Gavinology

Izen writes:
“Genetics provided abundant new information, and an explanation of the hereditary process that expanded Darwinian ideas, but did not displace the underlying concept.”
Saying that it expanded Darwinian ideas strikes me as an anachronism. You are reading modern genetics into Darwin.
Also, specifically, modern genetics has not provided an explanation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. What it has provided is an explanation of the mechanism of heredity; that is, an explanation of how traits are passed on. In addition, it explained one input to variation, namely, genetic anomalies whose effects on the creature prove adaptive. Modern genetics is not inconsistent with the claim that Darwin’s account of natural selection is a good description of a driver of evolution; however, modern genetics has nothing at all to say about how the environment acts to cause evolution.
Take what I consider to be the most interesting example, the appearance of human organs that underly human speech. Modern genetics has not told us when, where, or in whom these organs first appeared or how they developed. We do not know whether the first modern human had theses organs as we do not know whether Neanderthals had them. The point is that knowing which genes are associated with human speech does not in itself tell us something about the evolution of human speech organs.

We are entering the final stages of the AGW dogma. With a lot of help from climategate and “global cooling”.
The warmists will increasingly start denying their past “warming” beliefs.
It is also the funniest stage.

@-Roger Longstaff says:
February 6, 2011 at 11:02 am
“How do you know that the stratospheric concentration may not simply be accounted for by natural variability?”
‘Natrual variability’ is a description not an explanation.
What cause does this natural variability you invoke have ?
I hold the BELIEF that there is no supernatural process causing the observed variation in ozone so I do think that the variation is ‘natural’. It involves chemistry and physics we already know in detail. Part of that natural process is caused by a compound that is manufactured by human industry. Its presence best explains the observed spring decreases in S polar ozone levels.
If you have an alternative cause for this natural variation that has not already been refuted then suggest it.
However the source of the Chlorine is established from the isotopic ratios (it may even be possible to detect which manufacturer produced it) and the measured absence of comparable amounts of naturally occurring haloalkenes above an altitude well below the stratospheric height where ozone generation occurs.
There is some modulation of ozone levels with solar activity which correlates to the solar cycle and the measured UV flux. Nothing in those observations would provide a mechanism for the rapid fall in ozone when UV returns to the S polar region that was not observed before CFCs entered the stratosphere in significant amounts.
In the face of a well established theory with ABUNDANT evidence for its accuracy as an explanation of what we observe you could hand-wave about ‘natural variation’ and invoke unknown unknowns or undetected chemical mechanisms…
But without a falsifiable hypothesis its not going to get any research time.

@-Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 11:44 am
“Posters on WUWT have never dismissed all of climate science.”
Far point, would you accept some (a minority) dismiss most of climate science?
” Everyone accepts the 19th Century work on the CO2 molecule which explains that CO2 can accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere, retard Earth’s cooling through radiation, and cause some warming. ”
I doubt its everyone, I’d settle for most. -grin-
“However, regarding the effects of CO2, what I have just described seems to be all the climate science there is. And that is not enough to enable explanation or prediction of dangerous levels of warming from CO2. ”
There are two aspects to this;
1) Climate sensitivity. Feedbacks and thermal inertia before energy balance is reached.
All complex, disputable and a matter of intense research which affect the magnitude of the possible warming. – and probably another thread before this suffers severe topic drift…..
2) The fragility of modern global civilization to the scale of environmental changes that the possible sensitivities may impose.
That is an even bigger and more complex issue, I suspect that technological advance does not make societies more robust, but at the moment I’m about halfway through;
“Joseph A. Tainter – The Collapse of Complex Societies”
which so far I find good and may change my views… or sharpen them so I’m even less keen to tackle that subject at the moment.

izen says:
February 6, 2011 at 2:08 pm
@-Theo Goodwin says:
February 6, 2011 at 11:44 am
“However, regarding the effects of CO2, what I have just described seems to be all the climate science there is. And that is not enough to enable explanation or prediction of dangerous levels of warming from CO2. ”
“There are two aspects to this;
1) Climate sensitivity. Feedbacks and thermal inertia before energy balance is reached.
All complex, disputable and a matter of intense research which affect the magnitude of the possible warming. – and probably another thread before this suffers severe topic drift…..”
You agree with me. There are no physical hypotheses which explain the forcings that would cause a dangerous rise in temperature. The only possible conclusion is that Schmidt and other warmists have a moral responsibility as scientists to inform the world that they cannot at this time predict that there will be a dangerous increase in temperatures. Schmidt and other warmists are doing exactly the opposite. Hence, the conclusion is that they are wearing ideological blinders and no longer engaging their duties as scientists.

Gavin on Ozone, 5.43 Says that Dupont argued because CFC’s heavier than air they couldn’t get up to the ozone layer and so there was no problem, Gavin says that’s pure fantasy but sounded scientific.
Same old, same old. Ardent anti CFC’s saying that there is so much turbulence in the atmosphere that CFC’s get up to Ozone level by floating up, and that gravity doesn’t work until much higher in the atmosphere so CFC’s can’t separate out lower down. But the best is this:
http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/RobertBidinotto/OzoneDepletion.html
Very sincere explorer looked at all the even NASA etc. data and saw for himself that CFC’s with man-made signature up in the lower stratosphere in significant amounts, even convinced Singer of this, and then goes on to debunk the “natural” argument, by arguing that volcanoes can’t be responsible for the chlorine because only a few are explosive enough to get chlorine up that high even if they have chlorine…
[compare the weights]
(and Mauna Loa he says, just steadily emits gases that are washed out in the lower stratosphere)
..I didn’t realise that fridges and underarm deodorant sprays were more powerful than volcanoes.
I live and learn.

LazyTeenager says, “So guys, engage brain and develop some skepticism before shooting mouth off.”
Far be it for me to challenge Lazy on being lazy!

@-vigilantfish says:
“Species invariance goes back to Aristotle, and was indeed later compatible with the Biblical understanding of the world. Lamarckism was obviously developed by Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet (1744-1829) – predating Darwin. Lamarck was an atheist, and his theory was championed by radicals in the medical profession in Scotland in particular, and by other materialists/atheists….”
You make good points.
Species invariance was the ‘settled science’, but it was an orthodoxy primarily for religious reasons (human exceptionalism) than any scientific argument.
I admit that coupling it with with Lamarckism is wrong. Lamarckian ideas do include the possibility of species change, it was a theory trying to cope with the scientific evidence against species invariance.
It was proposed by another poster as a ‘settled science’ that has been refuted by later discoveries. With the implication that AGW could suffer the same fate.
I am not convinced that Lamarckism was ever a settled science that Darwinian ideas replaced, more a competing previous attempt to deal with the cognitive dissonance between a religiously ordained orthodoxy and the growing fossil/anatomical evidence.
In the present I have encountered versions of Lamarckian evolution proposed as counters to Darwinian species origin because for some YECs they provide a source of rapid micro-evolution within ‘Kinds’.
There are some wonderful misconceptions about epigenetic variation out there….

From izen on February 6, 2011 at 9:30 am:

—–
But I find the best evidence for the robust finding that CFCs destroy ozone is in the historical development of the theory from speculation through hypothesis to well established theory.
—–
Lovelock developed a sensor for CFCs that soon showed that CFCs were well mixed globally and certainly did reach the stratosphere, including at the pole. (…)
—–

New rate of stratospheric photolysis questions ozone hole
January 8, 2011
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
Good reading, from right here at WUWT. From that piece comes:

James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist:

“I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.
I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

izen posted:

However if you prefer the actual scientific papers that established all this chemistry this would seem to be a good link references as it does many of the key papers. –
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v347/n6291/abs/347347a0.html

A September 1990 article, as if science hasn’t moved on since then in its understanding of ozone, the ozone hole and what could cause it, etc.
From the D’Aleo piece:

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature:
Scientific Consensus on Man-Made Ozone Hole May Be Coming Apart
As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.
Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

From izen on February 6, 2011 at 4:35 am:

Others may have doubts about evolution by natural selection, but the fact that some here have serious doubts about other aspects of established science does not improve the credibility of the position of those that express doubt over AGW.

You have royally missed two important items about science.
One, even established science needs to be challenged. Old experiments are repeated with measuring methods of greater precision and accuracy, or new experiments conducted that should verify old theories. Small discrepancies found yield new or revised theories, old theories that “everyone knows are true” fail to be verified by new experiments or old experiments conducted with improved quality control. New discoveries in paleontology are still revising and refining our understanding of evolution, it is not yet settled and still a work in progress. In science, what is known to be true must be shown to still be true, every now and then.
Two, you are missing the distinction between established science, and Establishment Science™. Here on WUWT we rail against the second, and know which of the two (C)AGW really is.

Is the maths right here?: http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Ingles2/AmazingOzone.html
&
Re reliability of data:
“In case readers don’t get the point, the NOAA also explains (emphasis in original):
GLOBALVIEW-CO2 is derived from measurements but contains no actual data. To facilitate use with carbon cycle modeling studies, the measurements have been processed (smoothed, interpolated, and extrapolated) resulting in extended records that are evenly incremented in time.”
http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/main/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1396/categoryId/54/Greenhouse-Gas-Observatories-Downwind-From-Erupting-Volcanoes.aspx
That’s the way to do it, as Keeling perfected. Decide what you want to show, go to a great source of CO2 so there’s sufficient to play with, and claim there’s no local contamination of the samples.
No wonder Gavin refused to discuss the science in that debate…

Richard Verney, thanks so much for that comparison of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid.
ge0050, re my previous reply to your post about 28C and resilience to hypothermia, before retelling your point far and wide, I decided to try a few experiments (on myself) and I believe the 28C must refer to a naked human body in water, not in air. I know the site you quote says air, but I cannot find a scholarly backup for it. So not so impressive as we thought? Nevertheless, I don’t think the air figure is all that much lower, certainly it is higher than common temperatures throughout the temperate zones, so you still have a point in there.

Gnrnr says:
February 6, 2011 at 6:15 pm
izen says:
February 6, 2011 at 3:42 pm
“The CFCs in fridges and spray cans are chemically inert.”
If that is so then how can they interact with Ozone once they get there?
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UV