DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Republicans against science

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Somehow, "science" thinks that 150 million people here in the u.s. - conserving - but paying more to conserve - and paying more in taxes............somehow that will make a difference in this supposed man made global warming ... yet our science tells us if the u.s. taxes more, and uses less, we can save the world?????

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Don't shoot the messenger ABD. Science tells its happening and how, not what to do to curb it. Politicians are the ones you should be mad at. There is nothing in global warming theory about taxing anyone. Quit confounding the political issue with the scientific issue.

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I just don't get it.

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You're right, you obviously don't. You can't seem to reconcile this grudge you have against science for "telling you" all of these things which turn out to be partially to totally wrong. I've tried explaining your misunderstandings but you either won't, or can't, understand it due to this blind spot you have. I don't know how else to explain the theory to you, as you keep making the same mistakes as if I never corrected you and showed you how wrong some of the things you've spouted off are.

Did you read my post to you before? It seems like you're ignoring it.

arch, I'm right with you on questioning motives but you do sound pretty cynical even by my standards.

I'm not going to go into details on your whole post but I'll just address this one. As people switch to more fuel efficient cars and use less gas, that doesn't change the amount of money to build and maintain roads and bridges, so if the gas tax was paying for that, then the difference has to be made up somewhere. As an individual, if you bought one of those cars you are still saving money by using less gas... but if the states revenue for transportation goes down, how are they supposed to build and maintain roads?

The only reason they wouldn't need that extra road and bridge money is if the revenue went down because people switched from cars completely and started using public transportation... guess what? That would mean they needed more revenue for public transportation projects.

I'm not one who typically defends government, but they do need to make SOME money if we want nice roads and bridges and clean water and stuff.

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And that goes 100% to my allegation that it doesn't matter what we do, city, state, and federal gov't. want more money. Constantly. They always need more money. And, "it's for our collective good".

Bull - they want and need more money for one simple reason: they can take it.

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Want and need are two different things. Government at every level NEEDS money. Now we can debate how much.

People WANT the government to take care of a lot of their problems, therefore the government NEEDS more money to do that. Unfortunately the people who WANT the government to fix their problems are usually not the same people that the government NEEDS to take the money from.

DIVOT...

my intention was not to offend. but i'm not sure why you would be offended by my made-up description of an emotion. my point was about the process of transforming a real concept (love, as compared to God's creation) into a mother goose story (invisible butterfly vs. talking snakes, tainted apples, ribs-turned-women). i just find it doesn't make sense to me. Either God could've waited a few more centuries to enlighten us (He waited many before Blblical times, right?), or He could've just instilled the knowledge/understanding in humans, being all powerful.

as for your friend, good for him. it has nothing to do with what faith he ascribes to, but the world needs every kind heart it can get.

YTOWN...

i will never dumb things down for my kids (intentionally ). maybe i won't tell them all the details before they can comprehend it all, but there are no storks, no birds & bees, etc. in our house.

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It's about money - top to bottom. Science can tell us things - but when their research money comes from the gov't., you can bet your bottom dollar the science will prove what the gov't. wants it to prove.

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I'm sorry, I take offense to that. You're saying I'm a government shill? Please. I work off of government grants and let me tell you how much they care what I prove .... they dont care at all. I have expectations, I have hypotheses, but I don't have ANYONE telling me what to write, or how to evaluate the evidence I get. The NIH wants to know how my research will impact the overall knowledge base. The greater the impact, and the better the methods of investigation, the better chance you'll have of getting money. They don't check up on you, telling you you're doing it wrong because it doesn't match with their expectations. This is the biggest misconception out there, that there's some shadowy overarching world science division that tells us what to think. It's a load of BS.

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Ah, the old "Arch is too dumb" to get it approach. Neat. You are the only one that gets it - and you're trying to teach. Got it. If people don't buy your line, they're too dumb to get it.

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Didn't say that. I said your bias is clouding your judgement.

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What makes you so certain that 20 years from now we won't look back at all this science and say "dang - how dumb were we for believing that crap?"

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There was one line of evidence when the global cooling thing was going on. We now have dozens. And they all point in the same direction.

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Science - some people take that to mean "the end all, be all." It's not. It's the best we know at any given time - and we learn more all the time.

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Yes. And at some point we get so much evidence that we have a pretty good idea what's going on. We're at that point here.

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Which one - you have a lot of posts in here.

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The one that's a reply to your lengthy post that say's you want to learn. My post replies to a lot of your problems with the theory.

Once again blowing up the latest theories on evolution ...... (and that's not a slam on science)

I found this rather interesting. I do wonder though .... if this was a specific and well populated species ...... or a small family or clan with a few mutations?

http://news.yahoo.com/closest-human-ancestor-may-rewrite-steps-evolution-141606435.html

Closest Human Ancestor May Rewrite Steps in Our Evolution
By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor | LiveScience.com – 7 hrs ago


A startling mix of human and primitive traits found in the brains, hips, feet and hands of an extinct species identified last year make a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, scientists have announced.

These new findings could rewrite long-standing theories about the precise steps human evolution took, they added, including the notion that early human female hips changed shape to accommodate larger-brained offspring. There is also new evidence suggesting that this species had the hands of a toolmaker.

Fossils of the extinct hominid known as Australopithecus sediba were accidentally discovered by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa in 2008, findings detailed by researchers last year. Australopithecus means "southern ape," and is a group that includes the iconic fossil Lucy, while sediba means "wellspring" in the South African language Sotho. [See images of human ancestor]

Two key specimens were discovered — a juvenile male as developed as a 10- to 13-year-old human and an adult female maybe in her late 20s or early 30s. The species is both a hominid and a hominin — hominids include humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and their extinct ancestors, while hominins include those species after Homo, the human lineage, split from that of chimpanzees.

To begin to see where Au. sediba might fit on the family tree, researchers pinned down the age of the fossils by dating the calcified sediments surrounding them with advanced uranium-lead dating techniques and a method called paleomagnetic dating, which measures how many times the Earth's magnetic field has reversed. They discovered the fossils were approximately 1.977 million years old, which predates the earliest appearances of traits specific to the human lineage Homo in the fossil record. This places Au. sediba in roughly the same age category as hominids such as Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, which were thought to be potential ancestors to Homo erectus, the earliest undisputed predecessor of modern humans. [10 Things That Make Humans Special]

"As the fossil record for early human ancestors increases, the need for more accurate dates is becoming paramount," said researcher Robyn Pickering at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Small but humanlike brain

Most aspects of Au. sediba display an intriguing mix of both human and more primitive features that hint it might be an intermediary form between Australopithecus and Homo.

"The fossils demonstrate a surprisingly advanced but small brain, a very evolved hand with a long thumb like a human's, a very modern pelvis, but a foot and ankle shape never seen in any hominin species that combines features of both apes and humans in one anatomical package," said researcher Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "The many very advanced features found in the brain and body and the earlier date make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus, the genus Homo, more so than previous discoveries such as Homo habilis."

The brain is often thought of as what distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, and the juvenile specimen of Au. sediba had an exceptionally well-preserved skull that could shed light on the pace of brain evolution in early hominins. To find out more, the researchers scanned the space in the skull where its brain would have been using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France; the result is the most accurate scan ever produced for an early human ancestor, with a level of detail of up to 90 microns, or just below the size of a human hair.

The scan revealed Au. sediba had a much smaller brain than seen in human species, with an adult version maybe only as large as a medium-size grapefruit. However, it was humanlike in several ways — for instance, its orbitofrontal region directly behind the eyes apparently expanded in ways that make it more like a human's frontal lobe in shape. This area is linked in humans with higher mental functions such as multitasking, an ability that may contribute to human capacities for long-term planning and innovative behavior.

"We could be seeing the beginnings of those capabilities," researcher Kristian Carlson at the University of Witwatersrand told LiveScience.

These new findings cast doubt on the long-standing theory that brains gradually increased in size and complexity from Australopithecus to Homo. Instead, their findings corroborate an alternative idea — that Australopithecus brains did increase in complexity gradually, becoming more like Homo, and later increased in size relatively quickly.

Modern hips

This mosaic of modern and primitive traits held true with its hips as well. An analysis of the partial pelvis of the female Au. sediba revealed that it had modern, humanlike features.

"It is surprising to discover such an advanced pelvis in such a small-brained creature," said researcher Job Kibii at the University of the Witwatersrand. "It is short and broad like a human pelvis ... parts of the pelvis are indistinguishable from that of humans."

Scientists had thought the human-like pelvis evolved to accommodate larger-brained offspring. The new findings of humanlike hips in Au. sediba despite small-brained offspring suggests these pelvises may have instead initially evolved to help this hominin better wander across the landscape, perhaps as grasslands began to expand across its habitat.

When it came to walking, investigating the feet and ankles of the fossils revealed surprises about how Au. sediba might have strode across the world. No hominin ankle has ever been described with so many primitive and advanced features.

"If the bones had not been found stuck together, the team may have described them as belonging to different species," said researcher Bernhard Zipfel at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The researchers discovered that its ankle joint is mostly like a human's, with some evidence for a humanlike arch and a well--efined Achilles tendon, but its heel and shin bones appear to be mostly ape-like. This suggested the hominid probably climbed trees yet also halkid in a unique way not exactly like that of humans.

Altogether, such anatomical traits would have allowed Au. sediba to walk in perhaps a more energy-efficient way, with tendons storing energy and returning that energy to the next step, said researcher Steve Churchill from Duke University in Durham, N.C. "These are the kinds of things that we see with the genus Homo," he explained.

What nice hands …

Finally, an analysis of Au. sediba's hands suggests it might have been a toolmaker. The fossils — including the most complete hand known in an early hominin, which is missing only a few bones and belonged to the mature female specimen — showed its hand was capable of the strong grasping needed for tree-climbing, but that it also had a long thumb and short fingers. These would have allowed it a precision grip useful for tools, one involving just the thumb and fingers, where the palm does not play an active part.

Altogether, the hand of Au. sediba has more features related to tool-making than that of the first human species thought of as a tool user, the "handy man" Homo habilis, said researcher Tracy Kivell at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "This suggests to us that sediba may also have been a toolmaker."

Though the scientists haven't excavated the site in search of stone tools, "the hand and brain morphology suggest that Au. sediba may have had the capacity to manufacture and use complex tools," Kivell added.

The researchers do caution that although they suggest that Au. sediba was ancestral to the human lineage, all these apparent resemblances between it and us could just be coincidences, with this extinct species evolving similar traits to our lineages due, perhaps, to similar circumstances. [Top 10 Missing Links]

In fact, it might be just as interesting to imagine that Au. sediba was not directly ancestral to Homo, because it opens up the possibility "of independent evolution of the same sorts of features," Carlson said. "Whether or not it's on the same lineage as leading to Homo, I think there are interesting questions and implications."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Sept. 9 issue of the journal Science.

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You say co2 changes the atmosphere - fine. That's provable I guess. But why did the earth warm, and cool, many, many times over the last however long? See, the earth is a "been there, done that" kind of thing.

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It's proven. Co2 is a greenhouse gas. Photons are absorbed by a molecule of Co2, which then is emitted as heat. That's how it works as a greenhouse gas.

The earth's climate as always depended mainly on it's atmosphere. Other outside sources like the sun have small to moderate affects. Volcanic activity or impacts of celestially bodies have a greater effect, and that's by altering the composition of the atmosphere. That's why the earth has been all over the range of climates.

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What we'll know in the coming years, decades, centuries will be more than we know today.

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You going to keep going on that timeline? I mean, if thats the case, we'll never know anything for sure, and things will always be changing. But you're wrong. There gets to be a point in our understanding of a topic that we can essentially say, "Yes, it's happening, and this is how." We've been studying evolution for 150 years. Over those decades we've amassed such a large amount of information that we can say for sure that is occurring, and in a few different ways. For climate change, we've been going since the late 60's. However, we have enough evidence from so many lines of questions and experiments that it would be wrong to say it wasn't happening. The earth is warming, and increased Co2 in the atmosphere is the best candidate to explain it.

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1 bad, or wrong, input can skew everything beyond belief.

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It can. I never said it couldn't. But that one bad study is usually vetted in a few years with more evidence, through the peer review process. So where's the one bad piece of evidence that's skewing the results for global warming? So far, when something like that has come up, other people test it, try to replicate it, etc. and if it doesn't hold up to the pressure exerted by the peer review process it's not considered.

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As to your taking offense at what I said about follow the money - sorry you took offense. But, that's your problem. Yes, I'm being blunt. I'm NOT attacking you, though. I'm saying "prove it".

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Fair enough. I'll make sure to demean and offend the honor of your chosen profession and those around you when you bring it up. Won't be my problem. I'm just telling it like I see it.

You want me to prove to you that I'm not a government mouthpiece? Is that what you're saying? You really are cynical, bordering on paranoid, if you believe that.

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Also, on another note - this man made global warming thing - here in the u.s. we get it hammered to us almost daily "save, conserve...." etc. Meanwhile, other countries are putting in new coal powered electric plants weekly almost. IF man made global warming is real - if the science was proven - wouldn't those other countries take a step back and say "hmm, they have a point. Perhaps we should re-consider"?

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No, not necessarily. They, I'd imagine, think quite a bit like you are. It's expensive to push the envelope and try to get off oil or coal. It's easy to keep the status quo and spend the least amount of money to grow an economy, like China is doing right now. But, the thing you don't hear about too often is that while they are putting in these coal plants they're also funding quite a bit of alternative energy too. Last year I believe China surpassed the US in overall amount of energy produced by windmills. Both China and India have aggressive plans to implement more alternative energy sources like solar over the next 5 years than the US does. Not only they, they're no longer going to be relying on us to manufacture the parts for solar panels and windmills, they're making them themselves. So, while you don't see it through your rose colored glasses, the fact remains that other countries are taking it seriously while still growing their economy.

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Do you think that the u.s. is going to save the world?

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At one point we did, but that time has past. I don't think the US has the ability to be a world leader anymore. We're too involved with ourselves to come together and work towards something great. We're not willing to make something that will last.

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Are you a global warming scientist? Are you an atmospheric scientist?

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No, a biologist. My bachelors is in evolution, my master's is in neuroscience, and my PhD will be in development. I'm by no means an expert in climate science. I can read and digest the pertinent parts of a journal article though, even if the math slips by me.

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What percent of your funding comes from the fed. gov'.t, and/or from companies that profit from the man made global warming theory? Serious question.

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My funding? Difficult to say since I'm not actually privy to how much money is in the coffers. But, I'd guess mostly my summers. Roughly a third of what I make a year comes from a grant from the National Institute of Health. The rest I'm paid by the university to teach classes.

As for federal funding of climate research, the majority of funding comes from the National Science Foundation. Private companies may play a small role too. I don't know any exact numbers though. But, there aren't many people, if at all, that use their own money or anything like that to do their research. The only place to get the money necessary for some of these expensive projects is through granting agencies in the government. Citizens or non-profits generally can't give as much as the government can. Any technically driven scientific endeavors to advance our knowledge requires lots of money. Literally we're usually inventing something new when we do this.

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I hear quite often "Oh, you can't believe that person/company, etc...they are funded by the coal/oil industry."

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Sure you can. If the science is sound, then it's fine. But if there's shenanigans with the statistics or the techniques are poor, then you have to be a bit skeptical about the results.

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Once again blowing up the latest theories on evolution ...... (and that's not a slam on science)

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Uh huh. Not sure if you're trying to provoke me or not. It doesn't blow up anything though for what it's worth. Evolution predicts that there would be have to be a transitional fossil that links two current forms of a organism by way of an common ancestor. That's what they found, a individual with both human and ape-like traits. I'll give you that it changes the hominid tree and the human evolution story a bit though.

If you're interested in human evolution, there's a good blog called Gene Expression where the author is an anthropologist and discusses all the current news in physical and cultural hominid evolution. He's a bit technical though.

That wasn't a slam. What it was is yet another change in our understanding of the history of the human race.

No one can say with absolute certainty how mankind evolved. No one can say if there was an entire human race millions of years ago that was as advanced as we are, or even more advanced. After 50,000 years or so we completely lose almost every bit of evidence of human achievement. We can theorize and guess what our history over millions of years might be .... but we are using very small pieces of evidence.