Slashdot Mirror
Cosmic Rays and Global Warming
Overly Critical Guy writes "The former editor of New Scientist has written an article in the TimesOnline suggesting that cosmic rays may affect global climate. The author criticizes the UN's recent global warming report, noting several underreported trends it doesn't account for, such as increasing sea-ice in the Southern Ocean. He describes an experiment by Henrik Svensmark showing a relation between atmospheric cloudiness and atomic particles coming in from exploded stars. In the basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, Svensmark's team showed that electrons from cosmic rays caused cloud condensation. Svensmark's scenario apparently predicts several unexplained temperature trends from the warmer trend of the 20th century to the temporary drop in the 1970s, attributed to changes in the sun's magnetic field affecting the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere."
....then he discovered he could encourage them to join the army and send them to Iraq
I don't therefore I'm not.
THE FOUR PILLARS OF THE SOCIALIST REVIVAL, AND THE RISE OF ISLAMOFASCISM
Here is a fascinating talk by Bernard Lewis in which he discusses a variety of issues with regard to Islam (hat tip: OBloodyHell). Of particular interest is Lewis' analysis of the Danish Cartoon story:
That is the question of the Danish cartoons. Now, this is a very curious story. The news story, as it broke, was that a Danish newspaper had published a series of cartoons offensive to the Prophet, and that this had led to spontaneous outbursts of indignation all over the Muslim world. Now, there are several problems in this. One of them was that the spontaneous outbursts of indignation didn't occur until slightly more than four months after the publication of the cartoons. It's a little difficult to follow, I think you'll agree. The second problem was that when the spontaneous outbreaks of indignation did occur all over the Muslim world, in the remotest parts of northern Nigeria, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere they had an ample supply of Danish flags of suitable size and texture for trampling or burning, as required. Obviously, this was something carefully prepared over a period of time.
What exactly was it about? Well, fortunately we have a little background on this, which makes it easier to understand. About 18 years ago, you may recall, the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death against the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was living in London at that time. The crime for which he sentenced him to death was insulting the Prophet. For a Muslim to insult the Prophet is tantamount to apostasy, and that, as we were recently reminded in Afghanistan, is widely seen as a capital offense.
But this is a different matter. And after a time, I got interested in what was happening, and therefore made a study of the literature relating to this offense, which probably I would not otherwise have bothered with. A number of interesting things emerged. By the way, when we talk of Muslim law, I would remind you that we are talking about law. Sharia is a system of law and adjudication, not of lynching and terror. It is a law that lays down rules, rules for evidence, for indictment, for defense and the rest of it, quite a different matter from what has been happening recently.
The first point made was that it is forbidden to portray the Prophet, that making images of the Prophet of any kind is against the Muslim religion. That is true, though not always strictly observed by Muslims. But the point is that they want to avoid any kind of deification of the Prophet. Muslims are shocked when they go into churches and they see pictures and statues being worshipped. This they see as idolatrous. And if you go into the interior of a mosque, it is very austere: no pictures, no statues, only inscriptions. The ban on the portrayal of a prophet is intended to prevent the development of idolatrous worship of the Prophet. I don't think there was any danger of that from the Danish cartoons.
What was much more at issue was another ban, and that is on insulting the Prophet, which is, of course, an offense. This raises a number of interesting questions that I think are of direct relevance to the whole issue at the present time. Insulting the Prophet is an offense in Muslim law. This raises two issues: one of substantive law, the other of jurisdiction. Muslim jurists discuss this at some length, and there is a considerable body of case law concerning it in Muslim states.
The first point of disagreement: What is the range of jurisdiction of Muslim law? And here you have two opinions. According to the Shi'a and a minority among the Sunnis, Muslim law applies to Muslims wherever they may be in the world. A Muslim who commits an offense against Muslim law, wherever he may be in the world, is subject to Muslim law and must therefore be punished in accordance w
Why did they arrest him? What did it gain them?
More whores or virgins? more book sales?
Common, what did it gain them.... bigger dicks?
Do those sort of people still exist today in the corporate world, knocking down good decent people for their own career gains?
Is the church a fraud that has billions of gold hidden in the vatican or hidden alien treasures? Are they really the one true original
one world government neocons? Is the church like the ORI from stargate?
This is the basic human fundamental fight.... individualism vs collectivsm.... the bee hive vs the wasps....
Just let it be, do both, dont kill each other... and lets see how colonizes mars/moon first.... Communists or Capitalists.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you'd like to do some of the experiments discussed in the article yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 and/or turn the sun down by a few percent (to measure solar effects) all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
Now, I could be missing some data, and if so, by all means correct me, but my current understanding is that the first actual record that we have is from about 24 years after Jesus was to have died, in an AD 64 letter from Tacitus that mentions the Christian cult (his own words.) Josephus mentions Jesus, but as Josephus wasn't even born until AD 37, and was writing in the AD 80's, I think we can agree he had no direct experience. Then Pliny the Elder mentions Jesus and the cult again in AD 100. Also, Jesus, as I understand it, hasn't been described as having "lived about AD 30", he is purported to have lived from about AD 0 or perhaps BC a few to AD 30.
What all this amounts to is evidence of the cult of Christians in the times following (by 3 decades at the closest) when he was reputed to have lived, but not of Jesus himself, no bill for a cross, no records at court of having to reprimand him, no records of him picking up the whips in the temple; Other than the bible itself, which of course we only have components from about AD 300 onwards and so it isn't a reliable historical source, the mentions of Jesus all seem to be about the cult, not the man. Note that I am not in the least saying that very early Christians aren't real; just that there is no particular evidence that supports Jesus himself. He may, of course, have lived anyway - but the evidence doesn't appear to be there to say so.
Given that I am unaware of any records of Jesus, as opposed to records of the Christians - please, if you are aware of any such records, I would like to know about them. Thank you.
It is important to note that were we to be able to establish that Jesus was real, had followers, and so forth, we still have not in any way established that he was the son of a god, or that there is a god. We've simply gone about finding some guy who said so. I can find the guy who established the FSM meme, too. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There are two references he makes. One is very good contextually, and not disputed as far as I am aware. That's where he says "Ananus... convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned." The main one scholars object to is the one where he call Jesus the "messiah" which of course is a very unlikely (or worse, blasphemous) term for a non-Christian jew to use at the time, and also made unlikely by other, contemporaneous reports of Josephus' outlook, which was decidedly non-Christian.
It really is amazing how strongly the thread of presumed "evidence" for Jesus' actuality runs through society. When you go looking, you find basically nothing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.