Time Immortal

My former professor, Denis O. Lamoureux, offers up his thoughts in a discussion of a recent paper by one George Murphy: Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin.

I basically agree with George, but I wish he had been more forceful. Gen 1-2 is an ancient origins account. Typical of these in the ancient world, origins is De Novo (quick and complete). The ancients saw a cow give birth to a cow, give birth to a cow, etc; and they logically extended this phenomenological experience to an original cow [termed "retrojection" It's what we do in geology]. Similarly, a human gives birth to a human, who gives birth to a human, etc, Ergo, who is Adam? Ancient science. He never existed.

Therefore, if Adam never existed, then he never sinned. And if he never sinned, then his sin was never passed down to us from him. End of story.

So what’s happening? The Holy Spirit is accommodating. NOT LYING, BUT ACCOMMODATING. Therefore, don’t go to Gen 1-3 to find out how the world was created, or how human history began — it’s not there.

What we must do is separate (not conflate as most through history and today have done) the Holy Spirit inspired Message of faith (inerrant & infallible) from the INCIDENTAL ancient origins science (the science-of-the-day). In the case of Gen 1-3, Adam is an ancient vessel that transports the spiritual Truths: humans are created in the Image of God, humans are sinful, and God judges us for our sins. Worrying about where Adam fits in the paleontological record makes about as much sense as trying to figure out where in the firmament NASA sends its spacecraft.

There’s more than just what I’ve excerpted, but I’ve always thought that this hermeneutical analysis of Denis’ has always been the important starting point for dialogues with those who take an anti-evolutionary, hyper-literalist interpretation of the Bible, especially concerning the Book of Genesis and Adam and Eve.

At any rate, read the whole thing, good Reader. And maybe check out some of the other articles in the ongoing dialogue as well.

Hmmn…that’s twice today I’ve found a reason to link to Denis’ new book on Amazon.com.

The Deeps of Time reports that the solar minima we’ve been experiencing of late has come to an end; solar activity, according to NASA, has begun to increase again.

That is: we should begin seeing more sunspots and flares again, solar phenomena which have been essentially absent since about January of this year.

Actually, the timing is ideal: auroras are always at their best when observed in a night sky in winter.

Apparently, the last year that had a higher count of days in which no sunspot activity was observed on the face of the Sun was way back in 1954. And if less than 50 days between now and the end of the year demonstrate any indication of sunspot activity, 2008 will replace ‘54 as the third-place champion for spotlessness in the last century.

From NASA yesterday:

Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”

And why the blankety-blank does this matter? From Planet Gore in May:

Sunspots are magnetic storms on the sun’s surface that are used as a proxy measure for the Sun’s interplanetary magnetic field. As Henrik Svensmark and Fred Singer argue, the Sun’s magnetic field effects cloud formation in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The more magnetically active the Sun is, the fewer cosmic rays reach our upper atmosphere. When cosmic rays do reach the Earth, they react with atmospheric gases to free nuclei that help seed cloud formation, cooling the Earth’s surface.

No sunspots = more clouds = lower temperatures.

Coincidentally, the Earth’s average temperature has been dropping since at least January of this year.

Or perhaps…not so coincidentally.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Or maybe it broke itself? Regardless, the Hubble Telescope has evidently stopped transmitting.

Didn’t the just fix the thing? Or was that longer ago than I think it was? It’s getting so hard to sort out NASA’s failures from their successes these days.

Mike Brock has an interesting analysis of changes in average global temperature relative to changes in solar activity. While a lot of people still attempt to downplay the role of the Sun in changes in Earth’s climate (sidetracking the discussion into things like CO2 and methane), the best evidence we have still seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that all the gases humanity can pump into the air count for almost nothing compared to the effect that the Sun has on Earth’s climate.

Indeed, since the ending of the last solar cycle, since which time no new sunspots — a good indicator of an active star — have been observed, the Earth’s global average temperature has reversed almost all of the 0.6 C rise above “average” that was observed at about this time last year.

That’s not to say that humanity should just pump industrial and agricultural emissions into the atmosphere all willy-nilly — that would be stupid, because some of those emissions have other harmful effects not related to global warming (although others are mostly harmless). We should do our best to curb the emission of substances which cause, for example, cancers or respiratory maladies. But there is no point in trying our damndest to break otherwise healthy, functioning Western economies in pursuit of a phantom goal of “reversing” a trend over which we have no control anyhow.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced NASA’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

One cannot, hopefully, have failed to notice that the climate change alarmism movement has become a moneymaking enterprise for some, while for others it has become a vehicle through which policies of massive state intervention in industry — that is, socialism — is demanded and advocated for. The science upon which the movement is based is shoddy and uncertain at best (if not outright an outright fallacy in many respects), and the outcomes of the changes that folks like Al Gore and David Suzuki are demanding would be crippling and disastrous.

It’s a good thing, then, that more and more evidence is now coming to light demonstrating just what kind of lies are being told to us, the Western public.

…and apparently, so does its moon Rhea — the icy, second-largest moon of the gas-giant. This would be a first-of-a-kind discovery, if in fact it is true.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of material orbiting Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. This is the first time rings may have been found around a moon.

A broad debris disk and at least one ring appear to have been detected by a suite of six instruments on Cassini specifically designed to study the atmospheres and particles around Saturn and its moons.

As I may have noted before, one regret I will take with me to my grave is that I’ll never get the chance to view any planet — especially another planet apart from our own — from orbit. Things like rings around another world would, I suspect, be the a most amazing sight to behold with one’s own eyes.

Apparently, the temperature decrease over the last twelve months has basically undone the previously observed rises in same (rises which were said, by Al Gore and others, to be “permanent”).

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

…

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide [CO2] is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Others have demonstrated just how inconsequential CO2 is in the grand scheme of global average temperature. This new development merely serves as one more argument in favour of the suggestion that humanity really doesn’t have much at all to do with changes in that average temperature, especially not when compared to the big glowing ball in the sky.

Which seems reasonable to suggest, given that the Sun is…well…our star (and thus responsible for basically all the energy that the atmosphere traps, thus making this chunk of rock we call Earth a habitable place), and given that other planets in the Solar System also show warming and cooling trends that match the changes in how energetic the Sun is.

Of course, now we’re likely to be told that humanity is causing the globe to head for a new ice age, and that we need to ratify the Kyoto Protocols immediately in order to stave off the impending “big chill.”