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?

That’s “Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious” - headline: Wi-Fi Access Increases Time Spent Online.

In other news: obtaining first driver’s license increases time spent behind the wheel; eating half-gallon of Death by Chocolate every day increases weight; effective store advertsing increases sales.

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.

The Rev. Richard Hall explains this photo:

Visitors to a Liverpool art gallery are being shaken by the sight of a new statue of Jesus. Called ‘The Cleansing of the Temple’, I don’t suppose it is meant to represent ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’, but reactions have been even more extreme than the artist intended. Some are convinced the statue is evil and recoil in terror. Others fall to their knees in prayer. Some say they see sparks coming from the statues eyes.

Gerard Van Der Leun quotes the lyrics of 16 Horsepowers’ song, “Sinnerman.”

o sinnerman where will you run to
sinnerman where will you run to
sinnerman where will you run to
All on that day

Run to the mountain
The mountain wont hide you
Run to the sea
The sea will not have you
And run to your grave
Your grave will not hold you.
All on that day

Gerard explains,

Many years ago, I was flipping through the pages of a newsmagazine and came upon a photograph of the machete-hacked corpse of a child floating like some half-chewed chunk of jetsam in a backwater of Lake Victoria. This was during what we now think of, because we have to think of it as something distinct from our normal run-of-the-mill massacres, as the Rwanda genocide.

It was a crystal clear photograph showcasing an act of genocide like any other, only the meaningless details changed: children, machetes, an African lake. As a professional in the pornography of violence, the photographer had gotten in close. The child’s eyes could be seen. They were without pupils, a dead fish-belly white; the white of clotted milk. …

The child was long since buried or left to dissolve as mere carrion. What had disturbed me was only the abstraction of a child snagged out of the world with photographic film, transmitted across the oceans via orbiting satellites. printed up on sheets of flimsy paper, and delivered to me and millions of others on a weekly basis…. to what purpose? To. What. Purpose.

Because I needed to know? What did I know? That we are, each and every one of us, capable of the darkest evil? This much I’d known long before I’d known it. Did I see it because I needed more confirmation? I’d long been confirmed. And yet the image stuck in my mind, not as an obsession, but as an unbidden harbinger. And in time, I came to know it’s purpose.

It’s purpose was to teach me to hate God. …

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!
(Johann Heermann)

Gerard continues,

Childhood leukemia? God’s on the job.

A close friend is shot-gunned on 14th street in a mugging? God’s there pulling the trigger.

Yet another mass grave in yet another subdivision of Hell in Europe, Africa, the Middle East? God’s working the back-hoe.

It’s all a tough and dirty job and nobody but God has the moral clarity to do it. He’s the original Bastard. A real Professional. To top it all off He had billions of fools convinced of His mercy and His goodness. They were ready to tell you that “God so loved the world. …”

But,

O sinnerman where will you run to
O sinnerman where will you run to
O sinnerman where will you run to
All on that day

There wasn’t any kind of great switcheroo where my hatred was replaced with love and the peace that passeth all understanding. It wasn’t a replacement, but it was a departure.

I did not forget the photograph. I would never forget the photograph. But I did let go of the idea that the evil it embodied was an Act of God. It took me a long time, a lot of hate, and a very simple song before I understood that every act of evil is an Act of Man.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
the slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.
For our atonement, while we nothing heeded,
God interceded.

There was a day when Jesus was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, where he said,

“This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.” …

And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.

O sinnerman where will you run to …
Run to the mountain
The mountain wont hide you
Run to the sea
The sea will not have you
And run to your grave
Your grave will not hold you.

So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Your grave will not hold you
all on that day
run to the lord

The Hebrew Scriptures say that the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD. Then the LORD sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.

O sinnerman where will you run to
O sinnerman where will you run to
O sinnerman where will you run to?

Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. … The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?”

“Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.”

Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. Then they cried to the LORD, “O LORD, please do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O LORD, have done as you pleased.” Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard … .

O sinnerman where will you run to?
Run to the sea
The sea will not have you
And run to your grave
Your grave will not hold you
all on that day.

Where can we run to? The Psalmist asked that question: “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Jonah surely did not think he could escape God. He instead sought to disqualify himself from carrying out God’s command by running away from what God wanted him to do.

Is that the escape we try to make, too? To run away from our God-commanded responsibilities? Why on earth do we think we can succeed? Not even the grave can hide us when the Lord comes again. The prophet Malachi had words to say about that:

But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire … And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the children of Levi, and refine them like gold and silver, that they may give offerings to the LORD in righteousness.

O sinnerman where will you run to?
Run to the mountain
The mountain won’t hide you
Run to the sea
The sea will not have you
And run to your grave
Your grave will not hold you
all on that day.
Run to the Lord.

When you gonna stop running?
When you gonna cease fleeing?
When you gonna stop hiding?
When you gonna start heeding?

O sinnerman, Jesus is calling!
O sinnerman, Jesus does see you!
O sinnerman, Jesus is coming,
all on that day!

O sinnerman where will you run to?
Run to the Lord!

For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation,
thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation;
thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
for my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.

Update: I should point out that “Sinnerman” is not original to 16 Horsepower but goes back quite a bit. As Gerard says, it’s a spiritual, though whether it goes back to the antebellum South I do not know. Here is an old recording of The Seekers singing it. You’ll notice that their lyrics differ somewhat from those of 16 Horsepower. I used that group as my reference because it aligned with the lyrics Gerard quoted, although he did not credit the song to any group.

… 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.

… the answer must be more gun control laws!

Only in Britain would you find this line of reasoning:

We have, post-Dunblane, what are said to be the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns - either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe - with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

So what to do? The usually sensible Telegraph says the solution is to enable even more draconian police powers and stiffen sentences for gun offenses.

The truth is that the laws relating to possession of guns are nowhere near tough enough. …

In particular, the ludicrous inhibitions placed on the police when it comes to exercising powers of stop and search have to be lifted. So must the post-Macpherson burden of political correctness, which makes any police officer think twice before challenging a young black man on the street. There is a wider failure here.

NB: in Great Britain merely possessing a gun, other than a registered shotgun, is illegal. I didn’t say “carrying,” but possessing. As in your house, locked inside a safe. Rusted beyond use. Lacking ammunition. It’s still illegal and a British subject will go to prison for that.

The Dunblane reference, btw, is to a “multiple murder-suicide which occurred at the primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane on 13 March 1996. It remains the deadliest attack on children in United Kingdom history. Sixteen children and one adult were killed, in addition to the attacker;” more at Wikipedia.

Crime in Britain has become so severe that in 2003 even the BBC explained, “Why Britain needs more guns.”

“You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York. Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them. They help keep the peace. A study found American burglars fear armed home-owners more than the police. As a result burglaries are much rarer and only 13% occur when people are at home, in contrast to 53% in England.

Of the 13 percent of occupied-home burglaries in the US, most stem from the burglars’ mistaken belief that the home is empty. In Britain, they don’t care because it is actually illegal for residents to defend themselves with force against an intruder. Remember Tony Martin? He was convicted of murder and sent to prison because he shot and killed a home intruder after suffering numerous home invasions in which he had been attacked and injured. The result? Mark Steyn, as always, nails it:

These days, even as he or she is being clobbered, the more thoughtful British subject is usually keeping an eye (the one that hasn’t been poked out) on potential liability. Four years ago, Shirley Best, proprietor of the Rolander Fashion emporium, whose clients include Zara Phillips, was ironing some clothes when the proverbial two youths showed up. They pressed the hot iron into her flesh, burning her badly, and then stole her watch. “I was frightened to defend myself,” said Miss Best. “I thought if I did anything I would be arrested.” There speaks the modern British crime victim.

The British used to be a free people, but no longer.

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.”