And Another Thing…

A couple days ago I posted on a recent article in the UK Telegraph proclaiming “2008 Was the Year Man-Made Global Warming was Disproved.”

I’ve been dwelling on this for these few days and I have some thoughts to drop here on this post. I’m no scientist, heck, I can barely keep up with the gurus of smart that fill the pages of dying dinosaur newspapers spouting opinions (disguised as news) about the state of our climate and how all of us common folk need to get rid of our big cars, air conditioners and Christmas lights and start living in caves to save the world.

However, I do have something that I would like to share with anyone that might stumble upon this post- common sense.

Our lives and our world exist in the physical realm of time and space. And that existence is made up of, I would argue even built upon, cycles. The seconds pass and make up minutes. The minutes pass and make up hours. And so on. While one could argue that the length of time passing and the names for those increments are man-made, it really doesn’t matter. They add up to a couple cycles that are most certainly not man-made… the day and the year.

So much of our existence is based on the day and the year. The day, the time it takes the earth to rotate on it's axis provides regular times of day and night, times for working, eating and sleeping. The days add up to a year- the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun. So much of our existence, our sense of time, and our collective memories, knowledge and experiences are based on the sun. The sun is where it’s at. The source of our heat and light, keeping us warm, growing our food, providing energy and the very foundation of life, and time itself through the constantly repeating cycles.

It’s no wonder that man has marked the passage of time by the repeating seasons and “movement” of the sun across the sky.

But it seems that somehow the little human population down here thinks that the year is the ultimate cycle. The clock re-set. We see all the little cycles inside the year. With hours passing we see tides change, with days passing we see work and rest cycles, and with weeks and months we see all sorts of cycles within our bodies and in the world around us including harvesting cycles, lunar and heavenly body cycles, even women’s bodies enduring their monthly cycles.

And with each passing year we see and feel the world changing, including the climate, all within the repeating cycle of the seasons within a year. Here in Nashville we see temperature swings of over 120 degrees. From 10 below in the depth of winter, to 110 degrees in the hell of August. But no one’s freaking out about that climate change, are they? Why? Because we know it’s a cycle. We have lived enough years to know that on the coldest day in winter when the sun seems to have permanently disappeared behind thick clouds and ice covers the ground where we need to grow food that all will be ok. Summer is coming. The world is not ending.

Isn’t it also, then, logical to assume that there might, maybe, possibly, be a cycle beyond a year? Perhaps 5 or 1o years? What about 100? Or 1,000 years? If we mark a day as the time the earth rotates, and a year by our trip around the sun, what about the time it takes us to rotate around the center of the milky way? Might some galactic cycles impact the sun and its heat?

What if the earth has heating and cooling cycles that last 100 or 500 years and we’re in the middle of one now (by the way, it looks like we might be in a COOLING cycle rather than a warming cycle)?

Let’s look at the housefly. A disgusting little creature that has a life span of about 7-10 days. During a year, taking out 3 months for winter, there might be as many as 25 generations of flies in and around your house. Those same 25 generations in the human world would take about 1,000 years.

Now imagine if flies could think and talk. By about late September or early October panic starts to make its way through the fly community. Word is that the days are getting shorter and the air seems to be getting colder in the morning and evenings. As far back as anyone can remember (even going back a dozen generations or more), no fly has had to worry about cold. There’s always been plenty of warm sunlight to warm plenty of large manure piles, proving plenty of fun and nourishment for all the brother, sister and cousin flies. What they can't possibly know is that even though winter will soon arrive ending those warm summer days, the spring will arrive again, and after that, summer. The cycle will continue, and the flies need not worry about cutting down on their flight times or trying other silly tactics to save the world from climate change.

Greenland was once, well, green. Mountain caves once sealed under ice and snow for generations and now exposed due to “global warming” show signs of ancient dwellers. The cycles continue, the world moves on, and each of our lives are but a flash in the pan.

"Have you not been paying attention? Have you not been listening? Haven't you heard these stories all your life? Don't you understand the foundation of all things? God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas— yes, like a tent canvas to live under. He ignores what all the princes say and do. The rulers of the earth count for nothing. Princes and rulers don't amount to much. Like seeds barely rooted, just sprouted, They shrivel when God blows on them. Like flecks of chaff, they're gone with the wind." Isaiah 40:21 from The Message

How Insignifcant Man Is

Love this article from the UK Telegraph. I've touched on the topic of man made global warming before (here, here, here, here, and here), and am a firm non-believer. A warming athiest so to speak. The news keeps rolling in, doing far more damage to the globabl cultist than that silly Darwin has ever done to dislodge what we are hard-wired to know- there is a God.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations made it possible for the latest "metric martyr", the east London market trader Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council's vindictive decision to prosecute her on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling produce "by the bowl" (to avoid using weights her customers dislike and don't understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into total disarray.

Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other original "martyrs" who were found guilty in 2002 – after a legal battle also made possible by this column's readers – of breaking laws so ridiculous that the EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute book).

Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith, whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling it to account for needlessly risking soldiers' lives by sending them into battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith's determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006, has at last become a national cause celebre.

May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008 – so many that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year.

Faith In Wormholes

A couple days ago I wrote about a movie our family watched- The Last Mimzy. While the movie was fun, the absolute best part in my opinion was listening to the gobblygook a scientist and a psychologist rattled on about in the bonus content. I thought I would share with you their amazingly cognizant and wise words. Welcome to the Church of Wack.

Wormholes
Brian Greene
Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University

“I wish that it would turn out that we can manipulate space and time and be able to travel to the past. That would be a truly wonderful thing to accomplish, a little dangerous perhaps, but truly wonderful. The people who’ve thought about time travel, have in some sense, developed wormholes as the most likely contender for a means of realizing time travel if it is possible at all.

So first of all, what is a wormhole? A wormhole is a tunnel through space that allows you to go from one point in the universe to another through a short-cut, just like a tunnel through a mountain. Some very clever scientists realized that if you have one of these tunnels in space, and you move the openings relative to each other, then something spectacular may happen.

The wormhole may not just be a short-cut from one point in space to another point in space, it may be a short-cut from one moment in time to another moment in time. You may be able to pass right through from the future to the past, or from the past to the future- that’s the basic idea.

So, it could be the case, some suggest, that you start in our universe, go into a black hole, go right down to the center, pass through a wormhole-type passageway, and wind up in another universe. A totally hypothetical idea- an interesting and fascinating one. The problem is that when we study them in more detail, keeping a wormhole open is a very difficult thing to accomplish. And People have tried to invoke quantum mechanics to help stabilize a wormhole, to keep it open long enough so for instance somebody might pass through it. But the calculations indicate that its very hard to make these objects stable. They want to collapse on themselves.

So it seems to be the case that if you had a wormhole it wouldn’t stay open long enough to keep it particularly interesting. That’s one of the main problems.

The other thing more seriously to bear in mind is no one knows how you build a wormhole. The mathematics show that a wormhole might exist fully formed somewhere in the universe, but if you told me “build a wormhole right here, because I want to go from this point to this point” I wouldn’t know how to do it. That’s something that’s way beyond our technological capacity, and that also is a big problem in trying to realize these scenarios.

If, and it’s a real big if, we could show that wormholes do exist, and if, another big if, we could show that they would stay open in a way that would allow safe passage, and if, ANOTHER big if, we could manipulate a wormhole and move the opening relative to one another, then we might in fact create something akin to a time machine.

Whether those scenarios will ever come to pass- that’s an interesting question that in many cases is hard to answer.”

Brilliant.






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My Chevy Suburban Is A Prius Offset

Someone out there has bought a Prius in order to save the world. I hope they don’t get too happy…my Chevy Suburban Z71 is offsetting their lowered carbon footprint with a heap of good old fashioned CO and CO2 output.

I don’t mean to turn this blog into a global warming tirade, it’s just that this Live Earth poop that’s all the rage is driving me crazy. There is simply no scientific proof that global warming is due to man. Period. While there is some scientific data that shows global temperatures have risen a half-degree or so (Celsius) in the last 50 plus years, but it has been far, far warmer in the past than it is now. And that is a fact that is simply irrefutable. And yet the world didn’t end. I’m sick of hearing that there is a consensus among scientists that man is causing global warming. There can be no such thing. Science is one of two things- proven scientific fact that can be argued by no one (examples include gravity, the fact the earth circles the sun, that the earth is round, etc), or a theory that is in the process of being proven or disproved. Man-made global warming is a theory, and one suffering more and more hits to its veracity every day.

There is a wonderful film online worth watching that I encourage anyone reading this to watch. Its called The Great Global Warming Swindle, and should be watched alongside Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to get a good look at both sides of the argument. Isn’t that the best way to do it? To listen to all arguments and weigh the evidence in order to make up your own mind? Check it out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566





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Who Are We That You Are Mindful Of Us?

This past Sunday we FINALLY made it back to church. It’s been a long stream of illnesses, problems, trips and other issues that have kept us from going to church for more than a month.

Our pastor, Rick White, did not preach this week. Instead Ken Davis delivered the message. It started off a bit slow for me. Didn’t seem that compelling. But then the evidence of our insignificance in the universe started snowballing. By the end of the message I truly, for the first time, really understood mankind’s absolute smallness and insignificance when contrasted against all of creation- the known and unknown.

Except for one thing that lifts us up above all that was created- our value to God.

I hope you have some time to watch this.

mms://72.22.74.59/7-1-07






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New Study Leaves Me Speechless

Perusing through the news last night I found this gem: “Women talk three times as much as men, says study.” I imagine Fiona Macrae, a writer for the UK’s Daily Mail, delivered this to her editor with a straight face truly believing she was reporting the news.

Meanwhile, 50% of the worlds population- the men- (well...maybe more like 48% or so if you catch my drift) see the report as just another 700+ time-consuming words thrown around about something they already know. Time wasted that could be better put to use watching sports or hanging out in the workshop (or for me, playing Battlefield 2 on the PC).

The key findings from the study:

• Women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.
• Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices.
• Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born.
  

Dr. Luan Brizendine gathered the data from this new study to put forth her findings in a new book titled 'The Female Brain.' My favorite quote from the “news” story is this from Dr. Brizendine:

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road."

Love it. So true, and apparently, so newsworthy to the good doctor from San Francisco. As I read the “news” story it became clear that this book and the findings in it mark a huge change in Luan’s life. She seems to have turned over a new leaf- pledging it seems to now favor truth over political correctness. She admits this clearly in her next quote:

"I know it is not politically correct to say this but I've been torn for years between my politics and what science is telling us. I believe women actually perceive the world differently from men.”

Torn for years between "my politics" and what science is telling us? Hmmm. I wonder how many other scientists and doctors in her field, or in other fields of study, have the same problem?

Perhaps after Dr. Brizendine uttered these words to the reporter, she remembered that soon after the publication of the “news” story, she would have to hang out with her female friends for drinks and deal with glaring evil stares and 10-20,000 words worth of bile. She quickly redeemed herself by throwing out a bit of reverse-sexist red-meat:

Fiona Macrae writes “Dr Brizendine explains that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain in men involved in hearing - allowing them to become "deaf" to the most logical of arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.”

Hilarious.

So here’s how it boils down for me personally. My wife talks way more than I do. I do not listen very well. I have a hard time talking about what is going on inside my head and heart. That is why I started this blog. I am able to sit here and drink coffee, listen to music and pour out thoughts and ideas (and I guess feelings or emotions of some kind- but I hate admit that) without having to say a single word.

Later the same day my wife reads my blog and voilà- we are communicating!

Michelle- if you are counting- please include the 1000-1500 words per day from this blog to my normal 7,000 or so spoken words. That is somewhere around a 14.29% - 21.42% increase over the norm. Progress!