- Engineering Humans -
- Does Telepathy Conflict With Science? -
- Argentina: Close Encounters in Antarctica -
- The Booms Beneath – Mistpouffers in Wisconsin -
AND: Labour Councillor: 'My Real Mother is a Green Alien'

Whether or not you believe that climate change is a reality, there are people out there who are thinking of ways to assist mankind in surviving any sort of global upheaval. It is clear that in order for humanity to survive as a species, we will have to be adaptable to whatever is going to be thrown at us in the near future.

It is heartening to see that there are some scientists who are taking this seriously and thinking outside of the box for possible solutions. However, some suggestions read more like the evil manipulations from soul-less corporations who are seeking profits off the backs of the rest of us.

So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven't delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geoengineering, and it could augment changes to personal behavior or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

"We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this," said Anders Sandberg, one of the authors and an ethicist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. "What we are arguing is we should be taking a look at this, at the very least." [Save the Planet? 10 Bizarre Solutions]

Their suggestions

In their article, they put forward a series of suggestions, intended as examples of the sorts of human engineering measures that people could voluntarily adopt. These include:

-Induce intolerance to red meat (think lactose intolerance), since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. "Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children," they write.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic. As a result, people would be more willing to act as a group and more sensitive to the suffering of animals and other people caused by climate change.

Engineering the Earth

Frustration with the gap between measures to address climate change and rising greenhouse gas emissions has prompted a colorful array of geoengineering, or planet-altering, solutions. These include pumping sulfur particles or other aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's warmth back out into space; seeding the oceans with iron to prompt algal blooms that would, in theory, suck carbon out of the atmosphere and eventually tuck it away in the seafloor; and perhaps most realistically, pumping the excess carbon into reservoirs and storing it there.

In general, these solutions are problematic because they cannot be ground-tested before being implemented, and once implemented, the effects would be global, according to Sandberg.

"If I want to test out one of those brain-enhancing devices, I can test it on medical students. If something goes wrong, I might get a lawsuit, but it is a localized problem. How do you test geoengineering?" Sandberg said. "How many Earths do we have to test on?"

What's more, a change that benefits one country may hurt another, he said.

Changing ourselves

The concept of human engineering isn't new. Sandberg studies the ethics of human enhancement, or "all the tools we have to mess with ourselves to improve our performance," as he puts it. "A lot of them are quite controversial, except the ones we don't recognize," he told LiveScience.

Someone will tell you, "'I think it's horrible people take pills to become smarter,' but they are saying it over coffee," he said alluding to the alertness-enhancing effects of caffeine in the coffee. Supplementing salt with iodine is credited with preventing brain damage in infants, and as a result, boosting intelligence around the world.

Fluoride is put into water systems to protect our teeth, and we receive vaccines to protect against disease. Both measures — just like human engineering measures that could address climate change — carry risk, but they have been widely adopted, Sandberg and his colleagues point out.

"Now, we are not that interested in saying the government should impose any of this stuff. … It is more interesting to think about what can people actually do to modify themselves that might be green," he said. "I am mildly skeptical if anything we propose is going to happen. I think it's most likely green changes to human nature aren't anything we have thought of."

Source: Livescience
http://www.livescience.com/19357-engineering-humans-climate-change.html

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Some people call what has been happening the last few years “weather weirding,” and March is turning out to be a fine example.

As a surreal heat wave was peaking across much of the nation last week, pools and beaches drew crowds, some farmers planted their crops six weeks early, and trees burst into bloom. “The trees said: ‘Aha! Let’s get going!’ ” said Peter Purinton, a maple syrup producer in Vermont. “ ‘Spring is here!’ ”

Now, of course, a cold snap in Northern states has brought some of the lowest temperatures of the season, with damage to tree crops alone likely to be in the millions of dollars.

Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine across the Northern Hemisphere. Parts of the United States may be shivering now, but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers in Paris were strolling down the Champs-Élysées in their shirt-sleeves.

Does science have a clue what is going on? The short answer appears to be: not quite.

The longer answer is that researchers are developing theories that, should they withstand critical scrutiny, may tie at least some of the erratic weather to global warming. Specifically, suspicion is focused these days on the drastic decline of sea ice in the Arctic, which is believed to be a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases.

“The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale,” said Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher. “The question is, how can it not be, and what are the mechanisms?”

Some aspects of the climate situation are clear from earlier research.

As the planet warms, many scientists say, more energy and water vapor are entering the atmosphere and driving weather systems. “The reason you have a clothes dryer that heats the air is that warm air can evaporate water more easily,” said Thomas C. Peterson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A report released on Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that issues periodic updates on climate science, confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding.

“A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events,” the report found.

Some of the documented imbalances in the climate have certainly become remarkable.

United States government scientists recently reported, for instance, that February was the 324th consecutive month in which global temperatures exceeded their long-term average for a given month; the last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. In the United States, many more record highs are being set at weather stations than record lows, a bellwether indicator of a warming climate.

So far this year, the United States has set 17 new daily highs for every new daily low, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Climate Central, a research group in New Jersey. Last year, despite a chilly winter, the country set nearly three new highs for every low, the analysis found.

But, while the link between heat waves and global warming may be clear, the evidence is much thinner regarding some types of weather extremes.

Scientists studying tornadoes are plagued by poor statistics that could be hiding significant trends, but so far, they are not seeing any long-term increase in the most damaging twisters. And researchers studying specific events, like the Russian heat wave of 2010, have often come to conflicting conclusions about whether to blame climate change.

Scientists who dispute the importance of global warming have long ridiculed any attempt to link greenhouse gases to weather extremes. John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told Congress last year that “the weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet every year.”

Yet mainstream scientists are determined to figure out which climate extremes are being influenced by human activity, and their attention is increasingly drawn to the Arctic sea ice.

Because greenhouse gases are causing the Arctic to warm more rapidly than the rest of the planet, the sea ice cap has shrunk about 40 percent since the early 1980s. That means an area of the Arctic Ocean the size of Europe has become dark, open water in the summer instead of reflective ice, absorbing extra heat and then releasing it to the atmosphere in the fall and early winter.

Dr. Francis, of Rutgers, has presented evidence that this is affecting the jet stream, the huge river of air that circles the Northern Hemisphere in a loopy, meandering fashion. Her research suggests that the declining temperature contrast between the Arctic and the middle latitudes is causing kinks in the jet stream to move from west to east more slowly than before, and that those kinks have everything to do with the weather in a particular spot.

“This means that whatever weather you have today — be it wet, hot, dry or snowy — is more likely to last longer than it used to,” said Dr. Francis, who published a major paper on her theory a few weeks ago.

“If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heat wave, drought or cold spell to occur,” she said, but the weather can change rapidly once the kink in the jet stream moves along.

Not all of her colleagues buy that explanation.

Martin P. Hoerling, a NOAA researcher who analyzes climate events, agrees with other scientists that global warming is a problem to be taken seriously. But he contends that some researchers are in too much of a rush to attribute specific weather events to human causes. Dr. Hoerling said he had run computer analyses that failed to confirm a widespread effect outside the Arctic from declining sea ice. “What’s happening in the Arctic is mostly staying in the Arctic,” he said.

Dr. Hoerling suspects that future analyses will find the magnitude of this month’s heat wave to have resulted mostly from natural causes, but he conceded, “It’s been a stunning March.”

That was certainly what farmers thought. Mr. Purinton, the syrup producer in Huntington, Vt., has been tapping maple trees for 46 years, since he was a boy.

This year he tapped the trees two weeks earlier than normal, a consequence of the warm winter. But when the heat wave hit, the trees budded early, and this tends to ruin the taste of maple syrup. That forced him to stop four weeks earlier than normal and cut his production in half compared with a typical year.

“Is it climate change? I really don’t know,” he said. “This was just one year out of my 46, but I have never seen anything like it.”

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html?_r=1

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Many are starting to think not

Recently, journalist Steven Volk was surprised to discover that leading skeptical psychologist Richard Wiseman has admitted that the evidence for telepathy is so good that “by the standards of any other area of science, [telepathy] is proven.” Mr. Volk goes on to write, “Even more incredibly, as I report in Fringe-ology, another leading skeptic, Chris French, agrees with him.”

Mr. Volk might even be more surprised to learn that back in 1951 psychologist Donald Hebb wrote this:

“Why do we not accept ESP [extrasensory perception] as a psychological fact? [The Rhine Research Center] has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue … Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioral evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it … Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is—in the literal sense—prejudice.”

Four years later, George Price, then a research associate at the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the prestigious journal Science that began:

“Believers in psychic phenomena … appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition. … This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians. … Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance.”

But Price then argued, “ESP is incompatible with current scientific theory,” and asked:

“If, then, parapsychology and modern science are incompatible, why not reject parapsychology? … The choice is between believing in something ‘truly revolutionary’ and ‘radically contradictory to contemporary thought’ and believing in the occurrence of fraud and self-delusion. Which is more reasonable?”

So, here we have two skeptics in effect admitting that if this were any other field of inquiry then the experimental data would have carried the day by 1950.

Like Price and Hebb before them, both Wiseman and French hold that the claim of telepathy is so extraordinary that we need a greater level of evidence than we normally demand. Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”

It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility that telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another both found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”—56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

Polls such as this suggest that most scientists are curious and open-minded about psi. This, however, does not seem to be the case in one field: psychology. In the former study, only 3 percent of natural scientists considered ESP “an impossibility,” compared to 34 percent of psychologists.

In fact, the most prominent skeptics of psychic abilities today—such as Wiseman, French, James Alcock, Susan Blackmore, and Ray Hyman—are psychologists. An exception is biologist Richard Dawkins, but like Wiseman and French, he is also on record as saying that the existence of telepathy would “turn the laws of physics upside down.”
Failure to Jibe With Other Areas of Science?

Psychologist James Alcock recently wrote that the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance of the modern scientific worldview. That by itself does not mean that parapsychology is in error, but as the eminent neuropsychologist Donald Hebb pointed out, if the claims of parapsychology prove to be true, then physics and biology and neuroscience are horribly wrong in some fundamental respects.”

But neither Alcock, Hebb, Wiseman, nor French ever bother to explain how the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance” of science, or how “physics and physiology say that ESP is not a fact.”

Indeed, it is rare for a skeptic to ever back up this claim with specific examples. As I show in my new book “Science and Psychic Phenomena,” on those rare occasions that they do, they invariably invoke the principles of classical physics, which have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century.

However, a number of leading physicists such as Henry Margenau, David Bohm, Brian Josephson, and Olivier Costa de Beauregard have repeatedly pointed out that nothing in quantum mechanics forbids psi phenomena. Costa de Beauregard even maintains that the theory of quantum physics virtually demands that psi phenomena exist. And physicist Evan Harris Walker has developed a theoretical model of psi based on von Neumann’s formulation of quantum mechanics.

Ray Hyman’s 1996 argument (in the Skeptical Inquirer) that the acceptance of psi would require that we “abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations” is thereby shown to be nonsense. Contrast Hyman’s statement with that of theoretical physicist Costa de Beauregard, who has written “relativistic quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme where phenomena such as psychokinesis or telepathy, far from being irrational, should, on the contrary, be expected as very rational.”

As mentioned earlier, adherence to an outmoded metaphysics of science seems much more prevalent among psychologists than physicists. Skeptics such as psychologist Susan Blackmore are fond of saying that the existence of psi is incompatible “with our scientific worldview”—but with which scientific worldview?

Psi is certainly incompatible with the old scientific worldview, based on Newtonian mechanics and behaviorist psychology. It is not incompatible with the emerging scientific worldview based on quantum mechanics, the neurosciences, and cognitive psychology.

But even before quantum mechanics began to supersede classical mechanics in the 1920s, many physicists were much more open to investigating psi phenomena than most psychologists seem today. An astonishing number of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century expressed interest in psychic research, including William Crookes, inventor of the cathode ray tube, used today in televisions and computer monitors; J.J. Thomson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for the discovery of the electron; and Lord Rayleigh, considered one of the greatest physicists of the late 19th century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904.

Of course, for their efforts in investigating these and other unusual phenomena, these men were often criticized and ridiculed mercilessly by their colleagues.

But modern physics is very different from the classical physics of the 19th century, and it is time the skeptical psychologists realized this. The great psychologist Gardner Murphy, president of the American Psychological Association and later of the American Society for Psychical Research, urged his fellow psychologists to become better acquainted with modern physics.

Murphy wrote in 1968: “… the difficulty is at the level of physics, not at the level of psychology. Psychologists may be a little bewildered when they encounter modern physicists who take these phenomena in stride, in fact, take them much more seriously than psychologists do, saying, as physicists, that they are no longer bound by the types of Newtonian energy distribution, inverse square laws, etc., with which scientists used to regard themselves as tightly bound.… psychologists probably will witness a period of slow, but definite, erosion of the blandly exclusive attitude that has offered itself as the only appropriate scientific attitude in this field. The data from parapsychology will be almost certainly in harmony with general psychological principles and will be assimilated rather easily within the systematic framework of psychology as a science when once the imagined appropriateness of Newtonian physics is put aside, and modern physics replaces it.”

Source: The Epoch Times
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/does-telepathy-conflict-with-science-211214.html

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- GO AWAY, NOTHING TO SEE HERE DEPARTMENT -

The Booms Beneath – Mistpouffers in Wisconsin

Isn’t it interesting how easily accepted a poor explanation can be passed off? The latest in our constant stream of paranormal happenings that our world is kind enough to dish up are the Wisconsin underground booms.

Now, unexplained underground booms are nothing new. They even have a term, ‘Mistpouffers‘ among others, and have been reported around the world for centuries. Coastal areas are often most affected, early settlers in the American Northeast were told by the Indians that the sounds were the great spirit busily hammering away as he continued to create the earth. Obviously, this was nothing new to the Indians either.

They are heard in Canada, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Ireland and many other places, most all covered by various legends as to what they really are ranging from ghost ships firing cannon to the more modern underground alien bases theories.

In the United States alone, there have been no less than 20 unexplained booms over the last decade. Some near water, some not. Of course some can be explained by meteorites entering the atmosphere, and there are many other theories about just what could create a boom, but this Wisconsin affair seems most interesting in that the booms were clearly coming from the ground.

There are far less rational explanations for a non-aerial boom. And it wasn’t just one location, we all know about the Clintonville booms, but more were heard 80 miles away in Montello, WI. And, there wasn’t just one boom. There were many over at least a four day period, possibly even months, some reports saying the booms slowed down in the morning and went full force again in the evening!

Seasonal or time sensitive booms are again nothing new. The “Barisal Guns” of Bengladesh were noted to sound like cannon, ran for years in the late 19th century before stopping, and seemed to prefer the summer months and hardly ever happened in the winter. No thunderstorms were ever in the area during the booms, and in this case the booms seemed to have stopped completely by the 1890?s. Clearly, it was not sonic booms from jets.

The most interesting case is the Bell Island boom. This particular boom did some serious damage to local homes in 1978. More interestingly, it damaged the electrical wiring of the homes in a manner that might be similar to what a natural EMP, or a weapon, might do.

This specific case was blamed on an unusually large lightning bolt, though meteorologists deny that the conditions were present for lightning, and a ‘crater’ of sorts was pointed out as the impact zone.

That’s a hard buy, lightning doesn’t usually make craters, it makes fulgerites which tend to look like small fused glass tubes going into the ground with the surrounding soil undisturbed. Big holes with apparently no fused glass isn’t very consistent, and wierder still Los Alamos labs sent a pair of scientists all the way out to the Island, off Newfoundland in Canada, to investigate.

The official story is that the infamous Vela satellite detected the huge lightning bolt, and they were sent on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to add up. Why go out there if you know what it was? Were other superbolts detected by Vela and investigated with the same vigor and expense?

So what did the powers that be do in response to the Wisconsin booms? They’ve called it a small earthquake followed by an earthquake swarm. The media, or at least most of it, took the answer happily and closed the case. Never mind that the explanation was entirely inconsistent with their earlier reports.

Witnesses note that the booms began much earlier than the 1.5 magnitude miniquake that the USGS advanced as a possible cause. The dual locations of the booms is also inconsistent with an earthquake. The shaking alone reported by some witnesses should exceed 1.5 magnitude from the reports, which is well below the 2.0 threshhold of usually being feelable by humans.

Residents in Clintonville seem unsatisfied, and well they should be. When illogical, inconsistent concepts are advanced in an authoritative “case closed” manner, it can be insulting and smacks of the want to get the whole thing buried and made to go away.

Despite official explanations, the weird sounds continue to be heard and felt.

Police in Clintonville were flooded with dozens of calls from concerned residents on Tuesday night (March, 27) after the town was again rattled by a series of booms louder than anything reported to date, despite official assurances that previous reports of the noise were caused by a minor earthquake.

According to authorities, the booms shook the same part of the town that was hit by a series of similar jolts over the last ten days, but last night residents said they were even louder. The booms occurred closer together and one lasted for a full 30 seconds, according to reports. City officials contacted the USGS in an effort to find answers.

Early indications suggest that last night’s booms did not correlate with any earthquake activity in the state.

“A preliminary review of seismic activity recorded at two permanent seismometer stations in Wisconsin did not indicate even a low-level earthquake at Clintonville late Tuesday, a spokesman for the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., said,” reports the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

Geophysicist Joe Bellini also looked at data from nearby seismometers which “detected nothing Tuesday night.”

The lack of earthquake activity suggests that residents were right to have doubts about naturally occurring seismic events being to blame for the booms, skepticism that was prompted by the fact that the jolts were also heard 80 miles away in a different town.

In fact, the Wisconsin underground booms remain unexplained, as do a great many others, and if the ground of Wisconsin continues to boom, we will not have heard the end of this story.

Source: Paranomala
http://www.paranormala.com/booms-beneath-mistpouffers/#more-928