NCSE Webinar, science denial, Wednesday

I used to deny anthropogenic climate change, too. Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data have to be rejected in order to hold YEC, and since ice cores are our primary source of information about the feedback mechanisms in the carbon cycle, throwing them out leaves you without a firm basis for saying that human carbon really is going to cause serious warming.

At least that was the idea.

Exactly what is this "Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data" that you speak of?

KlausH said: Exactly what is this "Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data" that you speak of?

Vostok[edit] Vostok team. Main article: Vostok, Antarctica As of 2003, the longest core drilled was at Vostok station. It reached back 420,000 years and revealed 4 past glacial cycles. Drilling stopped just above Lake Vostok. The Vostok core was not drilled at a summit, hence ice from deeper down has flowed from upslope; this slightly complicates dating and interpretation. Vostok core data are available.[30] (emphasis added)

The Dome C ice cores from Antarctica go back almost twice as far, to about 800,000 years.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

The Northern Hemisphere isn't quite so lucky, but with GISP2 ice cores from Greenland we have about 110,000 years of Arctic data.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/document/gispinfo.htm. As an aside, Richard Alley worked on the GISP project and is a fantastic science presenter when it comes to climate science and glaciology. Look up some of his videos if you're interested!

Slightly less aside, Skeptical Science is a fantastic resource for debunking denialist myths. It's like the climate version of the old TalkOrigins archives, including an index to common climate denialist claims like the one for Creationsts at T.O., and a database of popular denialists with their favorite talking points vs. reality.

Speaking of ice cores and Creationism, it's worth remembering that the comprehensive debunking Problems With A Global Flood, 2nd. Edition points out that if there were a literal Deluge, we wouldn't have ice caps at all. Even if you totally ignored the impossible thermodynamics and assume the Earth wouldn't become hot enough to boil them off into space, there's still the problem that ice floats. In my experience it's become a common YEC fiction that after the Flood there was a sudden "Ice Age," but this obviously can't explain the features of the ice cores like the hundreds of thousands of distinct annual layers or the telltale records of volcanic eruptions millennia apart. If you start to even brush up lightly against thermodynamics again it becomes impossible to move heat around fast enough for that kind of weather, too. That's not even mentioning the utter lack of historical records.

Yeah, the hardcore YECs have to compress human history even further, putting pretty much every civilization not only post-Flood, but Post-Mini-Ice-Age as well. Of course, the Egyptians get a bit of a pass because they wouldn't have been affected much, being south of the Fertile Crescent and all.

Babel supposedly took place in 2242 BC, give or take a decade. Barely more than 100 years after the Flood. How they expect to get as massive a population as was supposedly present at Babel in 100 years is anybody's guess, but they are sure about it. The Mini Ice Age follows shortly after Babel and lasts for something like 200 years.

All human history is supposed to have come after this point. All of it. Mind-boggling, I know.

But the idea that you could get more than three miles of ice comprising hundreds of thousands of layers in only a century or two? Please.

They'll tell you that the layers represent individual snowstorms and that the apparent climate variations are also storm and geography-driven. The match to other climate signals, like benthic sediment and coral? Coincidence and selection bias, of course.

Amazing what one gets out of reading the Bible literally, isn't it? Why, one can find all kinds of things that aren't even in it!

david.starling.macmillan said: But the idea that you could get more than three miles of ice comprising hundreds of thousands of layers in only a century or two? Please. They'll tell you that the layers represent individual snowstorms and that the apparent climate variations are also storm and geography-driven.

But there weren't any civilizations around yet! Remember, the global population had been 8 just a century before! All these dozens of major civilizations must have just started a bit later and gotten their chronologies mixed up. We'll just have to revise and compress them ALL. Yay revisionism!

Were there any nice obvious comets flying around just after the dawn of civilization? Say, perhaps, one in 3500 BC? Or 4800 BC? If we had multiple civilizations recording the appearance of the same comet during a pre-Food or even pre-Creation time period, that would be hard to explain away. They'd try, of course, but the mental gymnastics would be spectacular.

ksplawn said: Amazing what one gets out of reading the Bible literally, isn't it? Why, one can find all kinds of things that aren't even in it!

david.starling.macmillan said:... but the mental gymnastics would be spectacular.

david.starling.macmillan said: Yeah, the hardcore YECs have to compress human history even further, putting pretty much every civilization not only post-Flood, but Post-Mini-Ice-Age as well. Of course, the Egyptians get a bit of a pass because they wouldn't have been affected much, being south of the Fertile Crescent and all. Babel supposedly took place in 2242 BC, give or take a decade. Barely more than 100 years after the Flood. How they expect to get as massive a population as was supposedly present at Babel in 100 years is anybody's guess, but they are sure about it. The Mini Ice Age follows shortly after Babel and lasts for something like 200 years. All human history is supposed to have come after this point. All of it. Mind-boggling, I know. But the idea that you could get more than three miles of ice comprising hundreds of thousands of layers in only a century or two? Please. They'll tell you that the layers represent individual snowstorms and that the apparent climate variations are also storm and geography-driven. The match to other climate signals, like benthic sediment and coral? Coincidence and selection bias, of course.

KlausH said: Exactly what is this "Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data" that you speak of?

How, exactly, is it possible to inject megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without trapping more heat in the atmosphere?

I am surprised that climate deniers are so uninventive.

david.starling.macmillan said: Babel supposedly took place in 2242 BC, give or take a decade. Barely more than 100 years after the Flood. How they expect to get as massive a population as was supposedly present at Babel in 100 years is anybody's guess, but they are sure about it.

Matt Young said:

How, exactly, is it possible to inject megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without trapping more heat in the atmosphere?

Doing so could increase cloud cover and stabilize the temperature. Maybe the ocean will absorb it, and it will precipitate under the polar ice cap. Any creationist worth his salt could come up with an (wrong) answer to a question like that.

Scott F said:

david.starling.macmillan said: Babel supposedly took place in 2242 BC, give or take a decade. Barely more than 100 years after the Flood. How they expect to get as massive a population as was supposedly present at Babel in 100 years is anybody's guess, but they are sure about it.

It requires every single woman to give birth to 3 live children every single year for 20 years of her life, assuming a woman is fertile from age 15 to 35. No problem, right?

Oh, but remember, these people lived to 200 or 300 years!

Henry J said:

Oh, but remember, these people lived to 200 or 300 years!

Even the ones that had given birth to sixty kids over a twenty year period?

In subjective time, maybe?

david.starling.macmillan said: Of course! Pregnancy makes you live longer, right?

Dave Luckett said:

david.starling.macmillan said: Of course! Pregnancy makes you live longer, right?

Mine (being two down as of earlier this month) would likely concur. I consulted my wife on this question, and received the following responses: 1) No, it just seems that way. 2) If you can call that "living".

Dave Luckett said:

david.starling.macmillan said: Of course! Pregnancy makes you live longer, right?

I consulted my wife on this question, and received the following responses: 1) No, it just seems that way. 2) If you can call that "living".

Just Bob said:

KlausH said: Exactly what is this "Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data" that you speak of?

Well, here's a quickie from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

Vostok[edit] Vostok team. Main article: Vostok, Antarctica As of 2003, the longest core drilled was at Vostok station. It reached back 420,000 years and revealed 4 past glacial cycles. Drilling stopped just above Lake Vostok. The Vostok core was not drilled at a summit, hence ice from deeper down has flowed from upslope; this slightly complicates dating and interpretation. Vostok core data are available.[30] (emphasis added)

Sorry, "know". My K key is not working well.

KlausH said: I know what the hell an ice core is; I wanted to now specifically what ice core data supported manmade global warming, which is what you were referring to.

I used to deny anthropogenic climate change, too. Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data have to be rejected in order to hold YEC, and since ice cores are our primary source of information about the feedback mechanisms in the carbon cycle, throwing them out leaves you without a firm basis for saying that human carbon really is going to cause serious warming.

Exactly what is this “Hundreds of thousands of years of ice core data” that you speak of?

Just Bob said: He was indicating that it could be used to establish the connection between rises in CO2 and climate change in the PAST. IF there is such a demonstrable correlation, then the ice cores could give us a clue about likely climate consequences of such a rise in the PRESENT. (And reminding us that YECs won't accept such data anyway, as they can't allow such annual layers to actually BE annual layers.)

The ice cores unequivocally demonstrate that CO2 can act as a feedback: initial warming releases CO2 (among other things) which enhances the Greenhouse Effect, which sustains/prolongs/increases the warming. That this could happen was already known to physicists going back to Tyndall, and Arrhenius contributed important work to understanding CO2's role in the Greenhouse Effect. The ice core data makes it plain that this does happen.

With that context, that CO2 is a crucial climate FEEDBACK, we can look at what's going on today: the release of CO2 into the atmosphere isn't a feedback to some kind of initial warming. Instead, humans are digging up hydrocarbons from their geological lockboxes and freeing the CO2 through combustion. The extra, anthropogenic CO2 emissions pile onto all natural background emissions. It turns out that the carbon cycle was removing natural CO2 emissions from the atmosphere at just about the right rate to keep the concentration of this gas at a very steady, even level for thousands of years. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 was roughly 260-280 parts per million. After the Industrial Revolution, when we started digging up hydrocarbons and burning them on an unprecedented scale, suddenly atmospheric CO2 shoots up to its present levels of about 400ppm, increasing by ~40% over a (geologically) extremely short span of time. This rate of increase is unprecedented in our records or in the geological data.

The natural carbon sinks can't eliminate all of our extra emissions on top of the natural emissions, it can only scrub about half. Consequently, the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 has been roughly half of our total human emissions over that time. Nature is taking all of its carbon out and half of ours, but it can't keep up with us. So CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere like interest accumulating in a savings account. At a rate of about 1-2 ppm per year, every year, for the past hundred and fifty or so years. And we can tell that its our CO2 specifically because the isotopic signature of the excess carbon building up matches what we'd expect from fossil hydrocarbon deposits. Its coming from coal, oil, and natural gas more than anything else.

What we're doing is going way beyond the climate feedback effect of natural carbon dioxide emissions that we see in the ice core records. We have short-circuited the usual cycle of warming->emissions->warming and gone straight to emissions->warming, turning CO2 into a primary climate forcing. We are emitting CO2 into the atmosphere so fast that the natural sinks can't keep up, the oceans can't store all of it (and their attempts to do so cause a decrease in their pH; the process of ocean acidification), and so the Greenhouse Effect runs on steroids. More Watts per square meter of solar energy is trapped in the atmosphere instead of being re-radiated quickly out into space. The simple consequence of this process is that the climate system stores more heat, meaning things get warmer. You can't increase the amount of energy retained by a few Watts per square meter and NOT have this happen. The atmosphere is getting warmer (which we noticed first), the world's stores of ice are melting (north pole, south pole, and almost all glaciers around the world), and the oceans themselves are heating up (in addition to acidifying).

Moving beyond the context of ice core records shows us reasons for concern. It's becoming increasingly clear that large and fast climate swings are tied to previous periods of mass extinction. The most drastic climate-implicated die-off happened at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago. Our geological record for these kinds of things goes back about 300 million years, capturing this and other mass extinction events and many relevant indicators of what the climate was doing at the time. We have proxies for atmospheric CO2 and for ocean acidification, and over our entire record we have never seen these things happen so fast. Even during the extinct events, things played out at least an order of magnitude (and typically two or three) more slowly than they are happening today.

The climate of the last 10K years or so has been one of of relative stability, without huge ups and downs on a global scale (regional variations can be a bit more extreme). It's likely that this period of stable climate helped enable humankind to settle down and form civilizations, which even today depend on a stable climate to function. It wasn't until this stable period that we developed mass agriculture, and it wasn't until recently that we began to depend on industrial fishing to meet our protein needs. That could be a problem, because under any kind of real-world emissions scenario we are leaving (or have already begun to leave) the bounds of the last 10K years of climate behind. Under an entirely plausible "business-as-usual" scenario for future emissions trajectories, we can expect about as much warming over the next century as we had between the 20th century and the depths of the Last Glacial Maximum, when Chicago was buried underneath ice sheets a mile thick. That's "only" a difference of 3-5 degrees C, which is what we can reasonably expect to be in for if we don't take immediate strong actions to mitigate climate change. Keep in mind that the change from Ice Over Chicago to 20th century Chicago happened very gradually, over several thousand years instead of several human lifetimes.

None of this is scientifically controversial, though the causal link between climate change and several past extinctions is currently a bit more tentative than the basis of anthropogenic global warming (that's not saying much, since AGW is pretty well "factual" by this point). With more than 97% of practicing climate scientists in broad agreement on the IPCC's conclusions that recent warming is mostly us and needs to be dealt with, a conclusion reached only after about a century of debate and analysis, there isn't any reasonable room for doubt on what we have to start doing if we want to avoid a series of CO2-related disastrous shifts in our nice, stable little world.

ksplawn said: None of this is scientifically controversial... there isn't any reasonable room for doubt....

We stole the winds, rains and the thunder from the gods. Now, with all the gods rolled into one, they want it all back. With YHWH back in the saddle we can do without the natural sciences. God rules!

They denigrate science without an inkling of what their lives would be without it.

YEC creationism is an enrageous, abominable insult to the the human intellect.

Galileo Letter to Grand Duchess I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Paul claimed: All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

david.starling.macmillan said:

Paul claimed: All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

Just Bob said:

david.starling.macmillan said:

Paul claimed: All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

The trick then is in determining which writings are inspired scripture, which aren't, and which are maybe even inspired by demonic powers or something. It's a pretty easy trick. Anything that justifies Paul's particular prejudices, morals, and bigotries are obviously the inspired scripture.

The idea of a "canon" itself was pretty radicalizing, compared to most other contemporary religious traditions which didn't include such a focus on literature or orthodoxy. Even the Old Testament wasn't fully "canonized" by the Jews until some centuries AD.

Marcion was one of the first Christian leaders to propose a canonical list of Christian texts. He rejected the sacredness of the Old Testament for Christians (because he believed the God of the Jews and the God of Jesus were different beings, with only the latter bringing salvation from the cruel and imperfect world of the former) and much of what's now in the NT, as well as some of the bits of Paul's material he thought was corrupted by other sectarians (he had good reason to be suspicious; some of those he rejected and even some he accepted turned out to be forgeries or were later tampered with). Basically he accepted only a partial (preliminary?) version of Luke and some of the Pauline epistles.

Of course, Marcion was a "heretic" whose sect was viciously attacked by the sects that came to compose the early Orthodoxy. It was about the same time or a little later that they started to focus on creating their own version of canonical Scriptures to be accepted as authentic, informative, or uncorrupted. The list of books that we now know as the New Testament didn't really gel until well after Marcion's day.

It's worth pointing out that today's Christian canon, both Testaments, definitely includes forgeries, as well as books of anonymous and unknown provenance that were simply accepted to be Apostolic. The process of canonizing Scripture was carried out at a time before our modern state of Textual Criticism, and when professional (or even fully literate) scribes were not the normal means of preserving and transmitting the documents available. Demonstrable mistakes, incontrovertible corruptions, and internal contradictions abound.

I think it's important for people who take the Bible seriously as a divinely inspired and spiritually empowered source of Truth to consider these facts. Most serious scholars do. In the US, I'm afraid, most of the laity are entirely ignorant of the facts, and there are plenty of insular "bible institutes" churning out supposedly learned "scholars" who never acknowledge them, or are also kept ignorant themselves. In a way it's like the Statement of Faith issue from AiG: their sectarian beliefs preclude any consideration that the Bible they rely on might be imperfect in some way. So just as homeschooled Creationist children never learn biology, many Christian leaders never learn the Bible.

Maybe the quality of a canon depends on its caliber...

ksplawn said: It's worth pointing out that today's Christian canon, both Testaments, definitely includes forgeries, as well as books of anonymous and unknown provenance that were simply accepted to be Apostolic. The process of canonizing Scripture was carried out at a time before our modern state of Textual Criticism, and when professional (or even fully literate) scribes were not the normal means of preserving and transmitting the documents available. Demonstrable mistakes, incontrovertible corruptions, and internal contradictions abound.

The single-biggest paradigm shift in my faith was the realization that the Bible we have can contain forgeries, mistranslations, pseudepigraphs, and inaccurate or even immoral statements, while still being precisely the body of work God intended for us to have, study, and learn from. After all, human beings learn better from mistakes than from anything else. Once I realized this, everything changed.

Henry J said:

The single-biggest paradigm shift in my faith was the realization that the Bible we have can contain forgeries, mistranslations, pseudepigraphs, and inaccurate or even immoral statements, while still being precisely the body of work God intended for us to have, study, and learn from. After all, human beings learn better from mistakes than from anything else. Once I realized this, everything changed.

Do you suppose that the people who wrote it had that in mind while writing it? If so it would explain the internal inconsistencies that have been pointed out around here and elsewhere. Henry

david.starling.macmillan said: Paul wrote, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." And supposing that's true, what's it really saying?

shebardigan said:

david.starling.macmillan said: Paul wrote, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." And supposing that's true, what's it really saying?

We had a lively afternoon in my Greek class in seminary determining whether the text meant "all scripture is given by inspiration..." rather than "all scripture that is given by inspiration..."

shebardigan said:

david.starling.macmillan said: Paul wrote, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." And supposing that's true, what's it really saying?

We had a lively afternoon in my Greek class in seminary determining whether the text meant "all scripture is given by inspiration..." rather than "all scripture that is given by inspiration..."

I must have mentioned "The Jesus Mysteries" and "The Lost Goddess" before, but again:

Those two books are very good and interesting reads regardless of whether one wants to follow the road the authors have paved.

I found that maybe the most interesting part was the comprehensive notes section and the many sources quoted. One may disagree with the authors, but the sources speak for themselves.

And for people who really want to dig into the roots and history of Christianity, the origins of the texts et ceterea, their sources are referenced, some of them maybe not easily accessible, but they really have done their homework.

"Our" religion didn't begin with the Jews, Moses or the gospels - it all began thousands of years before, maybe we ought to be more aware of the world in which it originated?

Reading the Bible one may think that that's all there is and forget the history?

The portrait of Dorian Grey comes to mind.

With the hope that some of the controversy may be resolved I have taken the liberty of displaying a few pages from "The Jesus Mysteries" here

I hope FL and perhaps others as well may seize on the opportunity. The page will be available for a few days only!

Rolf said: With the hope that some of the controversy may be resolved I have taken the liberty of displaying a few pages from "The Jesus Mysteries" here I hope FL and perhaps others as well may seize on the opportunity. The page will be available for a few days only!