Warming Down, or Chilling Up?

Do we need to increase our footprints and warm up globally, to prevent record cold temps from arriving even faster?

Twenty years ago today, James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Energy Committee — in a room kept intentionally warm by committee staff — that the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests was already perceptibly influencing Earth’s climate.

Then, as now, Dr. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was pushing beyond what many of his colleagues in climatology were willing to say — at least publicly.

His critics show few signs of ever accommodating the ideas he now presses, which include a prompt moratorium on new coal-burning power plants until they can capture and store carbon dioxide and a rising tax on fuels contributing greenhouse-gas emissions, with the revenue passed back directly to citizens, avoiding the complexities of “cap and trade” bills. Andrew C. Revkin NYTimes Science

Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming to redistribute wealth.

On Monday, one of Gore's leading scientific resources, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate. Noel Sheppard (Bio) NewsBusters

The "inconvenient truth" Al Gore wanted us to believe, which some people still believe, in spite of the mounting evidence of record low temps, and in spite of science that says those carbons and other pollutants in the atmosphere are keeping out the sun rather than trapping it inside, must be his worst nightmare: the hell he predicted is not going to burn us after all. It may freeze some of us. We may be in a minor ice age even as you read this.

"Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age," says the website Winningreen. "What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended."

This is a map of the "Ocean thermohaline conveyor system that transports warm, salty waters into the North Atlantic, tempering the climate of Northern Europe. If the conveyor should collapse on its return loop near Greenland and Iceland, Britain's climate could resemble Labrador." The next paragraph shows how that might happen.

"Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different," says the website Alex Jones' Prison Planet. "Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades." [emphasis added]

Both sides say the sky is falling. How can both sides be right? "[S]cientists and officials involved in the intensifying international debate on how to deal with global warming say it has taken the United States far too long to put the issue front and center..." But which side is the "issue"? As President Obama put it in his innaugation speech, "science will be restored to its right place" and will be evidence-supported.

Who is to determine which side has the backing of the evidence since it seems to be politically "correct" for the left to claim we are undergoing "global warming", yet other evidence which is not compiled by politically correct scientists says North America is cooling fast enough to put us into the next ice before I die.

If we follow the politics of Al Gore and James Hansen, we risk, if they are wrong, bringing on the next ice age even sooner. This current winter season and the season of '07-'08 set records for low temperatures and snowfall.

What if the act of increasing our carbon footprints staves off the ice age until we can put scientific evidence that is not contradictory to proper use?

China, which has increased its footprint 1000 fold over the last decade has record winters. The U.S. which has reduced slightly its own footprint, has also had record winters, and the average annual temperatures here have been measured as dropping. So do we need to decrease our footprints and warm up globally, or increase our footprints to prevent those record cold temps from coming even faster?

Or, are the choices actually to do the contrary of one of those actions: decrease our footprints and chill down (since the left claims we are warming); or increase our footprints to chill down since the other scientists claim the carbons are keeping the heat out?

"Evidence driven" scientific policies are not made in a vacuum. The policies are specifically metaphysical in nature. And metaphysical policies of the government are political. Whoever wins this "evidence driven" policy debate will probably never know which side is correct.

If we are actually experiencing global warming while at the same time experiencing the onset of the next ice age, everything we do to prevent warming will cause us to freeze that much faster.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Understanding: Islamicism; Militant Feminism

From Act for America

Once again we have witnessed an Islamic terrorist attack incited and justified through appeals to Islam by its perpetrators. On one level it is understandable why so many in the West are unwilling or unable to connect the militant ideology of political Islam to the thousands of Islamic terror attacks that have been committed worldwide since 9/11. We extol the virtues of tolerance and pluralism and believe others in the world do so as well, so it is easy to dismiss such attacks as the work of a few “extremists,” rather than the product of adherence to an ideology.

The fatal flaw in this thinking is this: How can we successfully win a war on Islamic terrorism if we don’t correctly define the threat doctrine that motivates its adherents?

It is argued that most of the world’s Muslims are not terrorists. While true, this fact is irrelevant. Most of the world’s Muslims have never read the Qur’an or the Hadith in a language they can understand. They have not read the hundreds of passages that call for jihad against infidels, nor do they renounce such passages. They do not organize en masse to denounce the terrorist acts perpetrated by other Muslims in the name of Islam, nor do they denounce the frequent exhortations to world subjugation found in the holy books of Islam.

Yes, there are Muslims who have denounced the Mumbai attacks. But examine their denunciations closely and you will be hard-pressed to find renunciations of the supremacist doctrine of political Islam -- the foundation for jihad -- which emanates from its holy books. This is the justification commonly cited by terrorists for their actions. We in the West must come to grips with the uncomfortable fact that terrorism is a symptom of this militant, supremacist ideology.

Terrorism is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

And it is but one of many means used by those who are devoted to the supremacist ideology of political Islam. [all emphases added]

From Pacific Research Institute

by Sally C. Pipes, President and CEO

The national election has finally passed, thankfully without any mandate for 50-50 gender representation of the kind favored by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Susan Pinker, author of "The Sexual Paradox", [wrote] on the ability to make choices as “one of the benefits of living in a postfeminist Western democracy.” Does this mean that facts and common sense have finally prevailed against militant feminism, and that we can all celebrate the victory and get on with our lives? If a recent math controversy is any indication, the answer is no.

Last summer, a study of more than seven million students from grades 2-11, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Science, said that boys and girls perform equally well in math. At least, that is how the story was brokered to the public.

In her story on the study, Wendy Hansen of the Los Angeles Times could not resist taking a swing at Larry Summers, who as president of Harvard reportedly said that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses. Mr. Summers didn’t exactly say that, though it is true. As Susan Pinker has pointed out, there are more male geniuses, and also more male idiots. Male dominance of the idiot ranks, which can be easily verified in politics, does not appear to bother feminists in the slightest.

On the other coast, Tamar Lewin of the New York Times had Larry Summers questioning women’s intrinsic ability. He didn’t actually question it, however, but only suggested it was something to consider for further study. As for Tamar Lewin’s portrayal of the new study, she had boys and girls in a dead heat in the math competition. As the headline put it, “No Gap for Girls.” The results of the study are a bit more nuanced than that, as Heather MacDonald pointed out so clearly in City Journal.

Boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, she noted, but boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. That also squares with Susan Pinker’s observation on genius, but not with Tamar Lewin’s contention that in every category girls did as well as boys. They didn’t.

“This statement is simply wrong,” Heather MacDonald wrote, pointing out that among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile. Furthermore, among mathematically gifted adolescents, between five and 10 times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs. So why the misleading report?

Since boys and girls perform the same in math, the reasoning goes, any gender imbalance in a math, science, or engineering department, any “underrepresentation,” in other words, can only be due to bias and discrimination. That’s where they are going with the skewed reports. Every workplace, according to the dogma, should break down 50-50 between men and women. If not, it’s all due to stereotypes and prejudice, to be remedied, of course, by government action. We have already noted that the Title IX troops are leading a surge aimed at math and engineering departments.

The study published in Science has some valuable lessons, but not the ones touted by Tamar Lewin. “Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges,” says Heather MacDonald, “the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.”

With careful scholars such as Louann Brizendine, Susan Pinker, and Christina Hoff Sommers, there is now much more that feminists can refuse to acknowledge. Excuse me if I call this feminaticism: the persistent refusal to acknowledge any science or reality that raises doubts about feminist dogma, and the pursuit of misguided public policies based on those dogmas, even when discredited.

As Heather MacDonald also pointed out, the Wall Street Journal got the story right on the math study, that average scores are similar but that boys predominate at the margins. The author was Keith J. Winstein, so maybe men are also better at journalism about math. Feminaticism, however, seems to have eager advocates in the prestige press, as well as the academy and the legislature. That means, alas, that we can’t relax or take anything for granted, even in a post-feminist Western democracy where women enjoy boundless choices.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/