Is Earth really warming - and is it really our fault?
Possible. But, IMHO, until we can be sure that items like this are false, we should not be full of chutzpah.
A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.
“In an instantaneous flash, the dry Mediterranean became a normal Mediterranean like we see it today,” says lead author Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona.
He and his colleagues calculate that at the height of the flood, water levels rose more than 10 meters and more than 40 centimeters of rock eroded away per day. The model also shows that 100 million cubic meters of water flowed through the channel per second, with water gushing at speeds of 100 kilometers an hour. Rather than a Niagara Falls-esque cascade from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, the team’s results imply a torrent several kilometers wide at a fairly gradual slope.
Can we really affect weather that has been around for millions of years prior to man? Maybe. We should not, however, be spending trillions of dollars to attempt to do so unless we have far more evidence that it's "our fault" and that we really can do something significant and meaningful about it.
Have a nice day :)
Hi Peg,
It all comes down to peer-review, which liberals and leftists trust, for no obvious reason that I can discern. Here are some leftist reasons for not trusting it:
1. Leftists say that they want to listen to those at the bottom. But with respect to the reliability of peer-review, they only listen to those on the top, who naturally have wonderful things to say about it because it treated them so well. I'm at the bottom. Peer-review didn't treat me well at all, and I ended up unemployed. By leftist reasoning, my view of peer-review is just as valid, if not more so, than the view of those at the top.
2. Peer-review is dominated by those who went to elite schools, and those who went to elite schools generally come from wealthy backgrounds. People from more modest backgrounds end up going to lesser schools, and they find it very hard to deal with those from the elite schools when it comes to peer-review. Since leftists say they champion the poor, they ought to be suspicious of peer-review because peer-review hurts the poor.
3. I believe it's true that feminist scholars had a tough time getting their stuff through the peer-review process, so they were forced to start their own journals.
4. An article often touches on more than one topic, but the editors of journals will typically farm it out to the people in the topic that is dominant. This could mean dominant in terms of numbers, or with global warming, dominant in terms of politics. The powerful get to be gatekeepers over the weak, with the result that they keep their power.
Here's an example of the former from my own experience. My work touched on both Plato and his nephew Speusippus. Plato scholars didn't like what I said, but Speusippus scholars did. However, there are very few Speusippus scholars, so it was very unlikely that they would be the ones refereeing my articles.
5. Leftists who trust peer-review on global warming wouldn't trust peer-review in other contexts. If scientists at oil companies did peer-review on each other, their results wouldn't be trusted by the left.
6. Moreover, if a scientist at a drug company had come up with a new drug, and if his or her peers at the company had vouched for it, no leftist would accept the results. They would want something more, the more stringent tests of the FDA. And that is what we skeptics want: something more. We want a higher standard of proof than mere peer-review.
7. Leftists who trust peer-review are much more cautious about the criminal-justice system. Let's compare them. The criminal-justice system is mostly open to the public and it has many checks and balances. Peer-review is completely hidden from the public, and it has no checks and balances. If it is rational to be cautious of the criminal-justice system, then it is even more rational to be cautious about peer-review.
If there are any reasons leftists should be trustful of peer-review, I'd be glad to hear them.
Posted by: John Pepple | Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 09:03 AM