One of the claims of global warming alarmists is that anthropogenic global warming is causing the worlds Sea Level to rising and this rise will soon drown major cities such as New York.  While some former residents of New York may not see this as necessarily a bad thing others would disagree. As someone who has lived by the sea shore for the last 50 years I often wondered why none of this sea level rise has been apparent where I live? Many 100 year old structures built right at the waters edge still seem to be doing just fine. Of course anecdotal evidence like this is of minimum value in this type of debate.

However one of the worlds foremost experts on sea level change Dr. Niles-Alex Morner Head of The Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at the University of Stockholm and past President of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Change has come to a similar conclusion. 

If you still believe in man caused Global Warming you need to read the interview of Dr. Morner  published in Economics. The main points of the article are as follows:

1.  Sea Level varies over time with the Earth’s temperature.  However from 1850 till now no measurable trend has been found.  The graph of sea level for the last 150+ years is flat.

2.  Modern Satellite Altimetey (which is the most accurate measure) also shows no increase in sea level.

3. IPCC Claims of raising sea levels are based on a fraud.  This was accomplished by cherry picking tide measurements from instruments that were located on land that was known to be sinking.  Specifically instruments in Holland and Hong Kong were placed on land undergoing substantial subsidence.

4. A key peace of high profile photographic evidence used by the media to depict sea level rise showed a before and after of very low lying island in the Maldives that supported one lone tree.  The tree is now gone allegedly because of sea level rise.  In reality the tree was torn down by a group of Australian Global Warming Activists.

Source:

“Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is A Total Fraud” by George Murphy, Economics , June 22, 2007, pp 33-37.

Junk science is growing very rapidly in many fields.  This is a big and growing problem for Christians because this ideologically driven junk science is frequently used to undermine Faith especially of the young. This is evident from the effects of Darwinism in Biology and Origin of Life Research, Freudianism in Psychology and Cognitive Studies, Marxism in Economics and Political Science and on and on.  While not directly related to Christian Faith, right now junk science is nowhere more blatantly evident then in Climatology with the growth of anthropogenic global warming ideology.

However this has been a terrible month for those who still assert that human produced CO2 emissions are causing global warming.  First one of the world’s leading climate modelers and an author of the United Nations IPCC report on global warming told an audience of 1500 climate scientists at the World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland that new research indicates that the recent global cooling trend is likely to continue for the next 10 to 20 years.   Not only that, Mojib Latif went further and admitted that this change in the global climate had nothing to do with human activity but was instead the result of “natural cyclical processes.”

From the stand point of the credibility of the global warming argument an even more damaging revelation came this week.  When researchers recently asked to review the original climate data that the IPCC report was based on, they were refused access to the data.  However they persisted with their request and it has now been claimed that the original data upon used to produce the IPCC report, which is the foundation stone of the global warming argument, can not be reviewed because it has been destroyed.  It was further revealed that the original data had been altered by merging it with other data in order to ”homogenized” it.  In other words the original data was taken, manipulated and then the original data was destroyed so that the original data can no longer be examined by researchers.  Consequently it is claimed that skeptics can no longer examine the raw data to see if its analysis really supports the conclusions of global warming claimed by the IPCC.

This is not the way science is done.  It is the way scientific frauds are done.  This puts policy makers such as President Obama, who are pushing for sweeping legislation to massively change the world’s economy through “Cap and Trade” and other measures, to be advocating their position based on scientific claims that cannot be verified.   If the data really supported the global warming alarmists’ claims,  is it believable that they would have deliberately destroyed their proof? The much more likely explanation is that the evidence was destroyed to prevent the exposure of one of the greatest scientific frauds in history.

Sources:

1. “World Will Cool For The Next Decade,” by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, September 12, 2009, p.10.

2. “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” by Patrick Michaels, National Review Online, September 23, 2009.

If Indiana Jones discovered a 55 Chevy buried in the undisturbed tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh even he would be surprised. However Darwinists are unimpressed by an even more amazing discovery of something even further out of its place in time.

On May 29, 2008 scientists at the Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia reported finding the fossilized remains of the oldest vertebrate, placental animal ever discovered. The creature was a beautifully preserved placoderm (armored, jawed) fish found in a fossil bed in Northwestern Australia known as the Gogo Formation. What made this fossil so spectacular was that inside of this female fish was a tiny baby placoderm fish still attached to its mother by an umbilical chord. Until now the oldest known viviparous (animals that give birth to live young) vertebrate ever discovered was from the Jurassic period dating to about 180 million years ago. However this placoderm fish dates to at least the middle Devonian dating about 380 million years ago. Because the process appears to be in its fully developed form, it does not seem unreasonable to believe that viviparous birth in vertebrates probably dates back to at least the middle Silurian epoch to about 420 million years ago when placoderm fish first appear in the fossil record.

Viviparous insects are believed to exist from this period. However they are far more primitive than these fish, do not have umbilical cords and are clearly unrelated to them as any type of ancestral form. Scorpions for example hatch their eggs inside of the mothers and then release the live young. The placental birth process is extremely complicated. It requires many specialized organs and behavior. It also requires highly developed complex sexual organs, copulation, mating behavior and much more.

Here is what is so stunning about this find: the Cambrian period when true multi-cellular animals first appear in the fossil record only ends about 500 million years ago. These very advanced placoderms are in the fossil record only about 120 million years later and they appear suddenly, out of nowhere and fully developed. According to Darwinism they should have been developing gradually over long periods of time and should only appear much later in the fossil record. So there should have been lots of simpler intermediate forms in the fossil record not the fully developed form that was discovered at this stunningly early time.

Why This Is Important

The Darwinists while expressing surprise are just embracing this discovery as nothing truly stunning or creating a need to reexamine their assumptions about how evolution is supposed to work as an unguided, accidental process. Their conclusion will be that fully developed viviparous birth simply randomly developed earlier than expected. This is the equivalent of Indiana Jones concluding that there it was no big deal in finding a 55 Chevy in the tomb of a pharaoh. His conclusion being that the 55 Chevy was first built in 2500 BC instead of 1955 - no big deal - just revise the numbers and go on as before.

The real importance of this fossil is that it is another of a growing list of examples of highly advanced biological processes that appear far too early in the fossil record to be honestly explained as the result of an unguided random process.

Further Source: “The Oldest Pregnant Mum”, by Carina Dennis, Nature, 453, 575 (2008).

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph.D.

“Meteorites Delivered The ‘Seeds’ Of Earth’s Left-handed Life, Experts Argue”, read the headline in this Science Daily story of April 7, 2008. This claim was quickly advertised around the world by the media as a major breakthrough in the effort to explain the origin of life on Earth by purely natural, unguided processes. However, what the headline claimed and what the story actually reported are two far different things. This story is a classic example of how the media mis-informs and dis-informs the public on issues of great import. It is also an example of the widespread misuse of science and scholarly research to promote the materialist/humanist agenda.

Here is how the media operates this abuse: first they make a bold claim such as that in the above story. They then report the details in the story, realizing that few will read beyond the headline and knowing that even if they do, very few will understand what is being written at a level necessary to evaluate the claim in the headline and accurately conclude that the headline’s claim is so weakly supported by the data that the story is not really worth reporting. Also when competent scientists criticize the story, if reported at all, will be printed on page 36 under a headline such as “Scientist Question Chirality Claim.” A title, which will guarantee that almost no one will read it.

Let us examine the above story to see this pattern at work. The opening paragraphs tell an imaginative tale of the early Earth:

“Flashback three or four billion years – Earth is a hot, dry and lifeless place. All is still. Without warning, a meteorite slams into the desert plains at over 10,000 miles per hour. With it this violent collision may have planted the seeds of life on Earth.” “Scientists have presented evidence that desert heat, a little water and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up the first prerequisites of life: The dominance of “left-handed” amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet.”

The story claims to answer one of the greatest mysteries in biology, known as the “chirality problem.” Chirality here refers to the molecular mirror image symmetry of proteins. This symmetry is labeled as either left or right-handedness depending on how amino acid molecules polarize light. This is a very complex problem, which cannot be discussed here in detail, but in summary is as follows: With a few exceptions almost all of the amino acids in living systems are left-handed. However, in the inorganic world, amino acids because of the physics of their formation process are always found in mixtures of equal parts of left and right-handed forms. These amino acids are the raw material from which proteins are constructed. If protein synthesis occurs in a mixture of left and right-handed amino acids, even if the right-handed molecules constitute only a tiny fraction of the whole, the molecules formed will be biologically useless because they will fold in a manner that causes them to be inactive. Consequently when life was first synthesized on Earth it was necessary to start in environment of pure left-handed only amino acids.

Getting and maintaining a solution of purely left amino acids even under laboratory conditions is extremely difficult. This means finding a natural route to the synthesis of purely left-handed amino acids in the very messy natural world, full of right-handed amino acids, contaminants and thermodynamic problems seems almost insurmountable. Consequently origin of life researchers have long despaired over finding a materialist explanation for this phenomenon.

The article in question claims to provide a solution to this problem. According to this article: researchers examining the amino acids on the surface of some meteorites from Australia and Tennessee found a 5% to 10% excess of left-handed molecules over right- handed molecules. They then postulate that if this is combined with a series of natural processes (not currently known to exist), which could purify and amplify left-handed molecules, this concentration level can be increased to higher levels and (add another mere 100,000 or so other critical steps) you “voila” get life.

The article does not mention several interesting facts. First researchers have been examing meteorites for years looking for evidence of this chiral excess. Up until now all have always found that meteorites contain equal amounts of left and right-handed molecules. Ancient rocks in the Earth’s crust also always show this same racemic mixture. Would anyone like to bet that this finding will not be replicated when preformed at different labs using different meteorites? The fact that the excess of left-handed amino acids comes from the surface and not the interior of the meteorites should raise a big red flag because the surface is where contaminants from Earth life are likely to be found. Also not mentioned is the fact that even if there is a slight abundance of left-handed amino acids in meteors and a natural process did amplify this concentration (of which there is currently absolutely no evidence) it would still not provide the purely left-handed solutions of amino acids which is necessary for life to start from. In a mind-boggling step of illogic, the process of amplification postulated in this article requires preexisting biological organisms to carry out the process of amplification. So the way life originates under this scenario is through the mediation of preexisting life.

Why This Is Important

This piece of extremely questionable research will now begin to work its way into the public forum. It will become used as evidence to support the claim that “life originated through strictly natural processes.” It will probably become common knowledge that “meteorites brought left-handed amino acids to Earth and these formed the basis of life.” The reality however is that this common knowledge will be based on a greatly overstated case standing on the shakiest of evidence. This is reminiscent of that fact that many people now believe that there is genetic evidence to support the claim that homosexuality is genetically based. Such claims are based on several pieces bogus research, which were touted with extravagant headlines in the media. This research was all later shown to be specious, yet it is not unusual today to be told, “Everybody knows that scientists have shown that homosexuality is genetic.”

Source: www.eurekalert.org “Meteorites Deliver The ‘Seeds’ Of Earth’s Left-hand Life”, AAAS, April 6, 2008.

By: Lawrence Vescera Ph.D. - Isaac Newton Institute

Exobiologists study life on other planets. As of today it is a science without a subject, as the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life (SETI), despite more than fifty years of searching, has so far failed to find anything to study. Looking at Earth, however, exobiologists are in general agreement that it is difficult to see how life on Earth could be sustained for a long period of time without a moon like ours. They further agree that it is difficult to see how any multicellular life forms could have arisen or survived without such a moon. It is also reasoned that because the Earth was formed as the result of “random natural processes”, the Moon must have been formed by the same presumably ubiquitous natural processes.

Given this line of reasoning, they conclude there can be nothing special about the Earth – Moon System; therefore the Universe must be full of similar planet – moon systems harboring life. The Moon is considered critical to life, especially higher life forms for several reasons. Among these reasons is the fact that it plays a major role in plate tectonics, which in turn drives a number of geological cycles, such as the carbonate-silicate cycle, on which life is dependent. The Moon is also critical to climate stability, oceanic nutrient circulation and much, much more.

Even more important to these life-sustaining processes is the planet-forming role played by the Moon in the Earth’s history. It is now almost universally accepted by planetary scientists that the Earth took on its present form when it collided with a Mars-size body during the earliest phase of the planets formation. This collision did several things that are essential to making the Earth a habitable planet. Among the most important of these are the stripping away the Earth’s original extremely dense carbon dioxide atmosphere (such as that still retained by Venus) and the super-enriching of the planet’s core and crust with heavy metals. This collision also left behind the small low-density moon that now orbits the Earth.

Fortunately for astronomers new observational techniques and instruments allow observers to detect such collisions in other planetary systems and see if they are as common as is supposed. It is easy to imagine how much dust and debris must be left behind when an Earth-size planet collides with a Mars-size planet. This type of dust cloud is easily detectable from across the Galaxy.

To get a measure of the frequency of such collisions NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope examined 400 nearby stars that were believed to be good candidates for such a collision, based on the system’s age and other factors. It was originally assumed that about 5% to 10% of the systems would show evidence of such a collision. As it turned out only one system showed evidence of a collision event. This very low frequency indicates that life supporting planet - moon systems such as ours are probably very rare indeed.

Why This Is Important

The discovery of life on other planets is critical to the Materialist faith. The discovery of life on other planets is not central to Christian theology. Christian thinkers entertained such speculations as early as the Middle Ages. Finding extraterrestrial life would neither prove or disprove the existence of God, it would only show that God created life on planets other than just Earth. However, the discovery of extraterrestrial life is absolutely central to atheism/materialism. It is central because it would be taken as evidence for the claim that there is nothing special about the Earth or the origin of life. If life is found elsewhere, this would be taken as evidence that life is just the result of some natural process and consequently is a purposeless process devoid of meaning. As long as no evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found, the atheists/materialists realize they have no “proof” for their beliefs.

Source: “Uncommon Moon” Astronomy, March 2008, pp. 18.

Blogger: Lawrence Vescera, Ph.D., Isaac Newton Institute

The Earth’s Moon is most unusual, it is very large, yet its mass is very low, but this is exactly what is needed for life on Earth. How the Moon originated was a profound mystery until the Apollo Astronauts brought back lunar rock samples; these showed that the Moon was formed in a huge collision with a planet about the size and mass of Mars early in Earth’s history.

Almost all collisions between planet-sized bodies leave behind nothing but a lot of debris, as in the asteroid belt. However, the angle and speed of this collision were exactly right to permit the two planets to just barely disintegrate and to allow the more massive Earth to extract the core and heavy elements from the smaller planet before recollecting into their present forms. This process super-enriched the Earth with metals and left behind a moon with the characteristics needed by advanced life.

Our Moon does three things that are absolutely essential for advanced life. The first and most important of these is the stabilization of the Earth’s axial tilt. The equator is tilted approximately 23.5 degrees to the plane of its orbit around the sun. This permits the Earth to enjoy a stable climate and maintain liquid oceans over vast periods of time. Without a massive moon like ours, the gravitational tug-of-war between the Sun and Jupiter would cause the Earth’s axial spin to gyrate wildly. This would be disastrous for life.

Second, the Moon also regulates the oceans’ tides. The tides play a number of important roles in the maintenance of life, including the Carobonate/Silciate Cycle and Plate Tectonics.

Third, the Moon acts as a break on the Earth’s rotation rate. It has slowed the planet’s spin at exactly the rate needed to maintain the necessary temperature, wind velocity, and other factors required to properly regulate the greenhouse gas environment without triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. This is part of the phenomenon known as the “Solar Luminosity Paradox” which is far too complex to be dealt with here but is also an inexplicable miracle.

SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)

This most unusual collision event created a profound question for those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. How common are such collisions? If higher life forms require a moon like ours, what are the chances of a collision like the one that formed the Moon happening again?

To answer these questions researchers at the University of Florida, the Seward Observatory in Tucson, and at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile conducted an examination of a star cluster known as NGC 2547. Collisions of the type that formed the Moon leave behind a gigantic dust cloud and are detected easily. The purpose of the examination was to look for the dust cloud left behind by such a collision. NGC 2547 holds about 400 stars and is the right age for the desired stage of planet formation. Of the 400 star systems examined, only one showed evidence of having once had a planetary collision event. This led the researchers to conclude that any type of planetary collision is very rare, especially one that is just right to leave behind an object like our Moon.

Why This Is Significant

The presence or absence of life on other planets is not a theological problem for Christians. If God created life here, He can certainly do it elsewhere. But to those who believe that life originated solely thought a natural process, with out the need of God, the discovery of extraterrestrial life is an essential element of their faith. They theorize that the natural processes that brought about life on Earth should produce life on other planets when the conditions are the same. They believe that the Earth is not special, and there is no God; therefore, life should be common in the Universe. This claim was famously repeated ad nausium by Carl Sagan. This idea drives SETI and its ancillary programs such as the desperate search for evidence of large amounts of liquid water once having been on Mars.

The discovery that the Moon is indeed a very rare and perhaps unique object in the Universe does not support the expectations of the SETI theorists and their assumption of “a Universe loaded with intelligent life.” The Earth – Moon system is finely tuned to a stunning level of specificity. A billion things had to go just right at the right instant for the Moon to have come into existence. The chance of this happening even once as the result of a random natural event is so vanishingly small as to be in effect Zero.

Sources:
1. “A Moon Like Ours Is Rarely Formed”, The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News: Phillip Schewe and Jason Bardi, Dec 5, 2007, No.

2. “Debris Disks in NGC 2547”, The Astrophysical Journal: Nadya Gorlova, et al., Nov.

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph. D.

New evidence Indicates that the continents are Fine Tuned for Life

Genesis 1:9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let the dry ground appear.”…. the third day.

First physicists discovered that there was a single Creation Event now called the Big Bang through which the universe emerged. Then biologists discovered their own big bang, labeled the “Cambrian Explosion”. This biological big bang gave rise to almost all the modern phyla of life. Now it appears that the continental crust of the Earth also had a “Big Bang” of its own. New research indicates that the Earth’s crust appeared rather suddenly in a single burst of creation. This is the conclusion of two prominent geological researchers, Samuel Browning of MIT and Ian Williams of the Australian National University in Canberra as reported in several sources, including the February 1998 special issue of “Earth”.
Browning and Williams have been studying the oldest rocks known on Earth. These rocks appear to be at least 4 billion years old and are found in West Greenland. It is not the age of the rocks that make them so important, for it is generally believed that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, it is the composition of these rocks that makes them so intriguing. Most geologists believe that the Earth’s continents formed gradually over a long period of time. This standard model also postulates that continent formation did not begin until 500 million years after the planet had formed. They believe that the continents then began to grow in a series of slow pulses as the result of plate tectonics. This process is still supposed to be in operation today.
Browning and Williams argue instead that continent formation actually began almost at the planet’s birth. The continents then proceeded to grow in one continuous process so that by 3.8 billion years ago there was actually about a third more continental crust on the planet then there is today.
This conclusion is based on a comparison of the ratio of two of the elements found in the ancient rocks studied by the team. Browning, Williams and others at the Australian National University examined the ratio of the element neodymium to the element samarium found in these rocks. Radioactive samarium decays to form neodymium. The Australian team found that the rocks had an unexpectedly small amount of neodymium compared to the amount of samarium. The big question was where had all of the neodymium in these early rocks gone? The answer appears to be that it has gone down into the mantle underneath the crust. This indicates that by 3.8 billion years ago the continental crust had already separated from the mantle and was floating on top of the mantle where it still is today.
It was initially argued that this rather surprising finding could be the result of sampling error because the material tested all came from Western Greenland. Two subsequent tests, however, conducted on rocks from Northern Canada and Labrador also show similar neodymium depletion. Therefore the best current evidence supports the idea that this process was global and not a local phenomenon.
These findings have set off a bitter and acrimonious debate among geologists, particularly between Steven Moorbath of Oxford University and the Australians.

Why This Is Important!

In the mid nineteenth century Charles Lyle, a British lawyer, put forth the idea of gradualism in geology. Lyle argued that the Earth had been formed slowly over a long period of time by a series of processes that could still be observed going on today. This theory known as uniformaterianism is still predominant today. (This idea was later picked up by Charles Darwin and applied to biology). Up until that time most Christian and Jewish theologians had maintained, based on their study of the Bible, that the Earth had been formed primarily by a series of unique creative steps, many of which occurred in a catastrophic or very rapid process. They argued that these formative processes were not observable in the normal, gradual changes taking place now on the Earth on a day- to-day basis. Many mainline Christian theologians of that time and earlier times had in general believed that the Earth had considerable antiquity, at least on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, so the main debate was not just over the Earth’s age, but also over its method of formation.
It is interesting to note that the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old only gained prominence in the nineteenth century. It had generally not been a major issue in the thinking of church leaders historically. The antiquity of the Earth had been assumed to be at least on the order of hundreds of thousands of years by the many theologians as early as the fifth century AD. Consequently, when evidence of great age for the Earth was found in the nineteenth century, it was generally accepted by the majority of theologians Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish.
It is still too early to see what the long-range outcome of the research by the team from the Australian National University will be. However, numerous geological findings in subsequent years points toward the occurrence of single catastrophic or sudden event that shaped the course of the Earth’s development. Such findings include the discovery that many geological eras ended with a major asteroidal impact. These discoveries tend to support the claims of earlier Christian theologians that catastrophes did indeed play a major part in the Earth’s history. It is also of great interest that the above discoveries about the early and rapid appearance of the Earth’s crust tend to support their claim that all of the processes that formed the Earth’s surface are not observable today.
There is also a second major mystery reported in this research, which has even more interesting implications. This comes from the argument made by some scientists who believe that the universe has been deliberately fine tuned to support life here on Earth. They believe that the universe was intelligently designed and is not the result of purposeless natural processes. Life on Earth requires that the Earth’s crust be continuously recycled. New crust comes out of volcanoes while old crust is pulled down into the mantle along subduction zones located on plate boundaries. The ejecta from volcanoes return minerals to the surface that are needed by biological organisms. Without this recycling life above the bacterial level would gradually die out.
Terry Plank of the University of Kansas studies ocean sediments. She has found that the rate of sediment subduction into the mantle is about the same as the rate at which new crust is built. She noted that, “It is pretty remarkable that the two processes are in balance,” The geological gradualists believe that the Earth’s crustal recycling balance simply “developed” as a natural out growth of a continuous slow formative process. If it turns out that the crust appeared all at once, how could such a fine homeostasis between crust and mantle have “developed”? One possible answer is that it was deliberately designed that way.

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph.D.