Senator debunks global warming with snow

Here is the venerable Sen. Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma disproving climate change with coldness:

And just like the snowball in his bag, his IQ seems to be inexorably melting and evaporating before our eyes. I wonder if, in his mind, these other historic snow events also provide compelling evidence against climate change, even though many of them took place before all the mass “hysteria” about climate change erupted.

I also wonder about the series of events leading up to this speech. Did he gather the snow in the bag himself, or did he get a staffer to do it? If the latter, did the staffer gathering the snow feel more like a tool than usual? Did Inhofe worry that the snow would melt before he got his chance to deliver the decisive blow to climate change on the floor of the Senate? And if it did melt, did he worry that this fact would have dealt a serious blow to his own argument? Given my hypothesis about the disintegrating IQ, I would guess not.

Debunking theistic evolution

A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. But as Keith Blanchard said here, evolution is not disputed:

Theistic-Evolution

Theistic evolution

Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don’t believe in it — you either understand it or you don’t. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that’s how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they’ve been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.

Thus, instead of saying we believe or even accept evolution, perhaps we should speak about it with as much certainty of fact as we do gravity and the planet’s rotation around the sun, for when believers decry evolution, they make themselves look as ridiculous as if they had suddenly claimed the world is flat. While I agree with Blanchard that a person can, and many do, recognize evolution as fact and simply reconcile it with their faith — notice how the reach of faith always, always recedes behind science — they must do so at the expense of the Bible’s validity. Liberal Christians, such as Francis Collins, reconcile evolution and the Bible by claiming that God was behind the whole plan of creation and guided evolution to ultimately culminate in human beings. Basically, since Genesis does not provide an exact time frame for the process of creation, a “day” in the Bible could be virtually any amount of time.

But there are at least two problems with this theory. OK, three. First, although the Bible attempts to provide years and time periods for “historical” people and events, no attempt, as I’ve said, is made to do this in the creation story. One would think that an important event like the creation of man would have warranted a basic timeline so the Bible’s later readers could know about when the species began. Certainly, providing this information in detail would not have been out of the purview of an all-knowing god.

Second, as the image above points out, evolution is riddled with “errors” in design (Here’s just a few). Presumably a god who was in control of the process would have been able and willing to streamline the process and “guide” evolution more efficiently without the flaws, which leads to the next point. More than 98 percent of all species that ever existed, including early humans, are now extinct. An all-loving God would have had to watch eons and eons of misery and death before our little blip of time came around. Sure, some Christians will argue that millions of years for God is nothing, but while God might be able to fluidly transport himself through space and time, he still orchestrated a plan that includes 98 percent more death and destruction than life. So although some Christians do regard the accepted science of evolution as true, they still have logical mountains to climb if they are to reconcile evolution with the notion of all-loving, all-powerful god.

Dawkins: Evolution ‘no comparison’ to Genesis

It really is an enormously exciting thought that we are cousins of all living creatures, that we have a history of 4 billion years of slow gradual, evolution — just think about 4 billions years — of slow gradual history. That’s not something that we can easily take on board, but the effort of doing so is well worth it. It’s such a beautiful thought that we are the heirs of 4 billion years — maybe 3.5 billion years of evolution — and that we are cousins of all living things. When you put that against the measly, piddling little ideas that are in Genesis, it’s just no comparison, and it’s a sad and diminishing deprivation of a child’s opportunities to be denied that knowledge.

Obama speaks candidly on climate change

Although he should have been talking about climate change five years ago, it’s good to see Obama siding with science and advocating for a price on carbon. Better late than never. Here’s a preview from Tom Friedman’s interview on Showtime:

I particularly liked Friedman’s example about climate change deniers in Congress consulting the 97 percent of doctors who may diagnose their children, but on climate change, they want to consult the other 3 percent minority. This, I have found also, applies to religion, but instead, the percentages are more like 99-to-1, as Christians and other believers, despite 99 percent of scientists being in agreement about evolution and the inadequacy of creationism to explain our world, they still trust the dissenting 1 percent, and without any evidence all the while.

Two amazing, amazingly pointless inventions

I’m not sure what practical purpose this invention serves, other than wowing us with science, but it does provide a stunning visual:

Here’s another one (embed disabled) in which people can walk through falling water and not get wet. It apparently works by creating a field around the person through some type of 3D sensor. I imagine this invention would have a market among the super rich; they could build a special “rain room” in their homes and amaze guests over cocktails.