Oil and NASA's mission statement change

According to geologists the Antarctic ice formed about 12 million years ago and has been about the same as now since that time. Before 12mya there was no ice there and the world was full of life but man had not yet evolved. This topic is more hype than anything and as long as money can be had for hyping any of these details someone will be on top of it. Right now its office seekers pandering for votes they hope will come their way. Its very hard to examine these issues from a scientific perspective because most of the data is being used to get money that is being thrown at the problem.

In regard to Global Warming and Ice Ages, there are two points to keep in mind:

1) We haven't accurately observed our planet and the solar system for a very long time. Therefore, we have no knowledge of events which happen over multi-thousand year timespans.

2) Le Chatelier'S Principle: If conditions of a system, initially at equilibrium, are changed, the equilibrium will shift in such a direction as to tend to restore the original equilibrium.

The point is, if you want to predict a fundamental change in Earth climate, you must postulate an outside entity which adds or subtracts energy from the entire Earth surface, oceans and atmosphere. Claiming that some factor internal to the biosphere can cause a runaway change in climate, such as ocean currents or icebergs, would be in "violation" of Le Chatelier's Principle. Certainly, this principle is only an assertion by man, and we cannot claim that Reality agreed to it.

Gregg Wilson

Other evidence of Global Warming being a political beat up has been over-promotion of those obviously poor climate models. Their predictions of catastrophic warming have been spurious because they have not properly addressed the most powerful greenhouse effect-or H2O, simply because it has been very hard to do, until just about now.

They've just finished working on the experimental side of the problem in the tropical "top end" of Australia during the last few years. It may be a few years before the results will be reflected in the climate models. My intuition is similar to MV's: When H2O is more or less fully accounted for, and those models become really worth promoting, the findings may well be that the biggest threat is an ice age.

That politicisation of science I wrote about earlier has been with us at least 6,000 years, when the people who first began domesticating animals for milking during the Neolithic period would have started to learn this now highly developed PR skill. The toxic effects of milk upon individuals without the gene for digesting lactase may have been the original problem producing the need for such politicised Science.

Milking cows would have been too important an industry to those original milking societies to allow the industry to be smeared by weak individuals from weak families with very questionable backgrounds, very questionable bad (real or imagined) habits. Of course milk is today the big Good complementing that big Bad history. One generation's poison becomes a very much later generations', or another species' meat.

Models do as the maker decides and thats one good reason to question authority. The field of geology has the best data about the history of Earth and they have sound reasoning indicating ice comes and goes even if they loose their footing trying to explain why this happens. Climate change also seems to happen and proof is also in the rocks. Geology is a wonder of the modern world. The rocks tell a very interesting story mostly having nothing at all to due with mankind. Its a story that models cause some harm to and very little good.

Yes, Jim, Geology has had a particularly hard time with its models. One need look no further than the contemporary orthodoxy of Continental Drift (CD) which has long been beset with problems and which many, including myself, contend is wrong, completely untrue (while seafloor spread is true).

And your kind of geologist can get a long way with hardly any reference to models, but nevertheless models are implicit in your commonsense or whatever you call it, in methods of dating of those indications of ice ages and so on. Progress akin to what we saw in Physics, subsequent to its Relativity, Quantum Mechanics revolutions, is implicit in CD being wrong, untrue also.

A hint of CD versus no CD is given in the Sitchin interpretation of "Enuma Elish". If the gods are taken to be planets, then they "sprout" new "monsters, winds", whatever, when they approach one another. If a true planet has a nuclear core then such a core would block the gravitational flux. If two planets approach each other, mutually blocking the gravitational flux between them, then the angular momentum of each would lead to the "throw-off" and creation of moons. In addition, such blocking of gravitational flux would allow a higher radioactive decay of the nuclear cores, which would lead to the creation of much more "normal" matter. Since normal matter occupies about 1,000,000 times more volume than nuclear matter, the growth of the planet would be very impressive. (Reference: neutron star)

Gregg Wilson