Everyone agrees that global warming is real and that unless we do something soon our descendents will experience radical climate change that will destroy human civilization and send us back to the stone age, right?

Not quite:

Two of the world’s leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.

A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds

A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.

The controversy has erupted over an article published in Science Magazine by Dr Naomi Oreskes that purports to show almost universal agreement among climatologists over global warming being a genuine phenomenom and that mankind is indeed to blame.

Unfortunately for Dr. Oreskes, she um, didn’t quite tell the truth:

However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication – but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he makes had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.

Dr. Peiser thought that Science should publish the paper anyway. “As the results from my analysis refuted the original claims, I believe Science has a duty to publish them.”

This isn’t the only instance of global warming dissenters being shut out of legitimate scientific debate. Via Little Green Footballs we get this remarkable story from Canada. It seems that a group of scientists have made a documentary debunking global warming but are unable to get the show aired in Canada:

The numbers of scientists staggered me—17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two thirds with advanced degrees, are against the Kyoto Agreement. The Heidelberg Appeal—which states that there is no scientific evidence for man-made global warming, has been signed by over 4,000 scientists from around the world since the petition’s inception. I strongly questioned these high numbers, since I’ve had benefit of the Canadian government’s public relations machine on this issue. Dr. Leahey has since sent documentation to back his figures up.

All those scientists were in total agreement: the Kyoto Protocol was complete fiction.

The forces arrayed against dissenters are formidable. What’s at stake are hundreds of millions of dollars – perhaps billions – in research grants from governments and various NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) who have a vested interest in seeing the Kyoto Accords ratified by the world’s scientific community. With that kind of money floating around as well as the reputation and prestige of scientists on the line who’ve gone out on a limb to endorse the theory, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that dissenters are having trouble getting their viewpoints before the public and hence policy makers.

The third world has a huge stake in Kyoto in that they are not only immune from its requirements, they will be able to profit from the agreement because they will be able to “sell” emission credits to industrialized countries that can’t meet Kyoto’s stringent standards. Since the US has the farthest to go to meet the Kyoto target emissions, it could end up costing US taxpayers up to $800 billion dollars over the life of the agreement.

In short, Kyoto is nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth scheme from the industrialized world to impoverished and corrupt third world kleptocracies. No wonder one of its major supporters is that noted environmentalist and humanitarian Fidel Castro.

What are the pro-Kyoto scientists afraid of? Peer review is the lifeblood of scientific advancement. Unless your theories can stand up to the challenges of your peers, their not worth the paper they’re printed on. And with climate models, CO2 projections, and other greehouse gas emission predictions being so wildly off target the last few years, it may be that the proponents of the theory are just not up to the task of defending their work.

All they’re doing is defeating their own purpose. The US is never going to ratify Kyoto unless it’s amended to include China, the biggest polluter on the planet today, under its restrictive protocols. Even then, unless real debate is allowed, it’s doubtful that Kyoto has much of a future.

One would think that more than most subjects our children are learning in school, the physical sciences would be immune from the pressures of outside interest groups intent on imposing cultural relativism and multicultural “sensitivity” on the curricula. After all, unlike history or literature, science relies on empiricism and objective observation to resolve the mysteries of the universe. And the kind of interference associated with the multiculturalists would seem to be irrelevant when it comes to learning about universal laws like gravity or thermodynamics.

I am very sorry to disappoint you:

Several centuries ago, some “very light-skinned” people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After “many years under the tropical sun,” this light-skinned population became “dark-skinned,” says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education.

“Downright bizarre,” says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is “many years.” The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.

Pearson Education spokesperson Wendy Spiegel admits the error in describing the evolution of skin color, but says the teacher’s manual explains the phenomenon correctly. Just why teachers are given accurate information while students are misled remains unclear.

An isolated example? Hardly. And if it were only the moonbat left, it would be easy to dismiss as one more example of political correctness run rampant. Unfortunately, Christian idiotarians want to get in the act too:

A six-day courtroom-style debate opened on Thursday in Kansas over what children should be taught in schools about the origin of life—was it natural evolution or did God create the world?

The hearings, complete with opposing attorneys and a long list of witnesses, were arranged amid efforts by some Christian groups in Kansas and nationally to reverse the domination of evolutionary theory in the nation’s schools.

William Harris, a medical researcher and co-founder of a Kansas group called the Intelligent Design Network, posed the core question about life’s beginnings before mapping out why he and other Christians want changes in school curriculum.

School science classes are teaching children that life evolved naturally and randomly, Harris said, arguing that this was in conflict with Biblical teachings that God created life

What is going on here? While the goals of the moonbats and idiotarians are different, the motivations behind the meddling in science curricula are similar; to bend science to fit a specific worldview. While it’s pretty easy to make fun of “monkey trials” and attempts to equate tribal shamans with medical doctors, the sad fact is that by fiddling with the way science is taught, our children are the ones who suffer the consequences.

And those consequences could be devastating to both the country and the schoolchildren. When our kids grow up they must compete in a world where more than any other time in history, science will play a large part in the world’s economy:

In a field long dominated by the United States (with more than 1,300 U.S. biotech firms, compared with about 700 in all of Europe), the global competition is increasingly intense.

Britain, of course, was first out of the gate in starting its own biotech industry back in the mid-1980s when the outbreak of brain rotting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a form of bovine spongiform encephalopathies (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), first gathered public attention. 3 Britain now has 560 biotech companies. Of 70 or so publicly traded biotech concerns in Europe, half are British. This includes the grandfather of British biotech firms, Celtech, which pioneered drugs that exploit the body’s own antibodies to combat disease, and who posted a profit this year for the first time. Britain has approved its first three biotech products this year: a new anesthetic and treatments for migraines and Alzheimer’s disease.

The Netherlands-based firm Qiagen is the leading manufacturer of products for purifying genetic material such as proteins and nucleic acids; its products are now being used in most labs around the world.

The Swedish firm Prosequencing has become a technological leader in making systems for automated DNA sequence analysis, which is essential for mining the rich vein of data in the human genome.

It’s clear that biotechnology is a growth industry whose products promise to change our world in ways that are unfathomable to us today. The question is are our children going to run those bio tech factories? Or are they going to be sweeping the floors of factories owned by the Brits or Swedes?

It doesn’t help when pressure groups try and influence textbook publishers to put out stuff like this:

Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin’s fifth-grade textbooks won’t get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn’t mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill’s Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren’t named.

No Einstein? The man whose theories revolutionized the world isn’t even mentioned? And the three men – Waston, Crick and Wilkins – who unlocked the secrets of the structure of DNA, the biological basis for all life on earth are similarly ignored?

This kind of selective cultural memory is eerily reminiscent of tactics used by the Nazis when they purged their physical sciences of the names and even the achievements of Jewish scientists creating what they called “German” Physics and “German” Biology.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Hans Bethe believed that this kind of nonsense set the German atomic bomb program back significantly. He argued that when you throw out the theories of Einstein, Neils Bohr and others based solely on the fact that they were Jewish, there was no way the complexities involved in constructing an atomic bomb would be uncovered.

So there are extraordinary dangers when science education is subverted to serve some social engineering scheme. Not only does it do an injustice to history, it also poses a danger to the way that textbooks are written:

A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country. One
misstates Newton’s first law of motion. Another says humans can’t hear elephants. Another confuses “gravity” with “gravitational acceleration.” Another shows the equator running through the United States. Individual scientists draft segments of these books, but reviewing the final product is sometimes left to multicultural committees who have no expertise in science.

“Thousands of teachers are saddled with error-filled physical science textbooks,” wrote John Hubisz, a physics professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the author of the report. “Political correctness is often more important than scientific accuracy. Middle-school text publishers now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts.”

United States students are currently ranked 19th out of 21 leading industrialized countries when it comes to science. With attacks on objective scientific education by both the left and the right, the question must be asked: Why can’t Johnny dream? More than any other subject, science opens our minds to the staggering possibilities for acquiring knowledge about both the biggest and the smallest parts of our universe. And if that knowledge is dependent on being taught in such a way as to take into account the cultural sensitivities of students rather than the objective truths discovered through the ages, then Johnny will be left behind by those who don’t pay any attention to such nonsense.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

Lean Left blogs the Kansas Idiotarians and makes a plaintive cry for sanity:

This is not about science – it is about using science classes to indoctrinate children in one particular version of religion. Nothing more. That needs to be said. loudly and often.

Agreed. But will the left make equally loud noises about about the multiculturalists and their fanatic attempts to destroy science education by making it more important to take into account a student’s cultural background than get the facts right?

In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave new World,” the author posits a chilling future – a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive and consistently useful to the ruling class.

I always tried to imagine what events and decisions led up to Huxley’s nightmare reality. Did the scientists know that the research they were doing would be used for the nefarious purpose of changing the essence of humanity? Did the people realize that the potential for this kind of mischief was present? What would the ethicists and guardians of faith and religion have had to say?

I bring this up because scientists are now initiating research projects using human stem cells injected into animal embryos with the dual goals of perhaps creating organs suitable for human transplant and the extraordinarily profitable enterprise of creating “cutting edge” lab animals for use in testing a wide variety of new drugs.

Both of these goals have exciting potential to yield benefits that would change the face of modern medicine and pharmacology. But at what price? And are there hidden dangers, unseen trap doors that scientists and ethicists either aren’t aware of or just not bothering to look for?

This project in Nevada, where sheep embryos were injected with human cells to create partially human organs, is not really a big deal. Scientists have been doing similar experiments with mice for more than a decade. What makes this experiment different is that the researcher, Jason Chamberlain, also injected human brain cells into the brain of the animal fetus:

As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly within the new ethics guidelines the influential National Academies issued this past week for stem cell research.

In fact, the Academies’ report endorses research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.

Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep’s head?

Such a possibility is extremely unlikely. But not so much out of the question that one ethics panel didn’t think carefully about a “what if” scenario:

In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells. Stem cell scientist Irving Weissman said his experiment could provide unparalleled insight into how the human brain develops and how degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s progress.

Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.

At times, it seems scientists have never quite grown out of being the little boy or girl in the basement with a chemistry set who set out to mix two compounds together just to see what would happen and end up with either a toxic mess or a small explosion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as any good scientist will have that same insatiable curiosity as those children. The problem is, this attitude when carried into scientific undertakings with the most profound ramifications for humanity imaginable, should have the most stringent oversight imaginable. And at this point it’s not clear to me that this is the case:

Allegations about the proper treatment of lab animals may take on strange new meanings as scientists work their way up the evolutionary chart. First, human stem cells were injected into bacteria, then mice and now sheep. Such research blurs biological divisions between species that couldn’t until now be breached.

Drawing ethical boundaries that no research appears to have crossed yet, the Academies recommend a prohibition on mixing human stem cells with embryos from monkeys and other primates. But even that policy recommendation isn’t tough enough for some researchers.

“The boundary is going to push further into larger animals,” New York Medical College professor Stuart Newman said. “That’s just asking for trouble.”

Newman, along with bio technology gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, actually went so far as to patent a new life form – a combination human and chimpanzee they called a “humanzee” – that challenges the governments policy on both interspecies breeding and a corporation’s ability to patent life forms. The “humanzee” is theoretically possible so the patent office issued a ruling just this year denying their request on grounds that you cannot patent a human in that such a commercial venture would boil down to an issue of slavery.

I have nothing but admiration and respect for scientists like Chamberlain who are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. My beef is that this is largely taking place below the radar of public discourse. As we seek to unlock the mysteries at the very heart of what it means to be human, are we in danger of redefining human life in ways that should be examined and agreed to by society in general?

Just recently, we got a taste of one kind of redefinition of human life in the Terri Schiavo matter. With little in the way of debate, scientists, ethicists, and proponents of euthanasia have quietly undermined the very concept of what it means to be human. The parameters regarding human life have been changed to include mythical criteria such as “quality of consciousness” and the medical costs associated with keeping someone like Terri alive. Despite almost total ignorance about what actually constitutes “consciousness,” we were told that Terri was less than human because her higher brain functions were disabled. Being less than human, she then became a piece of rotting meat, a sad sack of bones and water easily discarded by both the courts and her husband.

And now we’re faced with another ethical dilemma, this time regarding the very real possibility of human-animal hybrids being created so that we can harvest their body parts. While I’m not opposed in principle to the use of animals to save human lives, are we proceeding with all deliberate caution in this research effort? I’m heartened by the National Academies’ call for stringent oversight by sponsoring institutions of such projects. But the issue begs the age-old scientific question; just because we can do it, should it be done?

It used to be that an individual scientists’ ethics alone determined whether or not a scientific undertaking was moral. Reading about scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard who wrestled mightily with their own consciences when it came to their work on the Manhattan Project and the building of the first atomic weapon, one is left with the impression that, in the end, the exciting science being done outweighed any moral ambiguity the project may have caused.

Today, ethics panels across the nation are empowered to examine scientific inquiry and determine whether or not moral guidelines are being violated. These panels are made up of people who’ve studied ethics for a living and can cite chapter and verse in subjects like metaphysics and moral philosophy. But is it enough? Or perhaps a better question, are the issues involved too complex, too morally ambiguous to be resolved in this manner?

I don’t know the answer, being a layman. I do know that I’m unsure if all the physical and ethical ramifications of this kind of research are under scrutiny as they should be.

We can only hope that there are people like Dr. Newman and yes, even the moonbat Jeremy Rifkin, who will be there to put the brakes on if we go too far too fast. Otherwise, when this Brave New World comes to pass, we’ll be cowering in the shadows afraid of whatever society we’ve created as a result of these truly wondrous advances in human understanding.

Approximately 65 million years ago, (give or take 3 million years) a fairly large meteor (or possibly a smaller comet) hit the earth in the area of the Yucatan penninsula. Most scientists agree that this event was the proximate cause for the extinction of most dinosaurs.

Turns out that this was not an isolated incident in earth’s history.

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few million years—and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went extinct about 65 million years ago.

There’s nothing really new as far as the theory goes. Scientists have noticed this before. What makes this study so compelling is that it’s so exhaustive.

The Berkeley researchers are physicists, not biologists or geologists or paleontologists, but they have analyzed the most exhaustive compendium of fossil records that exists—data that cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than 36,380 separate marine genera, including millions of species that once thrived in the world’s seas, later virtually disappeared, and in many cases returned.

But the cycles are so clear that the evidence “simply jumps out of the data,” said James Kirchner, a professor of earth and planetary sciences on the Berkeley campus who was not involved in the research but who has written a commentary on the report that is also appearing in Nature today

The evidence of strange extinction cycles that first drew Rohde’s attention emerged from an elaborate computer database he developed from the largest compendium of fossil data ever created. It was a 560-page list of marine organisms developed 14 years ago by the late J. John Sepkoski Jr., a famed paleobiologist at the University of Chicago who died at the age of 50 nearly five years ago.

For more than 20 years there’s been some fantastic speculation as to what the heck is going on that would cause regular extinctions. For a while, some scientists were enamored of a theory involving a rouge planet dubbed “Nemisis” who every 65 million years swings into the Oort cloud out beyond Pluto where billions of comets slowly orbit the sun. As Nemisis passes through the Oort cloud, thousands of comets are disturbed and start dropping towards the inner solar system and the sun. Inevitably, several will hit the earth causing massive die-offs.

Then there’s this hypothesis from one of the authors of the study:

Muller’s favorite explanation, he said informally, is that the solar system passes through an exceptionally massive arm of our own spiral Milky Way galaxy every 62 million years, and that that increase in galactic gravity might set off a hugely destructive comet shower that would drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth.

Our Milky Way galaxy spins like a massive pinwheel in space so that passing through one of the arms of our own galaxy could be a possibilty.

Alas, not very likely…But wouldn’t you love to be alive and look up to see tens of thousands of stars rather than the measely 2000-3000 you can see with the naked eye today?

What this also does is raise some interesting questions for the SETI folks (Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence). One of the reasons it’s thought that advanced intelligent life is so rare is that earth may be exceptional for its very long, very stable geologic and cosmological eras. And we’ve been lucky so far in that no “planet killer” sized meteors have hit here probably since the moon was formed about 4 billion years ago. That means that the slow processes involved in the evolution of life has had a chance here.

Other planets capable of sustaining life may not be so lucky.

If you’re keeping track of when modern humans arose on planet earth, it’s time to reset your clocks…by about 35,000 years:

A new study concludes that the earliest known humans appeared in southern Ethiopia about 195,000 years ago, about 35,000 years earlier than had previously been thought.

That conclusion is based on what researchers say are the oldest anatomically modern human fossils ever found.

Although leaving the full-fledged arrival of Homo sapiens far from resolved, this development suggests that roughly three-fourths of modern human evolution occurred on the African continent.

This new information dovetails nicely with some genetic studies showing that modern human DNA diverged approximately 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologists, using a form of DNA passed down through the ages by females only called “mitochondrial” DNA, determined that the bulk of Homo Sapien evolution occurred in Africa and that humans began to spread out from there about 125,000 years ago.

It’s this kind of confirming evidence that scientists love because the DNA theory of divergence has now been “proven” by the physical evidence of the bones.

This news also deals a crippling blow to an alternate theory of human evolution known as the “Multiregional” theory. In this theory, modern humans evolved in several different places at approximately the same time and replaced more archaic human genera approximately 100,00 years ago. While the mitochondrial DNA evidence disputed this hypothesis, its proponents had pointed to the fossil evidence as being compelling. With the discovery of these older fossils, even the multiregionalists have to conclude that the 200,000 year date for modern human divergence is a blow to their theory.