More Perverted Science…

The Guardian (19th May 2009) quoted Sir David Attenborough: this little creature is going to show our connection with all other mammals. Google changed it’s home page icon to reflect the find. On 21 May 2009, the Daily Mail trumpeted Scientists find the 'missing link': A 47million-year-old lemur that could revolutionise how we see human evolution.

But also on 21 May, the New Scientist published an article Why Ida fossil is not the missing link. On 24th May, the Times weighed in with Origin of the Specious: Ida the fossil was hailed as the ‘missing link’ in our evolution. Don’t believe the hype

Because it was hype. The early enthusiasm for the “missing link” idea was based on press releases and media rights rather than scholarly content and careful analysis. Ida was dug up in 1983 and reportedly one of the protagonists had bought her for a large sum of money – which he was presumably trying to recoup. She is an amazing fossil, but later and more sober assessment appears to have concluded that she adds almost nothing to our understanding of human evolution.

We can do without this kind of thing. If science is going to work at all it requires a critical mass of integrity. Once again, as with NASA climate change data, not only does that integrity appears to have been lacking, but also the perpetrators appear to have escaped any significant censorship

The lights of a Perverted Science

 

Sir Winston used the phrase in his “Finest Hour” speech: and now I have seen it in a respected free world organisation, and my heart quails.

There are four major sources publishing data on world temperatures: the Hadley Centre (UK),  NASA, UAH (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa). The Hadley, UAH and RSS data sets show temperature rise having more or less levelled out since 2000. The NASA dataset is radically different, suggesting a large and significant rise. This throws doubt on the NASA data.

It gets worse, much worse however. If you compare the NASA data published in 1999 with the NASA data published in 2009 for the same historical data they are substantially different: and different in a way which supports the climate change hypothesis.

It is fairly clear that NASA has been fiddling the books.

Forget the argument about climate change. This is a harbinger of  “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science”. Fiddling data is the unforgivable sin. If an organisation like NASA can get away with it, then the bedrock on which we have accumulated much of our knowledge of the world is breaking up, and all we have left is a fight between the loudest voices and the deepest pockets.

A lovely day for Anoraks

I've just got back from the Battery Vehicle Society Spring conference. It was one of the best one day event of any kind that I have ever attended - a good number of speakers, very varied, but not a single dud amongst them. Appropriate venue, faultless organisation.

I struggle to pick a highlight but the most memorable bits included a chap who had invested about £40-grand in a ton and a half of Lithium Polymer batteries to put into his Berlingo Electrique to make a super - long-range EV. Others were seeing a real live Zebra battery, some supercapacitors and a talk from a chap designing a rover for a Mars mission. On coming back I joined the EV network - a database of EV charging points public and private (the latter available to other members). I was also encouraged to come across a couple of others who share my scepticism about man-made climate change

£5000 Subsidy for battery vehicles

The government today announced a subsidy (probably from 2011) on battery-powered vehicles. I was saddened by the welter of vitriolic and grossly - ill-informed comment this generated. Even worse, much of it wasn't even the product of independent thought, but a fairly transparent regurgitation of a monumentally misinformed piece on Top Gear.

For the record

• There are no current widespread commercial applications for hydrogen fuel cells
• Lithium batteries (the most likely chemistry for a battery vehicle) are used in a high proportion of the world's consumer electronics
  
• The very first hydrogen fuel cell car would require a vast infrastructure investment in hydrogen production and distribution (tankers, filling stations)
  
• A battery vehicle with an onboard charger needs a 13 Amp socket
• A million battery vehicles would use less than 1 % of UK generating capacity. Further growth could scale as required using incremental addition of well-understood commercial technology

Bendy Buses

I understand that some bendy buses are running around London bearing the slogan There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

I trust that these buses are being routed well clear of Hannibal Lector's home. Or those of convicted Paedophiles. Or those who enjoy beating up people of different racial origins.

Maybe they just mean illicit pleasures that are currently regarded as socially acceptable??

American Christianity and politics

I recently came across this speech that Obama gave a couple of years back to a Christian group and I think it points up a trend in the influence of Christianity on US politics. One of the guys Obama mentions, Jim Wallis, was a prime mover in a delegation of US churchmen who visited Tony Blair before the Iraq war and attempted to persuade him not to jump.

My reading (from 3000 miles away) of what has happened in the US in recent years is that the Democratic party has been dominated by a secular fundamentalism which attempts to ban any reference to God in public life (e.g. the language checker in our American HR software which objects to "Christmas" and suggests "holiday" instead). This has (unsurprisingly) driven many Christians into the arms of people like Falwell and through them, the Republicans. This support has in turn been used to shore up an increasingly theocratic regime which (probably mistakenly rather than cynically) confuses America and the Kingdom of God.

I think what is interesting is that we might be at a tipping point. Even the most honey-tongued televangelist must be running out of ways of persuading anyone who has actually read the Sermon on the Mount that the current Republican executive maps onto Jesus's blueprint for human relationships! I am fascinated that Obama sounds like he thinks along the same lines as Wallis.

To make it work, I think Christians have to persuade rather than pronounce; if for example they want to lower the rate of abortions for social reasons, to provide arguments that the secular humanist can subscribe to, rather than just expecting them to accede to a Christian viewpoint. The secular humanists meanwhile have to drop this absurd notion that religion and politics don't mix and give Christians and other religious believers the space to express themselves in theological terms on the public stage as King (and indeed Lincoln) did.

Christmas stamps

I was told that the UK Post Office were offering a mixture of secular and Christian stamp designs this Christmas. This seemed odd to me given the nature of Christmas as a Christian festival (it would seem pretty weird to print secular stamps for Ede, Hanukkah or Diwali).

However I didn't mind very much so long as I could get Christian designs. When I tried to purchase some stamps 6 days before Christmas though, I was told that my local Post office had long since run out of the Christian designs. Since when does a post office run out of stamps? And what are those small-minded enough to object to a Christian festival doing sending Christmas cards anyway? Christmas without the Christian bit seems to make as much sense as a rock concert without music.