Scientific Sainthood Today

The wuwt site has a post on "Three Little Known Scientists Who Changed Our World View of Climate". I was shocked to find the scientists being lauded included Alfred Wegener, the discoverer of past continental drift, and Milutin Milankovitch, who theorized that periodic variations in the Earth's orbit and axial tilt are responsible for ever-repeating, dramatic changes in the "global climate", between global "ice ages" and warm "interglacials". My response:

The fundamental assumptions of all of the earth and life sciences, including continental drift and Milankovitch cycles, have been disproved, by my discovery and extensive verification of a deliberate design imposed upon the Earth's surface, and the entire solar system, less than 20,000 years ago, which I call the Great Design of the "gods" (because the images wrought in the design, on both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, account for all of the ancient religiously-held obsessions of mankind, in particular the belief in the "gods" who were universally held to live among the stars and to have come down to Earth and remade the world).

Plate tectonics is most simply disproved (for those unwilling to confront and accept the full testimony of the Design and its countless, precise echoes, in ancient "myth" and all the famous "ancient mysteries" of the world) by looking at the precise arrangement of the continents, which are all "parked" along their eastern coasts in a simple and very precise pattern (anciently well-known, to the likes of Socrates and Pythagoras) which cannot be the result of chance formation, as I showed in my 2009 post, "Challenge to Earth Scientists". Of course, there is much more evidence than this, a whole world of evidence, which I have made available to the world in my book, "The End of the Mystery" (the clearest, simplest bits and pieces of which I have written about in this blog and elsewhere on the Internet), but except for a handful of open-minded truthseekers, the world (and particularly the scientific community) WILL NOT hear of a real, deliberate past design of the world, by real, historical beings from beyond the Earth (not "God"). By dogmatically outlawing the very idea of design of the world, science has cut itself off from the real past history of the Earth, and miseducated generations of scientists, ever since the hasty (and frankly religiously-biased) elevation of Darwin to scientific sainthood (in order to "remove God from science").

The Great Design itself indicates, again precisely, when it was inaugurated: 15,128 BC, (+/- 20 years). Again, the "mythical" histories of not-so-ancient Egypt, and the same or similar myths from around the world, all confirm such a late date for the "remaking" of the world and solar system.

And, since the world and solar system were subjected to wholesale re-formation less than 20,000 years ago (and continuing to as late as 10,000 years ago), Milankovitch theory is irrelevant, as is all of "paleoclimatology", indeed all of geology that is now attributed to before 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

"Skeptics" of today's climate science are ill-advised to accept and promulgate the pronouncements of other "consensus" fields of science, including Milankovitch theory, but also plate tectonics and undirected (Darwinian) evolution theory. They have all been overturned, and must be fundamentally reconsidered, in the light of the new paradigm, the Great Design of the "gods". You don't need to remove "God" from science; you need to learn to distinguish design from undirected physical processes, the (pre)history of the Earth from its unattended operation according to physical laws.

Why I Don't Believe In Milankovitch Theory I: The Earth's Obliquity

The wuwt site Wednesday had a post on "fractal patterns" purportedly seen, in "millions of years" of climate variations, by Peter Ditlevsen, Associate Professor of Climate Physics at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and Zhi-Gang Shao from South China University, Guangzhou in Kina. Along the way, Prof. Ditlevsen wrote:

"The astronomical factors that affect the Earth’s climate are that the other planets in the solar system pull on the Earth because of their gravity. This affects the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which varies from being almost circular to being more elliptical and this affects solar radiation on Earth. The gravity of the other planets also affects the Earth’s rotation on its axis. The Earth’s axis fluctuates between having a tilt of 22 degrees and 24 degrees and when the tilt is 24 degrees, there is a larger difference between summer and winter and this has an influence on the violent shifts in climate between ice ages and interglacial periods."

Ditlevsen was talking about the Milankovitch theory, not observed reality. I don't believe in that theory, and the following is my response to the above statement:

Modern science is choked with the weeds of false assumptions and unsupported speculations, based upon long-nurtured false dogma. The Milankovitch theory is just one such worthless field, widely admired and widely quoted today, but quite false nevertheless. My unprecedented research has uncovered the single, objective source of all of the ancient mysteries in the history of man on Earth--a design of the Earth itself, and the solar system, meant to be read and understood when man's knowledge grew enough to recognize all of its parts and encompass the whole. The Great Design is based upon an essentially unvarying tilt to the Earth's spin axis with respect to its orbital axis (the latter being the normal, or perpendicular, to the ecliptic). In that design, the Earth itself is set up like a leaning, spinning top in space, and like the top always maintaining nearly the same tilt. That setup of the world in space, I have found, is not just at the heart of every mythological tradition in the world, indeed of every ancient sacred obsession, superstition or "ancient mystery" in the world--it IS the heart of it all, first and foremost as a proclamation, by the "gods" who made it, that it WAS DESIGNED, by them. Simply put, all the ancient mysteries are based upon the north pole of the spin axis CIRCLING the north pole of the ecliptic, which means it is always separated from it by the same angle, about 23.5 degrees, on the celestial sphere. I will say more about the clear, observational evidence (independent of any consideration of design) for an essentially constant tilt below.

Even without recourse to that design, as a physicist I would seriously question any theory that claimed that a change of only 2 degrees in the tilt (between 22 and 24 degrees, as claimed by Ditlevsen, or more accurately 23.1 +/- 1.3 degrees in the Milankovitch theory) would necessarily and substantially alter the global mean temperature, certainly not by so much as the 9F°, or 5C°, we are told by today's miseducated scientists means the difference between a global "ice age" and a warm "interglacial" (in quotes, because I no longer believe in either, since my host of discoveries pertaining to the design). I certainly have experienced no substantial difference (in my past travels and living around the United States) in temperatures at most places that are separated by only 2 degrees latitude. And I think that it is unreasonable, even foolish, to think that our current "interglacial", with a mean temperature of 59°F, would turn into a global ice age if the mean temperature went down to 50°F.

Now, let us look at the historical evidence concerning the tilt of the Earth. Both Ptolemy in his "Almagest" (c. 139 AD), and Copernicus in "On The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres" (c.1525 AD) gave data on earlier observations of the tilt of the Earth, and modern sources tell us the precise value today, and how it is varying over time (it is decreasing very slowly, about 0.00013 degrees per year). Below is a graph I made of these historical observations and discussed in an appendix to my book, "The End of the Mystery".

Ptolemy (139 AD) gave the axial tilt (formally called the obliquity) as 23°51'20", or 23.856 degrees (to the nearest .001°), and he claimed the same value for Hipparchus (c. 125 BC), Aristarchus (c. 260 BC) and Timocharus (c. 281 BC) before him. Copernicus gave values for his own time (23°28.5' in 1525 AD), for Prophatius (23°32' in 1299), for Arzachel (23°34' in 1069), and for al-Battani (23°35' in 879). Strangely, his own 1525 value is the only one that is not in line with the modern established linear variation (the -0.00013°/yr. already mentioned). In 2000, it was 23.43928°. The axial tilt has been observed to be within .1° of 23.5° for over 1100 years, and that is the value that is usually quoted in popular works. (I suggested a value of 23.55646° as the most likely designed value, and which I noted on the graph, based upon my research, for reasons discussed in my book and which I won't go into here.)

From the precise star positions Ptolemy gave for some 18 stars (in ecliptic coordinates), and the positions he claimed his predecessors Hipparchus, Aristarchus and Timocharis gave for those same stars, I found his claim of 23°51'20" did not fit that data, and that a slightly smaller tilt was indicated by those given star positions. The errors in those star positions--compared to the extremely precise modern observations of them--are such that it is not surprising that the values of the tilt I calculated from them do not fit the linear trend of the data since 879 AD. Nevertheless, they are substantially closer to that line than is his claimed value (which is entirely inconsistent with that trend line), and they in fact follow that trend line by bracketing it, albeit roughly. However, the main point to be taken from Ptolemy's work (other than that his star data don't fit the axial tilt he claimed to observe) is that, since the design calls for a constant tilt of about 23.5° (or 23.556°), and Ptolemy's claimed 23.856° is just 0.3° above the "designed" value, and was touted unchanged for at least 400 years (from Timocharis to Ptolemy), it is likely that 23°51'20" in fact represents the peak in a periodically varying tilt, with 0.3° the maximum variation from the mean value. That variation is much smaller than the Milankovitch value of +/- 1.3 degrees, a maximum variation of only about 1.27%, only one-fourth of the Milankovitch claimed variation of over 5.5%.

It is natural that ancient observers would have for centuries thought the Earth's tilt to be a constant, as, again, that is what the design itself indicates, and what would have been taught based upon the sacred traditions, all of them deriving from that all-encompassing world design, which dealt only in circles (hence also the long-held belief in perfectly circular planetary orbits). In judging the modern Milankovitch theory, it is enough to have shown that the historically observed variation, and the 0.3°maximum variation as indicated by Ptolemy's claim of 23°51'20", is much smaller than what the modern theory claims. As I doubt the Milankovitch claimed variation of +/- 1.3 degrees could substantially affect the global temperature, so much more do I doubt that the far more likely +/- 0.3 degrees could do so.

Modern science needs to at least do better than Ptolemy and Copernicus, to impress me, and of course it cannot do so without confronting and accepting the Great Design, and the honest work of much earlier, even ancient, observers.

Science also needs to ask: If the Earth's orbit really varies from "nearly circular" to substantially more elliptical, why are we just now, and since well before the time of Kepler, in that nearly-perfectly circular orbit, rather than in a more elliptical phase? There simply is no observational evidence the Earth is ever in a more elliptical orbit, nor that, once in an elliptical orbit, it could be coaxed by the planets into such stable near-circularity as Kepler and all subsequent scientists have found it.

Science needs to laugh at all such theories, and say "Back to the drawing board, fellows!". Your obsessive seeking and finding of supposedly shared periodicities in your presumed causes and effects, in the "paleoclimate" data, especially in deep ice cores--which is all you seem willing or able to do with all of those theories--are all failing both hard (i.e., accurate and precise) observation and the common-sense physical insight expected of a good (i.e., competent, and honest) physical scientist.

The Bottom Line About "Climate Science" and "Global Warming"

The war of words over "climate change" and "global warming" continues to be a fragmented one, with a wide diversity of opinions and little focus overall. Most writers on the subject are set in their views now, as the consensus authorities--alarmist propagandists all--have been all along, in the interest of their own favored positions and of the political power these radical activists see now being wielded by an insane Left under President Obama. Another example of set opinion is Dr. Roy Spencer, who puts out a satellite-based global temperature record and is a harsh skeptic of the alarmist "consensus", but he is a "lukewarm" believer in the "consensus" science and therefore just as miseducated as the alarmists. He has, just this past weekend, decided to close all comments on his web page, simply to deny any further attention to those who, like me, deny the very existence of a measurable CO2 "greenhouse effect".

It is a complex situation for any layperson to try to learn the truth from. That is why my approach to the climate debate has been to present only simple, definitive evidence, all of which I have found to be against the consensus climate science. I can present my view in one clear and simple illustration.

The following image is my version of one presented to the public, on USAToday, in October 2010). It embodies, for me, the central truth about "global warming" and the "climate science" behind it, that everyone (particularly any "expert" who defends it, and any politician--like President Obama or his Attorney General--or dogmatic ideologue who demands obedience to it) needs to know and accept:

The original image purported to show that the "global temperature" (more correctly, the global mean surface temperature, or GMST) has increased with the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, since 1880.

Note, in the graph, that the temperature is shown as apparently closely tracking (to the eyes of the unwary, non-scientific layperson) the rise in CO2, from about 1975 on (to the end of the graph, about 2008). I say the temperature "apparently" tracks the CO2, because the scales of the two superimposed graphs have been selected to show just that (again, to "make it clear" to the non-scientist reader). The trouble is that the temperature data is very noisy, making that "jittery" appearance in the temperature graph, and it doesn't really follow the smooth CO2 curve all that well, particularly from 2000 on.

Now, honest scientists can legitimately argue over just how well or how bad the temperature tracks the CO2 from 1975 on, based solely upon this illustration as presented to the public by leading climate scientists. What cannot be honestly argued about, however, is that the temperatures BEFORE 1975 do NOT track the rising CO2; they vary, both positively and negatively, independently of the ever-rising CO2. That is the first simple, and devastating, point to be remembered by everyone, even those who are uninterested, or uneducated, in the debate.

This was so apparent to me, when I first came upon this image, that I posted the following comment:

"The graph shown here arbitrarily puts the CO2 curve on top of the temperature record so that the two curves rise together after 1979--but only after 1979, note. As an independent scientist, I do not hesitate to call this what it is: fraudulent science. This is very ugly, raw political propaganda in the name of science. All scientists should be repulsed, and ashamed, by the breadth and depth of the incompetence in their midst, and the foisting of that incompetence upon the public."

Since the public debate was not about the science, but was and is in fact a political war, my small voice for real science was ignored, as it has been by most ever since.

-------------------

In November 2010, just a month after seeing that fraudulent graph, I performed my Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison that, in my view, definitively proved to any competent scientist that there WAS NO "global warming greenhouse effect" due to CO2. That Venus/Earth comparison precisely confirmed the Standard Atmosphere model of Earth's troposphere, which has been well-known for over a century. The Standard Atmosphere defines an utterly stable mean surface temperature, and is based upon both many years of temperature measurements throughout the atmospheres as well as on a very simple understanding of the physics behind the vertical temperature gradient in the troposphere. Simply put, that temperature gradient (a simple decrease in temperature of 6.5°C for each kilometer of height above sea level) is widely known as the "lapse rate", and while all of the "experts" have been taught that it is "the adiabatic lapse rate", in fact it is fundamentally and properly called "the hydrostatic lapse rate", physically due only to the very simple hydrostatic condition, that the atmospheric pressure at any height in the troposphere is just the weight of the atmosphere above that height.

Again, my Venus/Earth comparison precisely confirms the Standard Atmosphere (as of 1991, when the Venus data was taken by the Magellan spacecraft), over the full range of tropospheric pressures. And here is the second utterly simple and fundamental point for everyone to understand: The mean surface temperature, in the Standard Atmosphere, is 288K (15°C, or 59°F), and it has been so FOR A CENTURY OR MORE. Look again at the above illustration, where I have added that fact into the graph. Simply, according to the precisely confirmed Standard Atmosphere and its simple physics of the hydrostatic atmosphere, the surface temperature of the Earth is 288K, and not only has it been so throughout the modern temperature record, despite what the official global temperature calculations claim, but it is HIGHER than the supposed mean surface temperature today, despite a century of "global warming", according to the climate scientists themselves (the above is THEIR graph; I am only contrasting their claims with the precisely verified, and utterly stable, Standard Atmosphere).

The leading climate scientists ignore this utter failure of their science. "Lukewarm" scientists like Roy Spencer vehemently reject it also, refuse to even have it heard on their web sites. And radical activists have used this epidemic of incompetent stupidity (actually dogmatic adherence to failed theory) on the part of the scientists to push for ruinous legislation, to make "war on coal" for example, now a full-fledged war on any and all fossil fuel use, despite the utter dependency of our civilization upon that energy. The free peoples of the world are being warred upon, literally, using clearly false science.

Ben Is Glory, Glory Is Ben

I read a comment on the jonova site that referred to "the gravitational warming theory". My response:

There is no "gravitational warming", per se. There is instead gravitational distribution of atmospheric pressure (the pressure at any level is just the weight of the atmosphere above that level), which imposes a vertical temperature distribution (the "lapse rate" structure). Whatever energy is contained in the atmosphere, it has to be vertically distributed according to that elementary physics. This is entirely independent of HOW the atmosphere is warmed. In particular it is independent of any heating by the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 or any other so-called "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere; the only effect such absorption can have is to increase the radiation pathway for heat transfer in the atmosphere, compared to the pathways for conduction and convection (the other two processes by which heat can be transported). As radiation travels faster than convection or conduction, IR absorption can only increase the SPEED at which heat is transported (over a short distance), but it can do no more than re-attain the governing lapse rate structure more quickly than would be the case without "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere; it cannot change the lapse rate, nor the temperature (at the surface or at any other pressure level in the atmosphere).

My Venus/Earth temperatures comparison precisely confirms this (it confirms the Standard Atmosphere model of the Earth's troposphere, which is based upon the above physics), and shows that the Earth's troposphere is warmed by direct absorption of incident solar radiation, not by heat from the planetary surface as everyone has been taught. And of course it utterly disproves the "global warming greenhouse effect", since Venus's atmosphere has over 2400 times the concentration of CO2 as Earth's, without any effect upon the temperature.

But not many listen, or seem capable of understanding. I just happen to have the TV on now, and it is showing a rerun of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", where they are fighting the "god" Glory. Glory is limited by the fact that she turns into the harmless Ben at awkward moments, but even when people see this transformation take place right in front of them, they can't seem to remember it after a brief moment. The climate debate is like this, where no one seems able to retain knowledge of the simple physics of the Standard Atmosphere. So just remember, "Ben is Glory; Glory is Ben" and "there IS NO greenhouse effect".

In One Ear and Out the Other

The Real Science site has a post on "Understanding Climate Science in One Paragraph", a paragraph that informs the reader that the globe warmed from 1977 to 1991, and very little if any since.

I find this interesting, because I informed the Real Science author and his readers of this (I specified the time period as 1976 to 1989/90) as early as September 2013, nearly two and a half years ago--and in a number of later comments on the site. To my knowledge, he never mentioned my insight, including in this latest post. (To be fair, no other blog ever acknowledged me either, when I tried to inform them years ago that the global mean sea surface temperatures, from late 2010 through much of 2011, precisely tracked those in 1990/91, twenty years earlier.)

The Real Science author also never mentioned my informing him that US Temperatures Have Been Falsely Adjusted According to the Level of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere either--but he told it to his readers two years later (precisely two years later, as a matter of fact).

His acceptance of my insights thus has seemed to lag my attempts to inform him of them by two years or so, and without ever mentioning me. So I have generally stopped visiting his site.

Anthony Watts, meanwhile, will no longer accept my comments on his "wattsupwiththat" site, and he has been hostile to me ever since my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison showed any competent physical scientist that there is absolutely NO carbon dioxide "greenhouse effect" (which he adamantly defends), all the way from the 0.04% CO2 in Earth's atmosphere to the 96.5% in Venus's. The "greenhouse effect" is a religious cult, of brainwashed believers, whether "consensus" or "skeptics".

This is one of the reasons why I don't post on my blog as often as others in the climate debate--I have found both "warmists" and "lukewarm" critics of the warmist "consensus" to be tone-deaf to me, and to the definitive evidence I have tried to put forward.

The other, main reasons are 1)that the public climate discourse, on the part of those in power now and their loyal followers, is insane and immune to honest reason, and 2)that almost no one wants to listen to my main message to the world, of the Great Design of the "gods", which overthrows the central theories of all the earth and life sciences, and heralds a new scientific paradigm, beyond that of "undirected evolution" of the physical world, and of the universe beyond. I have given definitive evidence proving that as well, on this blog.

The mess that is "climate science" is just the tip of a general incompetence in science today, across all fields of science, from the submicroscopic to the cosmic.

I do not write this to complain, but to inform anyone who wants to know the truth about the real size of the problem we face.

On Undirected Evolution, and Other Euphemisms For Design of the World

The Heartland Institute site has an admiring post on a new book by Matt Ridley, on "The Evolution of Everything". By "evolution", Ridley means undirected evolution (also known as Darwinian evolution), and as the title indicates, he applies the idea to everything.

My response is to republish, on this blog, an article I wrote back in 2008 for Helium.com:

Ten years ago, as a result of a personal scientific research program I had begun more than a year earlier, I discovered an ancient design in the world - not an isolated artifact or two, you understand, but a worldwide design. (You can read a bit about it at www.lulu.com/hdhsciences.) After several years spent proving that design scientifically (I am a professional scientist, in physics), I discovered my work had only just begun: I still had to figure out how to communicate my discoveries to the world, a world whose main authorities - science and religion - were, just at the time I sought recognition for my work, divided into diametrically opposite, warring camps over the very idea of design of the natural world; and both regarded the design I found as anathema to the polar-opposite positions they had each staked out.

A verifiable design is like a jigsaw puzzle, whose overall picture becomes ever more apparent the more pieces one correctly places. The pieces of the puzzle I found were of several kinds: The precise shapes of constellation forms on the celestial sphere and the matching forms of landmasses on the Earth ("As Above, so below," the ancient tradition said); the precise placing of landforms to represent important conceptual features of the celestial sphere as recognized by science (such as the ecliptic, or path of the Sun, and the vernal equinox, the zero point of celestial longitude, or right ascension); the precise positioning of the Earth's continents according to a famous ancient, global symmetry (a dodecahedron design); clear design features around the poles of the ecliptic (defining the axis of the entire solar system, indicating its deliberate design as well); and uncounted precise associations between these features on Earth and sky, and the ancient sacred traditions of all the peoples of the world - the common themes, objects and characters of myths and legends, word usages, other religious traditions, and megalithic monuments of precise construction mimicking the precision of the design.

This design, involving a re-formation of the Earth and solar system, invalidates the principle of uniformitarianism underlying evolution theory, and invalidates the assumptions behind plate tectonics. These, the two central theories of all the life and earth sciences, are overturned wholesale, and science knows nothing about it, refuses to even hear of it.

Peer-reviewed science journals will not accept articles about a design of the world; individual scientists will not respond to queries about it, much less condescend to take time to study the overwhelming evidence; and religious authorities do not want to hear that someone other than an all-powerful Creator was responsible for any part of the world as we now find it (although I stress that what I found was a re-formation of the world, not a creation). I have tried to make the book I wrote - The End of the Mystery - available to the public (at the above-named site), but in the present intellectual climate of war, between two powerful and opposing authorities, the revolutionary discovery of a third position, and a more complex reality, has so far been too much for the average man or woman to embrace.

The person who claims a design of the world is widely considered a crazy fool by the many defenders of science today, both scientists and laypersons; identifying oneself as a scientist does not guarantee respect even from the unlearned, much less from the many self-sure scientific amateurs and experts. Yet once I had assured myself of the reality of the design I had found, I could see many hints to design in well-known phenomena. For example, the solar system is littered with moons orbiting the main planets, more than 135 the last time I checked (Jupiter alone has 62 listed moons now). Yet Earth's moon is unique, being both perfectly round like the Sun, and of just the right apparent diameter to completely eclipse the Sun - the Moon's average apparent diameter is 0.527 degrees, while the Sun's is 0.533 degrees. It is Earth's only moon, and the only moon, in a system littered with moons, that can not only precisely eclipse the Sun as seen from its mother planet, it does so regularly, and on a precisely repeating, 18.6 year cycle. Science today believes the Moon was not always at its present distance from the Earth, making it even more unbelievable that it should now be at just the right distance, purely by chance, to precisely eclipse the Sun as it regularly does.

There are many such clues to design of our world. Indeed, our modern earth and life sciences are all weak and unsupported by hard evidence to the precise extent and in the precise ways that they ignore the possibility of design.

While that may seem, to the scientist comfortably working within the parameters of current theories, a harsh and unconsidered judgment, it is easily illustrated. Here is an example, from biology, which was used as a featured example of the "overwhelming" evidence for evolution, in an article ("Was Darwin Wrong?") in the November 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine; so it was meant to be taken as among the best evidence confirming Darwinian, or undirected, evolution:

The Madagascar orchid - Angraecum sesquipedale - has a unique, 11-inch long nectar receptacle, far too deep and narrow for almost all insects, even moths with their extended proboscises, to obtain nectar from it. It is such a unique variation that Charles Darwin himself was drawn to it, and he predicted that there must be a moth, equally unique, with an 11-inch proboscis, to draw nectar out of so deep a receptacle. In fact, forty years later (the article relates) just such a moth was found, the Madagascar sphinx moth, Xanthopan morganii praedicta. This is an example of a very common, wide-ranging phenomenon that is called "co-evolution" (also "mutual adaptation"). There are many variations of orchids that offer different, individual examples of "co-evolution", and in fact, the whole range of flowering plants, the angiosperms, are generally dependent upon animals for their reproduction, and so are "co-evolved" with those animals. I have seen it written more than once, in recent years, that most evolution is in fact co-evolution. That is how important the example given here and in the National Geographic article really is: It exposes a fundamental characteristic, called "co-evolution," in the development of the vast array of lifeforms - both plants and animals - on Earth.

The tendency for evolutionists is to interpret the Madagascar orchid-moth pair as the moth following the orchid in its variation; that is, as the orchid's receptacle lengthened, the moth's proboscis lengthened to be able to probe it successfully. Indeed, it hardly makes sense the other way around, that the moth's proboscis might have begun to lengthen, and the orchid's receptacle lengthened in response - what, to get away from an overlong probe?

The National Geographic article emphasized that the discovery of the moth "confirmed Darwin's forecast." But Darwin, under his own theory, would have to have been arguing that the orchid must have developed its unique variation in order to follow the variation in the moth - that the moth's variation required the orchid's - in order to predict the existence of the moth from the fact of the orchid as he did. And we see that is nonsense; why should the orchid receptacle lengthen precisely to follow the length of the moth's proboscis - it doesn't need to. If Darwin had known about the moth and not the orchid, he could have legitimately predicted the orchid on the basis that the lengthening receptacle of the orchid required the moth's proboscis to lengthen - the moth would have needed to undergo some such variation, to survive as it did.

The truth is, Darwin did not predict the moth based upon his theory. The only way he could predict the moth from the orchid would be to intuit that such a unique variation in the orchid implies a design, the intent of which was to match it to an equally unique moth. Darwin unconsciously did what any competent logician would do, who believed that things don't happen without reason in nature, that everything has its particular use. Put another way, any competent reasoner - including a child - should be able to tell, upon seeing both the moth and the orchid, that they were made for one another. Yet Darwin was so focused upon interpreting everything in terms of his own theory, he deluded himself that he was using that theory in making this prediction; and it is a strange fact that, over a hundred years later - a hundred and more years of debate, scientific research and development - his mistake is still upheld as a triumph of scientific prediction, and a triumph of Darwinian theory.

Looking even more deeply into this example, it is hard to understand why biologists would have so long accepted such a stunning example as this one as even being consistent with the theory, much less a sterling example of it. Evolution is currently believed to proceed by natural selection of random mutations. This means that a particular mutation, or variation in one species, has no direct influence upon what mutations may occur in another species, however closely they are associated in nature. The lengthening of the orchid nectar receptacle proceeded, it is supposed, through a sequence of variations - one variation would not force it to lengthen to precisely 11 inches, it would have to make it past two, three, and so on, in stages. The moth would have to undergo a precisely similar sequence of variations to get to an 11-inch proboscis. At every point along the development of the 11-inch receptacle and the 11-inch proboscis, the moth would have to undergo just the right variation. Its variations would have to precisely track the entire series of variations undergone by the orchid (or vice-versa, since under the theory the orchid might just as well track the moth as the other way around, however counterintuitive that may be to our minds). Yet the theory provides no way for even one variation of the orchid to force the precisely-needed variation in the moth, much less an extended sequence of variations in the orchid to force an exact tracking of that sequence in the moth. And what is the result of this precise "co-evolution" of the two species: A quite unnecessary variation in both, taken to unnecessary extreme, without increased survival value to either. The theory is shredded by this one example alone; across the full range of living, "co-evolved" things, it is made ridiculous to uphold it.

There is overwhelming, world-ranging evidence surely indicating a progression in living things, but it is equally overwhelmingly a progression of design. A proper study of living things on Earth shows that they are remarkably "co-evolved," and that fact - that overwhelming fact - proves the progression, the development of life as we observe it, was not undirected. There must be design behind it, on more than one level. In the example presented here, we have looked at the level of just one, particularly remarkable, "co-evolved" pair of species.

I am 59 years old now; all my life, we have been assured that science is self-correcting. Yet for all my life, it has not been self-correcting. Science is in critical condition, and its symptoms of distress are being widely ignored. (These symptoms include dogmatic debates, particularly over evolution, and the most improbable speculations - such as unobserved, "dark matter" making up to 99% of the universe - needed to save current theories.) In many instances, science is trying to ride on the back of a still-advancing technology - as in telescopic observations of an incredibly varied and structured cosmos - but failing to explain, much less predict from current theory, what it finds.

The discoveries we read about are hyped to make them appear more important than they really are. Science now markets itself to the public through the media, driven by profit and influence, not desire for hard, dependable knowledge. And science has become a religion, in direct conflict with traditional religions, with its own incontestable dogmas - against intelligent design, for example - and its own religious defenders/warriors.

Science has become too much like a religion driven by fear of diametrically opposed ideas, rather than by love of a higher truth and an overarching unity.

------- And one or two points I summarized in my blog post "Challenge to Science and Religion" back in 2009:

Undirected evolution is invalidated 1) above all, by its denial of meaning (or truth, or higher reality) underlying the physical world; 2) by a great deal of positive evidence of design on every scale of observation throughout the biological realm (such as the many remarkable examples of "co-evolution" and its deeper, characteristic presence, across the entire class of flowering plants, for example); and 3) most surely by the world design I uncovered, which communicates a coherent message encompassing, and thus surely the original motivation for, all of the ancient, religious obsessions held in common by men worldwide.

and

The term "evolution" is abused and universally applied [N.B.-- as by Matt Ridley in his book] because it is only a robust metaphysical reality, not a physical one; across all fields to which it is applied, it merely reflects human learning. Here is the fundamental philosophical truth that needs to be apprehended by all sides today: "Evolution" requires design, and design requires an overarching, prior intelligence. Undirected evolution is a logically inept metaphysics, a fundamental confusion of the mind, and the "intelligent" in "intelligent design" is superfluous.

The Awful Truth About Global Temperature Records

The Notrickszone site has a post suggesting a "sharp global cooling ahead". My response:

The global temperature is stable — no runaway global warming OR cooling [correction: no global warming at all from a century or more ago]. The definitive evidence (as I have been harping on since November 2010) is my Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison, in which the Standard Atmosphere model of the Earth’s troposphere is precisely–I repeat, precisely–confirmed against the temperature vs. pressure profile of Venus, when only Venus’s lesser distance from the Sun is taken into account. Not only does that Venus/Earth analysis prove there is no global-warming CO2 greenhouse effect (since Venus’s atmosphere has over 2400 times the concentration of CO2 as Earth’s does, with no effect upon the temperatures), it shows that the century-old Standard Atmosphere, developed by measurements throughout the atmosphere over many years, precisely agrees with the Venus atmospheric profile on ONE DAY, October 5, 1991. THINK about that, people: The mean surface temperature in the Standard Atmosphere, 288K, has been unchanged in that model for a century, and yet it precisely agrees with the measured temperature in the Venus atmosphere at the same pressure, on that one day in 1991 (after most of the supposed “unprecedented global warming” is claimed to have occurred on Earth). The surface temperature in the Standard Atmosphere–288K, for a century or more–is greater now than the supposed global mean surface temperature today, despite all of that supposed recent global warming. This is the pitiful truth, behind all of the “authoritative”, condescending “expert” opinions that are fed to the public as the unquestionable, sacred truth.

The Venus/Earth comparison, all by itself, shreds not only all of the alarmist climate science theory, it shows that the “measured global mean surface temperature” record(s) is a farce–there has been NO global warming since the development of the Standard Atmosphere Model a century and more ago.