Why climate skepticism is not skepticism

Sourcing Skepticism … what factors drive questioning of Global Warming?

Copied wth permission of the author, Adam Siegel, from http://getenergysmartnow.com/2007/09/13/sourcing-skepticism-what-factors-drive-questioning-of-global-warming/

The original was posted on September 13th, 2007 and attracted 23 Comments

Now it seems more relevant than ever, with such “skepticism” the posture of governments from Australia to Washington while the Arctic ice melts and methane begins to rise from the tundra.

Image Diane Tuft, http://dianetuft.com/the-arctic-melt-gallery

Skepticism … the ability to question unquestioned beliefs and stated certainties is a powerful intellectual tool.

Sadly, “skepticism” is receiving a bad name through association with those ready, willing, able, and enthusiastic about denying the reality before their (and our) own eyes about the global changes in climate patterns and humanity’s role in driving these changes.

Questioner … Skeptic … Denier …

Clearly, not every question, not every challenge to data, not every voicing of concern is the same.  Nor is every motivation the same.  This is not simply about “fossil-fuel-funding” — although it can be at times. This is not simply about seeking Rapture and the end of times — even though it can be.  This is not simply about political beliefs creating thought structures for dealing with science — but it can be.

Is Creationism racist?

Henry Morris’s “scientific creationism” taught that red, black, and yellow races were descended from Ham, and destined to serve the Europeans and Semites descended from Japhet and Shem. Evolution science, with the help of genetics, wrote in 1977 that “race” applied to humans is a hopelessly blurred concept, that Europeans, Middle Easterners and East Asians are more closely related to each other than to Africans, that the greatest human genetic diversity is within Africa, and that human group differences are trivial compared with individual variation.

Which do you prefer?

I reblog here some comments by my friend the Rev. Michael Roberts on this subject, linking to the original discussion here by Libby Anne:

Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin

That should get tongues wagging. Most creationists will deny that and Ham of Answers in Genesis tries to blame evolutionists for racism.

I have no idea what the quote from Revelation means but then fundamentalists use the Bible is odd ways

This article deals with some of Henry Morris’s comments on race, with the sons of Ham being born to serve! (This comes from Genesis 9 where Ham found Noah drunk after the flood. and was cursed Gen 9 vs25. Bad old anthropology had the “sons of Ham” who were to serve. This was used to justify Apartheid among other things as the sons of Ham were Africans)

This attitude is typical of the whites in the Southern States and was held by some Southern Presbyterians at the time of the civil war.

However, here we see the founder father of modern creationism being overtly racist. I didn’t realise that…

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Evolution of the River Nile

Reblogging from Steve Drury at wileyearthpages. In an earlier post (How to learn from creationists), I mentioned the case of the buried Nile canyon as one where I had learnt from answering creationists’ questions. This piece gives much more detailed interesting information, and I am surprised (not for the first time) to learn how young great river systems are in their present form.

The longest river in the world, the Nile has all sorts of riveting connotations in terms of archaeology, Africa’s colonial history, the romance of early exploration and is currently the focus of disputes about rights to its waters. The last stems from its vast potential for irrigation and for hydropower. It is probably the most complex of all the major rivers of our planet because it stretches across so many climatic zones, topographic systems geological and tectonic provinces. Mohamed Abdelsalam of Oklahoma State University, who was born in the Sudan and began his career at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile in its capital Khartoum, is an ideal person to produce a modern scientific summary of how the Nile has evolved. That is because he has studied some of the key elements of the geology through which the river and its major tributaries travel, but most of all…

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