Abusing science

Conservapedia is back to abusing science. This is from their “news” section.

The study, which was published on July 14, 2009 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, found CO2 was not to blame for a major ancient global warming period and instead found “unknown processes accounted for much of warming in the ancient hot spell.” The press release for the study was headlined: “Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong.”

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

The mistake Conservapedia made is so readily linking to the abstract.

We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

While the idiots over at Dumbopedia (good one, right?) are claiming that this study PROVES!!! that global warming is not man-made (thus implying that any polluting business practice is a-okay), the study is saying no such thing. This is referencing a period of warming where CO2 alone does not account for all the warming. That isn’t to say that the rise in CO2 can be dismissed during that time – nor is it saying anything about our time. It’d be like saying natural selection doesn’t account for all the change in evolution, therefore evolution is false. CO2 still was a huge factor by which warming was initiated (upwards of 38 degrees F). Today it remains a huge factor.

Let’s just say it. Conservatives are not concerned about science. They care about allowing businesses to practice as they please. That’s it.

CO2 found on exo-planet

I need to get back to some science. Fortunately, CO2 was recently detected on an exo-planet.

NASA said its Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of “hot Jupiter” planet HD 189733b, which orbits a nearby star 63 light-years from Earth.

The planet is itself too hot to support life — its surface is about 1,800 degrees F (1,000 degrees C).

But the astronomers said the observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars.

So the CO2 itself doesn’t mean anything particularly important, but it does lend credence to the idea that it is only a matter of time before astrobiology becomes an enormous field. How exciting would it be to finally confirm that we aren’t all alone, afterall? Granted, we may never make contact with any life we find, most obviously if it isn’t intelligent, but also simply because it may be so far away. This CO2, for example, was produced at 63 years ago. Assuming there was life that close (which would be almost as tremendous as the discovery of the life itself) – and it was intelligent – it would be 126 years before we could make two way contact; that’s 63 years for our (presumably) radiowaves to travel at the speed of light, reach the life-bearing planet, and then 63 years for a return message, provided the exo-life even gave a damn.