Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the Gulf.

Evaporation, storms, and natural dispersion effects (and human cleanup efforts) are doing what they’ve done in the past: reducing the concentration of the oil, sometimes to microscopic size, where it’s consumed as food by microbes. So, once again, the sky hasn’t fallen.

The growing impatience of late medieval and early Renaissance thinkers with the Scholastic method favored by the Roman Catholic Church and its many schools led at last to an intellectual revolt best exemplified by Rene Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637) and his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

In a return to ancient Greek sophistry, Descartes made the human mind the measure of all things and reduced God to a mere guarantor, an epistemological “co-signer” of sorts, whose sole substantive role was to assure the truth of whatever Descartes perceived “clearly and distinctly.”

Think of it this way: God becomes the Federal Reserve, with Descartes as Ben Bernanke.

* The 0.7°C increase in temperatures over the last century is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

We are now in what is called an interglacial period, or the time between ice ages. Previous interglacial peaks were three degrees warmer than now. In Antarctica, these previous peaks were actually six degrees warmer.

Since the last ice age, the oceans rose about 400 feet. Most of that occurred before the pyramids were built (and well before modern use of fossil fuels), but the trend for hundreds of years up to the present has been rising sea levels.

The sea ice of the south polar ice cap has grown in the last 30 years.

Climate scientists have fairly recently recognized a climate cycle they now call the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. “The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.” They think this is why temperatures over the last eight years or so do not show the continued warming their models predicted. This and other cycles (Pacific Decadal Oscillation, El Nino, La Nina) are not included in the IPCC climate models.

The sun does appear to account for “at least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades,” according to two Duke University physicists. While they were quick to remind us “that their findings do not argue against the basic theory that significant global warming is occurring because of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse’ gases,” they note that IPCC type climate models do not include any solar influences.
The “ice caps” on Mars shrank over all three years of initial observation by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions, 2005-2007.

Glaciers in the northern hemisphere generally have been shrinking for about 700 years, while those in the southern hemisphere have been shrinking for the last 6,500 years. (You might notice that those times precede the modern use of fossil fuels.)