Chris Knight

Unless Darwin is a dirty word here, environment change challenges the biosphere to evolve the best adapted species for the status quo, even at the expense of the current champions of the food chain. It's tough at the top, and it's tough to claw your way up from the bottom, and keeping a low profile is sometimes a good survival strategy. I may regret the extinction or emergence of a species, but I cannot be sentimental about it. Thats what life is all about. Toxic algal blooms utilise the carbon dioxide generated by the decay of (so called) "higher organisms" that they kill so that they can sporulate and leave their offspring waiting to capitalise on the next population explosion of swimming things. The organic remains of the dead then goes on to be recycled into the next population explosion of reef, lake or river life.

Other way round I think - cooler oceans, more gas dissolved, thats why the arctic oceans can be so productive of plankton, lots more CO2 near the surface compared to the warmer tropics. Also a possible reason why atmospheric CO2 appears to increase with a lag following an episode of global warming, as the oceans outgas. http://jcbmac.chem.brown.edu/myl/hen/carbondioxideHenry.html

I was pointing out that earthly geomagnetic change timescales don't happen overnight - like ice ages, but on an even much longer scale. Unless you are living on the sun where there are regular reversals which take on average 11 years to flip. But they are different phenomena, with different influences. Just because the next earthly magnetic pole reversal is long overdue on historic data doesn't mean it's imminent. Records are broken every year, but not all records are broken, some may never be!

It aint fast: http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/nmp/reversals_e.php

The albedo of the arctic ice only has any effect during the arctic summer - during the winter, it experiences no solar radiation to reflect. On the other hand, the ice free Arctic Ocean, as it enters the long Arctic Winter darkness will radiate heat more rapidly than if the pack ice was still present. The situation next year may be much more typical than this year. One of the factors for this atypical Arctic Summer may be the lack of stormy weather. Hasn't the wind speed over the Arctic been very low over 2006 and 2007 compared to previous years? http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np_weatherdata.html - the Arctic theme pages of the NOAA - seems to show a very different picture in the data from 2002-2005 on the same site. Low wind chill factor in winter and summer, as well as ice floes not being piled together in stormy waters, and thin ice not being broken by waves to allow freezing of exposed ocean water during the winter, and low wind speeds in summer, allowing surface temperatures over the ice floes to remain at 0, allowing melt pools to build up since April - phenomenally early. Add to this the fascinating property that water is densest at 4 deg C, so the melt pools are warmer at the bottom than at the surface. Mmmm, Emmenthal! It is also no wonder that the SST anomalies in the Arctic are unprecedented - there are no previous SST data to compare with, since what is currently water was previously only ice! One final point - sea ice does not figure in sea level changes*, only ice on land in glaciers, which is basically Greenland and Antarctica combined. If they both melted, the sea level rise would possibly reach 70 metres above current mean sea level. However, most of the ice lies above the snowline, so a rapid melt is unlikely, even if sea level temperature is raised by several degrees. The rate of glacier flow, and iceberg calving may increase as global warming increases, but whether this would increase sea level may be counteracted by increased precipitation and ice accumulation on Greenland and Antarctica. Unless of course, there is a collapse of the WAIS. *otherwise we would be seeing a sea level change this year, wouldn't we? Ice floats on water, displacing an equal weight of water. As it melts, the water level does not change.

I am unsure that GW is real, but believe that human activities certainly affect microclimates, and therefore grosser climate effects in some way, e.g. aerosols, photochemical smog, and ozone destroying CFCs, as well as urbanisation, Jet vapor trails etc., but remain totally unconvinced on anthropogenic CO2 as a small proportion of natural CO2 having any effect on the atmospheric increases measured. Much more certain that human activities would contribute to overall cooling if we do not clean up emissions. 1950-1970 cooling has a lot more to do with increased ionizing radiation in the atmosphere due to atmospheric nuclear tests than the authorities let on - remember Wilson's Cloud chamber? Thus I have some empathy with those who believe that solar wind/cosmic ray balance affects cloud cover and the solar forcing is by far the most significant change seen over the last century. However there is a political force to blame CO2, and thus a demand for scientists to show increasing temperatures. If their models and observations show cooling, they would not get continuing support for research, would they? Thus warmer temperatures from urbanisation ie in Europe and the surrounding seas, higher SSTs from thinner Arctic float ice, and extrapolated temperatures from satellite observations unable to get direct measurements due to cloud cover etc., raise the global averages, rather than underestimate them. A few years time and we shall see a cooling trend since 2003 and wonder what all the fuss was about!

Global warming may be an artefact due to the way that global temperature averages are estimated. Available ocean volume may be increasing allowing greater heat capacity. Desertification, urbanization, changed patterns of agriculture and deforestation have resulted in less available water on the land masses, leading to changed patterns of temperature and climate on the surface. and warmer coastal waters in areas of high population. none of the above.

What "unity"? Belief systems are all right, scientific investigation/theory is all wrong? Random effects don't exist, we exist in a lawful universe at all levels - as long as there are faith systems to preserve the status quo - what existed before they existed (in their historical status on this earth)?

As are "God" & "Intelligent design" without defining the ? intelligence involved.

Chaotic systems produce stable subsystems - the universe with its distribution of galaxies and other cosmic bodies, the periodic table with some missing (i. e. very short-lived) heavy elements, the predictable half-life of radioactive isotopes, all arise from chance occurrences. At the statistical level they appear to be non-random and occur within normal gaussian distributions in space and time. Just like throwing dice. In fact, every occurrence is rooted in chance. Biological systems exist within this universe and are subject to random interactions at all dimensions from the subatomic to the gross physical levels. Life has a peculiar property - the necessity to survive, and this mirrors some non-living processes in the universe like the proerties of matter that cause clumping into massive bodies whose gravitational effects attract other massive bodies into systems such as our solar system, binary star systems, galaxies. "Natural selection" was coined by Darwin to compare the way that species evolve in the wild with the way that domestic species, plant and animal, were selected by man to produce new and improved livestock and crop varieties. He knew nothing about genes, the mechanisms of mutation, or the rules of inheritance that were elucidated by Mendel and improved by numerous others during the 20th century. He merely understood that there was natural variation for many characteristics within any species, from the humblest plant to his fellow humans. How was this variation important? Rather than The Origin of Species, I would recommend the account of the young Darwin of the Voyage of the Beagle, where he made his observations of among many other new and interesting people and phenomena, the wildlife of the Galapagos, then untouched by the hand of man, including the tortoises and finches, which he documented in detail. He realised that these groups of animals were related in their origin, isolated by their different island habitats, and their environment and habits were reflected in the characteristics and behavioral patterns. Darwin proposed a theory that has stood the test of scientific validity - it has not been disproved by any better scientific theory. The theory has nothing to do with the origin of life, which is a different question altogether, and has many questionable hypotheses, some of them proposing origins on Earth, others proposing extraterrestrial origins. The hypotheses are not any more testable than an intelligent creator, and are thus equally (un)questionable. However, they do not boil down to blind faith, proposing some natural cause rather than an untestable divine source for their origin. To paraphrase Hawking, not only does God play dice, he throws them in places that cannot be observed. Mutations (L. mutare v. to change) are a complicated group of changes elucidated by geneticists over the 20th century to explain the variations found in individuals within a species. Darwin dealt with populations rather than individuals. Populations are groups of individuals, no doubt with a pool of shared genes, some variations and indeed some mutations. The majority of mutations exist as single nucleotide polymorphisms, which have no effect on the characteristics of the individuals - they are neutral and are represented by the difference between a single nucleotide pair within a gene, or a another region on the chromosome map of the individual that is outside a functional gene, in a non-functional sequence of the DNA, or within a control region. Mutations that have a major effect on the development of an individual, its growth, health etc. are mostly fatal, and the individuals rarely survive to pass on the mutation. When the early 20th century Geneticists learnt how to produce mutations, they chose the survivors from deliberate poisonings with chemicals, radiation etc., to produce their mutants and investigated what changes in the genes produced the different characteristics in their subjects, thus spreading a lot of light on the processes underlying genetic changes. On the other hand there were studies on populations that existed in the wild where single gene mutations were beneficial and caused species to survive in changed and adverse situations. Well documented is the Peppered Moth which mutated to a melanic (black) form which survived better than its white original counterpart on its resting places on the black polluted tree bark in the suburbs of 1930s Birmingham. This is a direct application of Darwin's theory to a natural phenomenon, and as such is a classical case in support of the theory. Complexity within biological systems exists, undeniably, and much has been done to show how the basic processes work together to produce the complex interractions between individual members of populations and how their genetic compositions are capable of change over time, on the basis of experiment and observation, with the consensus among methodical scientists over a century and a half, that Darwin's principles are consistent with the real world observations. On the other hand there are so-called trolls that bring out oft-repeated falsehoods that evolution is under the control of some intelligent process. The existence of such individuals is just another confirmation that Darwin was correct in his observation that variation exists and however compelling the evidence may be there will always be some individuals, that are less likely to survive in the face of ever changing conditions or evidence.