Tag Archives: Science

News

New study finds that cosmic rays and the sun cause global warming

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Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?
Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?

From the Financial Post.

Excerpt:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

[…]Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

Well, this is no surprise to me. We’ve KNOWN that the planet was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. We’ve KNOWN that the surface temperatures on Mars increased when ours was increasing.

Why do secular socialists have to insist on believing what they want to believe against the scientific evidence, and then lie to everyone else, using taxpayer money? If they want to propagate their myths, why do they have to get the government involved? Why can’t they just have a global warming church and go to that, and leave government to serious people who don’t believe in myths and superstitions?

We really need to get leftist ideology out of the business of government. I don’t mind if they want to teach their flat-Earth myths to each other with their own money, but why do I have to pay for it?

If you are curious about this story, James Delingpole has more on it in the UK Telegraph.

Related posts

Commentary

Historian James Hannam debunks myths about Christianity and science

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James Hannam has written a book about Christianity and the history of science.

The Daily Caller has posted an interview with James Hannam.

James Hannam is the author of “The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution,” set to be officially released Monday.

Hannam earned his undergraduate degree in physics from St. Anne’s College at Oxford University and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He has been published in numerous scholarly and non-scholarly publications and is also the author of “God’s Philosophers.”

Wow, we could certainly use more scholars like this to plead our case.

That article features 10 questions and answers with Dr. Hannam, and here are the three best ones:

2. You contend that contrary to popular belief, there was great scientific advancement during the Middle Ages because of the Church. How did the Church help spur this scientific discovery and why do most people believe the Church was a hindrance to science?

The Church made math and science a compulsory part of the syllabus at medieval universities for anyone who wanted to study theology. That meant loads of students got grounding in these subjects, and professors could hold down jobs teaching it.

The myth that the Church held back science dates from the “enlightenment” when Voltaire and other French philosophes invented it to attack the Catholics of their own day as impediments to political progress.

[…]4. You write that it is a myth that people in the Middle Ages believed the world was flat. How did this supposedly erroneous notion about the Middle Ages become part of our conventional wisdom?

The earliest record I’ve found of this myth is from a book by Sir Francis Bacon written in the sixteenth century. Sir Francis was a Protestant who claimed believing the Earth is flat was evidence for medieval Catholic stupidity. So the myth started off as Protestant propaganda but was soon used to denigrate the Middle Ages in general.

5. What are some of the other great myths of the Middle Ages that we haven’t touched upon so far but our readers would find intriguing?

There are loads! For example, witch trials didn’t get going until the Renaissance and reached their peak in the seventeenth century, so they are not really medieval at all. Even medieval torture devices like the iron maiden turn out never to have existed until 1800 when they were invented as gruesome hoaxes. My favorite myths, because they are so ridiculous, is that a pope excommunicated Halley ’s Comet and that medieval theologians liked to ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

If you get objections about Christianity and science, now’s your chance to prepare your answers. It’s amazing how people who don’t know the history believe what they want to believe. And I think that is interesting – it shows that the Bible is right in diagnosing the human condition. We don’t know, because we don’t want to know. We speculate, because we want to have a buffer to do what we want without having to be accountable.

Hmmn. Isn’t it funny that in secular public schools, atheists don’t put more science into the curriculum, but instead inject more religion, e.g. – Darwinism, global warming, feminism, socialism, multiculturalism, etc. Ideology, not math and science. But the religious people put in math and science.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink about the multiverse

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Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 has a new interview with Jeff Zweerink on the multiverse.

Brian’s summary:

Today’s interview is with astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink. Jeff is a research scholar with Reasons to Believe, and serves part-time on the physics and astronomy research faculty at UCLA. He is author of Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse?, the main topic of our interview today. He talks about his background and how he got into astrophysics, scientific evidences pointing to God, the role of natural theology, the strongest (and weakest) arguments from science, the multiverse, the various types of multiverses, why scientists postulate the multiverse, various objections to the multiverse, should Christians, how to be well-informed in scientific evidences, advice for apologists, and more.

Full Interview MP3 Audio here (55 min)

Krista Bontrager writes this about Jeff’s book:

Reasons To Believe has a new booklet out. It addresses the multiverse controversy: Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? (And when I say “booklet” it would really be more accurate to call it a short book. It’s a “good-sized” short treatment.)

RTB’s newest research scholar, physicist, Dr. Jeff Zweerink, explores the multiverse idea and its implications for biblical creation models. He addresses such questions as:

  • Does the multiverse pose problems for the Christian worldview?
  • Does the multiverse offer atheists an escape-hatch, one that is capable of explaining away design of the universe?

Zweerink’s answers to these questions may surprise some readers. He believes it is quite possible that particular types of multiverses to exist. (Whereas I think it would be fair to characterize Hugh Ross as being a little more cautious about this issue.)

Zweerink does a good job of explaining the appeal of the multiverse approach for some athetists. In fact, he is so fair and even-handed that, at times, the reader may wonder whether he’s defending the multiverse in all of its forms.

I am not aware of any other treatment of this quality by a Christian physicist. If you have a teenager who is planning on a career in science, especially in astronomy or physics, Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? is a must-read. It would probably also be of interest to those who are curious about the topic.

It sounds like Jeff actually is open to the multiverse. BOOOO! James Sinclair’s essay in Contending With Christianity’s Critics also seemed to give the idea a fair treatment. Oh well, I have to be open to being proven wrong, so here is the podcast and let’s see the evidence!