perfidy

I couldn't help but notice that the EPA's pages on Global Warming haven't been updated since 2000. In fact, it's downright difficult to find a policy page or information page anywhere that gives the Bush adminstration's position on these issues. If you read the US government's pages, you'd come to the conclusion that little has changed in the last five years or so.

This is more "we just don't know" bullshit. I am struck by how similar this all is to debates over smoking. For today's youth it's hard to believe (and even silly) that twenty years ago the health effects of smoking were very much a matter of debate. Back then it didn't seem like smoking was good for you, but the hard-and-fast science on just how and why just never really seemed to emerge. We know now that a highly successful campaign by tobacco companies to distort the science coupled with tobacco-driven politics conspired to deprive the public of key information they should have been told, giving the industry a few more years of profitability at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

That's just par-for-the-course for corporations in general. A vanishingly small number of companies will try to do the right thing, when the profitable thing is so appealing. We need regulation to protect ourselves against harmful actions conducted in self-interest by private and corporate entities; their cost and decision equations simply do not take into account the greater good. Unless forced to, they never will.

Six years have gone by and the EPA's position on climate change is identical -- we just don't know. What's written on those pages is very much the state of the art in GOP positioning on this issue. Proclaim as loudly as possible that there are too many unknowns to make a decision, and further study is necessary.

The climate science community has shifted from arguments about whether global warming is taking place to the clear and present danger of the tipping point, something long postulated in the literature. What they're trying to figure out is, is warming occurring so rapidly that we are approaching a point beyond which we will be unable to repair the damage, should we decide to do so?

This Administration's position on climate change is to do nothing and say nothing. Based on recent news reports it appears that the administration has engaged in an active policy of suppression to inhibit the release of any scientific data or conclusions that might support serious action vis-a-vis global warming. Only by suppressing official domestic science has this administration been able to delay the engagement of the public on this issue.

Ask yourself -- are you comfortable with the idea of Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Randy Cunningham, Ralph Reed (and their pay-to-play, bought and pair for ilk) setting US policy on the environment? Because they already have. Responsible, honest leadership is needed -- leadership that doesn't simply "stay the course" no matter what inconvenient facts present themselves.

I've described the election of Bush in 2004 as a disaster -- a turning point from which devastating consequences in the future will result. In five short years he has created a financial disaster in the federal government it seems almost impossible to repair. Taxation policies have inarguably yielded great benefit for the wealthiest, but none of the promised effects have materialized -- indeed, average wages are down relative to inflation. Bush has destroyed the credibility of the US in the international community with his "tough guy" policies and utter lack of candor. You can argue that you believe he's done what needed to be done, but the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. He has squandered the reputation of the US military, pointlessly exposing to the rest of the world precisely what the US military can and cannot do, and how long it can sustain itself. He has engendered a culture of corruption in Washington that sets new records for dysfunction.

I can't help but think that the center and left in this country are fighting so many low-level battles that we're simply losing sight of what's really important. Global warming and climate change is important. We need to study the hell out of it and figure out the best path forward. Separation of powers is important. "It's not constitutional" is the only thing standing between freedom this country's citizens enjoy and a history replete with examples of dictatorial and executive control.

The task at hand: Discover some absolutes. Find a list of ten issues and develop simple decision points for them. Hell, find three issues just to get started.

Mark over at Kaedrin Weblog has a had a run of good. His last few posts concern probabalistic systems and emergent order, as represented by Amazon, Google, and Ben Franklin. Go check it out.

Christian Fundies remain entirely confident in their assertions that the world has only been around a few thousand years, that it was "intelligently designed" recently, and that the end of the whole darn thing is just around the next corner anyway. One of the unemployed corners of my mind started looking for an explanation that could just bring us all together, let us all get along.

God seems to have gone to an awful lot of trouble to convince us that the world is billions of years old. There's all that "evidence" around, like rocks that are zillions of years old, sharks, monkeys that play checkers (but can't read bibles), and space junk like stars and whatever. But what if there are two universes? The first one has been around forever, like science and mathematics and logic tell us. The second one, this one, is a photocopy Of the first one, made just a couple of thousand years ago. Presto! No confusing lack of unity. It's not intelligent design. It's intelligent photocopying.

Just praise God that He wasn't a little drunk on that day, wearing stretchy pants, and in the mood for a little juvenile hijinks. Oh wait. Maybe that does explain the moon. Huh.

Today's Stars and Stripes includes coverage of hangover treatments sworn to by soldiers, men, women, and Germans.

Note that the first coupla people the article speaks to (and the only ones pictured if you're reading the electronic edition) are from intelligence units. Also note that they were found at a local bar. This ought not surprise anyone. Not at all. Ah, memories.

For my part, I don't get hangovers. Even when I drank to excess on a regular basis, I was never hung over. I woke up bone tired, achey, and feeling half starved, sure, but that was more likely due to the astonishing volumes of vomit, and concomitant effort to hurl same, than purely the spirits themselves. Never a headache. Unless I'd been cracked in the head.

Tell you what though, that one young stud swearing by a raw egg in a Bloody Mary or some such- geh. Imaginative, but much too gross in the application. What I have seen is medics drink all night, then instead of just crashing for an hour or two before PT, would give themselves IVs of vitamin C and sugar solutions. They were right as rain, in a clear example of nutrition science trumping alchemy.

Does anyone else dabble in the alchemical pursuit of hangover remedy?

Rand links to an excellent speech by Michael Crichton on the subject of complexity and the environment. I really insist that you go read it.

I bought Crichton's most recent book, State of Fear, a little while back but it has been languishing unloved on my bookshelf. After reading this, I will plow through his wooden prose to get at the meaty goodness inside.

Two entomologists have named three recently discovered slime mold beetles of the genus Agathidium after our President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense. Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller were responsible for naming 65 species of slime mold beetles, and aside from A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi, they named other bugs after wives, a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, Darth Vader ("who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head"), their scientific illustrator Frances Fawcett, the Greek words for "ugly" and "having prominent teeth" and the Latin word for "strange," and for various distinguishing features they discovered on the beetles. Also achieving immortality in scientific nomenclature were various geographic locations, such as California, Georgia and a few states in Mexico.

Lest you think that the decision to name slime mold beetles after administration figures is some sort of lame political hit job,

The decision to name three slime-mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, didn't have anything to do with physical features, says Quentin Wheeler, a professor of entomology and of plant biology at Cornell for 24 years until last October, but to pay homage to the U.S. leaders. "We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," says Wheeler, who named the beetles and wrote the recently published monograph describing the new slime-mold beetle species while a professor at Cornell.

President Bush was pleased with his new namesakes, and called Wheeler in London to thank him.

If you want to acquire your very own Agathidium, for a pet or for ritual sacrifice, Wheeler says, "bushi so far is known from southern Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia; Agathidium rumsfeldi is known from Oaxaca and Hidalgo in Mexico; and Agathidium cheneyi is known from Chiapas, Mexico.

For a super-size version of the above image, suitable for (among other things) desktop wallparper, framing or target practice depending on your proclivities, click here.

From a while back, Kathy linked to this interesting research from MIT. Apparently, the tin foil helmets believed by paranoics everywhere to block the signals from the government's mind control satellites actually attract the signals, not repel them. The MIT researchers discovered that,

[after testing] several hat designs, there was "a 30 db amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium."

..."the helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for 'radio location' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites."

The researchers speculate that the government is behind the rumour that tinfoil hats protect people from invasive radio signals in order to encourage their use and therefore to enhance the effectiveness of their radio control program.

The author of the Register piece pointed out, though,

We're no experts, but the researchers did admit to using Reynolds brand aluminum foil, rather than the classic tin foil, and we wonder if this could have skewed the results. We wonder also if a tinfoil propeller beanie might scatter the signals more effectively than a plain hat, and offer this humble suggestion for the benefit of the paranoiac community until further testing is complete.

Looks like I will have to do some research into a more effective lining for my baseball cap. And my coworkers always wonder why I am never seen without my hat...

The Table of Condiments that Periodically Go Bad.

From the "So weird, it has to be true" files comes this report that Uncle Joe Stalin attempted to breed half-man, half-ape super warriors.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

Along with the red terror, and just around the corner the engineered famine in the Ukraine and the purges.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

When all of his experiments failed utterly, Ivanov was sentenced to five years in prison, though he was merely exiled to Kazakhstan. He was lucky it wasn't the gulags or a bullet, but in any event he died not long after, falling ill from standing on a freezing rail platform.

Bizarre experiments and programs were a near constant in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was renowned, often unjustly, for pushing back the frontiers of science. We remember Soviet successes in the space race, and their ability to construct a large and well-equipped war machine. But the failures were much more the rule than the exception. Aside from the tragic failures of forced collectivization and the industrial programs, Soviet science was a morass of bad ideas and programs inspired by ideology rather than rational inquiry. Lysenkoism was only the most obvious wrong turn. Further, most Soviet successes were the results of individual genius rather than a system that produced results. The T-34, the AK-47, and most of the Soviet Space program were the achievements of individual geniuses working despite the system. The Soviet Space program largely collapsed after Korolev, the chief designer, died as a result of the inefficiencies of the Soviet medical system.

Still, reading that article made me think: if the program had succeeded, what would the effect have been on Nazi attitudes toward race? Confronted with super soldiers invulnerable to pain and privation, and derived from, literally, sub-human stock, would they have initiated their own program?

The Dog Genome Project is powering ahead, hoping to divine the secrets contained within doggie DNA. This is actually pretty interesting - dogs are unique critters in so many ways, because of their thousands of years of alliance with us, and because of the effects of selective breeding over most of that period. No animal has the range of variation that dogs do - from chihuahuas to St. Bernards, from short haired dobs to long-haired afghans. And not just physical variation - the difference in temperaments found in German Shepherds, Terriers and Retrievers is striking to say the least.

Researchers have catalogued the genome of Tasha, a boxer, and are publishing the results in Nature. Earlier victims include Genome Project scientist Craig Venter's pet shadow, as well as eight other breeds and samples from a gray wolf and a coyote.

As a result [of the large differences between breeds], some breeds are predisposed to conditions such as heart disease, cancer, or blindness, and identifying genes responsible for diseases or traits should be much easier to do in dogs than man.

The sequence of 2.4 billion DNA "letters" records the genetic recipe, or genome, of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), which consists of 19,300 genes - roughly the same number as that found in people. The team also sampled the genetic recipes of 10 dog breeds, the grey wolf and the coyote, pinpointing 2.5 million differences in a single "letter" of genetic code, which serve as signposts to physical and behavioural traits, as well as diseases.

...By tracking evolution's genetic footprints through the dog, human and mouse genomes, the scientists found that humans share more ancestral DNA with dogs than with mice, confirming that dog genes can be used to understand human disease. They also found that selective breeding has shuffled large blocks of DNA code among dog breeds, which should make it easier to find the genes responsible for body size, behaviour and disease.

Soon, we should be able to purchase glow in the dark accessory poodles for nitwitted bimbo celebrities. But more important, with the knowledge gained we may be able to design superior fighting dogs to help us in the coming war with the giant fighting robots. We can count on the allegiance of the canines - they've stuck with us this long. The cats, though - I'm not so sure about them. They'll probably be the first to welcome our new robot overlords, so long as they can eat the scraps after the robots destroy us.

Geneticists have completed a map of the common variations in the human genome. Sadly, this will not immediately lead to technology that would make our brains, muscles or, uh, units bigger. However, it is a major step forward in our understanding of what actually makes us tick. The HapMap, as it is called, is a sort of a complement for Craig Venter's human genome project. Where the human genome project detailed the genetics that all humans have in common, the HapMap details the genes that make us different.

As scientists dig into the details, it is expected that we may begin to get a handle on how genes can contribute to disease. In the past, single genes have been linked to rare disorders, but the technology did not exist to look at patterns in large numbers of genes. Analysis of the data in HapMap may lead to stunning advances in medical treatments.

The idea behind the map is rather clever, as we would expect of highly paid genetic scientists. There are over three billion letters in the human genetic code. That's a lot, and presents a problem for researchers trying to track down subtle interrelationships between genes. However,

Each person differs from someone else by, on average, 3 million of these units, but every time two people are compared, it is a different set of 3 million. To find all those differences, scientists had feared they would need to determine the full genome, all 3 billion units, of every volunteer in a study, which would be too expensive using current technology.

But then researchers began to notice consistent patterns in the DNA of different individuals that suggested a shortcut, said Mark Daly, a scientist at Mass. General and the Broad who was one of the first to discover the patterns. They found that DNA can be thought of as a series of sections, called ''haplotype blocks." Each block comes in only a handful of variations, and each person has just one of the variations. (Each of these variations is known as a haplotype, which is why the map is known as the HapMap.)

To determine which block a person has, researchers have only to look at one spot where the block varieties are different, giving them a ''tag" that identifies the block.

So instead of laboriously trawling through billions of units, only a relative few need to be checked. Maybe we'll beat the robots yet...

And maybe, we can all get tiger-shaped eyes. 'Cause that would be so cool!

Tropical Storm Beta has formed in the Caribbean. Sounds like they're still in testing. Anyone want to lay odds on Hurricane Epsilon ravaging the East Coast? I bet Rocket Jones and most of the munuvians are desperately praying for at least Tropical Storm Mu. If they could have Mu and Nu, well, they'd probably all just die.

For those of you who are insufficiently classically trained and cannot, as I can, recite the greek alphabet; here for your convenience is the list of the next score or so hurricanes that will form in the next five weeks:

Via the 'Dredge Report, we find a story that tracks down the truth, corners it, and has it cowering in fear before skewering it with something pointy. We've run out of names on the hurricane list. The next named storm will have the awe-inspiring moniker "Alpha," and given that we have more than a month left in the season, we might be confronted by the terrifying spectre of hurricane Delta rampaging through the Gulf of Mexico like a sorority chick on spring break going through sissy drinks. (Maybe hurricane Phi Mu (a fat but slow category three) would be lingering off to the side, not really hitting anything but seeming vaguely embarrassed to be there, yet determined to stick it out and make sure that Delta gets home without too much vomit or roof fragments in her hair.)

The DCeiver has some thoughts for how the National Weather Service could improve matters by changing its system of nomenclature:

We want to fear these storms. We really do. But I'll be damned if I run from Hurricane Florence. I already have had the experience of being in a mandatory evacuation over a Hurricane named Bob. I didn't want to evacuate. I felt like a grade-A pussy running from someone named Bob. I still feel that way.

... If the National Weather Service wants to get serious about protecting people, they have got to rethink this name thing. They need to start giving these storms some names that absolutely leave NO doubt that they are going to seriously FUCK US UP. Names like Hurricane Deathbroth or the Kneecapper or Margaret Thatcher. Something that's going to inspire the average person to fear for their lives.

Look at the names they're getting into next year. Hurricane Beryl? Hurricane Ernesto? I can see a little germ of fear growing in the face of a hurricane named Oscar, maybe. I knew a thorough-going bitch named Joyce once. But most of these names are just no good! Nadine is the cute barista at the coffeeshop across the street. Tony is the lead in West Side Story. Isaac is the Love Boat bartender. No, no, no. These are mixed messages!

What we need is a hurricane named, let's say, The Penetrator. You tell me that The Penetrator is coming ashore in 24 hours and I am gone like Keyser Soze. Use the names of famous human predators, like Adolph or Idi Amin or Attilla or Affleck, and people will break out in a mad dash for higher ground. Think about it--when the media reports on the "aftermath of Leslie", how worked up do you expect the Federal responders to get? But if you have reporters beaming out picture live from the devastation wrought by The Defecator--then we'll see some motherfuckers rolling out to save some people on roofs!

Amen.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "peak oil" – the idea that we have passed the mid-point in our insatiable quest to rape the Earth of her oil. Having extracted the easy half of the world's oil reserves, getting at the rest will be ever more difficult and expensive. The price of oil will inexorably rise, leading to the collapse of western civilization and forcing the starving and emaciated survivors to survive on a diet of boiled SUV seat leather. Or something.

The above scenario, endorsed with virtual unanimity by all of the professional petroleum geologists employed by the large oil companies, is based on the uncontroversial theory that oil is biogenic; that is, that oil and coal and natural gas are created by a process of heating and cooking of biological material (dead dinosaurs and focuses from previous geological epochs) in the upper layers of the Earth's crust. Given that there is only so much dead T. Rex to go around, there is an inherent and relatively small amount of these fossil fuels to be had.

However, there is another theory. There are some (largely Ukrainians and British astrophysicists) who believe that petroleum is the result of abiogenic processes. Which is to say that oil does not come from T. Rex and the clever velociraptors, but rather from non-biological processes acting on hydrocarbons that were present in the Earth (in stupendous quantities) from the time of the Earth's formation.

The oil company petrochemical experts say bunk to this, and point to the fact that there are biological materials found in oil and coal. That is, in fact, why we call them "fossil fuels." How do you explain that, Mr. Smarty-pants?

Well one of the Smarty-pants on the abiogenic side of the debate is the now deceased Thomas Gold. Gold, originally from Austria, spent most of his lengthy scientific career in Britain, where he worked with Fred Hoyle as one of the proponents of the Steady State theory of cosmology. Now thought to be wrong, no one ever believed that it was stupid – and the contest between the two theories greatly enhanced our understanding of the cosmos. But Gold was right about an uncanny number of things. When the first pulsars were detected, Gold was the first to realize that they must be rapidly rotating neutron stars. Neutron stars had first been theorized in the thirties, but no one had ever detected one. Gold was laughed at, and then proved right.

Gold oversaw the construction of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo. When radio sources were first seen through Arecibo, astronomers thought at first that they were merely unusual stars. From the 1950's, Gold insisted that they were galaxies. Again after a long dispute, he was proven right. Starting in the seventies, Gold began looking at the problem of petroleum. He published a controversial paper in 1993 on the The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth. His efforts culminated in the 1999 publication of the book, The Deep Hot Biosphere.

Gold maintains that there is another biosphere, one of bacteria living deep in the earth and feeding on heat and oil found in the depths. The total mass of biological material under the earth would be many, many times greater than of all the life on the surface or the oceans. And as the oil, natural gas and other petroleum seeps up from below through fissures along the fault lines of the Earth's crust, it is fed upon by these bacteria – which are where some of the biological markers found in oil come from. As it gets closer to the surface, it collects in reservoirs. Sedimentary rock form particularly good ones, because of the porous structure of the rock. And that is where the fossils come from. But oil has not only been found in sedimentary rock. And human skulls have been found in coal deposits in Pennsylvania. Gold's theory has coal formation a result of petroleum saturating fossil biological material and "freezing." The age of the substrate is irrelevant – the oil comes from below.

There are several key arguments for the abiogenic theory for the origin of petroleum:

The basics:

• The constituent precursors of petroleum (mainly methane) are commonplace in the solar system and it is likely that they were part of the Earth's makeup from the start, and that appropriate conditions (heat and pressure) exist for hydrocarbons to be formed deep within the Earth. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites have been found to contain kerogen-like carbon and hydrocarbons, similar to the precursors for the oil we drill. Heated under pressure, this material would release hydrocarbon fluids in addition to creating solid carbon deposits. Further, at least ten bodies in our solar system are known to contain at least traces of hydrocarbons. Kerogen-like material has been detected in interstellar clouds and in dust particles around stars.

  Dr. Gold, from this excellent article:

  Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?

• Also, it is now accepted that the formation of the Earth was a "cold" process – a process of accretion that didn't heat up until radioactive materials began to sink to the center under the heat and pressure from the cold surface. This process would not have resulted in outgassing of hydrocarbons and methane from the surface as it would have if the surface had been all molten rock. (That surface likely would have done away with all the water, too.)
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits spontaneous generation of hydrocarbons heavier than methane at low pressures. Thermodynamic calculations and experimental studies confirm that n-alkanes (common petroleum components) do not spontaneously evolve from methane at pressures typically found in sedimentary basins. There simply isn't enough crushing and squeezing energy at these relatively low depths. The materials we find in petroleum would require far greater pressures – those found below 200 km.
• Hydrocarbon deposits have been found in places that are said to be poorly explained by biogenic theory. In the White Tiger field in Vietnam and many wells in Russia, oil and natural gas are being produced from reservoirs in granite basement rock, below all sedimentary rock. In the Vietnamese case, this rock is believed to have no oil-producing sediments under it, so the biogenic theory requires the oil to have migrated laterally dozens of kilometers along faults from source rock. Experiments in Sweden, deep drilling over five kilometers into shield rock has also revealed oil, and microbes. These microbes live on the hydrocarbons.
• Petroleum deposits are often found close to deep structures in the earth – subduction zones, plate boundaries, and the like. They also are found over meteorite impact structures. In short, the places where faults can reach to the Earth's mantle, and release the primordial crude. Oil is often found in sedimentary basins because sedimentary basins fill and cover – cap – depressions over the deep structures. Sedimentary rocks make good reservoirs that allow hydrocarbons to pool, but prevent them from migrating further upward. (Petroleum also occurs in crystalline basement strata, but most petroleum companies prefer to drill sedimentary basins, either because they are looking for large reservoirs or because they hold with the idea that petroleum would only be formed there from organic debris.)
• Some oil fields are being refilled from deep sources, although this does not rule out a deep biogenic source rock. One instance is Eugene Island in the Gulf of Mexico which "began producing about 15,000 barrels of oil per day in the early 1970s. By 1989, the flow had dwindled to 4,000 barrels per day. Then, suddenly, production zoomed to 13,000 barrels. In addition, estimated reserves rocketed from 60 to 400 million barrels." The age of the oil recovered now is reportedly greatly different from that of only ten years ago.
  

  "The Middle East has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma." Off the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says."

  Gold said, in a Wired interview,

  It becomes accessible by recharging, and the recharging process I think I completely understand. There's a stepwise approximation of the pore pressure to the rock pressure - that will always be the case if the stuff is coming up from below. You will not just fill up one reservoir at the top in the shallow levels. It will always be underlaid by another reservoir, and that in turn by another, and so on for a long way down.

Circumstantial evidence:

• Tiny diamondoids occur in oils and condensates. They have similar structure to regular diamonds, and would probably have the same origin - earth's mantle.
• Helium gas has close association with petroleum. Although some He is primordial, much He gas is from radioactive decay of uranium. Helium gas is associated with light oils, sometimes accompanied by nitrogen that allow petroleum to reach shallow levels in crust. No conceivable biological process would result in helium, a noble gas which plays no part whatsoever in organic chemistry.
• Nickel (Ni),vanadium (V),lead (Pb),arsenic (As),cadmium (Cd),mercury (Hg) and others metals frequently occur in oils. Some heavy crude oils, such as Venezuelan heavy crude have up to 45% in vanadium pentoxide in their ash, high enough that it is a commercial souce for vanadium. These metals are common in earth´s mantle.
• Russian geologist Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev first enunciated the modern abiotic theory of petroleum. He studied the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada and concluded that no "source rocks" could possibly have formed the enormous volume of hydrocarbons. (Source rocks being sedimentary deposits with requisite quantities of dead dinosaurs.) Therefore, abiotic deep petroleum is the only plausible explanation.

J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corp. in Houston said there is no real debate about petroleum origination.

There has not been any 'debate' about the origin of hydrocarbons for over a century," he stated. "Competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological material since the last quarter of the 19th century.

Gold Said:

We have two conflicting pieces of evidence. Petroleum contains helium, which the plants cannot have concentrated," he said. "Petroleum also contains purely biological molecules, which petroleum-fed biology deep in the ground could concentrate.

This (upward migration from great depth) is the only explanation I've ever heard of to account for the amount of helium brought up with petroleum.

Gold believes that the amount of oil is hundreds of times greater than the estimates produced by the oil industry's scientists. The Russians are already acting on the theory, and now have many wells producing oil where no western petrochemical engineer would believe it should be. If abiogenic oil exists in the quantities imagined by Gold and the Ukrainians, much of our energy worries are grossly exaggerated. And given the scarcity-driven price of oil, criminally exaggerated.

The new Hurricane Forecast for October calls for continued high levels of activity. Tropical Storm Stan is expected to grow to Hurricane force before slamming into Mexico this week. And that is named storm #18. The record is 21, back in 1933, with 21. Just four more to set a new record, and also for the first time completely run through the list of names set aside every year. Personally, I think that seeing Hurricane Alpha would be sweet, so long as it doesn't hit where I live. I want to see it on the weather channel, not outside my house.

Of couse, this is all just another sign of Bush induced global eco-apocalypse. Unless of course, global warming is caused by, I don't know, the Sun.

While I've still got electricity and a connection to the internets, I figured I'd pass along this weather related news-like information from a friend in Ohio:

When you see this on the way to work you might as well turn around and go back home because it is not going to be a good day!

God may not play dice, but that doesn't imply an impaired sense of humor, or lack of access to Photoshop.

[wik] Message from the Ministry of Future Perfidy: The image above is lost to time. As a minor consolation, here is a random image of an ominous cloud:

Live science has a top ten possible US disasters list. Here it is, with some commentary.

10. Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake The fault line up there by Seattle is apparently a lot like the one that caused the Christmas Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

9. New York Hurricane Hurricanes very rarely get this far north. But when they do, it’s bad. 1938 was the last time one hit, and 600 people died. There’s a lot more people there, and given the unpredictability of hurricanes once they head north, warning times might be in hours.

8. Asteroid Impact Depending on where it hits, and how big the rock is, this could range from annoying to devastating. An asteroid like the one that created the meteor crater in Arizona could easily take out a city if it hit the wrong spot. Given the way that earth-crossing asteroids can sneak up on us out of the sun, like the red baron, there might be no warning whatsoever.

7. Los Angeles Tsunami Another goddamned tsunami. Imagine the big one, the earthquake we all know is coming, combined with the flooding of Katrina.

6. Yellowstone Supervolcano I don’t know why this is ranked six, seeing as if this one lights up, we are all done for. A super volcano once knocked humanity down to under a few thousand people. This one, at the very least, would gut the entire middle of the country.

5. Midwest Earthquake This one would also gut the middle of the country. If the New Madrid fault slips, all those non-earthquake resistant cities in the heartland will fall over. St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Vicksburg… All gone. Plus, flooding as the Mississippi evades centuries of Army Corps of Engineer constructed restraints.

4. Heat Waves We all felt a bit of schadenfreude when the French were unable to cope with a heat wave, and thousands died. It could happen here, but even if we avoided that, a serious, long term drought would cost a shitload of money.

3. East Coast Tsunami This list posits an asteroid impact as the root cause of an East Coast Tsunami. But there is another possibility, a little more down to earth. There is a volcano on the Canary Islands that, should it rip, could drop twenty cubic miles of dirt into the Atlantic. Given the westward facing alignment of this slab, it’s like a shotgun aimed at the East Coast of the United States. Regular Tsunamis are limited in the scope of their destruction because an earthquake is only going to move so much – thirty feet in the case of the Christmas Tsunami, and that becomes an upper bound on the size of the resultant waves. But when you drop large amounts of stuff in the water, there’s no limit. If all that rock dropped in at once, you could have 150 foot waves from Savannah to Boston. Of course, it might not all drop at once.

2. Gulf Coast Tsunami I didn’t know about this one, but apparently only the north coast of the United States is safe from tsunamis. This would probably do a lot more lethal damage on the islands, but it’s not like it’d be a picnic on the mainland.

1. Total Destruction of Earth This takes you back to a list of ways the whole shebang could go up in flames. Makes any run of the mill, regional disaster seem a little small.

There was no way I wasn't going to read an Economist article that started like this:

THEODORE STURGEON, an American science-fiction writer, once observed that “95% of everything is crap”. John Ioannidis, a Greek epidemiologist, would not go that far. His benchmark is 50%. But that figure, he thinks, is a fair estimate of the proportion of scientific papers that eventually turn out to be wrong.

Dr. Ionannidis' article, entitled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" turns out to be a really interesting read. It uses numerical and statistical methods in an attempt to prove that, in fact, 50% of everything scientific is crap.

I'm sure it's just me, pretending to think too deeply on a stormy day in Houston, but there's a circular irony to his assertion that got me chuckling.

Once past that, the reasons that his statistics seem reasonable are many and credible. As a ferinstance:

Dr Ioannidis began by looking at specific studies, in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July. He examined 49 research articles printed in widely read medical journals between 1990 and 2003. Each of these articles had been cited by other scientists in their own papers 1,000 times or more. However, 14 of them—almost a third—were later refuted by other work. Some of the refuted studies looked into whether hormone-replacement therapy was safe for women (it was, then it wasn't), whether vitamin E increased coronary health (it did, then it didn't), and whether stents are more effective than balloon angioplasty for coronary-artery disease (they are, but not nearly as much as was thought).

Not to worry, though - that's all part of the process, as we're reminded, not by Dr. Ioannidis, but by the Economist's science editor:

Science is a Darwinian process that proceeds as much by refutation as by publication. But until recently no one has tried to quantify the matter.

A fun fact to remember next time I hear of breathless new scientific hypotheses. Also important to remember? Even highly authoritative sources, as measured by number of citations elsewhere, are not guaranteed to be the truth might be crap.

While I'm making fun of the editorialists at the Boston Globe (see below), I might as well bang on the piece by Ross Gelbspan (a rental, not a staff member of the paper) earlier in the week, informing me, among other things, of Katrina's real name:

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

Now, I know - the two foot snowfall in Los Angeles has been thoroughly debunked, for the simple fact it didn't happen, and Gelbspan's article is full of inaccuracies, not least of which is that, you know, actual meteorologists think he's blowing bubbles here. There's nothing out of the ordinary about the cycles of hurricanes in recent years, and while that doesn't diminish the pain felt by the Gulf Coast victims of Katrina, it does invalidate hurricane season as the jumping off point for another slobber-fest about global warming. Perhaps more important, it gives me a reason to cite an interesting article in today's UK Telegraph on the matter.

I'm a global warming skeptic, relative both to the importance of the small changes alleged to have occurred over the past couple centuries and to the asserted causes. You see, I remember only too well the claims of last century that we were heading for a new Ice Age. And, heck, I've even seen stories about global warming being caused by the sun, for cripes' sake, and I don't want to hear that this, too, is within Bush's purview.

As to causes, and the blame for their existence, it's probably not helpful to Mr. Gelbspan's already weak case to find, all gathered up in one place, the purported cause for a significant fraction of all global warming:

Burning peat bogs set alight by rainforest clearance in Indonesia are releasing up to a seventh of the world's total fossil fuel emissions in a single year, the geographers' conference heard yesterday.

It would be a lot easier to take the alarmists on this and other matters more seriously if they did their homework. From the Taranto column linked above, Gelbspan gets tweaked pretty hard by a reader, excerpted here for anyone who doesn't care to go read the entire piece, even though you should:

(from reader Eric Free of Oceanside, Colo.)
You are way too cynical and know-nothing in your mockery of RFK2 et al. The flood in Genesis was caused by Global Warming. So was the Johnstown Flood. So was Curt Flood. So were the Ten Plagues and the splitting of the Red Sea.

The Chicago Fire of 1871 was caused by Global Warming. So was the Panic of 1873. So was the Panic of 1837. The bubonic plague too was caused by Global Warming (how could you forget this?). So was the fall of Constantinople (note the parallel with the war in Iraq). And the Red Chinese onslaught across the Yalu River in the Korean War was caused by Global Warming. So was the Normandy Invasion in World War II. So was the Norman Invasion of 1066. And the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and Haley's Comet. And for that matter the Hale-Bopp Comet.

The title weather in "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" was clearly caused by Global Warming. So was the pink snow in "The Cat in the Hat." So was Andersonville Prison during the Civil War. So was the entire Civil War. So was the Amityville Horror. So was the Dunwich Horror. So was the failure of the Colorado Rockies to make it to the World Series every single year that they've been a Major League franchise. So was the failure of any of the three "Matrix" movies starring Keanu Reeves to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

AND GEORGE W'S ELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY IN 2000 WAS CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING!!! (Why do you think he opposes an end to it, after all?)

Lack of homework + alarmism = not being taken at all seriously. But then, if folks like Gelbspan did their homework, while they might still hold the same opinions, in very few cases would they remain alarmists.

And that don't sell newspapers, now do it?

We are warned that Global Warming is real. We are warned that such warming presents a real and imminent danger. All sorts of things have been proposed - from the reasonable to the ridiculous to the draconian - to deal with the warming. And all of this is to prevent the onslaught of a temperature rise of about one degree over the next century or so.

However, what would happen if the global temperature went up by several degrees, and the what if the oxygen content went up by 50%? What if the CO2 content of the air quintupled? Surely, all life would come to an end! Either that, or the Earth would just be a bit more like it was in the Cretaceous Period, when life did come to an end as a result of global warming, leaving the Earth a barren and sterile wasteland inimical to all future life. Like New Jersey.