Most people who disagree with the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming have their doubts about official temperature record collection. But unless you are really following the issue closely, it might be hard for you to find peer-reviewed papers that question the majority view. Let’s take a look at some recent peer-reviewed papers that will help skeptics make their case.

This article is from the Epoch Times. They sometimes hide their articles behind paywalls, but this out is available to all. Just in case, I found an archive of it.

It says:

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

[…]Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

I already know about that problem of measuring stations being located in areas of high ambient heat, like busy streets, industrial areas, solar panel farms, etc. But I had not heard about homogenization.

I looked up homogenization, and it’s referring to the need to remove the impact of “non-climatic changes” on the temperature data. That could be changes caused by changing sensor technology, moving the weather station, or other factors unrelated to climate.

The article says:

For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.

That was an interesting point. So, the warming would be actually caused by increased heat from cars, buildings, Sun reflections, etc. as the sensor got surrounded by civilization. It’s readings would change, but not because of changes in the climate.

But there’s a problem with the way that scientists have been adjusting the raw data:

Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.

But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.

“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.

Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.

Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.

One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.

He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.

“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”

This is “very bizarre,” he said.

“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.

These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.

Because NOAA doesn’t maintain historical information on its weather stations, the CERES scientists reached out to European scientists who had been compiling the data for the stations that they oversee.

They found that just 17 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were consistently applied. And less than 20 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were clearly associated with a documented change to the station observations.

“When we looked under the hood, we found that there was a hamster running in a wheel instead of an engine,” Mr. Connolly said. “It seems that with these homogenization programs, it is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.”

For me, that is the take home lesson for the whole article.

Well, how much of a difference do these problems make for climate change models?

It’s a huge problem:

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

I waited a few days to blog this article, so that I could check up on the studies. Here is one, and here is another. There are a lot of authors on these studies, and they are from good journals: Climate and Atmosphere. The authors are from a variety of academic institutions from different countries, like Germany, Ireland, Hungary, Austria, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands.

If you like to debate climate change like I do, then you might want to bookmark this article. To me, this is another new, peer-reviewed piece of evidence that argues against the catastrophic man-made global warming view. And we have to be guided by evidence.

Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA.  Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.

I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly from over at Evolution News. Günter writes an article about fossils every Friday (he calls it “Fossil Friday”).

Here’s last Friday’s article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.

He writes:

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.

Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.

Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:

• The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
• The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
• The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
• The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
• The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
• The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
• Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
• The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
• The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.

Günter concludes:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. I blogged on it so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.

A lot of Christians today seem to think that it’s a good idea to deal with the DEI crowd with “compassion”. Instead of laying out standards of merit, and asking everyone to measure up, they want to give special carve out benefits to certain victim groups. But are people who take out student loans for non-STEM degrees really victims? Are people who claim victimhood good people?

Take a look at this story from the New York Post:

From approximately January 2017 to September 2021, [Barbara Furlow-Smiles] “led diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook and was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives, operations, and engagement programs,” prosecutors said.

[…]Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, set up fake business deals, invoices and events — including a Juneteenth celebration — to line her own pockets, the Justice Department said.

[…]To cover her tracks, the disgraced DEI officer submitted fake expense reports claiming her associates had performed work for Facebook, such as providing swag or marketing services.

[…]Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty in December to the wire fraud scheme, which saw her take more than $4.9 million from Facebook before bilking a six-figure amount from Nike “to fund a luxury lifestyle in California, Georgia, and Oregon,” the DOJ said.

This part was interesting, because the virtue of accountability is the exact opposite of the victimhood of the woke secular leftists:

[Facebook] claimed her “crimes also resulted in anguish amongst those employees that worked closely with her,” while Nike said her “complete lack of accountability or remorse was incredibly disappointing,” according to sentencing memos obtained by CNBC.

[…]When she was fired from Facebook, Furlow-Smiles “carelessly continued her fraudulent schemes at Nike, thinking she was untouchable,” said Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta.

I talk to a lot of men who are struggling in the current dating environment. And their number one complaint about the secular left young women they encounter is a complete lack of accountability. Young women don’t want to be judged, and they don’t want to face consequences for their poor choices. They want to make decisions in the moment, based on feelings, and then play the victim to get out of the consequences further down the road.

Facebook and Nike are known to be far-left companies. So it’s not surprising that they declined to respond to requests for comments. But I hope that other companies begin to realize the risks and costs of hiring people on the woke secular left, who have absolutely zero foundation for morality. And you should be careful about trusting them, too.