Part 5 - SCIENTISTS ARE HUMAN TOO

It’s not beyond science to bend the rules occasionally should the need arise. Any organisation involving people is subject to an individual’s ambition or corruptibility, not to mention his or her own incompetence. Science has something of a history of getting it wrong – either by accident or design.

PILTDOWN MAN

In 1912 a team of archaeologists unearthed a find that was to send shockwaves throughout the world. On Piltdown Common in Sussex a skull, which appeared human like, was unearthed and that was hailed as the evidence of the missing link by a team led by a guy called Charles Dawson. Thanks to this find, he became famous, but tragically died soon after in 1916.

It wasn't until 1953 and modern testing techniques became available that the whole missing link story was exposed as a fraud. The skull they found was human - it was around 600 years old. The jaw found with the skull belonged to an orangutan. The teeth in the jaw belonged to an elephant, a chimpanzee and a hippopotamus. The chimpanzee tooth had been patched with chewing gum. The whole thing had been treated with iron sulphate to artificially age it.

But at the time the cream of the science community were queuing up to laud the find including people like Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith and Elliot Smith, considered great minds of their day.

FINDING YOUR QUARRY

US Marines found 30 skulls and 147 teeth in 1941 in a quarry. Scientists believed they may have finally found their missing link. It received huge publicity at the time because everyone wanted to prove the evolution theory. It is now known the remains were of some large monkeys and baboons killed and eaten by ancient workers.

MORE MISSING LINKS

Nebraska Man was found in 1922. The find was one tooth. It was declared by Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn to be the missing link. It was discovered in 1927 to be the remains of a PIG!!!!
The Keilor skull was discovered in Australia in the 1940’s and was dated at around 150,000 years old until re-tested and found to be 8,500 years old.

MODERN SCIENCE DOESN’T MAKE MISTAKES

Climate change is not mentioned in the Bible and I’m not including this to give any Biblical substance to global warming.

On the contrary, I’m including this section to demonstrate that lies, mistakes and hoaxes still go on today, despite our superior technology.

Here’s the problem – We know the temperature of the Earth is rising – Records clearly show that – what is less clear is the cause of that rise.

Since the late seventies, when we really first sat up and took notice of climate change, it’s been the popular thought that carbon dioxide emissions, created by the industrialisation of the western world has caused this warming process. But in the last few years some serious problems with this theory have come to light.

The theory goes like this:
Heat from the sun warms the earth but the troposphere, the first really important layer of earth’s atmosphere, prevents all of that warmth simply evaporating back out into space by trapping some of this heat.

One of the components of the troposphere is carbon dioxide. Planes, cars, the burning of fossil fuels – all of these things produce tons of carbon dioxide every year which floats up to the troposphere, trapping more of that warmth from the sun – The more carbon dioxide, the less heat can escape and the surface of the earth warms up – hey presto – the greenhouse effect.

Now carbon dioxide has been portrayed as the bad guy in all of this but the industrialisation of the western world didn’t really take off until the 1950’s – and then we were pumping out carbon dioxide like it was going out of fashion. But this temperature rise started way back in the late nineteenth century. From 1890 to now, the average temperature has raised half a degree Celsius. That doesn’t sound much but it is a very significant amount.

The majority of this rise occurred before 1940 - before we were really pumping out carbon dioxide. After 1940 – the temperature has continued to climb but a much slower rate – it even fell in the 70’s before returning to this upward trend. In the 70’s we didn’t care less about the environment – we had carbon dioxide production down to a fine art and were spewing millions of tons of the stuff out every day.

So the notion that the more carbon dioxide there is the warmer things get doesn’t hold together too well. But artic ice core extractions have recently taught us something very interesting… the warmer things get the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the complete opposite of the greenhouse effect.

Ice core extractions freeze not only water but also trap air and we can test that. Many samples have been taken by different people and groups and they have all come up with the same thing – first a rise in temperature followed by a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a fall in temp followed by a fall in carbon dioxide. Now, that we can scientifically prove – this is not theory, this is fact. But the question is why?

Carbon dioxide makes up less than 1% of the atmosphere – it’s a natural gas – not a pollutant, and is produced by all living things – the wildlife on this planet gives off 150 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Even volcanoes give off around 10 gigatons – our industrialised lifestyle, including our cars, trains and planes can only muster 6 lousy gigatons.
Do you want to know who really pumps out carbon dioxide in quantities that dwarfs them all? The oceans…

As temperatures rise, the oceans release carbon dioxide, in huge amounts – as they cool, they absorb carbon dioxide. Temperatures are rising so more carbon dioxide is being released at the moment. But all the oceans, all of industry and ALL the life on this planet are not producing nearly enough carbon dioxide that would affect global temperatures one little bit.

We have known for hundreds of years that the activity of the sun directly affects the climate on earth. Astronomers started watching solar activity hundreds of years ago in the form of sun spots. They didn’t know what they were looking at back then but they recorded what they saw. We know sunspots are formed on the surface of the sun as part of the violent processes that goes on within. We can directly link sunspot activity to temperature changes. Solar physicists have known this for years and must look at the carbon dioxide arguments with disbelief at how embedded and accepted as fact they have become.

In the 14th century Europe was plunged into a mini ice age. There are plenty of records and even paintings at the time to show this. We also have records that show sun spot activity was very low at that time.

Now, our earth is warming and we have the sun spot records to show an increase in solar activity. Every change in global temperatures can be tracked through hundreds of years to correlate exactly with sun spot activity. The more active the sun, the warmer it gets here. The less activity, the cooler it gets here.

There is some speculation to the reasons why the scientific community has pointed the finger at carbon dioxide - much of it surrounding money and politics.

A UN recognised body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, produced a report linking carbon dioxide with temperature change – the panel that submitted it’s report was made up from 2500 scientists – but the 2500 wasn’t all science – there were some big business and political players in there too – also, many scientists on the panel dissented against the findings and resigned from the panel yet, incredibly, found their name on the final report.

In 2005, the House of Lords commissioned a report to look into the science of the theory. The chairman, Lord Nigel Lawson, described the science as ‘weak and uncertain’. The Al Gore presented ‘documentary’, An Inconvenient Truth, found out that the truth was very inconvenient, and largely absent, as many of it’s claims were tested in a court of law in the UK and found wanting.

There are all kinds of lobbies, environmental groups, politicians and media people who are making a very nice living from global warming – it’s a $2 billion industry and, if shown to be wrong, would cost many jobs and embarrass the hell out of several governments.
The annoying thing about this is that we don’t seem to have learnt from our mistakes, either from the distant past or recent past.

In the 1950’s, scientists told us that smoking was perfectly safe, even wanted children to take it up as it was good for you. The paymasters of these scientists were the tobacco industry. Now, its law that every packet makes it clear that smoking kills – because independent science woke up to what was going on – it took many decades because they trusted their fellow scientists – but they saw through it in the end. They also realised the government had turned a blind eye because of the huge tax revenue.