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The Trend Is Not Good for Global Warming Advocates

A graph showing Global Climate Model predictions compared to surface temperatures (click for credit).
The Economist recently ran a story highlighting the fact that the Global Climate Model (GCM) predictions upon which most of the fear of global warming is based are not doing well when compared to measured surface temperatures over the past few years. I found the story to be surprisingly balanced and full of a lot of good thoughts. I strongly recommend that you read it if you can find the time, because it gives you a great idea of how little we know about climate science. I don’t want to rehash the article, but I do want to add some thoughts of my own.

If you look at the graph above (which is from the article), you will see the GCM predictions most recently cited by Global Warming advocates. The dark cyan areas represent what the GCMs predict with a certainty of 75%, and the lighter areas represent what the GCMs predict with a certainty of 95%. As you can see, the measured surface temperatures (given by the dark line) are not behaving as predicted for the past several years. In fact, they have already strayed out of the 75% certain predictions and are poised to stray out of the 95% certain predictions. This, of course, is discussed in the article. What is not discussed is that the graph is rather misleading.

If you look at the graph from 1950 to the present day, you will see remarkable agreement between the GCM “predictions” and the measured data. However, prior to 2001, none of those “predictions” are actual predictions. They are a retrospective fit to the already-known data. You see, the GCMs are so oversimplified that they contain all sorts of “fudge factors.” Those fudge factors are varied to produce as much agreement as possible between the known data and the GCMs. Since the GCM predictions shown in that graph were produced for the IPCC report issued in 2007, they represent work done after the IPCC report issued in 2001. As a result, the data that appear on the graph prior to 2002 were all known when the work was started on the 2007 report. This means that all agreement between the “predictions” and the data prior to 2002 say nothing about the ability of the GCMs. It only tells you how well the fudge factors could be varied to agree with the known data.

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The 2013 Midwest Homeschool Convention (and abiotic oil)

I spent this past weekend speaking at the 2013 Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. The crowds were huge, and there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst both the attendees and the speakers. It seems to me that this convention was much like the conventions I remember from ten years ago: lots of enthusiastic homeschoolers listening and talking to lots of enthusiastic speakers about the joys, troubles, and triumphs of home education. It was wonderful.

I spoke a total of seven times on six different subjects. Two of my talks were given with Diana Waring, and I enjoyed them the most. She and I have different styles that seem to complement each other really well. As she puts it, I provide the “analytics,” and she provides the “warm fuzzies.” I am not sure that’s exactly right, but it’s probably close. We gave the same talks in Greenville, SC, and we will be doing them again in Springfield, Missouri and Kissimmee, Florida.

As is typically the case, the most interesting part of the conference for me was interacting with the attendees. I had a rather constant stream of parents and students coming to my booth to talk with me. Many of them asked questions, and I hope my answers provided some help. Others came by just to report on how they (or their children) were doing with my courses. I was really impressed to meet one young lady who had completed all of my textbooks! I have authored or co-authored eight texts, and most students get through five of them. Some complete six, and a very few manage to cover seven, but this young lady had gotten through all eight of them. As a result, she has already taken the equivalent of a year of university-level biology, a year of university-level chemistry, and a year of university-level physics. That’s pretty impressive!

I take questions from the audience in all of my talks, and at the end of one of my evolution-related talks, a man asked a question about abiotic oil. He had read a book by Dr. Thomas Gold entitled The Deep Hot Biosphere, which tries to make the case that both oil and coal are not fossil fuels. In other words, they are not produced by decaying dead things. Instead, they are produced by chemical processes in the earth and simply reworked by living organisms. I read that book many years ago, and while it is definitely worth reading (even today), I personally think that it really overstates the case.

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Another Study Estimates Minimal Risk from the Fukushima Disaster

A protestor at the anti-nuclear demonstration in Paris on March 20, 2011. The demonstration was sparked by the Fukushima disaster (Click for credit)
On March 11th of 2011, an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean produced a tsunami that devastated parts of Japan. According to the Japanese National Police agency, at least 15,870 people died in the disaster, and an additional 6,114 were injured. Over 2,000 people were still missing as of September 12, 2012.1 In addition, the tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As a result, approximately 900,000 terabecquerels of radiation was released into the surroundings. To give you a sense of what that means, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred in 1986 spewed an estimated 5.2 million terabecquerels into the surroundings.2 So while the radiation released in the Fukushima disaster was bad, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened at Chernobyl.

Of course, the total amount of radiation released isn’t the entire picture. After all, the Chernobyl area wasn’t nearly as densely populated as Japan. So while the Fukushima disaster released less radiation, that smaller amount of radiation could have a larger effect, given the fact that there were so many people who could have been exposed to it. Last year, a study was published in the Journal Energy & Environmental Science, and it indicated that the increased cancer risks caused by the Fukushima disaster would be minimal. Since cancer is the most common long-term consequence of radiation exposure, the report seemed to indicate that the long-term consequences of the disaster would be small.

A new study was recently published by the World Heath Organization (WHO). The authors of the previous study were not involved in this study, and the methodology of the new study is different from that of the previous one. As a result, it seems to me that this is a truly independent assessment compared to the previous one. However, the conclusions are roughly the same.

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Another Easter Drama

Easter Sunday is a big deal at my church. This is fitting, of course, since Easter is the most important holiday in Christendom. As 1Corinthians 15:14 reminds us:

and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.

Because we want to make Easter Sunday worship special, we put a lot of work into all parts of the service. This year, I was once again asked to write a short drama to communicate some truth about Easter. Below the fold, you will find the script of what we ended up performing.

Before you read the script, I want you to know three things. First, feel free to use this script in any way that helps you provide a meaningful experience for your fellow Christians. I would appreciate a credit, but the script is not copyrighted in any way. Second, I have only three or four original ideas when it comes to drama, so I tend to recycle them quite a bit. If you remember my previous Easter drama, you will find the basic premise and even the final line to be essentially the same. Nevertheless, I do think the drama presents a profound truth about Easter in a meaningful way. I hope you agree. Finally, this script was made significantly better with the help of Diana Waring. Without her help, the ending would not have been nearly as effective.

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Coral Can Call for Help

This broad-barred goby is one of the species that responds to a coral's call for help (click for credit)

Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that I am fascinated by the mutualism that seems to be all over creation. You can seem some of my previous posts about this topic here, here, here, here, and here. I recently came across a study that provides another example of mutualism in one of favorite habitats: a coral reef. As an amateur scuba diver, I spend a lot of time enjoying the wonders of coral reefs, and the more we study their biology, the more amazed I am at the interconnectedness that exists among their inhabitants.

The authors of the study were trying to understand how a very common species of coral, Acropora nasuta, protects itself against the toxic seaweed Chlorodesmis fastigiata. This particular seaweed attempts to take over a coral reef by producing chemicals that harm the coral. The chemicals reduce the coral’s ability to grow and feed, allowing the seaweed to “muscle in” on the coral’s turf. When the seaweed is completely successful, it chokes out the coral, forming a shrubby thicket where the coral once was.

As the authors note, previous studies have already shown that overfished coral reefs are more likely to be taken over by such seaweed, so they wondered if perhaps the fish that live in the coral reefs provide some sort of protection for the coral. They found that certain species of goby (particularly the broad-barred goby, Gobiodon histrio, and the redhead goby, Paragobiodon echinocephalus) do, indeed, protect the coral from the seaweed, but the process by which this happens is rather surprising.

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Soft Bone Tissue in a Triceratops Fossil

A triceratops skull like the one from which the horn in the study came. (click for credit)
These are exciting times to be a creationist! Ever since Dr. Mary Schweitzer first demonstrated the existence of soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that is supposed to be 65 million years old,1 soft tissue is turning up in all sorts of supposedly ancient fossils (see here, here, here, and here for more information). The latest example comes from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, which is supposed to be about 65 million years old, so the fossil is assumed to be that old as well.

The fossil in question is a horn from a Triceratops horridus specimen. After it was collected, it broke in several places, indicating that the fossil had been fractured. Since the fossil was broken, the authors of the study decided to get rid of the “hard parts” of the fossil to see if there was anything soft inside. To do this, they soaked the horn in a weak acid for a month.

As the acid ate away at the minerals that formed the horn, the authors found strips of light brown, soft tissue remaining. Now this soft stuff could be from all manner of things, so the authors decided to do a microscopic study of the tissue, and what they found was was exactly what you would expect to see if you examined the tissue from the bone of a recently deceased animal!2

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Does Natural Selection Weed Out Harmful Mutations?

A model of the influenza virus (Public Domain Image)
It is generally assumed by evolutionists that natural selection tends to “weed out” harmful mutations. After all, if a mutation is harmful to an organism, that organism will be less fit to survive and less likely to pass on that mutation to its progeny. While this idea makes perfect sense, it is not clear how effective natural selection can be at its job.

In his book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, award-wining geneticist and young-earth creationist Dr. John C. Sanford argues that most mutations simply don’t produce a strong enough effect to influence natural selection. As a result, organisms continue to build up deleterious mutations as time goes on. This leads to an erosion of the genome. As he puts it:1

While selection is essential for slowing down degeneration, no form of selection can actually halt it. I do not relish the thought, any more than I relish the thought that all people must die. The extinction of the human genome appears to be just as certain and deterministic as the extinction of stars, the death of organisms, and the heat death of the universe. (emphasis his)

While he quotes a lot of experimental research to support his findings, he has never been able to demonstrate this effect directly…until now. He obviously hasn’t shown that the human genome is deteriorating, but last year he and young-earth creationist Dr. Robert W. Carter published (in a standard, peer-reviewed journal) the results of some of their research, which directly demonstrate that even when natural selection is working hard, it doesn’t seem to do a good job of getting rid of harmful mutations.

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Another Study that Confirms Homeschool Graduates Outperform Their Peers in College

A happy graduate (Click for credit)

Last week, I spoke at the Great Homeschool Convention in Greenville, South Carolina. It was very well attended, and other than a fire alarm that interrupted one of my talks, it ran really smoothly. I gave two brand-new talks at this convention, and they were both done with Diana Waring, whose high school history curriculum is truly wonderful.

One of these new talks was on the myths that you find in textbooks. It started off with the myth that ancient people thought the earth was flat. There is simply no truth to such an absurd idea. As early as 200 BC, natural philosophers knew the circumference of the earth, and the earliest Christian writers who mention the shape of the earth (such as Basil of Caesarea – c. 330-379) mention the spherical shape of the earth as an accepted fact. No one thought that Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the earth. His problems getting funding involved people not thinking he could carry enough supplies to make a voyage all the way around the earth. The other talk was based on a study by Dr. Harold McCurdy, which I have already discussed here.

While the talks I gave were enjoyable, as usual, the most interesting thing that happened occurred as a result of someone asking me a question. One of the solo talks I gave was called Why Homeschool Through High School. As a part of that talk, I discuss studies in which homeschool graduates are compared to graduates of traditional schools when it comes to their performance in college. Not surprisingly, the homeschooled students do much better in college than their traditionally-schooled peers.

After the talk, a homeschooling parent who is also a college professor asked me a very interesting question. He asked me if any study had attempted to measure not the performance of homeschool graduates at the college level, but instead the preparation that homeschool graduates have when they arrive at college. After all, he said, a student can perform well at the college level even when he is unprepared, as long as he has the ability to learn on his own. I told him that the studies I had seen focused on performance, but I would take another look at the literature and see what I could find.

Well, it turns out that such a study has been done. It is a PhD dissertation, which is why I hadn’t seen it in the academic literature. It was done by a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and it at least partially addresses the question that the homeschooling parent asked.

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The Appendix Is Now So Important That It Supposedly Evolved Many Different Times!

This medical image shows the appendix coming from the large intestine. (Click for credit)
The appendix is a tube-like structure that extends from the cecum, a small pouch that forms the beginning of the large intestine. In the medical image on the left, you can see it because it is filled with a contrast medium, as is the large intestine. For a long, long time, evolutionists have told us that the appendix is useless. It is a leftover vestige from when our ancestors depended heavily on vegetation for food. We have evolved out of such dietary needs, and as a result, we don’t need an appendix anymore. So the appendix we have today is just a shriveled remnant of what used to be a large, complex cecum in our ancestors. Here is how the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defined the appendix in 2008:1

BODY PART: 1 (plural appendixes) a small tube-shaped part which is joined to the INTESTINES on the right side of the body and has no use in humans
[emphasis in original]

Of course, anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows what the scientific evidence actually says: The appendix is not useless in any way. As a recent study tells us:2

Substantial evidence supports the view that the cecal appendix is an immune structure primarily functioning as a safe-house for beneficial bacteria, and comes from a range of disciplines, including medicine, epidemiology, immunology, and microbiology.

In order to salvage what they can, most evolutionists who know about the recent evidence now admit that the appendix has function, but they still insist that it is vestigial. They argue that the appendix evolved this new function once the old function was no longer needed.

At least some evolutionists, however, are more interested in what the data actually say. The authors of the study in reference (2) have looked at the data and have come to the conclusion that the appendix is not vestigial in any way. Instead, it is so important that it has evolved independently at least 32 separate times throughout the course of mammalian evolution!

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