Leading Environmental Scientist

Jason Katz Cooper in American Thinker surveys a variety of scientific and popular publications, and finds alarums everywhere: excessively early swallow arrivals, too few cold-water plankton, too many warm-water plankton, diminishing sand eels and disgruntled sea birds. No wonder Al Gore declared that “global warming is more serious than terrorism.” The British journal Nature recently even warned that carbon dioxide is now predicted to be causing global freezing along with global warming. (Too bad Nature is a subscriber-only site, that one ought to have been good for a laugh.)

Cooper concludes:

As an American I am embarrassed that my country sent 100,000 troops overseas to defend freedom in Iraq while ignoring the dangers of greenhouse gasses as they kill cold-water plankton, injure reindeer noses, and spread frogs across the great Russian tundra. The temperature right now in Fairfax, Va (from where I write) is 41°F. If we had concentrated our focus instead of Iraq on the CO2 terror it would be 40°F.

The Edge asks the Annual Question for 2006:

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Answers so far.

An English Baronet, lacking an heir, is resorting to DNA testing of Americans of the same name to locate a suitable male relative to take up the burden of maintaining the estate. This interesting exercise in genealogy will by covered by the Discovery Channel in a program currently, misleadingly, titled I’m Really a Royal.

The ad would read: Free to one lucky American named Slade, a 16-room English mansion surrounded by 1,300 acres of prime land in southwestern England. But be prepared to work for it.

Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade, 59, has no heir, but is desperate to pass his ancestral home, Maunsel Home — now a busy entertainment venue — to someone in the family.

So he has given a DNA sample to a team of genealogists, who will search for the closest match among Americans called Slade; some 5,000 are estimated to live in North Carolina alone.

“Running Maunsel House is a young person’s thing and I’m tired of it,” Slade told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I spoke to my 14th cousin in England, but he has a nice house of his own and he doesn’t want to move.”

The lucky man — Slade insists his heir must be male — will inherit the stately home near Taunton in southwest England, which dates in part from the 13th century and boasts a library, a dining room for 80 guests and a staff of five.

Maunsell House

Slade Surname Genealogy Project

Slade Surname Genealogy Project Current Results

—————————————

Sir Benjamin appears on television to discuss the search.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet)– An international research team reported on Monday that it has mapped part of the genome of the woolly mammoth, a huge relative of today’s elephant extinct for about 10,000 years.

Using a combination of novel techniques, the researchers have sequenced a chunk of ancient DNA belonging to remains of a woolly mammoth and “fellow travelers,” including a sample of the bacteria, fungi, viruses and plants that lived at the same time as the mammoth.

The remains of the mammoth, which lived in Siberia about 28,000 years ago, were well preserved in the permafrost, the researchers from Canada and the United States said in the Dec. 22 online edition of the journal Science.

IT’S official: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested emotion-recognition software on the famous enigmatic smile. His algorithm, developed with researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, examines key facial features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions. Sebe drew on a database of young female faces to derive an average “neutral” expression, which the software used as a standard to compare the painting against.

Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, tried to explain the apparent conflict in the emotions they found in the Mona Lisa’s face.

“She could have been chuffed he wanted to paint her and … a wee bit disgusted by the old man doing the painting. He might have been in the nude or have come on to her for all we know,” she said. “Or maybe she was annoyed because she had been sitting there for ages and he’s still not finished.”

Dr Tony offers the media a previously unreported story of millions slaughtered, and the complete destruction of a minority community, in an attack by government-approved agents.

Definition and video.

WorldNetDaily reports that developments in deep-drilling for natural gas present serious challenges to those who still maintain “Fossil-Fuel” theories as to the origin of complex hydrocarbon fuels. The Oklahoma GHK Company has found Natural Gas in two wells drilled to depths greater than 30,000 feet (approximately 5.7 miles), too deep for the remains of dinosaurs to be found. A Japanese Company, Teikoku Oil, produces equipment specifically for use in Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields which are producing natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in origin.

(Some) might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface… those levels (may) contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels? Deep-earth natural gas strongly supports the theory that the origin of oil (also) is abiotic, not organic in nature.

The growing evidence of the possibility of an abiotic, geological origin of so-called “fossil fuels” would be a very serious blow to leftist critics of modern industrial civilization. Predictions of the impending exhaustion of allegedly limited supplies of precious natural resources are a staple of leftist critiques of Capitalism and the American way of life.

——

Mr. David Nix, a classmate of mine at college, has thoughtfully passed along this link to an article on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists web site.

—–
California blogger Gahrie supplies some links to materials on the abiogenic theory.

US Patent No. 6,960,975 B1
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Boris Volfson, 5707 W. Maple Grove Rd., Apt. 3046, Huntington, Ind. 46750 (US)
Filed on Mar. 14, 2005.

Full text.

It certainly looks like a joke, but the patent can be found by the search engine on the US Patent Office site.

Science Daily is not pleased.

Nature comments.

photo by Capt. Dariusz Zajdel / Central Forensic Laboratory of the Polish Police.

Polish archaeologists think the skulls and bones they excavated last year in a Polish church are very probably the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy.

A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans according to a new study. Its teeth were discovered in a Hong Kong pharmacy 80 years ago, on sale as “dragon bones” used in Chinese medicine. New dating methods have pin-pointed the actual age of the fossils to the Pleistocene.