Wacko In The Sky

This has been reposted from the Skeptical Analysis blog. This month, on the 18th, the NTS will host a discussion of this topic. Contact us and join the discussion on Skype.

The Skeptic email discussion list is rich in skeptical lore. Creationism, psychic powers, astrology, cults, all are topics ripe for batting about. More than 15 years ago the topic of chemtrails bubbled up:

The term chemtrail is a portmanteau of the words “chemical” and “trail,” just as contrail is a contraction of “condensation trail.” Believers in the conspiracy theory speculate that the purpose of the claimed chemical release may be for solar radiation management,psychological manipulation, human population control, weather modification, or biological or chemicalwarfare, and that the trails are causing respiratory illnesses and other health problems.[1][9][10]Contrails are formed at high altitudes (5–10 miles or 8–16 kilometers) and if any chemicals were released at such altitude they would disperse harmlessly and fall many hundreds of miles/kilometers away, or degrade before touching the ground.

So “chemtrails” is a subset of “conspiracy theories,” itself encompassing JFK assassination theories, 9/11 cover up theories, black helicopters and the like. Conspiracy theories derive from a human personality quirk. Paranoia may be a necessary ingredient. The simple and more rational explanation is rejected in favor of one that quenches the thirst.

A common symptom is the ability to reject any sensible suggestion as an attempt to cover up the truth—a deeper sign of deception and reinforcement of the theory. Writings of the theorists are telling. Here are some excerpts from Chemtrail Central, “Searching for Answers in the Chemtrail Issue.”

Chemtrails: 600 strains of an aerosolized thought control vaccine tested
posted by: Ellyn @ Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:10 am
600 strains of an aerosolized thought control vaccine already tested on humans; deployed via air, food and water

http://www.naturalnews.com/048347_aerosolized_vaccines_behavioral_modification_obedience.html##ixzz3QLwsUis0

Chemtrails: Geoengineering is Not the Answer to Climate Change
posted by: Ellyn @ Thu Mar 20, 2014 3:55 am
Geoengineering is Not the Answer to Climate Change, by Dr. David Suzuki

http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/18/geoengineering-not-answer-climate-change/

Chemtrails: Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scient
posted by: Sore Throat @ Wed Apr 03, 2013 11:32 pm
So let’s see. For the past decade and a half the sky has been covered with a sun shielding haze emitted from high altitude aircraft.

http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/forum/thread10994-105.html&sid=122bf8bda36f05af411670f4d8de7208

Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=5%2c003%2c186&OS=5%2c003%2c186&RS=5%2c003%2c186

So with the billions spent on this covert activity it seems that “they” are forestalling the inevitable. Of course, this isn’t truly addressing the root of the problem, only treating a symptom (much the same as much of modern medicine). CO2 levels are still progressively building up in the atmosphere, oceans are becoming increasing acidic. But this “pause” in global temperature rise eliminates the perceived urgency of the problem, and allows climate change deniers to claim there is no problem. So is this clandestine activity actually helping, or is it in reality sowing the seeds of our destruction? Meanwhile the Greedy Lying Bastards keep feeding like pigs at the trough.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kert-davies/greedy-lying-bastards_b_2846129.html

It’s no surprise seeing Natural News among the references:

Natural News (formerly Newstarget) is a website founded and operated by Mike Adams. It is based in Cedar Creek, Texas.

It is dedicated to the sale of various dietary supplements, promotion of alternative medicine, controversial nutrition and health claims, and various conspiracy theories, such as “chemtrails“, the purported dangers of fluoride in drinking water (as well as those ofmonosodium glutamate and aspartame), and purported health problems caused by allegedly “toxic” ingredients in vaccines, including the now-discredited link to autism.

I’ve touched on Mike Adams and Natural News in previous posts

How cell towers are frying your brain and causing mass confusion

NaturalNews Insider Alert ( www.NaturalNews.com ) email newsletter

The Health Ranger Dear NaturalNews readers,

The brains of everyone living within range of cell towers are being damaged by electropollution.

A hard-hitting new scientific study published in the British Medical Journal reveals how cell towers cause mental confusion, irritability and loss of sleep, among other brain-altering side effects:
http://www.naturalnews.com/044464_cell_towers_EMF_pollution_mental_confusion.html

Specific phenomena which confound the chemtrail theorists include:

  • Contrails with long duration
  • Crosshatch patterns of contrails
  • Contrails that spread to enormous width

Explanations given by scientists and the military, and which are rejected by the theorists, include:

  • Long duration contrails have been known since American bombers started flying high-altitude missions in World War Two.
  • Contrails that persist for a long time are spread horizontally by wind shear.
  • The supposed measurement of 6.8 parts per million of barium beneath a contrail hatch was erroneous due to misuse of the measuring equipment.
  • Military organizations have never seriously considered using contrails to affect climate. Furthermore, there has been no serious effort at climate control by the military.

Photographs such as the one below aid and abet these conspiracy stories.

Olivier Cleynen from Wikipedia: Ballast barrels in a prototype Boeing 747. Photographs of flight test barrels are sometimes said to show chemtrail planes.

These are some ballast containers installed in a test aircraft. Water is pumped from one container to another to shift the center of gravity of the plane, but if you are of the proper mindset this is a setup for spraying chemicals into the atmosphere.

Chemtrails 911 gives insight to this mindset:

Exposing aerial crimes and aerosol operations… …because it’s an emergency!!

INTRODUCTION TO THE CHEMTRAIL ISSUE
by Chemtrails911.com

Since approximately 1998, thousands of people started noticing airplanes spraying X’s, parallel lines, and grid patterns across our skies. These trails initially look like contrails but actually aren’t. According to the U.S. Air Force, contrails are condensation trails and happen when hot engine exhaust momentarily condenses ice crystals into pencil-thin vapor trails that quickly vanish like the wave behind a boat, very much like your breath when talking outside on a cold winter day. Chemtrails, on the other hand, linger for hours and will spread out to form large areas of “cloud” cover.

There are several theories as to why these operations may be occurring. However, most of the documentation available points to geo-engineering and space weaponry as the reasons that these spray operations are occurring. A concept that keeps popping up in major governmental studies is the idea of spraying aluminum oxide particles into the atmosphere to create a sunscreen.

Others pick up on the meme:

Following the Money: Obama, 9/11, Chemtrails, Climate Change, $Trillions in Carbon Taxes
Posted by Harold Saive on March 11, 2013

Harold Saive elaborates:

Note: This 2010 article gains significant light in the context of more recent research on the history of weather modification:

Originally published Tuesday, August 10, 2010

One 9/11 agenda was targeted murder of carbon trading companies with precision of a pilotless drone attack

Why does Franklin Raines of Freddie/Fannie own the patent for a carbon trading computer originally owned by Carlton Bartels, CEO “Cantor Fitzgerald/CO2e.com/eSpeedprogram ? – a company whose employees were murdered by a well-guided jet aircraft that crashed into their offices on 9/11/2001? Wasting no time, why did the new Democratic Congress (2006) give the patent to Raines obamaimmediately following the election?

It is statistically significant that 44 % of the souls murdered on 9/11 (including firefighters, police etc.) worked for companies that were in competition with the Chicago Climate Exchange. (CCX)? Al Gore, Obama, Maurice Strong, and whoever in Congress owns stock in CCX stands to cash in on $Trillions if they can pass enforceable Cap and Trade legislation.

And finally the truth is revealed:

There is more to the chemtrails story than I can possibly unravel in a single post. Perhaps when I chance upon another ripe fruit I’ll share it with readers. In the mean time keep your eyes trained on the sky. And keep reading.

Flash Update

This breaking news has only come to us since the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Readers are cautioned to pay close attention to the following and to take the necessary precautions:

There is a new gay conspiracy to turn more people to homosexuality this Fourth of July. Emboldened by Obama and his Supreme Court cronies’ decision to disrespect America’s Christian heritage by allowing gay marriage, gays are now salivating at the thought of seducing the nuclear family into their lifestyle.

The CDC confirms that since the 2015 fireworks season, there has been a drastic 1.2% increase in the amount of men confirming their homosexuality. Even more troubling there is now an estimated 53% of men suspected to be secretive or agnostic by their homosexuality.

While the link between fireworks and geo-engineering vis-a-vis chemtrails is well known in the scientific community, the phenomenon of placing lurid chemicals known to induce homosexual inclination is a development unique to the Obama Administration.

Remember, you have been warned.

No Blade of Grass

I’m reposting this from the Skeptical Analysis blog.

I was trying to remember how I got to this topic, and then I recalled we were having crackers with our salad, and crackers are made of wheat, which is a grass. So we were eating grass. And I got to wondering how long people have been eating grass, and I recalled that grass has not been around all that long. The earliest grass fossils (as I recalled) were only 30 or so million years old. Being the skeptic that I am I decided to look it up. I entered something like “origins of grass” in Google, and this is one of the thingsthat came up:

The origin of grass pushed well back into the ‘Mesozoic’

Michael J. Oard

Creationists are often challenged on the fossil record. Evolutionists commonly confront us with such questions as: if practically all fossils are the remains from a pre-Flood environment, where was such and such an organism at a particular time within the geological column? One of those challenges has been the first appearance of grass, which supposedly evolved in the Cenozoic. ‘Why aren’t grasses found in pre-Cenozoic rocks?’ evolutionists charge.

Whoa! Where is this coming from? And just who is Michael J. Oard, and why is he speaking in nonsensical terms?

And now we are back to the creationists. Michael Oard is associated with Answers in Genesisand has published several creation “science” articles in their in-house journalAnswers. Together with Peter Klevberg he has contributed “Green River Formation Very Likely Did Not Form in a Postdiluvian Lake”. Indeed. For the junk rag Creation he has written, among other things, “Do Rivers Erode Through Mountains”. His answer is that a global flood must be assumed. The geological evidence is … absent. He has also written the book “Flood by Design”. You see where this is going.

All right. That explains a lot. I should have suspected. The tip off should have been the language—in particular the way certain words are used.

  • creationists: not used in a disparaging context
  • evolutionist: used in place of the term “scientists”
  • Flood: capitalized as though the reader already knows which flood and of which fame

Of course, I should have glanced to the bottom of the page:

JOURNAL OF CREATION 21(1) 2007

That’s it. This is from a “creation science” journal. We started seeing this kind of thing 50 years ago:

Creation science (dubbed “scientific creationism” at the time) emerged as an organized movement during the 1960s. It was strongly influenced by the earlier work of armchair geologist George McCready Price who wrote works such as The New Geology (1923) to advance what he termed “new catastrophism” and dispute the current geological time frames and explanations of geologic history. Price’s work was cited at theScopes Trial of 1925, yet although he frequently solicited feedback from geologists and other scientists, they consistently disparaged his work. Price’s “new catastrophism” also went largely unnoticed by other creationists until its revival with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomband Henry M. Morris, a work which quickly became an important text on the issue to fundamentalist Christians and expanded the field of creation science beyond critiques of geology into biology and cosmology as well. Soon after its publication, a movement was underway to have the subject taught in United States’ public schools.

[Some links deleted]

A subsequent book is Scientific Creationism by Henry Morris.

Additionally court rulings, beginning, several decades ago, have prohibited teaching biblical statements regarding the creation of the universe, the special creation of the human race and Bible-based history in public schools. The courts have correctly ruled there is no factual basis for these stories and, further, that teaching them amounted to religious proselytizing through government authority and at public expense. Religious fundamentalists, particularly Christians in the United States, sought a way around these legal constraints by seeking to establish biblical stories as scientifically grounded, and thereby allowable under the law. “Creation science” was given birth in this manner.

What so impresses me about finding this item is that such things still exist. A Supreme Court decision in the case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education in 1982 affirmed that “creation science” is religion and not science. The Court further ruled in 1987 in the case  Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987 that a Louisiana law mandating equal treatment of “creation science” with the principles of biological evolution was in violation of the Constitution, because the law was religiously motivated and served no secular purpose.

Creationists reacted to this ruling almost immediately, and religious proponents with legitimate scientific credentials began work on resurrecting the concept of Intelligent Design, most notably outlined over 200 years ago by William Paley. Paley’s idea was that living forms are so complex and so uniquely constructed that they cannot be the consequence of materialistic processes. They must have been designed by a higher intelligence.

I was living in Dallas, Texas, at the time, and a local religious organization under the direction of Jon Buell was in the process of developing a book directed toward science education at the high school level. The organization still exists. It’s the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the book is Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. The book came out in 1989, and the FTE followed up with a second edition, which corrected some errors from the first. A follow up book, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems by Jonathan Wells and William Dembski came out in 2007. Wells and Dembski are fellows with the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, the leading organization promoting Intelligent Design.

The Pandas book did not fare much better with the courts than traditional “creation science” had before it. A plan to introduce the book into the science curriculum of the Plano, Texas, public schools was forced to back track under pressure from local citizens. A subsequent attempt by a school board in Pennsylvania led to the court case Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. In that case Federal Judge John E. Jones III ruled that Intelligent Design rests on religious concepts and has no demonstrated scientific merits.

I have previously reviewed the Pandas book in a disjoint series of posts.

Anyhow, seeing this item from the Journal of Creation brought back old times. These were times when the argument against creationism involved simply laying out a few facts and then enjoying a good belly laugh. It’s good to see the fun has not gone out of the game. Where to start?

Let’s take the “journal” article itself. If I had picked up this piece of paper early in the morning before having my cup of coffee I might possibly have mistaken it for something published in a scientific journal. Unfortunately I do not drink coffee, but I do read some scientific journals, and this item attempts mightily to impersonate one. For your reading pleasure, and in case creation.com ever goes out of business,  I have posted a copy of this item. It has:

  • A title
  • An author’s name
  • No abstract, unfortunately
  • The journal name, volume number and page number at the bottom of the page
  • A list of references

Let’s look at the references:

1. Oard, M.J., The geological column is a general Flood order with many exceptions; in: Reed, J.K. and Oard, M.J. (Eds.), The Geological Column: Perspectives within Diluvial Geology, Creation Research Society Books, Chino Valley, AR, pp. 99–121, 2006.
2. P r a s a d , V. , S t r ömb e r g , C .A. E . , Alimohammadian, H. and Sahni, A., Dinosaur coprolites and the early evolution of grasses and grazers, Science 310:1177–1180, 2005.
3. Piperno, D.R. and Sues, H.-D., Dinosaurs dined on grass, Science 310:1126–1128, 2005.
4. Anonymous, Dung grasses up dinosaurs, Nature 438:399, 2005.
5. Piperno and Sues, ref. 2, p. 1126.
6. Prasad et al., ref. 1, p. 1,179.
7. Piperno and Sues, ref. 2, p. 1127.
8. Barrick, W.D. and Sigler, R., Hebrew and geologic analyses of the chronology and parallelism of the Flood: implications for interpretation of the geologic record; in: Ivey, Jr., R.L. (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International
Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 397–408, 2003.
9. Note: see also Catchpoole, D., Grass-eating dinos: A ‘time-travel’ problem for evolution, Creation 29(2):22–23, 2007.

This is so good. The references are numbered and cite original sources of the pertinent content. Some citations are to legitimate scientific research. Others, not so much.

The first reference cites Michael J. Oard, the author of this paper. Of course, what better authority to cite for this material than the person writing it. I don’t have a copy of the referenced book, The Geological Column: Perspectives within Diluvial Geology, but Earth’s Surface Shaped by the Genesis Flood, also by Oard, is on-line. The following illustrates the level of science practiced by these old-style creationists:

Figure 3.2. Tas Walker’s biblical geological model for biblical earth history (courtesy of Tas Walker, http://biblicalgeology.net/).

In Oard’s paper on the origin of grass, he seems to argue that the mythical flood of Noah in the Bible explains the fossil record for the origin of grass. That’s likely not Oard’s exact intent, because the story of creation in Genesis has that grass of all varieties came into being during the week of creation, about 6000 years ago.

In telling his story, Oard unfortunately finds it necessary to fall back on terminology used by real scientists. In their arguments for biblical inerrancy creationists often must use traditional scientific language. this is because the creationists have never gone through the process of creating a complete scientific framework for their suppositions. Left without a complete and coherent framework, they often find themselves posing their arguments in language that contradicts their argument. For example, “Mesozoic” and “Cenozoic” describe periods in Earth’s history millions of years in the past, which past is supposed to have begun only 6000 years ago in the creationists’ arguments.

Oard compounds his difficulties by having to rely on actual scientific research, research that contradicts his premise. He cites two articles from the journal Science, articles which also argue that dinosaurs ate grass. In making these references, he ignores the findings of the cited research. The following diagram is from Piperno, D.R. and Sues, H.-D., Dinosaurs dined on grass, Science 310:1126–1128, 2005:

Phylogeny for grasses from GPWG (11)

This figure is a cladogram showing the phylogeny of Poaceae:

The Poaceae (also called Gramineae or true grasses) are a large and nearly ubiquitousfamily of monocotyledonous flowering plants. With more than 10,000 domesticated and wild species, the Poaceae represent the fifth-largest plant family, following the Asteraceae,Orchidaceae, Fabaceae, and Rubiaceae. Though commonly called “grasses”,seagrasses, rushes, and sedges fall outside this family. The rushes and sedges are related to the Poaceae, being members of the orderPoales, but the seagrasses are members of order Alismatales.

Grasslands are estimated to compose 20% of the vegetation cover of the Earth. Poaceae live in many other habitats, including wetlands, forests, and tundra.

Domestication of poaceous cereal crops such as maize (corn), wheat, rice, barley, and millet lies at the foundation of sedentary living and civilization around the world, and the Poaceae still constitute the most economically important plant family in modern times, providing forage, building materials (bamboo, thatch) and fuel (ethanol), as well as food.

[Some links deleted]

What this cladogram illustrates is something that is not supposed to exists in Michael Oard’s world. This lays out the biological evolution of different species of grasses. This evolution, according to Oard, was not supposed to have happened. Oard believes, and he wants others to believe, that all species were created at one time by a mythical person only a few thousand years ago. Yet, he is unable to tell his story, he is unable to make his argument, without falling back on the very science he denies.

What Oard seeks to demonstrate in his paper is that the geological record is produced not by successive layers of fossils laid down in chronological order by natural sedimentation processes, but are the result of a cataclysmic flood (the “Flood of Noah”) a few thousand years ago. What real scientists consider to be a chronological record is interpreted by religious fundamentalists as the result of “hydrological sorting” that occurred when almost all life on Earth was extinguished by the supposed flood. Creationists go to great lengths to fabricate this case.

The following is also from Oard’s on-line book:

Figure 3.3. Graph of the timing of the Flooding and Retreating Stages with Walker’s five phases (drawn by John Reed).

This is a graphical representation of the biblical account:

Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then theLord shut him in.

17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.[g][h] 21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.

Oard takes the biblical story a step further as he starts to form the argument for hydrological sorting:

Figure 3.4. Walker’s two stages of the Flood (left) with the two phases of the Retreating Stage (right). (Stages and phases renamed and drawn by Mrs. Melanie Richard).

The Science papers describe research that incorporates not actual grass fossils, but fossilphytoliths recovered from dinosaur coprolites, fossilized dung. The phytoliths are typically silica formations in plants, and they tend to remain after the soft components decay. Since different plants produce different phytolith forms, scientist study phytolith fossils to trace the existence of the related plants. Finding phytolith fossils characteristic of Poaceae in fossil dinosaur dung has led the researchers to conclude that grass existed as far back as into the Mesozoic:

Grasses (family Poaceae or Gramineae), with about 10,000 extant species, are among the largest and most ecologically dominant families of flowering plants, and today provide staple foods for much of humankind. Dinosaurs, the dominant megaherbivores during most of the Mesozoic Era (65 to 251 million years ago), are similarly one of the largest and best known groups of organisms. However, the possible coevolution
of grasses and dinosaurs has never been studied. Now, Prasad et al. (1) report on page 1177 of this issue their analysis of phytoliths—microscopic pieces of silica formed in plant cells—in coprolites that the authors attribute to titanosaurid sauropods that lived in central India about 65 to 71 million years ago. Their data indicate that those
dinosaurs ate grasses.

[Dinosaurs Dined on Grass, Dolores R. Piperno and Hans-Dieter Sues. Science 310, 1126 (2005); DOI: 10.1126/Science. 1121020]

Oard takes this bit of serious research and runs with it, some may conclude further than is justified:

From a creationist point of view, this study pushes back another taxon in the continued extension of
fossil ranges with further research.1 Moreover, we can ask, why hadn’t grass been well documented from
earlier than the mid Cenozoic? Could it be that the Flood was too catastrophic for its preservation? We also wonder what other fossils will be found in much earlier and much later strata, according to the uniformitarian geological column.

The coprolites also bring up an interesting question in relation to the Flood paradigm. Where did the dinosaurs obtain grass and other vegetation during the Flood? The coprolites certainly mean that the dinosaurs died soon after eating. I suggest that these dinosaurs were not overwhelmed at the very beginning of the Flood but later, allowing for a time of terrestrial habitation (including eating) as the waters rose. The dinosaurs could have already inhabited relatively higher areas before the Flood, or else had fled to higher ground at the start of the Flood. But, then when these dinosaurs were overwhelmed by the Floodwaters, their demise and deposition within the strata was quick. Such an idea would favour the creationist hypothesis of ecological zonation and possibly the fleeing of the animals to higher ground as the Floodwaters continued to rise on the earth. Furthermore, this could offer support for the idea that the Ark did not start floating until Day 40 because it was built on higher ground.8,9

I can say little beyond what Oard has already stated. If ever there was fantasy on display, this is it. If ever ignorance were enshrined, this would be its temple. For this gift the civilized world thanks Michael Oard.