It could happen, though a lot of research has yet to be done. According to the Wake Forest University Medical Center,

An approved drug for fighting obesity is helping scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine uncover clues about how to stop the growth of cancerous tumors. …

In the current issue of Cancer Research, [Steven J. ] Kridel [Ph.D] and colleagues are the first to report that a tubular network within cells, known as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), is regulated by an enzyme that is tightly linked to tumor growth and development.

“When the ER cannot do its job properly, there’s a series of events that gets turned on that can lead to cell suicide or death,” said Kridel.

The research showed that an enzyme known as fatty acid synthase is vital for the ER to do its job. Blocking this enzyme, which makes fat in cells, has been shown to prevent tumor cell growth and to promote cell death.

“No one had made connection before between fatty acid synthase and the function of the ER in tumor cells,” said Kridel. “This is the first to show that fatty acid synthesis is important in maintaining ER function and keeping tumor cells alive.”

So, apparently, the same enzyme system that can (hopefully) be manipulated into killing fat cells can be manipulated into killing cancer cells. Serendipity knows no bounds.

Britain’s Channel 4 was the key player in the broadcast there of “The Jesus Family Tomb.” Not content with stirring up trouble for the Christian religion, it’s now turned its guns against the global warming religion (oh, did I say that?) Its new show is called, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

The programme, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.

Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is shown, claiming African countries should be encouraged to burn more CO2.

Nobody in the documentary defends the greenhouse effect theory, as it claims that climate change is natural, has been occurring for years, and ice falling from glaciers is just the spring break-up and as normal as leaves falling in autumn.

A source at Channel 4 said: “It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for.”

Controversial director Martin Durkin said: “You can see the problems with the science of global warming, but people just don’t believe you – it’s taken ten years to get this commissioned.

“I think it will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists – people with qualifications – are the bad guys.

“It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.

“It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks.

“Al Gore might have won an Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but the film is very misleading and he has got the relationship between CO2 and climate change the wrong way round.”

One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.

He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth’s history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.

Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.

When the temperature increases, more gas is released into the atmosphere and when global temperatures cool, more CO2 is taken in. Because of the immense size of the oceans, he said they take time to catch up with climate trends, and this ‘memory effect’ is responsible for the lag.

Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.

It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.

This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.

The programme claims there appears to be a consensus across science that CO2 is responsible for global warming, but Professor Paul Reiter is shown to disagree.

He said the influential United Nations report on Climate change, that claimed humans were responsible, was a sham.

It claimed to be the opinion of 2,500 leading scientists, but Prof Reiter said it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and resigned from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and said the report was finalised by government appointees.

Much more at the link, RTWT. Another look at the documentary here.

Remember when medical science told us that taking an aspirin every day reduced the risk of heart attack and reduced the severity of a heart attack if you had one anyway?

The American Heart Association recommends aspirin use for patients who’ve had a myocardial infarction (heart attack), unstable angina, ischemic stroke (caused by blood clot) or transient ischemic attacks (TIAs or “little strokes”), if not contraindicated. This recommendation is based on sound evidence from clinical trials showing that aspirin helps prevent the recurrence of such events as heart attack, hospitalization for recurrent angina, second strokes, etc. (secondary prevention). Studies show aspirin also helps prevent these events from occurring in people at high risk (primary prevention).

(From the AHA site) Now they say,

Regular use of painkillers such as aspirin, ibuprofen and paracetamol is linked to greater risk of stroke and heart attack from higher blood pressure, research published today shows.

But,

Dr Gary Curhan, who also worked on the study, said men who were advised by a doctor to take an aspirin a day to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke should continue to take them. “The benefit outweighs the risk,” he said.

So just what am I to believe here - about aspirin and heart health specifically or about scientific reliability generally?

The earth floats: “3-D model shows big body of water in Earth’s mantle.”

A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.

One of the most dramatic features in the Wysession et. al global mantle shear-wave attenuation model is a very high-attenuation anomaly at the top of the lower mantle beneath eastern Asia. This anomaly is believed due to water that has been pumped into the lower mantle via the long history of the subduction of oceanic lithosphere — crust and upper mantle — in this region. The left figure is a slice through the earth, showing the attenuation anomalies within the mantle. The location of the slice — red line in the upper right figure — is a map of the seismic attenuation at a depth of roughly 620 miles. In both images, red shows unusually soft and weak rock, and blue shows unusually stiff rock (yellow and white show near-average values). The two figures in the lower right are resolution tests to see if the data have the resolution to retrieve Earth structure in these parts of the Earth. The sharper the black-white transitions are, the better the resolution is. Credit: Washington University in St. Louis.

This is very interesting stuff, but not surprising: any student of the Hebrew Scriptures knows that there are “fountains of the great deep.”

A leading hurricane scientist disputes claims that global warming has made hurricanes worse.

Chris Landsea, science and operations director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said the notion that global warming is causing an increase in hurricanes gained widespread attention after the stormy seasons of 2004 and 2005.

But that perception is wrong and the statistics don’t bear it out, Landsea told about 200 students and professors in the auditorium at USC’s geography building.

Further study continues to show that hurricane activity occurs in cycles of 20 to 45 years, he said. Even though the seasons of 2004, when four hurricanes bashed Florida, and 2005, when Katrina devastated New Orleans and neighboring parts of the Gulf Coast, seemed shocking, they were no more intense than some storms in the early part of the 20th century and in the 1930s, Landsea said.

The 1926-1935 period was worse for hurricanes than the past 10 years and 1900-1905 was almost as bad, he said. So it is not true that there is a trend of more and stronger hurricanes.

“It’s not a trend, it’s a cycle: 20-45 years quiet, 20-45 years busy,” Landsea said. Scientists currently have no idea what causes the time period.

What makes the recent storms seem worse is the amount of damage, and that is because of the amount of people and their structures on the coast, elements that barely existed in the early 1900s. …

“An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore, also persuaded some people that global warming is contributing to hurricane frequency and strength, Landsea said.

But facts that also refute the theory are that tropical storms are weakening and becoming less frequent in all oceans except the Atlantic, he said.

If the storms were caused by global warming, they would be getting worse everywhere, he said.

You may remember that global warming apocalyptics predicted that last year’s hurricane season would be even worse than 2005, the year of Katrina. In fact, though, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States last year. In a piece published in August 2006, Weatherstreet.com reflected, “Media reports over the last year have suggested that, since global warming will only get worse, and last year’s hurricane activity was supposedly due to global warming, this season might well be as bad as last season.” But it wasn’t.

Part of the reason for the slow season is that tropical western Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are running about normal, if not slightly below normal. …

The cooler SSTs in the Atlantic are not an isolated anomaly. In a research paper being published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists will show that between 2003 and 2005, globally averaged temperatures in the upper ocean cooled rather dramatically, effectively erasing 20% of the warming that occurred over the previous 48 years.

Catch that? In only two years, a fifth of the warming that had occurred in almost a half-century was erased. Twenty percent of the warming erased in four percent of the time. No explanation seems to be forthcoming from global warming apocalyptics as to how this cooling occurred, since they blame human activity for the previous warming. Well, folks, if you’re going to blame us going up, you’re going to have credit us going down.

… a false front for the urge to rule it.” So said H.L. Mencken, quoted by US Rep. John Linder in, “Global-warming theory and the eugenics precedent.”

Rep. Linder summarizes the consensus behind the early 20th century’s eugenics movment. The core of the movement - it was in fact considered cutting edge science at the time - was that the state should control whom may have children. Eugenics was racist to its very core, but,

The most respected scientists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other bastions of intellectual rigor retreated to a complex on Long Island named Cold Spring Harbor. Their support came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman fortune working with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and other agencies.

The “science” was not lacking important public supporters. Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson were enthusiastic believers. The theory won approval of Supreme Court justices, leaders in higher education and Nobel Prize winners. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was one of the most vocal adherents. She established the first “birth control” clinic in 1916.

They believed that “the best” human beings were not having as many children as inferior ones — the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, Blacks, degenerates, the unfit and the “feeble minded.” Sanger said “fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty.” She spoke of the burden of caring for “this dead weight of human waste.” H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Roosevelt said, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

Eugenics faded in the aftermath of the revelations of the Holocaust. Linder continues:

One must ask, “How in the world did university researchers come to conclusions that defended this outrageous affront to society?” A look back at the research concluded that the researchers adjusted their outcomes to support the theory of those paying for the research.

Linder thus proceeds to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming.

It has been known for years that most CO2 is dissolved in the oceans. It is called “carbon sinking.” The oceans typically contain 60 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. It is also known that colder waters dissolve more CO2 than warm waters. Which do you think is cause and which is effect? We currently have CO2 levels of about 380 ppm. A recent study completed at UC Davis concluded that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere 300 million years ago was on the order of 2,000 ppm. Then this, “the same increase that experts expect by the end of this century as remaining reserves of fossil fuels are burned.” If it is a given that human burning of fossil fuels is what will cause an increase of CO2 levels up to 2,000 ppm in the next 93 years, don’t they owe us an explanation as to who burned those fossil fuels 300 million years ago? In fact we are being treated to a modern scientific shell game. The most prevalent and efficient greenhouse gas is not CO2; it is water vapor, which accounts for about 60 percent of the heat-trapping gases while CO2 accounts for about 26 percent. So, why are we being served a daily diet of our destroying the environment with our behavior as it relates to CO2? Because our behavior has little to do with the amount of water vapor, so it is a non-starter when it comes to those whose principal goal is ruling our lives.

So my questions are:

* Have ocean warmings preceded global warmings, and the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels been a trailing, not leading, indicator of warming?

* Also, does CO2 have a specific wavelegth of solar radation that it blocks? And if so, once CO2 reaches a certain level in the atmosphere, would it achieve a saturation level above which no additional radiation would be blocked? That is, is there a natural upper limit to the greenhouse effect of CO2, and if so do we know what it is?

* Rep. Linder reports that atmospheric water vapor “accounts for about 60 percent of the heat-trapping gases,” presumably by volume. Does water vapor also account for 60 percent of the greenhouse effect? In fact, if water vapor is more efficient in greenhousing than CO2, does that mean that it accounts for more than 60 percent of the greenhouse effect?

I mentioned in my post, “Consensus” and global warming that scientists have not quite come to a consensus about how dinosaurs perished. The theory of an asteroid strike near present Yucatan 65 million years ago is compelling to scientists, but has not yet reached the status of consensus.

According to a show on the Discovery channel not long ago (I think it was that channel), most scientists within this field of study agree that such a asteroid strike did occur, though a minority say the extinction is best explained by hypothesizing volcanic activity. That the impact basin is almost all under the sea inhibits stronger agreement among scientists. Nonetheless, the majority view is that an asteroid strike did occur there; based on new space-imaging technology, the strike seems certain.

Some think the impact threw massive quantities of dust into the atmosphere which blocked the sun and arrested plant growth. Others believe sulfur released by the impact lead to global sulfuric acid clouds that blocked the sun and also fell as acid rain. Another possibility is that red-hot debris from the falling asteroid or comet triggered global wildfires.

The last hypothesis is what the Discovery program covered. Its presumtion is that the while the direct effects of the asteroid strike reached out to a radius of only 600 miles, the energy of the impact hurled massive amounts of earth and asteroid framents into the atmosphere and suborbital trajectory in near-earth outer space. This ejecta eventually re-entered the atmosphere where it burned upon reentry as do meteors today. The heat generated by the entire sky on fire all at once, lasting for a long time, accounted for the mass extinctions across the globe, far separated from the impact site. Scientists say that almost three-quarters of the other species alive at the time were extingushed at this time.

Could the same catastrophe happen again? Consider the asteroid Aphosis:

Apophis has emerged as the “poster child” for the assessment of asteroid collision threats, said Steven Chesley of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Initially, the uncertainties surrounding observations of Apophis’ orbital path were so great that experts gave it a 1-in-40 chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Since then, more observations have reduced the risk in 2029 to zero, but that 1-in-45,000 chance remains for a later encounter in 2036.

But not so fast on the lethality of the Yucutan asteroid strike. The NGS reports that many researchers now demur whether the Yucutan strike killed the mighty lizards.

For over a decade, most scientists said yes.

But authors of a controversial new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (online edition) contend that the asteroid behind the Chicxulub crater impacted Earth 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. They say a second, as yet unidentified asteroid impact must have caused the mass extinction popularly attributed to the Chicxulub asteroid.

Princeton University professor of geosciences Gerta Keller led the study, which analyzed new core samples drilled at Chicxulub. The drilling was “done with the express purpose to solve the ongoing controversy of what killed the dinosaurs and prove once and for all that this is the impact that caused the mass extinction,” Keller said.

However, Keller said close examination of layers in the core samples shows that the prevailing theory that the Chicxulub asteroid killed the dinosaurs “seems to be wrong.”

“The Chicxulub impact hit Yucatán about 300,000 years before the mass extinction. Another impact occurred at the time of the mass extinction,” she said.

While asteroid impacts played a role, Keller says several hundred thousand years of “massive volcanic eruptions” contributed to climatic changes that precipitated the mass extinctions that marked the end of the Cretaceous period.

This hypothesis is decidedly the minority view, however. But, back to the worldwide fires the asteroid’s impact is presumed to have caused. Maybe they weren’t really worldwide.

[N]orthern Asia, Europe, Antarctica and possibly much of Australia may have been spared the inferno, according to a new computer simulation of how the wildfires spread around the world.

The wildfires are thought to be a key ingredient in the concoction of environmental changes that killed more than 75 percent of all plant and animal life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

“Our calculations suggest fires may have been more intense in some parts of the world than in others and that some areas may have been spared fires altogether,” said David Kring, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “However, other environmental effects would have affected the spared regions.”

Hence, there is no scientific consensus as to what made the dinosuars die off.

One of the claims continually put forth by the media about global warming is that there is a “scientific consensus” about it. So let’s take a look at just what is a “scientific consensus” and how does the concept relate to the debates about climate change.

At the start we must distinguish between scientific fact and scientific consensus. A scientific fact was defined by geologist Stephen Jay Gould in a Time magazine interview (Aug. 15, 1999) as “a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse” not to assent to it. In this sense it is a fact, for example, that the noble elements are naturally inactive in combining with other elements. The process used to discover facts about the world must be describable by the investigator and repeatable by others using the same method of inquiry. At a very basic level, that is how science works. This process presupposes that nature works the same way now as it worked before and the same way that it will work later.

But a collection of facts do not comprise scientific knowledge any more than a pile of feathers makes a duck. Facts, though crucial, are intermediary. Facts must be interpreted. Scientists relate facts to formulate theory. The major usefulness of theories is to make predictions and inferences about nature, what it is and how it works and how it will work.

Ultimately, theories that interpret facts, and that can be used to predict accurately future events within the theoretical scope, come to form the basis of scientific consensus. Example: NASA doesn’t re-investigate the nature of gravity every time it wants to send a rocket into space. There is a scientific consensus about gravity resting on the affirmations of gravitational theory to such a high degree that it is literally pointless to reopen investigations of gravity just to shoot another rocket. True, at the far reach of theoretical physics there is not a consensus about gravity’s nature, but theoretical physicists do not launch rockets. Practical scientists and engineers do. And they are in consensus about gravity insofar as gravity affects their work.

What the media have generally failed to distinguish in their coverage of global warming issues is the difference between the consensus that the earth is warming overall, and the lack of consensus about the causes of the warming, especially the degree of warming attributable to human activities.

Recently, much ink and airtime was given to the latest release by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). When reporting the IPCC’s latest release the media have generally not only failed to distinguish between the two issues just mentioned, but have also not generally recognized the IPCC for what it is. The IPCC’s own web site (this page) informs us that the IPCC is not a research agency and conducts no research at all. It is chartered to assess,

… the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature.

Note carefully that the IPCC’s beginning premise is ” human-induced climate change,” and perusing its documents shows that all conclusions flow from that basic premise. Earlier this month the IPCC released the executive summary of it forthcoming fourth report, which is promised sometime later this year. The summary states that the earth is getting warmer, continuing a warming trend that has been going on, with variability, since 1750, and that the trendline has accelerated since 1950. However, the fourth report’s summary also reduced the amount of warming from that claimed in the third report, issued in 2001. The fourth report’s apparent bottom line: the earth is warming, but not as much as we thought, and warming’s effects will not be a great as we thought before. Even so, of seven identified phenomena and direction of trends (p. 9 of the summary), the report says that the “Likelihood of a human contribution to observed trend[s]” ranges from “more likely than not” to “likely.”

Does this report represent scientific consensus? From my reading, the answer seems to be yes and no. Before explaining why, let’s take another look at what a scientific consensus is.

A simplified model of the scientific method is this. A phenomenon is observed. An explanatory hypothesis about the phenomenon is formed. Empirical tests and measurements are performed to confirm, or not, the hypothesis. Over time enough data are collected to refine the hypothesis into a theory. A theory is a comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon that can also be used to predict future occurrences and the condition in which they would occur. The ability of theory to serve as a predictive model is crucial to science and the nature of a theory itself.

Many non-scientists do not understand the role of theory in science. In non-scientific discourse, saying something is “just a theory” is a way to dismiss it. “Just a theory” in such conversations means unconfirmed, undetermined, speculative and unreliable. But that’s not what theory means to scientists. The major usefulness of theories is to make predictions and inferences about nature, what it is and how it works and how it will work.

A theory, then, is not just a guess. A theory is how scientists express the interpreted results of many observations carried out over a long time. A theory is how scientists make sense of their collective experience. The formulation and reformulation of theory is, I think, grounded in the deep human need to establish meaning. Because we exist in nature, we are compelled at a most fundamental level to explore what nature means. Science is one very powerful and reliable way we do that. Science, and scientifically-based meaning, can no more exist apart from theory than Barry Bonds’ home-run record could exist apart from baseball.

“Just a theory” is an accusation that actually makes no sense. It’s really “just a theory” that gravity holds us on the earth with a force equal to the inverse of the square of our distance from the planet, but does anyone care to jump off the Empire State Building tomorrow because, hey, gravity is “just a theory?” Our understanding of how wings keep airplanes up is just a theoretical understanding, but millions of people per month literally bet their lives that the theory is correct.

Theory is to science as money is to finance. Theory is to science as scales are to music. Theory is to science as yard lines are to football games.

Yet theories are not inherently infallible. They can be overturned. Example: Darwinian evolution was once accepted by evolutionary biologists but has been pretty much abandoned now. Biologists still affirm evolution theory’s ’s basic premise - that species evolved into other species - but argue quite a bit over how it happened and why. Creationists and others who scoff that evolution is “just a theory” conflate scientific dispute over how evolution happened with the consensus that it did happen.

Another example: certainly there is consensus that dinosaurs exist no longer. Yet scientists have not quite come to a consensus about how they perished. The theory of an asteroid strike near present Yucatan 65 million years ago is compelling to scientists, but has not yet reached the status of consensus.

So what is “consensus?” It is when scientists within a particular field of scientific inquiry have reached such a degree of agreement on a question that there is no substantial doubt about the theory relating to the question.

But before consensus can be reached on theory, it must be reached on the theory’s empirical basis. Empirical data are the foundation of science and so all scientists have a deep interest in the validity of empirical evidence and measurement. A lot of the argumentation within science is over the validity of data, the accuracy of measurements and the inclusion of relevant data and measurements within the development of theory.

As far as I can tell, it is accurate to say that there is a scientific consensus that the earth is getting warmer. That the amount of warming predicted for the future has been lowered since 2001 does not obviate the consensus about the trend. But this is really just consensus over the validity of the empirical measurements, which is the easiest kind of consensus to reach.

There is no consensus on why the earth is getting warmer and therefore no consensus on how much the warming is influenced by human activities. The IPCC’s claims that warming trends are “likely” anthropogenic should not be dismissed out of hand, but neither should they be seen as holy writ. After all, to claim that something is “likely” is actually to show there is no consensus! Besides, many highly-credentialed climatologists say not so fast. Thomas Sowell lists some:

There is Dr. S. Fred Singer, who set up the American weather satellite system, and who published some years ago a book titled “Hot Talk, Cold Science.” More recently, he has co-authored another book on the subject, “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.”

There have been periods of global warming that lasted for centuries — and periods of global cooling that also lasted for centuries. So the issue is not whether the world is warmer now than at some time in the past but how much of that warming is due to human beings and how much can we reduce future warming, even if we drastically reduce our standard of living in the attempt.

Other serious scientists who are not on the global warming bandwagon include a professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard S. Lindzen.

His name was big enough for the National Academy of Sciences to list it among the names of other experts on its 2001 report that was supposed to end the debate by declaring the dangers of global warming proven scientifically.

Professor Lindzen then objected and pointed out that neither he nor any of the other scientists listed ever saw that report before it was published. It was in fact written by government bureaucrats — as was the more recently published summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that is also touted as the final proof and the end of the discussion.

You want more experts who think otherwise? Try a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Patrick J. Michaels, who refers to the much ballyhooed 2001 IPCC summary as having “misstatements and errors” that he calls “egregious.” …

Skeptical experts in other countries around the world include Duncan Wingham, a professor of climate physics at the University College, London, and Nigel Weiss of Cambridge University.

Sowell cites another “professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, David R. Legates,” who points out that the summary of the 2001 IPCC report was “often in direct contrast with the scientific report that accompanies it.” Since the 2007 full report has not been published yet, we’ll have to see how it and its summary mesh. Another non-consensus voice is Dr. Timothy Ball, Canada’s first Ph.D. in climatology, who wrote,

The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

I wrote more about the infuence of the sun’s magnetic field here. Obviously, we cannot control that.

Ah, here enters that word: “control.” For the upshot of all this is that the politics and ideology of global warming have moved far ahead of the science. And the political-ideological impetus is decidedly so slanted that it has no attachment to what scientific consensus there is. More about this later.

Update: One reason there is no consensus on the primary causes of warming is that climate-predicting models are terribly inexact. This is shown by the large changes in predicted future warming between the IPCC’s prior report and this one, and also by developments such as this.

COLUMBUS , Ohio – A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.

This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.

It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet. …

David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.

“It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now,” he said. “Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It’s very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth.”

Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available – there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe . And the records that we have only date back a half-century.

“The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica .

“We’re looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment,” he said.

But we’ll keep looking, you betcha. See also, “Glaciers come, glaciers go.”