science

Creation Or Evolution

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I have been thinking this week about two stories of how we arrived in the world. The first theory is evolution, which says that we are just a product of random chemical reactions over a very long period of time. The second story is that of creation as described in the very first chapter of Genesis.

This is not the place to say whether one of these stories is factually correct, or whether we can blend the two together in some way. I do want to consider some of the ramifications of these stories and the results of believing one or the other.

As we read the familiar words of Genesis 1, we discover that God is greater than the world, the sun and moon, the stars and bigger than everything all put together. Science tells us that the universe is unimaginably huge and more complex than we can imagine, but God is bigger than all of this.

At each stage of the process, God describes the creation as good, until the last day when He makes the first people and He describes it as “very good.” It is as if everything is made for the purpose of supporting human beings.

The Bible teaches that we are created for a purpose and that we are the pinnacle of God’s creative activity.

On the other hand, evolution tells us that everything is random, from the birth of our planet (an insignificant lump of rock on the edge of an average galaxy), to the production of individual human beings (you are just a random arrangement of DNA, and it determines your life).

So we get to a place of despair because there is no reason for us to exist. There is no future because in the end the whole universe will just run out of energy.

From that depressing explanation of life, we reap a harvest of depression, purposelessness, sexual anarchy and lawlessness.

God made you for a purpose. He has a plan for your life and a destiny for you in eternity.

Praise God!

Atheist rejected God because of science, then science led her to God

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Atheist rejected God because of science, then science led her to God

Decidedly “100% atheist,” Mariah Jones pitied Christians, believing they reject reason and the advancements of scientific knowledge.

“I did not believe in God,” Mariah says on a 2019 video on her YouTube channel. “I didn’t believe in spirituality at all. I thought believing in such things was silly. Basically I was just a strong believer in science.”

Right after high school, Mariah joined the Navy in 2013. It was in the Navy that she developed anorexia and bulimia.

“It grew more and more aggressive as the years went by,” she says.

Once out of the Navy, she enrolled in college, and she positively relished the science classes which at first affirmed her belief in nothing.

“I used to enjoy when people would bring up God so that I could try and destroy their argument with science.” she admits. “I would ask them impossible questions that would put them in this awkward position and make it pretty much impossible for them to answer.

“I hated when people would talk about Jesus.”

Her distaste for Christianity was extreme, fueled by the grip of the evil one in her life.

“My mentality towards Christians and anyone who was religious was like, You’re wasting your entire life trying to live by these impossible standards and these rules that supposedly God created just to go to a place after you die,” she says. “I thought religion was a man-made construct that was harmful to people.”

Then a boomerang struck in 2017 in her second year in college. The same science that in the first year of college affirmed her atheist became the science of the second year of college that undermined her atheism.

Specifically, how could biological molecules with astronomical number of atoms all sequenced with confunding minute precision have just come together by chance? she wondered.

See related article: scientist Sy Garte became a Christian when he studied molecular biology.

So at first science contributed to her atheistic arrogance. Then, as the classes advanced, they deconstructed it.

“Having to accept that everything just formed on its own by itself on accident, it didn’t make sense to me,” Mariah admits. “It really started to bother me because deep down I didn’t want to believe something. I didn’t want to take that responsibility.”

Mariah stayed after class and probed professors looking for logical answers.

“What came first, was it the blood or was it the heart that pumped the blood?” she quizzed them. “Was it the skin that held it all together or the organs inside the skin? How did nothing turn into something? How did nothing result in intelligent life? How did an explosion result in living breathing loving unique beings?”

The professors were of no help with these befuddling questions. So, her mind wandered to the obvious: there had to be an outside agent guiding the process, an external agent with a purpose from another dimension.

Her progression bugged her. She had always felt sorry for those who saw the need to believe in God. But now science was leading her towards him.

“Eventually I recognized my biases and I knew that I was being closed-minded towards the alternative which was God,” she says.

As she pondered what she had vowed never to do, she prayed to God.

“I refused to call it a prayer at this time,” she recalls. “But I basically said, ‘God if you’re real and you really exist, would you not want me to know you? Would you want me to wonder forever about if you exist? I don’t want to be disrespectful to you. But I just if you’re there, I want you to give me a sign and I’ll believe.’”

Immediately… nothing happened. To be truthful, Mariah felt embarrassed and dumb.

But as the next six months unwound, things happened: vivid dreams that reflected Bible verses and scary events rattled her.

Mariah was disinclined towards Christianity. So she searched every other religion: Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, you name it, she researched it.

Finally, she looked into the character of Jesus in the Bible, and what she saw startled her.

“I started studying the Bible and learning about Jesus and the meaning of his life and death and what he claimed his purpose was,” Mariah says. “I ended up finding out that his purpose was essentially for me.”

Then in December 2017, her battles with anorexia and bulimia came to a head.

“I was trapped in this violent cycle that would never end, never, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break out of it,” she admits. “I remember being in the bathroom. I was in the bathtub and I was throwing up. I remember feeling like, How long will I keep doing this? I felt so enslaved by this disease, this addiction”

As the water was running, she broke down crying for the first time.

Without any forethought, she cried out: “Jesus, please help me.”

This time the response was immediate.

“I can’t explain the feeling what it was. It was love. Someone loved me. I felt stillness, peace,” she explains. “Within seconds the crying stopped, not on my own. Something had come over my entire being. There are no words. The entire room was filled with Jesus.”

The anorexia and bulimia simply disappeared from her life.

“I felt healed,” she thinks. “It felt almost like I never had an addiction to begin with. This darkness, this heaviness that was over me for four years, gone completely. I went to bed that night shocked – in a good way. I just could not believe what happened to me. I still can’t fathom what he did to me.”

A few days later, she received Jesus Christ into her heart.

Initially, Mariah was reluctant to share her testimony online because she feared a blowback from her atheist friends.

“I know what I’m going to face. I know people will probably make fun of me. I’ve accepted it,” Mariah says. “I know who I used to be. I would have laughed at me. But I don’t care. I will never forget what he did for me. I will always be in his debt. This is just a small, small portion of my gratitude for what he did for me.”

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

From: God Reports

The Sad State of Science

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Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash

Science, as it is popularly understood, is in a parlous state. Politics and activists have captured important areas of research such as climate science and virology. People make stuff up and rely on dodgy computer “models” to make apocalyptic predictions, and nobody is ever held to account.

Now we have major science journals publishing mountains of computer-generated gibberish. So much for peer review.

Jo Nova writes:

Sea level height based on aerobics and other gibberish published in top science journals

Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.

It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “

They are shocked that  scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails.

In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published.

Indeed, no one even read the titles…

Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published

Nature

Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.

Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.

Guillaume Cabanac,  a computer scientist who uncovered nonsense papers, was shocked:

…it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.

The papers are computer generated junk:

 71 articles have abstracts or titles that contain the words ‘dance’, ‘aerobics’ or ‘sports’ in relation to geoscience, including the articles ‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’ and ‘Rock stress and deformation characteristics based on SVM and sports high-intensity interval training’.

And it’s all happened before — in 2014 at least 120 papers were “computer generated nonsense” and were published and later retracted. It’s emblematic of the entire academic sector really. An industry using AI to produce nothing, discover nothing, get published, and then write papers about it?

So who benefits?

But the scammers’ motivations remain a mystery to Ivan Oransky, a journalist who runs Retraction Watch. Even the article titles, which would be listed as part of an individual’s publication record, often do not make sense, he says. “The papers are so obviously terrible, so why would you want them on your CV?”

Many of the papers were from authors based at Chinese institutions, and most contained nonsensical phrases that Elsevier thinks came from the use of reverse-translation software to disguise plagiarism.

Perhaps Western professors are trying to plump out their bio’s with statements about “publishing 412 Nature papers” and just paid a paper-scam generator in China. But who’d really want their name on papers like these? These papers are so bad, they look like the hoax papers done purposely to expose the rot in academia.Will a team appear next week admitting the papers were faked to test the system? Or are there just too many incentives for Chinese or other academics to “publish or perish”?

Either way, Western Civilization is paying tillions of dollars to change the weather based on “The Science” according to peer review — which appears to have no more intellectual prowess than a Nigerian 419 email scam.

Peer review is anonymous and unpaid and worth every cent.

Eratosthenes And The Size Of The Earth

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Eratosthenes And The Size Of The Earth

People in our age often arrogantly assume that we are smarter than ancient people. This is probably because we live in an information age, where the the combination of technology and widespread education makes a wide range of knowledge available to just about everybody.

Additionally the flawed theory of evolution causes us to assume we must be better than people who lived a long time ago.

This story of how a man with rudimentary measuring and calculating technology is also a reminder of how God blesses people at all ages and all nations.

So about 2200 years ago there was a very bright man called Eratosthenes who came from Greece which was then the centre of learning and philosophy. He took up residence in Alexandria in Egypt, where there was a famous library which contained all of the world’s great learning.

While he was living in Alexandria, Eratosthenes heard about a well in the village of Syene in the south of Egypt where there was a well, where at midday on the summer solstice the sun shone right to the water below without casting a shadow on the walls of the well. In other words, the sun at that time was directly overhead. Today we would recognise that Syene is located on the Tropic of Cancer.

This caused Eratosthenes to wonder if this held true at Alexandria, some distance to the north. So at midday on the summer solstice, he observed a vertical post in the ground and noted that it cast a shadow. So when the sun was overhead in Syene, it was not directly overhead in Alexandria.

Measuring the length of the shadow and the post he discovered that the sun was at an angle of 7.2 degrees off the vertical. This proved that the world is not flat but is a sphere. All he needed to do was find the distance from Alexandria to Syene to find out just how big the sphere is.

Apparently in the ancient world they had people called bematists whose job was to accurately pace out the distances between locations. He discovered that the distance between the two towns was 5000 stadia or 800 km.

Now here is the clever part. A complete circle is 360 degrees, and 7.2 degrees is one fiftieth of 360. If 800 km, the distance from Alexandria to Syene, represents one fiftieth of the circumference of the earth, then the full circumference is 50 x 800 km or 40,000 km.

Was he close? Yes! The pole to pole circumference is 40,008 km while the circumference at the equator is 40,075 km. That is brilliant calculation with such limited tools as he had.

So Eratosthenes drew a map of the known world with grids of latitude and longitude, and hundreds of towns and cities. This made it much easier to estimate distances than ever before, and laid the foundations of modern geography.

God created people with great intelligence. We have not evolved into higher levels of smartness over the millennia. Despite the arrogance of our age, people in the ancient world knew more than we give them credit for.

Hundreds of Scientific Papers Say There Is No “Climate Change”

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From wattsupwiththat.com comes this interesting revelation that last year there were 148 scientific papers that state there is no global warming.

What Global Warming? 148 New (2020) Scientific Papers Affirm Recent Non-Warming, A Degrees-Warmer Past

By Kenneth Richard on 14. January 2021

Scientists continued defying the “unprecedented” global warming narrative by publishing nearly 150 papers  in 2020 that show large regions of the Earth (a) haven’t warmed in recent decades, (b) were as-warm or warmer within the last several centuries, and/or (c) were 1-7°C warmer than today just a few millennia ago.

Here is the link to the 2020 (and 2019) Non-Global Warming scientific paper database:

Non-Global Warming Studies From 2020 & 2019

Below are 8 examples of the 148 non-global warming papers published in 2020.

Read the full article here, together with extracts from some of the papers.

Forget Slow-and-Gradual—New Study Says Life “Emerged Fully Formed”

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From Answers in Genesis comes this report that scientists are thinking abut creation as a potential explanation for the beginning of life.

 

Forget Slow-and-Gradual—New Study Says Life “Emerged Fully Formed”

by Ken Ham on August 20, 2020

 
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For decades scientists have debated when, how, and where the first life supposedly evolved. Various hypotheses abound: maybe RNA came first; perhaps life evolved around hydrothermal vents; maybe life arrived on an asteroid—but none have satisfied everyone, due to significant problems with each one. And now an old idea has been revived and refined: maybe there was a “chemical big bang,” and life arose spontaneously in a river, with all the major components in place all at once.

As this article from New Scientist states,

It has long been thought that the ingredients for life came together slowly, bit by bit. Now there is evidence it all happened at once in a chemical big bang.

In other words, it used to be that life evolved so slowly you couldn’t see it happening, and now it happened so fast we missed it!

The article explains that life requires, at the bare minimum, “three core systems”: an outer membrane, the ability to metabolize, and the ability to reproduce using genes. Chemical evolutionists have a problem when it comes to trying to explain the origin of life—you need all three of these systems at the same time for life to even be imaginable. So scientists have argued over which came first, but now some say all three came at the same time. That’s a pretty fortunate set of circumstances!

In other words, it used to be that life evolved so slowly you couldn’t see it happening, and now it happened so fast we missed it!

Geneticist Dr. Georgia Purdom says of this study,

The scientists correctly define what you need for life—something to contain it (membrane), ability to make/utilize energy (metabolism), and ability to reproduce. They’ve given up on bacteria being the first living organism because they know how complex even these “simplest” organisms are. Since none of their other ideas about which came first have panned out, they’ve decided that all three requirements for life must have evolved at once from “Goldilocks chemistry.”

Just like Goldilocks is a fairytale, so is their idea for the origin of life!

So just the right molecules interacting under just the right conditions in just the right place led to a living organism. Just like Goldilocks is a fairytale, so is their idea for the origin of life! All of the research to develop this idea has depended on the scientists adding just the right chemicals (e.g., iron, sulfur) in just the right conditions (e.g., UV light), meaning intelligent design was needed, and they still didn’t end up with anything living! Life only comes from life (the law of biogenesis), and life only comes from the Creator God.

The popular summary of the study concludes with,

Of course, all this depends on the everything-first idea proving correct. Szostak’s protocells and the new biochemical insights have won over many researchers, but some pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Perhaps the most persuasive argument is that the simpler ideas don’t work. As is the case with many things in life, the beginning was probably more complicated than we had thought.

So the strongest support for this origin of life story is this: that the alternatives don’t work? Maybe that’s because life didn’t arise by natural processes! Really, their story is nothing more than a “just-so” story because they have to somehow explain the origin of life without God. They’d rather put their faith in the unbelievable—that something as complex as life could just pop into existence—than put their faith in the One who made them. And not just any “One,” but the only One true God: the Creator God of the Bible.

And information systems don’t just pop into existence. Information only comes from other information and, ultimately, a mind (in this case the mind of the Creator).

Life shows the fingerprints of the Designer. Just consider one of the three categories for life—the ability to reproduce using genes. This requires an information system to code the instructions needed to assemble life. And information systems don’t just pop into existence. Information only comes from other information and, ultimately, a mind (in this case the mind of the Creator).

Just as information only comes from information and, ultimately, a mind, so life only comes from life and, ultimately, the Lifegiver. These researchers, studying the incredible complexity of life, are without excuse for denying the Creator’s existence (Romans 1:20).

Covid Models Were Wrong, and Modellers Unwilling to Learn!

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From the University of Sydney:

Did COVID-19 models get it wrong? Professor Sally Cripps explains

Leading statistician analyses COVID-19 modellingRenowned University of Sydney statistician, Professor Sally Cripps, examines the efficacy of COVID-19 modelling as part of an online analysis with colleagues from Stanford University and North-Western University.

Did COVID-19 models in the United Kingdom and the United States get it wrong?

As part of an online discussion between an international group of researchers, including Stanford University Professor of Medicine John P.A. Ioannidis and Northwestern University statistician, Professor Martin A. Tanner, University of Sydney statistician Professor Sally Cripps discusses the efficacy of the two countries’ COVID-19 modelling efforts, with recommendations on how countries – including Australia – can better prepare for uncertainty.

In April, Professor Sally Cripps alongside US colleague, Professor Martin A. Tanner found that over 70 percent of US states had death rates that were inconsistent with IHME predictions. Credit: Centre for Translational Data science. 

“COVID-19 models got it wrong in that they failed to forecast with any degree of accuracy daily death counts even when the forecast was for one day in advance. In addition they failed to accurately quantify uncertainty,” said Professor Cripps, who is the Director of the University of Sydney Centre for Translational Data Science and the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Data Analytics for Resources and Environments. 

“But that doesn’t mean all modelling is bad or ineffective. In fact, what this scenario represents is an opportunity to learn and do better. Modellers have tried to justify their faulty models rather than learn from their mistakes.” At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, societal lockdown was the sensible thing to do. Australia acted swiftly in that regard, but now we need to find a way out. 

“At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, societal lockdown was the sensible thing to do. Australia acted swiftly in that regard, but now we need to find a way out.

“Though lockdowns minimise COVID-19 deaths, there are many studies which show that lockdowns increase domestic violence, as well as increase deaths from cancer and heart attacks.

“We need to develop models which have multi-criteria functions that allow governments to better understand a measure’s effect across all of our society.

“We also need access to reliable data, and models that are validated and continuously reappraised for their performance in real-time.”

As of 26 June 2020, COVID-19 had claimed almost 125,000 lives in the United States and over 43,000 in the United Kingdom.

DISCLOSURE:

Professor Cripps conducted an analysis on the efficacy of COVID-19 modelling efforts as part of an ongoing online discussion with international colleagues, Stanford University Professor of Medicine John P.A. Ioannidis and Northwestern University statistician, Professor Martin A. Tanner. The discussion has been published by the International Journal of Forecasters. 

The Great Extinction Myth Exploded

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A few weeks ago when the UN report about biodiversity was released, the media unquestioningly reported that millions of species were going extinct and humans are the problem.

My initial, cynical reaction was, “Gee they have discovered that nobody is listening to the climate change scare any more so they’ve found a new scare.”

It also runs counter to what we are seeing around the world. Every year more and more land is converted to national parks, and for some years now the amount of land being reforested exceeds the area being cleared. Agriculture is becoming more efficient, food is more plentiful, people are moving to cities. Even with a still increasing global population we will have plenty of potential food for decades to come.

In fact, the only bleak spots are those caused by the demands of environmentalists. For example the EU has mandated a certain amount of so-called bio-diesel to be used in vehicles, leading to massive clearing of forests in Indonesia and Malaysia to plant palm trees. The other folly is the requirement to use ethanol in petrol in many developed countries. The main source of this is from corn in North America, leading to an increase in the price of corn, a staple food for millions of poor people, of between 5% and 10%

Anyway the extinction report claims that millions of species are going extinct in our time. Here is the only graph in the Summary for Policy Makers

Scary graph, until you look at the labels on the axes. “Cumulative % of species driven extinct.” It is not clear exactly what that means, but it does seem to be adding all the previous values as you go. That curve can never go down. It’s a bit like the old “hockey stick” of Al Gore fame.

Here is the actual number of extinctions per decade recorded by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

So, it’s not quite zero, but we are heading in the right direction- the opposite direction to the one the UN would have us believe.

Oh look that decline is happening right through the period of time when so-called human caused global warming is happening.

These graphs are from a much more detailed article by Gregory Wrightson which I encourage you to read.

The so-called “Mass Extinction” is, sadly, another example of science being politicised and twisted to cause alarm.

“Science shows sex is binary”

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gender_theory_810_500_75_s_c1Those pesky facts do get in the way of a “good” social change program.

From lifesitenews.com

Tired of left-wing media manipulation, liberal researcher declares: ‘Science shows sex is binary’

 November 1, 2018, (LifeSiteNews) – Amid the fiery backlash against the Trump administration’s stated intent to legally define sex as either male or female, an expert in neuroscience has claimed, “The concept of sex is, by definition, binary.”

After The New York Times leaked a memo describing how the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to reverse the Obama administration’s guidance allowing students to use restroom and locker room facilities of the opposite sex based on which sex students “identify” as, media outlets and activist organizations unleashed relentless attacks on the Trump White House, claiming it seeks to harm “transgendered” people.

In two recent articles, one written for RealClearPolitics and the other for Playboy, Debra W. Soh, who holds a Ph.D in sexual neuroscience research from New York University, doused the raging firestorm with facts.

“As much as I understand the public’s concern, it’s important to offer a fact-based approach to the issue,” wrote Soh, a self-described liberal, in her Playboy essay.

Playboy

✔@Playboy

In light of the news that the Trump administration is seeking to define sex on the basis of genetics, writer @DrDebraSoh explores the importance of having “difficult, honest & fact-based conversations instead of derailing potentially meaningful progress.” http://ply.by/f4rMmC 

“It isn’t necessary to redefine ‘sex’ in order to facilitate the acceptance of people who are different,” said Dr. Soh in her RealClearPolitics commentary. “Pushing for social change for the sake of change, as many of those on the left seem wont to do, only leads to misguided policies and unnecessary confusion for the public.”

Humanity: 10 fingers, two sexes

Soh points out that the inflammatory New York Times article incorrectly sought to use the existence of a very small minority of people who are “intersex,” i.e., born with genitalia of both sexes or otherwise ambiguous genitalia, as proof that sex is on a spectrum, not binary.

Certainly, research has shown that as many as 1 percent of the population is intersex, a medical condition denoting that an individual possesses anatomy characteristic of both sexes, such as a combination of vulvar and testicular tissue. Statistically speaking, however, this means that the vast majority of us fall into one category of sex or the other.

It therefore becomes a question of whether a statistically rare occurrence in the general population should be considered typical. An analogy that is commonly used to illustrate this is the fact that most of us have 10 fingers. There exist individuals who possess fewer or more than 10 digits on their hands, but this hasn’t called for a re-conceptualization of how many fingers a human being has.

Ironically, the term ‘transgender’ implies that sex is binary

“This argument has been extended to include the transgender community, with its proponents contending that transgender people defy male and female categorization, and offer proof that sex and gender are a spectrum,” said Soh. “But in reality, the term ‘transgender’ means that a person identifies more as the opposite sex than their birth sex — which still operates within a framework of sex being binary.”

Left-wing media incite outrage, falsely accuse Trump administration of bigotry

According to Soh, the HHS memo suggesting that governmental agencies define sex as being “either male or female, unchangeable and determined by the genitals that a person is born with” is an accurate statement based on science.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ clear statement on defining sex “left most of us with a half-hearted understanding of human biology confused exactly why people are outraged, as there is nothing factually incorrect with this definition,” said Soh.  “And yet, left-wing media has been treating it as bigotry.”

Trump administration has it right

“Indeed, a single definition of sex should be reinstated across the U.S. government’s agencies,” asserted Soh. “This is basic demographic information that shouldn’t be seen as controversial or difficult to attain. Don’t get me wrong: acknowledging a transgender person’s sex at birth feels insensitive, especially for those of us who aren’t transgender. But the solution to ending discrimination against gender-variant people is not to adopt the position that biological sex doesn’t exist.”

“To suggest that this group proves that gender is completely unrelated to anatomy, or that a person’s sense of gender in the brain somehow operates in a way that is distinct from the rest of their body, is foolish and erroneous,” she added.

Tired of left-wing media’s manipulative tactics

Soh, who is a supporter of equal rights for “transgender” people, nonetheless views the stances of left-wing activists and media as unsupportable, arguing that important differences between females and men who identify as female certainly do exist. “We should be able to advocate for equal rights for transgender individuals while also acknowledging that differences exist between trans women and women who were born female.”

People should not “deny science” or “make sweeping claims in order to ramp up the backlash,” said Soh in her Playboy essay. “In our current climate, heightening political polarization is reckless and only serves to frustrate and alienate well-meaning people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.”

“Rather, they must contend with whether they are being manipulated by the media,” continued Dr. Soh. “These changes have no doubt been a wider response to the left’s increasingly extreme views on gender; some liberals, including myself, have become tired of its nonsensical ideas, including the concept that self-identification supersedes everything else, and that shaming and silencing someone is the only acceptable reaction should they question the outrage.”

I Like Turtles

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turtle

A great journalistic triumph on the ABC this morning was the report on the all female hatching of green sea turtles at the northern end of the Barrier Reef. The study was funded by US weather agency NOAA , the Australian Government and WWF (the World Wildlife Fund), a notorious pusher for climate change propaganda. The research was carried out by scientists (I would use that word cautiously) from James Cook University, another institution devoted to the climate religion.

Anyway, using DNA samples from turtles in the wild they were able to trace where they hatched from and deduced that all turtles from the northern end of the reef born last year were female. We know that the warmer the environment the more likely the hatchlings are to be female.

The journalist asked a very wise question, “How much have temperatures here increased?”

There was a pause while the scientist was obviously thinking “Crap! We haven’t thought this through.” Eventually she said “We know that the average global temperatures have increased by 0.8 degrees since the 1880’s and we need to do more to fight climate change.”

We don’t know how the temperatures have changed at the place where the turtles are hatching, but they are obviously under threat because temperatures in other paces have increased a little since the Little Ice Age.

Being the modern journalist at the ABC, there was no pressing of the point.

Also I was intrigued by other questions that were not asked like:

  • How are the turtles at the other breeding sites doing? Are they producing males who then mix in with the wider population?
  • What role does habitat destruction play in the health or otherwise of the turtle population?
  • Since they were only measuring older turtles and working backwards, is it possible that there were in fact many males produced but something other than slightly higher temperatures was killing them?
  • Is it possible that the last two years of warmer than average temperatures were caused by something other than “climate change”?
  • If we stopped all CO2 production tomorrow would the turtles notice the supposed change in temperature?
  • How did the sea turtles survive the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods, not to mention other geological periods when temperatures were much higher?

Here is the problem for environmentalists. If you think that climate change explains everything that is bad in nature, then if there are other causes for bad outcomes focusing on “fixing” the climate will kill the very things you are trying to save.

What a pity we can’t get proper journalists and scientists to ask the necessary questions.