Article: Tibetans didn't get their genetic advantage from Homo sapiens

Article: Here’s Why Tibetans Can Live Comfortably At Crazy-High Altitudes

Researchers have discovered they [Tibetan] share a gene with our hominid cousin the Denisovans, who went extinct some 40,000 years ago...

Known as EPAS1, the gene allows Tibetans to absorb scarce oxygen without creating extra red blood cells—something the rest of us mortals must deal with at altitude...

Another example of microevolution. A mating, or several, transferred the gene to the human population of the Tibetan Plateau. The gene then spread through the population because it conferred an advantage to those bearing it.

Students prefer jolt of pain than being made to sit and think

Article: Shocking but true: students prefer jolt of pain than being made to sit and think

This is interesting on all kinds of levels.

They did not explore what was motivating the people who shocked themselves, but did throw out some ideas: sensation/novelty seeking, boredom, curiosity, etc.

The self-shocking was spun as preferring punishment rather than boredom, but the shocks were so small as to be hardly called pain.

I teach. This is obviously true.

People do not know how to be silent or why. This is a general issue. However, I think the younger generation has very little experience with silence. I grew up in a time and place without constant music or TV or radio. I was "alone with my thoughts" a lot. It was and remains a very comfortable place for me.

Practicing silence and being alone with oneself is a disciple.

Additionally, I have learned a couple of different types of Christian meditation. Mostly, they involve being quiet before the Lord, letting my mind loose on a scripture verse or about Jesus.

CS Lewis, quoting George MacDonald in Screwtape Letter #22.

Heaven: 'the region where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence'. Lewis goes on to add that Hell is the kingdom of noise.

Stewardship and Global Warming

I linked one of the posts below on Facebook and attracted many comments. This post is a "comment on the comments."

Please read the entire passage below, whatever your position with regard to global warming, climate change, or politics. The passage is from page 5 of “The Vision of the Anointed,” By Thomas Sowell (1995).

The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields--from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them: 

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government [emphasis added] to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uniformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes. 

I am not going to comment on any specific comments in the global warming thread.

However, I want to grab one word, stewardship, and talk about it.

Christians (should) see stewardship first in terms of the actions of the individual before God, secondarily in terms of the actions of others, including government.

The "anointed" (and the people that can be called that could be on the left or right hand side of the political spectrum) see stewardship in terms of government action.

Almost all of the ways that have been proposed for dealing with the global warming/climate change are government regulations, laws, and policies. As Mao observed: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Ultimately, all government policies are backed by force. [Did you know that the EPA has its own SWAT team? And has deployed it?]

Both governments and individuals can be good and bad stewards. A significant difference is that the individual is actually more flexible and able to change than the government. Government policies that don't work or have disastrous, unintended consequences will go on for years, as long as there is a constituency for it. And once money is involved, there is a constituency and they will go on.

Farm subsidies were established to help poor farmers. However, at one point, one of the largest recipients of farm subsidies was a billionaire, Ted Turner, founder of CNN.

Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the US, advocates high "death taxes." Of course he does. His company, BerkshireHathaway, sells investment instruments to wealthy people that allow them to avoid or reduce death taxes. He personally profits from high death taxes.

The first action of the newly established EPA was to reject scientific findings and do the politically correct and politically expedient thing. The unintended consequence of the total ban on DDT was the deaths of millions of people, worldwide, mostly children, due to malaria. This policy is still in effect 45 years later.

In our country, stewardship works best when the government engages in mostly an educational role, with some regulation. Excellent examples of this include tobacco smoking and soil conservation. This pathway takes time and forces the "anointed" to trust ordinary human beings (AKA, "voters" and "American citizens"), but also means that the government will never reach 100% compliance. But total compliance can only be expected under a dictatorship, and not achieved, even then.

Note: While working on this, I ran across this posted on National Review Online:

For decades, progressives [the left's version of the "anointed"] have used the battle over climate change as a proxy for a broader war about culture and ideology. Whether they’re demanding cap-and-trade schemes, plotting ways to plan the entire energy economy, or trying to order entire classes of power plants out of existence by government fiat, progressives consistently forward schemes designed to enlarge the size of government and squelch the freedoms of private enterprise. It’s time to respond.

Conservatives should address climate change. And they can do it without giving up a single conservative principle.

July 1936 or July 2012. Which is the hottest July in the US history?

NOAA’s temperature control knob for the past, the present, and maybe the future – July 1936 now hottest month again

 Two years ago during the scorching summer of 2012, July 1936 lost its place on the leaderboard and July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the United States. Now, as if by magic, and according to NOAA’s own data, July 1936 is now the hottest month on record again. The past, present, and future all seems to be “adjustable” in NOAA’s world.

The article also includes two maps of Kansas. One for the temperatures of July, 1936 and one for July, 2012. The maps include two temperature readings for each weather station: the raw data and the adjusted data.

The temperatures for 1936 are mostly adjusted down. The temperatures for 2012 are mostly adjusted up.

No explanation has ever been given by the scientists or the agencies involved as to why the temperatures are adjusted in the first place.

It is not necessary to be a global warming denialist to realize that fraud is being committed. The unadjusted data alone is good enough to make the case that there has been warming over the last 150 years. Why is necessary to lie about it?

For example, we now know that this article posted on the ScienceDaily website, written by NOAA, is lying about the July data:

July 2012 marked hottest month on record for contiguous U.S.

And why do we always get press releases about the hottest events, but not the coolest?

"Noisy Science," DDT, and Global Warming

Article: How the EPA's empire-building got in the way of its science

The founding of the EPA, and the first major decision by its first administrator. DDT was found to be safe by a long series of scientific studies, but was banned for political reasons. [see also: The Lies of Rachel Carson]

I accept the idea that DDT causes eggshell thinning in raptors. However, that was due to indiscriminate spraying. Malaria can be controlled in third world countries by spraying the walls and floors of homes. There, it is stable and does not migrate into the water supply and thence into the food chains leading to the top raptors.

However, because the USA completely banned DDT, so did everyone else. That is the basis for the charge in this article (and elsewhere) that the DDT ban in the US has caused millions of deaths world-wide.

Skin color, microevolution, and dehydration.

Article: In human evolution, changes in skin's barrier set northern Europeans apart

An example of microevolution.

It has already been hypothesized that the pale skin of Europeans is due to a natural selection-driven need for vitamin D. More UV-B can be absorbed by paler skin, producing more vitamin D synthesis.

The authors of this article add that paler skin in Europeans may also be due to mutations which reduce the ability of skin to conserve water and prevent dehydration. That is, Europeans have a reduced need to conserve water compared to their African ancestors.

Yet, there was an evolutionary tradeoff for these barrier-weakening [...] mutations, Elias said. Mutation bearers have a tendency for very dry skin, and are vulnerable to atopic dermatitis, asthma and food allergies. But these diseases have appeared only recently, and did not become a problem until humans began to live in densely populated urban environments, Elias said.

Some Global Warming / Climate Change Links

Article: Updated Global Temperature: No global warming for 17 years, 6 months – (No Warming for 210 Months)

This was published in March of this year.  A person may object to the website. A person may object to the author. However, the data is from NASA's satellite. You can read the article if you want the technical details. The graph shows the temperature spiking in 1998, due to an "El Nino" event. And no increase since then. 

Yes, May was supposedly the hottest on record. I have read that in various places, but have not found it any "official" publication or in any graphs. This past winter was supposed to be the coldest in North America since 1985. Both of these reflect the weather, not the climate.

When I first taught about weather in high school, "climate" was the 30-year, rolling average of the weather. I have seen mostly 15-year averages more recently. In any case, a single year's weather is the weather. A single weather event (snowstorm, hurricane, tornado) are weather events. Neither are climate.

Article: Pessimistic Predictions: Global Temperature Changes (Published in 2013).

This graph is similar to the one in the article above, except that this graph contrasts the earth's surface temperature to the various predictions from the IPCC.

I am working on a post that spends more time exploring the following idea. The computer models used by the IPCC are, scientifically speaking, the experiment. The hypothesis the model is trying to prove is the collection of assumptions and predictions that make the particular hypothesis for each model.

Because the models have failed to match reality, scientists say that the "hypothesis has been falsified." That is, they have been shown to be false. Now that does not mean global warming has not occurred over the last 150 years. It is just that the models currently used fail to reflect reality. One article I read about, says the following: [Quoting an article in German (in Der Spiegel)]

"Climate models had never expected the pause: Only 3 of 114 climate simulations were able to reproduce the trend of the past years, the IPCC [link in German] concludes in its latest report. The reason for the deviation between models and observations is unclear.”

In other words, about 3% of all global warming simulations made predictions that reflect reality. The rest have been falsified.

Article: U.S. Meets Kyoto Emissions Targets Without Trying: Emissions from energy consumption at lowest level since 1994

The US is the only country in the world that has met the fabled Kyoto Treaty's emissions target. This is partly due to increasing energy efficiency. However, it is mostly due to switching to cheaper natural gas. Natural gas releases less carbon dioxide than coal. And natural gas is cheaper due to increased supplies due to fracking. (I have paid my "dues" for those two sentences.)

So, reduced carbon dioxide emissions and more fracking? Or, as most environmentalists advocate, less fracking? And, therefore, more emissions.

Article: Al Gore, soothsayer: Ice caps are still there, and hurricanes haven’t blown us away (Published December, 2013)

The article notes that Al Gore predicted in December 2008 that the all Arctic ice would be gone in 5 years. It is now 2013 and we have same amount of ice in 2013 that we had in 2008. And "the total today is within 5 percent of what it has been for the past 30 years."

He was wrong about Arctic ice, wrong about polar bears, wrong about more and more powerful hurricanes, wrong about how much the seas will rise, and (see above) wrong about how much temperatures would rise in the last 17 years.

Before you wave your hand and say that Al Gore is just a blowhard, consider the following.

He won the votes of 51,000,000 Americans to be president in 2000.

His documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was seen by at least 10,000,000 people in the theaters alone (based on gross receipts).

Fifty thousand copies were made available for schools in the US alone, and made part of the curriculum in many western countries. My eldest daughter had three different teachers show it to her in a single school year.

He went, based on a variety of revenue streams snd most of them related to his advocacy, from being worth a few million (7 figures) in 2000 to being worth in the hundreds of millions. (He is so wealthy, that he has had to deny that he is a "carbon billionaire.")

He is rich, powerful, famous, and persistent. People listen to him, even if is a "reverse Cassandra" (that is everyone believes him, but he is rarely right, at least in his major predictions).

And yet, he is the mostly widely recognized "expert" on global warming and climate change in the world.