July 2019 : Proslogion

Data Indicate That Earth Was Warmer in The Middle Ages

Inferred temperatures for Antarctica as a Whole over the past 1500 years.
(graph from study being discussed)

For some time, climatologists have accepted the fact that from about the year AD 1000 to AD 1200, the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was unusually warm. In fact, most studies indicate that it was warmer than it is today. This period of warm temperatures has been referred to as the “Medieval Warm Period,” the “Medieval Climate Anomaly,” or the “Medieval Climate Optimum.” A few hundred years later, the Northern Hemisphere experienced cooler-than-normal temperatures, and that part of earth’s history is sometimes called the “Little Ice Age.” Many climatologists argue that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were limited to the Northern Hemisphere. However, a series of studies indicate that these periods of extreme temperatures were experienced worldwide.

I just recently became aware of these studies because the latest one appeared in my news feed. This study used the results of climate proxy data from 60 different sites. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it refers to data that scientists use to attempt to understand climate conditions of the past. Tree rings, for example, are sensitive to temperature and precipitation, so it is thought that we can use them to determine past climate conditions of the region where trees have been growing. Many climate-sensitive things like recorded harvests, coral growth, pollen grains, etc. can be used as climate proxies. The more climate proxies you have for a given region, the more likely you are to be able to determine the local climate conditions over the times for which you have those data.

As I said, the study used proxy data from 60 different sites to reconstruct the temperature of Antarctica over the past 1500 years. The overall graph from the study is given above. As you can see, according to the study, Antarctica was significantly warmer from AD 500 until AD 1250 than it is today. The pink region is the time over which the Northern Hemisphere experienced the Medieval Warm Period, and as you can see, the study’s data indicate that Antarctica was experiencing warmer-than-average temperatures as well. You can also see that those temperatures then fell over the next 750 years or so, producing colder-than-average temperatures. Thus, Antarctica seems to have experienced both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

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How I Address the Age of the Earth in My Courses

My publisher has been getting several questions about how I address the age of the earth in my science courses. This probably stems from the fact that there is a lot of misinformation going through the homeschooling community regarding my position on the issue. I thought I would try to clear things up with a post.

First, my position on the age of the earth hasn’t changed in more than thirty years. I turned from atheism to Christianity in my late high school years, and at that time, I was happy to believe what my teachers told me about the age of the earth. It was more than four billion years old. I was told that we knew this because of radiometric dating methods, which involved studying the relative amounts of radioactive atoms in rocks and fossils. This “fact” of science was later reinforced when I went to university, so I was still happy to believe it.

Then I started my Ph.D. program in nuclear chemistry. I learned about radioactive decay in detail and started doing experiments with nuclear reactions. Most of my work was done at the University of Rochester Nuclear Structure Research Lab, which also had a group that did radiometric dating. I never did any of that work myself, but I watched them do their experiments, asked them questions, listened to their presentations at the lab, etc. Based on what I learned there, I decided that I couldn’t put much faith in the ages given by radiometric dating.

This caused me to question the age of the earth from a scientific perspective. Theologically, I wasn’t committed to any age for the earth. Certainly the most straightforward interpretation of Genesis is that the universe and all it contains was created in six solar days, and that leads to a young-earth view. At the same time, however, there were early church Fathers (as well as ancient Jewish theologians) who didn’t interpret the days in Genesis that way. So I attempted to investigate the subject with an open mind. I found that in my view, science makes a lot more sense if the earth is thousands of years old rather than billions of years old, so I started believing in a young earth. The more I have studied science, the more convinced I have become that the earth is only thousands of years old.

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In This Case, the Journal Science is Holding Back the Progress of Science

Sometimes, scientific journals hold back the progress of science.

***Please note that while political beliefs are mentioned in this post, it is NOT a political post and political commentary will NOT be approved.***

Science is supposed to be self-correcting. The history of science is full of mistakes, but over time, those mistakes are usually found, and the findings are communicated to the scientific community so that the mistakes no longer influence scientific thinking. Unfortunately, one of the main ways that findings are communicated is through scientific journals, and there are times when scientific journals are not interesting in correcting mistakes, especially when those mistakes reflect badly on the journal’s reputation. I recently ran across a story that illustrates this point.

Back in 2008, the most prestigious scientific journal in the United States, the journal Science, published a study that attempted to understand the root causes of political beliefs. They exposed several participants to images and sounds designed to evoke fear and correlated the participants’ response to their political beliefs. Based on their results, the authors concluded:

…individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

In other words, if you are prone to fear, you are more likely to be a conservative. If not, you are more likely to be a liberal.

The study was ground-breaking, and it has strongly influenced scientific research in the field. Indeed, at the time of this posting, the study has been referenced in 257 subsequent studies. There’s only one problem. It probably isn’t correct. How do we know? Because some researchers who were initially interested in expanding on the results of the study began doing some experiments, but the experiments didn’t seem to support the conclusions of the 2008 study. In an attempt to see what they were doing wrong, the researchers contacted the authors of the 2008 study so that they could replicate their methodology. They weren’t trying to demonstrate that the 2008 study was wrong. In fact, they were trying to use its methodology to “calibrate” their study so that they could get consistent results.

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MIT Professor Writes About Her Conversion from Atheism to Christianity

Rosalind Picard is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also a Fellow with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which is one of the highest honors that an engineer can receive. She even invented an entire branch of computer science called affective computing. She is obviously an incredibly smart woman who is a very successful in her field. She is also a Christian.

Several months ago, one of my readers on Facebook sent me an article Dr. Picard wrote. It describes her journey from atheism to Christianity, and I loved reading it. I really wanted to write about it as soon as I had finished reading, but every time I had a chance to blog, there was something else that I thought I needed to cover. Then I forgot about it. I was probably distracted by something shiny. That happens a lot. Recently, I was reminded of her story, so I want to share it, because in many ways, it is a lot like my own.

Of course, the best way to read her story is to just click on the link above, but I will add a bit of my own “color commentary,” just because I relate to so much of what she has written. For example, aside from the grade school part (it was junior high for me), the first paragraph of her story could have been written by me:

As early as grade school, when I was a voracious reader and a straight-A student, I identified with being smart. And I believed smart people didn’t need religion. As a result, I declared myself an atheist and dismissed people who believed in God as uneducated.

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More Global Warming Nonsense

One reason the public doesn’t take “climate change” (the disaster previously known as global warming) seriously is because the media report on it so stupidly. Essentially, any bad thing that happens in the world is due to climate change. Consider, for example, the Great Lakes. Their depths started to decline noticeably in the year 2000. In 2007, New Scientist ran a story entitled:

Global warming is shrinking the Great Lakes

This, of course, is exactly what you would think global warming would do. Increased temperatures should increase evaporation rates, causing lake water levels to drop.

Fast forward to today, when the Great Lakes are at record high levels. What could be causing this? Climate change, of course! As PhysicsWorld puts it:

So, what has changed and why have water levels fluctuated so wildly in less than 10 years? Drew Gronewold and Richard Rood of the University of Michigan argue that climate change has disrupted the balance between evaporation and precipitation in the Great Lakes region.

Of course, when one looks at the data (compiled by the NOAA), one sees that there has been no recent “wild fluctuations” in the levels of the Great Lakes. Their levels have varied over the past 100 years, but the variation has not become “wilder” in recent years:

Now I don’t think most people take the time to look at data like those I presented above. However, they do notice desperation when they see it. When the media take great pains to find ways to blame everything on climate change, it is natural for most rational people to start questioning whether or not it is causing anything.

Soft Tissue Showdown

Soft tissue structures in a dinosaur bone that the authors interpret as biofilms left by modern bacteria (image from study being discussed)

Since Dr. Mary Schweitzer shocked the paleontological community with her discovery of what appears to be soft tissue in a dinosaur fossil, scientists rushed to find more examples of such soft tissue in fossils that are thought to be many millions of years old. They were apparently successful (see here, here, here, here, and here, and here).

Reactions to these finds follow one of three schools of thought. Some in the scientific community (like myself) beleive that the soft tissue is from the creatures that made the fossils and is therefore evidence that the fossils are not millions of years old, since there is no plausible mechanism by which soft tissue can stay soft that long. Some believe that the soft tissue is from the creatures that made the fossils and are seeking a means by which it could stay soft for millions of years. So far, those attempts have not been successful (see here, here, and here). The rest accept the seemingly obvious fact that soft tissue cannot possibly stay soft for millions of years and therefore argue that the soft tissue that has been found cannot be from the creatures that made the fossils. The results of a recent study at least partially support the view of those in the third camp.

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