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Just heard some twerp from the people who are setting up the camp near Heathrow Airport on BBC News 24. She said that climate change was the be biggest issue around and that it was a survivability on the planet issue. What tosh. even in the worst case scenarios humanity will be able to adapt to the changes that occur. It will not wipe us out. Does this mean that we shouldn’t try to mitigate the effects? Of course not. We should use cleaner energy technologies to reduce our emissions etc. Should we limit the flights people can take? No. Should we use better engines and fuels? Yes.

The twerp on BBC News 24 (who probably wouldn’t understand climate science if you slapped her round the head with it) also called BAA climate criminals. Hmm. Apparently we also need to go back to a more sustainable level of living. Bollocks. What we need to do is make better use of the resources on the planet for the betterment of the whole population. Not retreat backwards. And we need to start planning to use the resources on the other bodies in the Solar System.

I was on a flight this week from East Midlands airport, near Nottingham in England, to Belfast. It was about 19:00 and it was sunny with broken cloud cover when the flight took off. Once we got above the clouds the view out the window was stunning. Really beautiful. The cloud cover was almost complete when looking down, but there were lots of gaps as well. The gaps in the clouds were filled with a sort of thin mist. The sun was low near the western horizon and the light shinning through the mist in the cloud gaps coloured them milky-blue. It made them look like lakes in ice covered land. The low sun was also casting long shadows so the relief and 3D appearance of the whole scene was quite striking. Also quite alien. Our brains didn’t evolve in an environment where we saw many scenes like that. I wish I had a camera with me. A quick Google turned up the picture below. This is similar to what could be seen from the plane, although there were more clouds in reality. Still it gives an impression of the scene.

Click picture for larger view

There is a story in this weeks Nature about the withdrawal of the Downe House site, where Charles Darwin lived when writing The Origin of Species and other works, from the process to make it a World Heritage Site. The withdrawal is due to an unfavourable evaluation by a body that advises the Committee that makes decisions on new World Heritage sites. Apparently sites only get a single chance at becoming a listed site so the Downe House site has been withdrawn and will be resubmitted at a later date. That’s all fine and probably quite sensible. In the Nature article however we have the following quote:

“I can’t think of anything more important to do for the history of nineteenth-century science than to protect the whole environment Darwin inhabited and exploited,” says James Moore, a Darwin scholar at the Open University in Milton Keynes and one of the first historians to explore the importance of this rural refuge to Darwin. “Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe,” he says.

No, no and thrice no! There is no religion called Darwinism and no Darwinian followers! I can probably accept that the above quote is likely out of context and of the cuff, but shame on Nature for perpetuating the fatuous idea that there is a religion of Darwinism similar to other religions. There is not; outside of the warped minds of creationists and intelligent design advocates.

Evolution by natural selection, as originally outlined by Darwin (and Wallace), and as expanded upon over the last 150 years, is both a scientific theory and a fact. The theory provides an explanatory framework to explain the fact that populations of organisms evolve over time. It also makes predictions about what we should find in the natural world as a result of changing environments, what we should see in the fossil record and also the biochemical relationships between organisms.

Alluding, falsely, that people who visit Downe House are doing so for reasons comparable to religious pilgrims is very unfortunate (to put it mildly).

We can dream that this opinion piece from the Washington Post comes to pass.

(via Pharyngula)