COMMENT TO CAMILO MORA ET AL., THE PROJECTED TIMING OF CLIMATE DEPARTURE FROM RECENT VARIABILITY, NATURE 502:183–187 (10 OCTOBER 2013) DOI:10.1038/NATURE12540:

THE CLIMATE MODELS DO NOT FAIL BECAUSE OF “VARIABILITY” BUT BECAUSE OF THE NEGLECTED MULTI-DECADAL NATURAL OSCILLATIONS AND THE OVERRATED EFFECT OF THE ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION

Albert Parker

E-mail: [email protected]

If the authors of [1] carefully analyse the reconstructed global land and sea temperature time history since the 1800s (for example GISS [2]), they may certainly realize that the reason why climate models are failing so badly so quickly is not because of the “variability” in the climate, but only because of their wrong assumptions about the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission driving the climate and the neglected natural oscillations. This “inconvenient truth” emerges clearly as soon as the reconstructed global temperatures are compared with the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions not only during the last upwards phase of a quasi-60 years natural oscillation affecting the climate, but also including what happened prior of 1970 and what is happening since 2000 [3-8]. Fitting the data with functions that minimize the error over the full record length and not only a small time window of the recent past it is clear that the theory of exponentially growing temperatures is wrong.

The Carbon Sense Coalition has accused those waging a war on carbon dioxide of being “anti-green”. The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that carbon dioxide is the gas of life, feeding every green plant, producing food for every animal and in the process releasing oxygen, another gas of life, into the atmosphere.

A recent report on measuring global vegetation growth notes that data from remote sensing devices show significant increase in annual vegetation growth during the last three decades. They also report that CO2 fertilization is more important than climate variation in determining the magnitude of the vegetation growth. “The CO2 fertilization effect of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, gas and oil, is beginning to assume its vaulted position of being a tremendous “boon to the biosphere. . .”  

Current levels of carbon dioxide are well below optimal levels for plants, so all true environmentalists should welcome any increase – all life would benefit if the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was triple current levels.

The biosphere always flourishes during the recurring but short warm eras on Earth. Ice ages are the times of extinctions. As oceans warm, carbon dioxide is expelled and water evaporates. Warmth, and more moisture and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provide ideal growing conditions for the green world.

Not content with promoting junk climate science the former poster boy of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published his latest unscientific rant, ‘The Subterranean War on Science‘.

Pronouncing that “science denial kills,” Penn. State University’s Michael Mann’s new paper launches off by promoting a myth first promulgated by data fraudster,  Dr. Pride Chigwedere (2008). Chigwedere’s false claim was of 300,000 needless South African deaths due to President Mbeki’s refusal to adopt Big Pharma’s use of antiretroviral drugs.

Clark Baker, CEO of the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ) and a dedicated opponent of junk HIV/AIDS science unequivically dismisses Mann’s claim as “pure propaganda.” But then, those of us familiar with Michael Mann, infamous for his ‘hockey stick’ graph, can see why he and co-author, Stephan Lewandowsky, find such affinity with Chigwedere. Mann’s reputation is now so low that even those who were once his closest colleagues distance themselves from his shenanigans.

Lewandowsky, Mann’s accomplice in the latest tawdry piece, is likewise increasingly mocked among his peers. The tortured (and tortuous) twosome have just published (November, 2013), in the Association of Psychological Science (APS), a 2,400-word outpouring of hate against critics who simply demand that scientists be more open about their methods and data. And heaven knows this is desperately needed with so much apparent fraud and deceit tarnishing the image of government scientists in general.

But in this paper we see that Lewandowsky’s and Mann’s old habits die hard. They are back to the same tricks – this time telling ‘porkies’ about the AIDS/HIV controversy.

As Clark Baker points out, “As I reported here, Chigwedere admits to using estimates that UNAIDS admits were deliberately inflated and FAR BELOW South Africa’s actual mortality numbers.” (see table below)

The Chigwedere data begs the question: if AIDS allegedly kills millions in Africa, why has Africa’s population doubled from 400-800 million during the same period? The source of such misinformation is Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which is funded by mining giant AngloGold and TAG, which is funded by pharma. Chigwedere’s report was funded by the Harvard School of Public Health, which received a $160 million spike of AIDS funding from HRSA in the years leading up to publication (2008). As they say: follow the money!

While perusing the US Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA 2007 one finds this astonishing statement in footnote #26 on page 26: “No party to this dispute [Massachusetts vs. EPA 2007] contests that greenhouse gases both ‘enter the ambient air’ and tend to warm the atmosphere. They are therefore unquestionably ‘agents’ of air pollution.”

As you can see, according to this Court decision “warm[th]” is itself air pollution and “greenhouses gases” are simply presumed to be “agents” of that pollution. Under this paradigm anything that enters and warms the atmosphere can be considered a “pollutant”. Sunlight enters the ambient air and tends to warm the atmosphere; is it a “pollutant” as well?

The law upon which the US Supreme Court was relying in the formation of this decision was the Clean Air Act (first passed in 1970 and revised in 1990) that defines a “pollutant” as that which can reasonably be “anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In their 2007 decision the Court reasons that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant because it is presumed to warm the atmosphere; ergo the Court views atmospheric warmth to be a danger to public health and welfare. Stated another way, the US Supreme Court in Massachusetts vs. EPA (2007) asserts that warmth is air pollution.

A common argument that skeptics of anthropogenic global warming have been voicing of late is the fact that the mean global temperature stopped going up some 15 or so years ago while carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise, thus attempting to disassociate carbon dioxide from global warming. Even though it has a certain merit the problem with this argument is that it tacitly concedes the assertion being made that global warming is itself a bad thing and leaves open the possibility that said warming may very well have resulted in environmental catastrophe had it continued. Have we forgotten that the cold polar regions are nearly devoid of life while the warm equatorial regions are teaming with life and that in the mid to upper latitudes everything dies or goes dormant in the cold of winter and comes to life in the warmth of summer?

Did not humanity start using fire as an energy source in the first place to warm the air because in many places on Earth during much of the year the air is just plain too cold?

Once I had begun to take in the full import of the fact that the earth and the oceans meet the atmosphere just everywhere and all-at-once I began to search for a word to describe this phenomenon that everybody observes yet which virtually nobody acknowledges. Could one say simultaneous-ness? Ugly. Then I thought of ‘synchronicity’ – but it is not enough. Synchronous applies only to time. I needed a word for time and place.

The great heat exchange that is taking place over the entire globe is taking place everywhere and all at once by contact, by conduction. There is not a word in the English language that I am aware of that can describe the fact that is easily observable – that the action and reaction that is taking place between every surface everywhere on this planet is instantaneous, contiguous and continuous.

Far from it being the Sceptics who do not believe in Global Warming and Climate Change, precisely the opposite is the case. It is the Warmists who do not acknowledge, who are utterly blind to the incredible Global Warming/Cooling that is taking place all together and all at once – in a sort of majestic symphony. Every instrument in this celestial orchestra is playing its part harmoniously, everything is on cue, and the supreme conductor, Great Nature, is conducting everything.

BRITAIN faces a new mini-Ice Age with decades of severe Siberian winters and washout summers, an expert has warned.

Professor Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, said erratic and extreme weather patterns could be the norm in 20 years. He said the risk of harsh winters and wet miserable summers has gone up to 25 to 30 per cent compared with 10 per cent a few years ago.

Weakening sunspot activity is to blame for a “major change” in the UK’s weather he told BBC TV.

He said: “The sun is ‘quietening’ really rapidly. We think it is actually quietening more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.

“So this is a major change. We think lower solar activity does seem to tie up with more cold winters in central Europe and the UK.”

Climatologist Dr Dennis Wheeler from Sunderland University, said: “When we have had periods where the sun has been quieter than usual we tend to get these much harsher winters.”

The comments follow unusual weather patterns over the past few years including the extreme winter of 2010 and this summer’s heatwave.

I was reading this excellent book ‘Taxing Air’ for the second time and for the second time I was stopped dead in my tracks by some words on page 69. It says that the common ground among scientists includes that ‘Carbon Dioxide is a Greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere.’ Whoa! Whoa! Bob Carter, Spooner et al, and the composite authors of this book.

Surely this is a printing error, or something written in haste. What is generally agreed is that Carbon Dioxide is 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere and reacts to the infrared radiation from the earth; and it is this radiation that warms the molecules of carbon dioxide. So it is the gas that is warmed by the radiation. Even the Warmists do not really claim any more, because obviously a gas cannot heat itself; the atmosphere, the temperature of which is always varying – cannot heat itself.

So yes, the Carbon Dioxide molecules are warmed by the infrared radiation, all 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere. But being a gas these molecules are also subject to convection; that is to say that as they warm these molecules rise up and cool, as does the whole of the lower atmosphere.

So that begs the question: What warms the lower atmosphere? Now we come to what warmists and sceptics do agree on. They agree that the sun warms the earth and the oceans, as radiation from the Sun encounters mass. It is also generally agreed that water has a great heat capacity and that the warm oceans in particular warm the lower atmosphere. Is that OK? Not quite. And the cold oceans cool the lower atmosphere. Is that better?

The land is more complex. Hot sands warm, while cold rocks cool the atmosphere. Hot tar warms, while frosty runways cool the air. A leafy wood is often cooler than an open field or lawn. Snow-bound Siberian wastes are cooling, while the Gobi desert by day is warming the atmosphere – all by conduction.

The atmosphere is being warmed or being cooled every instant of every day. The gases of the atmosphere are being warmed primarily by contact, by conduction. So where does that leave the 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere that is Carbon Dioxide? In order to answer this question let us ask ourselves another question that I first saw posed in the book ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.’ Why does the Sun warm the Earth? Answer: Because it is hotter.’ Is that agreed? Because the Sun is hotter than the Earth.

Evaluation of “Climate Change Reconsidered II – Physical Science”

What’s good about it.

The above report was recently issued by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). It was coauthored by Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer together with an equally distinguished group of scientists who served as lead authors, contributing authors, and reviewers. The report is a well documented and thoroughly researched analysis of the hypothesis put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 caused by human emissions from fossil fuel combustion is causing, or will cause, dangerous global warming and climate change. Such warming has been observed in the late twentieth century as atmospheric CO2 was measured to increase. According to the IPCC paradigm increases in atmospheric CO2 precede, and then cause, parallel increases in temperature.

A large number of governments, professional societies, scientific journals, journalists, the print media, the TV media, and even some corporations, generally accept the validity of that IPCC paradigm. Accordingly, there has been a concerted effort to reduce CO2 emissions, or to tax such emissions, or to replace fossil combustion sources by alternative energy sources. A smaller number of governments or organizations have rejected that IPCC paradigm and NIPCC is among them. The NIPPC report being reviewed here documents the observations and measurements that contradict the paradigm.

While NIPPC concedes that CO2 is a “mild greenhouse gas” that might cause some mild heating, such heating far from representing a “climate crisis” would actually be beneficial to mankind. The Global Climate Models produced by the IPCC have predicted drastic warming up to 6 C for decades to come. Those predictions have been falsified by the data. In fact, during the past 16 years, even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by 8{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, the Earth’s average temperature has not increased. While prior to 1995 there was a parallelism between the CO2 increase and temperature rise, such a parallelism does not prove causation, and in fact that parallelism has ceased since the mid- 1990’s. In geologic time, the Earth’s temperature has oscillated naturally between +4C and -6 C relative to current values. Those fluctuations are driven by glacial coolings and interglacial warmings caused mainly by changes in the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit. The Earth’s overall warming since 1860 corresponds to its recovery from the Little Ice Age as modulated by ocean-atmosphere oscillations and variations in solar activity.

Even more telling is the CO2 data from those ice core measurements as obtained from air bubbles trapped in the ice. They show a parallelism between CO2 and temperature with minima in CO2 occurring near the lowest temperatures of a glacial cooling. The maxima in CO2 occur near the highest temperatures of a glacial warming. But if one analyses the data carefully, one finds that the changes in temperature always precede the changes in CO2 by several hundred to a thousand years. The same precedence is observed during the most recent glacial warming cycle that we are currently experiencing. Those observations conclusively falsify the IPCC theory that CO2 is the primary forcing agent for temperature changes. Quite the contrary, it is the temperature changes that are the cause of the CO2 changes. Even shorter term variations in CO2 over the last several decades also display somewhat similar behavior with sea surface temperature changes inevitably leading to atmospheric CO2 changes. There is still more to be learned from such data and we will return to it again.

This is written in response to an earlier contribution by Derek Alker, which I criticized and I need to begin with an apology to Derek. My criticism was clumsy in its wording and could have been interpreted as arrogant in spirit. As far as I know Derek has no ill intent towards me and I have none towards him but I was surprised by my own apparent aggression when I saw the contribution on-line. This is important, though I withdraw none of the points of criticism I made, since the manner of criticism is an important issue in the community of science and in particular in the debates about climate change, which (as anyone will know who is familiar with the main blogs) are awash with insults and bad behaviour and even threats. I want to begin by correcting my own mistake in that respect by referring to a key aspect of Popper’s philosophy.

In the debate about the relative merits of Popper’s and Kuhn’s ideas about what I will call the dynamic of science, this matter of attitude is pivotal, though few commentators have analysed it. And this in spite of the repeated emphasis that Popper gave to it. It is captured in the often-quoted lines;

“I may be wrong and you may be right,

and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth”

These lines encapsulate what Critical Rationalism means and they hold the secret to the whole of Popper’s approach. They have many layers of meaning; logical, methodological and social. They point to a logic of discovery that is based on criticism, to an attitude of mind that is non-authoritarian, to a culture of tolerance and to humility in the individual.

The Internet Reformation is the culmination of the power and glory of Western civil society and free-market thinking. It is the apogee of all that is best in a sweep of history that began with the ancient Greeks and has culminated in the hearts and minds of millions of young men and women who industriously add to its impact every day via additional code, non-mainstream news or fundamental scientific commentary.

It is NOT an “Internet Revolution.” The Internet Revolution is a standard “pat” phrase of the powers-that-be about the so-called empowering effects of technology. The Internet Reformation is a much more deeply disruptive concept. It is truly a revolutionary one, affecting every aspect of human society and human relationships with modern elites. It is focused around the insights generated by the Internet itself.

This concept is based on what happened during the era of the Gutenberg press. Almost from the beginning, the Gutenberg press was a revolutionary technology. As soon as people used the press to print Bibles, readers began to discover that the Holy Word differed considerably from what they’d been taught by the Catholic Church.

Until then, Bibles had been fairly rare. They were printed in Latin or Greek, and copied down by hand with elaborate engravings. The Catholic Church and its important functionaries and bureaucrats possessed Bibles. Priests performed Mass with their back to the congregation. The ceremony was a highly Romanized one, as the West had come to conceive of Rome within its most corrupt and centralizing phase, and highly controlled.

But printing Bibles in moveable type changed the power relationship entirely. Now, anyone could own a Bible and they were easily reproduced and increasingly inexpensive. Almost immediately, then Bibles began to be translated into “vulgate” and eventually the King James Version (English) would become a dominant variant. But in the meantime, the damage was done. First came the Renaissance and then the Reformation and finally the Age of Enlightenment, three powerful rolling waves of free-thinking that transformed the face of human society, first in the West and then around the world.

The changes ushered in by the Gutenberg press were fundamental. The Renaissance began the reconfiguration by allowing for the rediscovery of the scientific orientation of Greece and Rome. This set in motion a series of events that has not yet ceased to reverberate.

Across North America and elsewhere, independent scientists are increasingly worried that freedom of thought and discourse among fellow professionals is under grave threat. One such scientist who has long endured attack on his academic freedom is Dr. David Rasnick. Rasnick is a chemist and biologist noted for research questioning the orthodoxy about HIV/AIDS. For raising doubt on common misconceptions he is vilified by the mainstream. In this article we examine Rasnick’s concerns and offer readers some insight into how propaganda about HIV/AIDS and man-made global warming sprout from the same Establishment root: the Academic-Governmental-Industrial Complex (AGIC).

The AGIC is a multi-national business enterprise that has kept science in its enthrall due to the mega bucks on offer to researchers. Dissenters are denounced and starved of funding in this monolithic culture. Without numerous competing sources of funding, the centralized gatekeeping mechanisms of government grants have led to a scientific community too readily possessed by Group Think.

Group Think is the collective corruption of the decision-making processes. Group thinkers have an illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship, mind-guards, and belief in the inherent morality of the group.

As psychologists have shown:

“They typically have defective decision-making, involve the incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing. Not surprisingly, these combined forces are predicted to result in extremely defective decision making performance by the group.” [1]

David Rasnick has the courage to stand up for his personal scientific convictions. According to PubMed, Rasnick has contributed to 18 scientific papers on protease-related research, and written a book about the aneuploidy theory of cancer. Rasnick’s complete CV and publication list is posted on his website. He dares to advance new ideas that question common AGIC scientific assumptions even if they may threaten entrenched interests (and investments). AGIC investments are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars to those who serve the system. Even those who passively kowtow to it are, in effect, sustaining the Establishment view.

Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5^th WGI Report claims that sea level will rise by an amount between 0.26 to 0.97 metres by 2100 according to which of their new scenarios actually happens.

Relative Sea Level, the distance between the level of the sea and the level of neighbouring land, is what matters to most of us. The Level of the open ocean is only of minor importance. This Report tries to mix the two up in a single chart.

Relative Sea Level is measured by tide gauges which measure the distance between the level of the sea registered on specialist equipment and a supposedly constant benchmark location on the neighbouring land. This is carried out in over 1,000 coastal locations all over the world. The records are averages, over a day, week, month or years.

Both the level of the sea and of the neighbouring land constantly vary from place to place.and from  time to time. The sea changes level constantly, diurnally and seasonally. It is influenced by winds, storms and hurricanes and also by earthquakes. The level of the sea may be influenced by breakwaters and harbour works. The equipment may be damaged or its location altered by storms. Severe storms may prevent correct measurement and give a false reading which interferes with claims for “change.”

Land surfaces may change. The land may subside by weight of buildings, and removal of minerals and groundwater. The Report illustrates the problem of measurement near land covered in ice. Geological change (Isostasy) may result from plate movements and earthquakes. Many of these effects cause an upwards bias to the readings.

Long term trends may as much show these changes as any other influence. As a result  they are not a reliable guide to the future, which should be based on a recent period of reliable measurements.

The recent installation of GPS levelling equipment on many sites has greatly improved the reliability of the land-based benchmark. It has resulted in a nearly constant sea level change for many records. It is therefore wrong to place reliance on older readings in order to assess future behaviour. It should be based on the most recent measurements which are the least likely to be affected by previous bias.

The records are publicly available at the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level  (PSMSL) website at   athttp://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/map.html which features a very convenient map of the world from which all the records can be obtained.

Many records are defective in one way or another. Many have gaps or sudden changes. Few have a long-term continuous record.  Frequently there is little sign of change during the recent decade – evidence. that currently there is little or no change in sea level. The following figure from Chapter 13, FAQ 13.1 Figure 1. illustrates this error.

It shows six tide gauge records compared with the supposed global average.

The actual current records, which are shown (rather small), disagree with this supposed trend:

San Francisco is unchanged since 1990.

Charlottetown is unchanged from 1995 to 2010.

Antofagasta  is unchanged from 1980 to 2012

Pago Pago is unchanged since 2000.

Stockholm is actually falling.

Manila is a rogue record.

Dear Professor Steffen,

We read your comments in the Canberra Times on Saturday 26th October. As you have not responded to our earlier letter we now add our further concerns.

Is it misleading the Australian public when you say that the science on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warmining/(CAGW) alias climate change/ extreme weather events etc. has been settled for decades?

You completely omit to mention the NIPCC Report which shows robust evidence for the null hypothesis.

You omit the historical events detailed in the climate gate emails which clearly indicate that the science was not settled as far back as 2009. Is it a coincidence that the bipartisan support for CAGW started to decline as from 2009?

You omit to mention the recorded signatures of more than 30,000 scientists (www.petitionproject.org) who have maintained over a considerable period of time that there is no convincing evidence for CAGW.

You omit to mention that many of these scientists are considering legal action against Al Gore for fraud (Preview on YouTube).

The Australian people trust you to provide them with reliable, evidence-based information. That means no exaggeration of effects, no misleading allegations and no omission of evidence that does not support your hypothesis.

University of Florida Threatens to Arrest anti-GMO Presenters and Bans Them from Campus

Gainesville, FL (US) – The University of Florida, a leading institution researching genetically engineered (GE) trees [1], threatened to arrest activists from the Campaign to STOP GE Trees when they arrived on campus Saturday to prepare for a presentation to highlight critical perspectives on tree biotechnology that was scheduled for tonight. The police informed the group that their presentation had been cancelled, and warned them that they were banned from University of Florida (UF) property for three years.

“Evicting us from campus was a blatant act of censorship by the University of Florida, likely linked to the millions they are receiving for GE trees research,” said Keith Brunner, from the international Campaign to STOP Genetically Engineered Trees [2].

In 2011, the University of Florida School of Forest Resources and Conservation along with GE tree company ArborGen won a three-year, $6.3 million grant from the US Department of Energy to develop GE loblolly pines for liquid biofuel production [3]. There is rising opposition to GE trees due to concerns over genetic contamination, increased flammability, deforestation and other ecological impacts of industrial tree plantations.

The UF presentation was part of a multi-week speaking tour titled “The Growing Threat: Genetically Engineered Trees and the Future of Forests” [4]. The tour will travel through several southern states (NC, GA, FL, SC) to educate the public about the social and environmental threats posed by the proposed commercial release of billions of genetically engineered freeze tolerant eucalyptus trees in seven southern states from South Carolina to Florida to Texas.

University of Florida Professor Bron Taylor teaches a course on Environmental Ethics and had encouraged students to attend the presentation. He expressed disappointment about the cancellation and stated, “The University is supposed to be a place characterized by free and robust debate. This situation begs the question, why was the presentation cancelled and these activists banned from campus under a threat of arrest?”

Genes and environment play dynamic role together

The well-established view that intelligence is largely genetically fixed and hardly malleable has been discarded. A team of Dutch research methodologists at VU University Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University propose that the high heritability of intelligence stems from a dynamic interplay between genes and environment that takes place throughout the course of development. The interplay results in individual differences in knowledge and skills, and in this way differences in intelligence arise. The role of education, culture, and society is crucial in this process; they enable genetic effects to arise. The larger the environmental influences, the larger the genetic effects. Their paper will be published in the upcoming edition of Psychological Science. Empirical results contradict mainstream intelligence theories Research methodologists Kees-Jan Kan, Jelte Wicherts, Conor Dolan en Han van der Maas investigated how well intelligence theories actually predict empirical results. To this end, they listed the predictions from mainstream intelligence theories and collected relevant results that have been published in the scientific literature over the last decades, and which pertained to intelligence test scores from thousands of subjects across the world.The team showed that on essential aspects empirical results were opposite of the predictions from mainstream theories of intelligence. Surprisingly, it also turned out that the larger the genetic influences on completing intelligence tests are, the larger is also the dependency on education and culture. Heritability estimates of clearly culture-depended knowledge and skills, such as vocabulary, spelling, and general knowledge, are the highest among all abilities that are measured by intelligence test batteries, hence higher than heritability estimates of less culture-depended abilities such as working memory, spatial ability, reasoning, and processing speed. This pattern did not follow from mainstream theories of intelligence, in which intelligence is interpreted as a biological trait.The old idea: nature versus nurture

Toxic Lakes and Radioactive Waste

The wind industry promotes itself as better for the environment than traditional energy sources such as coal and natural gas. For example, the industry claims that wind energy reduces carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

But there are many ways to skin a cat. As IER pointed out last week, even if wind curbs CO2 emissions, wind installations injure, maim, and kill hundreds of thousands of birds each year in clear violation of federal law. Any marginal reduction in emissions comes at the expense of protected bird species, including bald and golden eagles. The truth is, all energy sources impact the natural environment in some way, and life is full of necessary trade-offs. The further truth is that affordable, abundant energy has made life for billions of people much better than it ever was.

Another environmental trade-off concerns the materials necessary to construct wind turbines. Modern wind turbines depend on rare earth minerals mined primarily from China. Unfortunately, given federal regulations in the U.S. that restrict rare earth mineral development and China’s poor record of environmental stewardship, the process of extracting these minerals imposes wretched environmental and public health impacts on local communities. It’s a story Big Wind doesn’t want you to hear.