase since 1920, and for global warming since 1750. However, evidence to show one causing the other is weak. I have been following this debate for the last ten years. I read heaps of material on both sides of the argument. When I read articles supporting the greenhouse gas/global warming link, I look for their empirical evidence. So far, it is close to zilch. Instead, we get a barrage of predictions from computer models. I would have more confidence in computer models, except for a couple of points. 1. They have never successfully retro-actively predicted the climate change pattern of the 20th Century. They always exaggerate the warming trend, and they never predict the two cooling periods - one which lasted 36 years. 2. As pointed out in an international conference in 2003, current computer models cannot make allowances for changes in cloud cover. Yet cloud cover is actually a more potent determinant of global temperature than greenhouse gases. 3. Even the modellers themselves admit that computer climate models are unreliable. Since it is clear that at least one other potent factor, besides greenhouse gases, is at work, perhaps there are more. For example : How about this piece of speculation? The world warms up. The air takes up more water vapour (basic physics). More water means more clouds. More clouds mean more heat reflected into space. A cooling effect. The above is a classic negative feed-back mechanism which reduces the impact of an effect - in this case reducing global warming. Sure, this is just a piece of speculation, and could well be totally wrong. However, again my point is that we just do not know what is happening.

There was a very good article in Scientific American a year or 2 back. Try their web site. A simple search would give good results.

Retroviruses do not incorporate themselves in their entirety in the host's DNA. In fact, any incorporation is relatively rare, and consists of only a single piece of DNA. (Think of it as a single gene in size). If this is incorporated into a cell that becomes a gamete that then becomes a human, the retrovirus gene may be passed down through the generations. Since this has been happening, even if very rarely, over billions of years, the sum total that has accumulated is substantial. The term RETRO virus is due to the fact that it reverses the normal process. In our cells, DNA makes RNA which makes protein. The virus does not have DNA, only RNA. In our cells, when it infects, it makes DNA copies of its RNA. It is this DNA copy that can be incorporated.

Prime-Evil. You have quite missed the point, probably because you have adopted a false bit of data. No. Carbon dioxide did NOT start to increase in 1750. We have excellent data on carbon dioxide levels in the past. Air bubbles trapped in glaciers. There was a trivial increase from 1850 to 1920, and a relatively massive increase since. No greenhouse gas increase before 1920 is sufficient to explain the global warming that has been going on from 1750. This is a real problem for those pushing the current paradigm. However, if we look further into the past, we see that global temperature change is not unusual. In latter Roman times, there was a warming period. So much so that grapes were grown, and wine made in northern England (in fact, in York). York is currently too cold to do that today. Then came the Dark Ages, which represent a relatively cold period. The came the medieval warm period from 900 AD to 1400 AD. During this time, Nordic settlers occupied Greenland and grew 5 different crops. We cannot do that today, since it is still too cold. After 1400 AD many settlers died from crop failure, and the rest had to leave. The world went into the Little Ice Age, which ended with warming from 1750. 5000 years ago, temperatures reached 2 Deg. C more than today. By comparison, total global warming in the 20th Century averaged 0.6 Deg. C. During the last inter-glacial period, 120,000 years ago, temperatures reached 5 Deg. C. more than today. Go back further. In the Cretaceous, 10 Deg. C. more than today. To support the current paradigm, many people have claimed that the Medieval Warm period, and the Little Ice Age, etc., were only small scale local events. However, the total evidence for their global spread is rather massive. Now, let me make myself clear. I do not deny either global warming, or the effect of greenhouse gases. However, it is also clear to anyone who is not intellectually blind that this is not the whole story. The current era of global warming was kicked off by another factor, rather than human released greenhouse gases. This Factor X was rather powerful, and was probably either the same, or similar to whatever caused previous warming periods. Greenhouse gases may have played a part recently, but can only have been significant since the year 1920. Even since 1920, other factors have been present. From 1920 to 1940, greenhouse gases increased to a lesser degree than subsequent years. Yet temperatures increased till 1940, and then dropped, till 1976. This small scale global cooling occurred while greenhouse gases were increasing markedly. Another influence MUST have been at work. My skepticism is mostly aimed at the arrogance of those who believe they understand what is going on. The short answer is that we do NOT!

Due to time zone differences, I have been out of this for over 12 hours, and a lot of replies have come in. I am really replying to Herpguy's earlier posting. Herpguy. Sorry, but my facts are real. Yes, I have been to a glacier (in fact, many). The pattern is widespread. When a glacier moves forward (with increasing cold), it pushes a pile of rubble ahead of it. This includes many fragments of organic matter which can be carbon dated. When climate changes, and things start to get warmer, it leaves this large pile of rubble in place (now called the terminal moraine). By carbon dating lots of organic matter in this rubble, and using the youngest as the date, we can be pretty sure when the glacier started to retreat. ie when things began to warm up. By repeating this test in many places world wide, we get global warming beginning about the year 1750. Admittedly, if a different method of measuring temperature (eg tree rings) is used, we get weird differences in results. This allows people to 'select' their science to suit their politics. Greenhouse gas in the atmosphere suffers no ambiguity at all. The results are very clear cut. Before 1920, there was very little change. From then, there was a major change. We are still faced with the incongruity that global warming began in 1750 and greenhouse gases in 1920. No-one has yet given the explanation. If greenhouse gas increase causes global warming, the increase MUST come before the warming.