Steven Goddard at Real Science:
Climate Alarmists Have A 97% Failure Rate
Now that the Arctic sea ice scam has collapsed, as far as I can tell every single Hansen et al alarmist prediction has failed miserably. This is by far the biggest junk science incident in history.
Ten years from now, people like John Cook will be publishing fake papers claiming that scientists never believed in global warming. It was all media driven, but scientists always knew that solar activity drives the climate.
Actually, Darwinism is the biggest junk science incident in history, but who's quibbling. The Darwinian prediction that most of the genome is junk DNA has impeded molecular genetics research for decades and squandered countless millions of research dollars. Only recently have leading researchers and journals come to admit that the Darwinian prediction was spectacularly wrong.
Eugenics was Darwinism's lethal spawn, and America's earliest plague of science apocalypticism. With "natural selection" hindered by modern compassion and public health, Darwinists insisted that we must cull "defectives" in order to save mankind from degeneration. "Excepting the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed" Darwin explained. Based entirely on the Darwinian understanding of human origins, we sterilized 60,000 people against their will in the U.S.. The Germans took Darwin's warning even more seriously.
But if you're talking about mere lethality, no junk science has killed as many people as pesticide hysteria-- at least 60 million people have died unnecessarily of malaria and other insect-borne plagues because of pesticide bans imposed by rich countries on poor countries due to anti-pesticide junk science.
Well, actually, overpopulation hysteria is probably mankind's biggest junk science killer, even more lethal than pesticide hysteria and eugenics. At least 200 million babies-- mostly in China and India-- have been aborted or killed at birth because of population control junk science, and 100 million-- 100 million-- girls and women missing in Asia. The rape epidemic in India likely traces in substantial part to the large population imbalance between women and men. If you're a girl in India, and population control doesn't get you killed in the womb or dumped in a gutter at birth, it gets you raped when you grow up.
Science apocalypticism is modern man's most lethal plague. Global warming is merely the most publicly refuted modern junk science, and the only one that's entertaining.
It all pales in comparison to the immense horrors inflicted on mankind by the genocidal pedophiles that have run the Roman Catholic Church for 2000 years.
ReplyDelete^ What's this? The foul abuser of a noble name is making moral assertions ... never mind the precise lack of facticity of the secondary premises of his "argument".
DeleteTroi is like that pink Energizer bunny with the cymbals. He has one note.
DeleteI'm thinking more like the monkey with cymbals in T(r)oy Story III.
DeleteAwwww, Ilion, King of the stupid. Good to see ya!
DeleteHoo
Such a short thread. So many lies.
ReplyDeleteCreationists love telling lies. They think that their lies, no matter how blatant, will be forgiven in the mythical afterlife.
Junk DNA wasn't a prediction of Darwinism. It was an explanation of an observation. That species, even very similar species, varied so widely in the size of the genome. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs. The marbled lungfish 40 times as much, 130 billion base pairs. The singlecelled protozoan Ameba dubia 650 billion base pairs.
ENCODE didn't show that at least 80% of the human genome is functional as Wells in your link and Stephen Meyer in 'Darwin's Doubt' claimed. It was actually between 20 and 80%, using a definition of functional so liberal that being transcribed at least once in a cell counts as functional.
It's probably going to be closer to 20%.
The concept of junk DNA didn't delay science. The human genome was read when the technology had advanced sufficiently, and even then it cost a billion dollars.
A lot of the human genome is still junk. The tens of thousands of broken pseudogenes. The 800,000 or so SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms),...
The quote from Darwin 'the Descent of Man' has been brutally butchered, leaving out entire clauses and sentences. The next paragraph read 'the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without determination in the noblest part of our nature'. And it goes on and on, clearly making plain that Darwin wouldn't approve of eugenics.
And 'DDT hysteria' didn't kill 60 million. Malaria experts in the '50s thought that a rigorous program of mosquito control and aggressive treatment of human malaria cases could eradicate malaria within 4 years. So Congress funded a 4 year program (not including subsaharan Africa) in 1959, which ran out in 1963. Perhaps because they thought that it had succeeded. Perhaps because they knew it had failed. Anyway. The developing countries continued to use DDT in huge amounts in agriculture.
The jury's still out on global warming and overpopulation. If we are lucky, in 2050 the global population will be 9 billion. Even without global warming concerns, we are still going to have to expand our energy supplies enormously, just to give the current 'have-nots' a decent standard of living.
Our current energy supplies include 90 million barrels of oil a day, supplying a quarter of energy needs. We probably need to double this - where is it to come from? And anyway, oil is a very valuable resource - the origin of our pesticides and fertilizers which made the Green Revolution possible in feeding today's global population - almost.
bach:
DeleteCharacteristically, you quoted Darwin in a deceptive way. The sentence that follows your quote: "We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak
surviving and propagating their kind..."
Darwin did indeed argue that morally the genetically strong were obligated to help the genetically weak. But he lamented it, and argued strongly for the eugenic principle (he acknowledges Galton as his source) that differential reproduction of the weak is a bad thing for man.
That is the desiderata of eugenics. In fact, Darwin's sympathy for the genetically weak was shared by many eugenicists. In the US, eugenics called for sterilization, rather than extermination, of the weak. Sterilization was believed to be more humane.
Darwin was obviously a eugenicist. His views reflected those of mainstream eugenics rather well. His theory gave rise to eugenics.
Bach,
Delete"Creationists love telling lies."
Excuse me? Maybe we should all be marched off to camps, lying bastards we are, eh? Remarkably bigoted, Bach.
"They think that their lies, no matter how blatant, will be forgiven in the mythical afterlife."
Actually, we're the ones who believe in JUDGEMENT and the consequences of physical life on our eternal soul.
As for the comments on junk DNA, you cannot save that argument. It's doomed. The functionality of DNA is far more so than predicted by Darwinian models; the prediction FAILED and those of the teleological theories like ID were proven correct.
Try being a little more scientific and a little less scienistic and maybe those results will begin to carry meaning...as will everything else.
PS
DeleteCongratulations on the win down there, Bach! Welcome back to the world of the sane. Maybe the school kids sandwiches will get eaten now instead of tossed at the PM.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/conservative-leader-abbott-expected-win-australian-election-polls-022037221.html
crus: "As for the comments on junk DNA, you cannot save that argument. It's doomed. The functionality of DNA is far more so than predicted by Darwinian models; the prediction FAILED and those of the teleological theories like ID were proven correct. "
Deletecrus, this is wrong on several levels.
(1) There is still plenty of junk DNA. As bach mentioned, ENCODE didn't turn up evidence of functionality for 80 percent of the genome, only that much of it is transcribed. Transcription does not mean functionality.
(2) Darwin's theory rules out junk DNA. What isn't functional and carries a penalty for just being there should be eliminated by natural selection. This is why Ohno was surprised to observe that there is "so much junk in our genome." It is consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which adds, among other things, neutral evolution by genetic drift.
(3) ID does not make any specific prediction about junk DNA. When pressed, ID advocates would say vaguely that more than half DNA should be functional. Well, if 51 percent is functional and 49 is junk, that's still a lot of junk. ID was never meant to be science. It's an apologetics tool, and anyone who thinks otherwise can buy a bridge in Brooklyn from me.
Hoo
Hoo,
Delete1) Transcription is indicative of a function, even if latent or unknown. The screws I carry in my pocket have no function yet, but they are not without function and will serve a purpose. I carry them in my pocket for future use.
2) Darwin's theory should have been scuttled by the very discovery of DNA. Darwin himself suggested that. A language of information transcription is not quite 'protoplasm' is it?
3) ID is all over the place on it's predictions. Some of the work I am familiar with predicted years before Encode's results were released that the 'junk' DNA meme was BS and would increasingly be shown to be so. In this I DO indeed have faith in scientific proof, if not so much the researchers themselves who quite naturally defend the dogma they are entrenched in.
crus,
Delete1) No, transcription does not indicate function. It indicates, well, transcription. If you are interested in seeing how professional biologists view the ENCODE publicity stunt, read ENCODE (2012) vs. Comings (1972) by T. Ryan Gregory (U. Guelph).
2) Darwin's theory wasn't "scuttled" by the discovery of the genetic mechanism. As long as parents transfer their phenotype to offspring mostly intact, but with small deviations, Darwin's idea of natural variation and selection works. You can see this in other areas of science. Chemistry was not invalidated by the advent of atomic physics or quantum mechanics. It was only strengthened by them.
3) If ID is "all over the place" in its predictions then it has no predictive power.
Hoo
Michael,
DeleteI didn't 'characteristically' misquote Darwin. I just got tired of typing a long extract. I did indicate where the quote can be found, and readers can go there and read it for themselves and make their own minds up.
Your 'quote' was ruthlessly butchered, leaving out words and clauses and pasting together fragments to give a deceptive misquote. Deliberately so. Extremely dishonestly. What I expect from creationists.
This is a gem:
ReplyDeleteMost of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
--- Paul Ehrlich
But I must admit, Egnor, my favorite quantitative apocalypticians are the Peak Oil boys. It's one thing to predict revenge of an angry Gaia while standing over a mysterious sample of tree ring cores with a bone in your nose and a Magic Hockey Stick in your hand, but the Peak Oil boys got mattamatics and cackalations out the wazoo. Here's a sample from my collection:
* 2011 - WikiLeaks reveals that Peak [O]il, or the point when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction has been reached and is about to enter terminal decline, is no longer the fringe theory it was just 10 years ago.
* 2009 - The chief economist of the International Energy Agency says the world is running out of oil.
* 1997 – Oil analyst Colin Campbell predicts peak production imminent.
* 1980 – Jimmah Carter's Energy Secretary James Schlesinger announces "future is bleak” and likely to grow bleaker due to oil shortages.
* 1972 – The Club of Rome (who knew they even had a Club?) estimated that only 550 billion barrels of oil remained in the earth.
* 1969 – According to estimates, the state of Oklahoma had 125 million barrels of oil left in the ground.
My personal favorite, however, is this one:
* 1874 – Pennsylvania State Geologist predicts U.S. has only four year oil supply remaining.
But wait!
Oil shale deposits in the Green River Formation are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.
------- A.K. Mittal, GAO Director, Natural Resources and Environment (2012)
Oops.
Georgie,
Delete'May be recoverable' does not mean 'will be recoverable'. The world will never run out of oil. Most of it will be inaccessible, too expensive to recover or requiring more energy to recover than it actually yields. Green River will probably fall into one of the last two groups.
Even if it is tapped, it will require fracking of immense scale, producing relatively small volumes per day. If we require 90 million barrels of oil a day, a total which has been difficult to supply (one of the reasons for invading Iraq) and demand increases by even a modest 10 million barrels a day, even adding an optimistic 5 million barrels a day from Green River isn't going to help much.
The oil price will skyrocket, and it will be the GFC all over again.
blinkfast, you have no idea where Green River will fall in. Your memory demons are just inserting old scripts into the meat between your ears. And, as you must know, the "GFC" wasn't caused by oil or gas, it was caused (in the US) by Progressive housing policy.
DeleteYou blatter on and on about science, but it seems the only science you know anything about involves Just-So stories about dinosaurs and invisible gorillas.
When I was teaching and consulting on Boston's Route 128 technology corridor in the 80's, there were snorks like you running around predicting that the new digital military telecommunications and guidance systems "would never work" in the field. Ask Saddam Hussein.
Never discount human ingenuity.
Admiral:
DeleteWe should have a contest as to which science apocalypse is most amusing. It's a close race!
In a manner of speaking, it's a "dead heat".
DeleteGeorgie,
DeleteI know that the Green River is roughly in the vicinity of Colorado.
The GFC did have something to do with the price of petrol. A book recommendation - Matt Taibbi's 'Griftopia'. Even if it's fiction (which I doubt) it is extremely entertaining, managing to attack conservatives and progressives (including Obamacare) alike. It's extremely funny.
The spike in petrol price (due to a speculative bubble, not problems with supply/demand) was the final nail in the finances of people who had mortgages they shouldn't have got in a grossly inflated speculative housing market. There was fraud in the way mortgage brokers managed to get mortgages for people who couldn't afford them in a market that was overpriced.
The price of oil has to go up, with an increasing population and the developing world with its burgeoning middle class wanting a better life. Demand will increase. The supplies of conventional oil are depleting.
Agreed - ingenuity will allow us to tap new sources of oil. But will in be fast enough and in sufficient volumes to overcome supply/demand constraints? The Green River shale oil requires aggressive fracking - heating the kerogen deposits, leaving it for a few years, then recovering it. The technology hasn't been proven, so whether it's feasible is uncertain. It takes energy to get energy. In the Middle East - one barrel of oil to get 20. Shale oil - probably one barrel to get 5 (or less), which is marginal.
Our affluence depends on having cheap abundant energy. And that's not going to last.
Egnor: "Eugenics was Darwinism's lethal spawn."
ReplyDeleteIn the same way as firebombing of Dresden was a lethal spawn of Newtonian mechanics and chemistry. Knowledge can be used for the good and bad.
Hoo
Hoo,
DeleteI wholeheartedly agree with you on this. It is the application of the science that is what is evil.
However, I would still not let the racist, eugenicist AUTHORS of the theory off the hook simply because they were not the ones manning the gas chambers or sterilizing the 'idiots' and homosexuals. The science of evolution has some very nasty baggage and it has been there since day one, and should be handled with great care. Newton did not suggest human breeding programs, his work was abstraction taken to that point.
In the world of theory, evolution should be treated like a loaded firearm and not handed out to children as a toy.
You know, one of the first images I can recall seeing of the Darwinian model was a 'tree of life' at a Museum in my native Britain. On it the 'negroe' sat next to the Orangutans.
Crusader Rex,
DeleteThe 'tree of life' was a 19th century concept of evolution, with the idea that evolution was 'directed' in some way, with eventual goals in mind. Egnor's idea of teleological evolution in fact, proposed over a century ago by such palaeontologists such as Henry Osborn (who was also a eugenist).
The 'tree of life' is now a very bushy shrub with lots of short branches, twigs and leafs, representing species. All are equally good, and whether they survive or not depending on contingent factors, such as changing climate.
Anyway - science informs us that there are no human races. There's more genetic variation in a 'race' than there is between 'races'.
The news in Australia this weekend isn't all bad. Collingwood got knocked of the AFL grand finals by a South Australian team (hooray!). And a local team, Fremantle, against all expectations, defeated Geelong at Geelong's home ground (where they're virtually unbeatable) to get an armchair ride into the Grand Final. And avoiding a preliminary final against Hawthorn, the strongest team in the competition.
Here' my take on Science apocalypticism:
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/BB0aFPXr4n4
Enjoy!
Pépé,
DeleteYou don't have enough brains to have a 'take'. You've managed to get this George Carlin video 180 degrees wrong. It's not a matter of 'saving the Earth'. It's a matter of saving us, our species.
Did you miss the part where he said that humans are just another species, and like all species will eventually go extinct? An evolutionary deadend.
Not that we should be trying to accelerate the process.
You're an idiot. Unless you meant to disagree with the video?
backward, does it hurt when you laugh? Would certainly explain why you're so obtuse!
Deletebackward, O Obtuse One, here is a very simple explanation of the AGW hoax:
Deletehttp://youtu.be/2cNodIDkiTw