The Log Ness Monster

It is interesting that despite the evidence of science, myths continue to be perpetuated in the face of such evidence. One such myth is the Loch Ness monster. The solution to the sightings appeared in an article by Robert Craig, published in the New Scientist in 1982, but it is most often conveniently overlooked.

Fake photos aside, such as the most famous plesiosaur-like neck sticking out of the water, there is no doubt that there have been sightings of something in the water at Loch Ness, one of the four very deep Scottish lochs (or lakes), this one almost 750 feet deep. At two other deep lakes, Loch Morar and Loch Tay, there have also been “monster” sightings. The fourth deep lake is Loch Lomond, but there have been no sightings here.

One other very deep lake should be included in this group, but this one is not in Scotland. It is Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway. It belongs in this group because there have also been “monster” sightings there.

What do these lakes have in common, apart from the “monster” sightings? Why have there been no sightings at Loch Lomond, a lake that appears similar to the others in all respects?

The answer has to do with a kind of tree, the Scots Pine (Pinus Sylvestris). These lochs were once surrounded by large forests of Scots Pines, including the lake in Norway. The exception in our list is Loch Lomond, which had no pine forests.

The “monster” starts with a Scots Pine, a very resinous, tarry tree, falling in the water. It becomes waterlogged and sinks to the bottom where the pressure is equal to about twenty-five atmospheres. Here under this enormous pressure, the log begins to decay, forming small bubbles of gas. The gas is trapped by the sticky resin, which gradually expands out of the log. Eventually enough gas bubbles form to lift the log off the bottom, and it begins to rise.

As the log nears the surface, the outside pressure decreases; the bubbles begin to expand rapidly and start bursting. At the surface they explode, partially breaking the log into pieces, churning the water violently until all the gas is released.  Some of the pieces fly up, and occasionally a trunk is momentarily ejected as the log disintegrates. Quickly the gases are released and the log sinks back down, heavier than water, never to rise again.

Remnants of such logs have been found ashore.  The process of decay and building up gases can take as long as a century, and because it is almost that long since the surrounds were populated by those trees, the age of the “monster” sightings is practically over.

The decay of these logs only occurs in very deep lochs, since very high pressure is needed to build up buoyancy in the logs. Naturally, it will only happen where the right kind of logs lie deep in the water. The conditions were right at Loch Morar and Loch Tay, and the famous Loch Ness in Scotland. They were also right at Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway. These are the lakes with “monsters”.

So why do we ignore the evidence of science? Has too much mystery gone out of this world? I suspect this is the reason why we want to hang on to our notions of UFOs and aliens, of Big Foot and the Yeti, and of the one that we regard most affectionately, the Loch Ness monster.

Christian Implants and Other Wonders

Carrie Prejean, as a conservative Christian Miss California, got her first nationwide publicity when, in answer to a Miss USA pageant question, she said that she was opposed to gay marriage. She was criticized for her answer, but what did the interviewer expect? Should she have lied? It was a stupid question by an idiot who had his own agenda. She was entitled to express her belief and she should be admired for daring to say it. Her later preparedness to switch off Larry King, during an unacceptable line of questioning, shows that she still has spunk.

The publicity from the gay marriage answer, however, led to other revelations, and she lost her the Miss California title. The subsequent happenings made her look like an airhead, especially when she proclaimed that Sarah Palin, the primo political airhead, was her idol. Some commentators suggested a joke Palin/Prejean presidential ticket for 2012!

First, it turns out that she had breast implants. Prejean defended these by saying that there was nothing un-Christian in getting them. “I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn’t get breast implants.” Then she had posed for half nude photographs, which she blamed on the wind blowing her top open. She did not say it, but there’s nothing in the Bible that says you shouldn’t pose for nude photographs. Then a solo sex video surfaced. Then many more. There’s nothing in the Bible that says you shouldn’t make masturbation videos. Now she has had a firm offer for a porn movie. Carrie, there’s nothing in the Bible that says …

I shouldn’t make fun of her conservative Christian rationalizations, since the fabric of her world may be crashing around her, or perhaps those fifteen minutes of fame are being effectively extended. Maybe her Christianity will allow her to venture into the seedier world into which she seems to be heading. If so, I feel kind of sorry for her.

Conservative Christians are very good at rationalizing. In Prejean’s case, what may be embarrassing to her, is no more than harmless amusement to the rest of us. Where it is not harmless, is when it appears in the people to whom we may someday entrust society and government. The ultra-right wing of the Republican Party is trying to purge the moderates of the party, and, together with the “screamers” on radio and Fox News, it defines itself solidly as Christian.

But what kind of Christianity is this?

It is certainly not the caring, charitable kind of Christianity we associate with Jesus, when its main characteristic is denial, when it takes rather than gives, when it says no to need and care. It is a selfish Christianity without moral depth and without charity. Christianity with implants!

It is okay to lie and deceive, both openly and through manipulation. We can divorce our wives, even as they are confined to bed with cancer. Adultery is fine, because our colleagues will forgive us (which is just about as good as God’s forgiveness.) We can send prurient emails to boy pages we lust for. Being “unclean” (Matthew 16:10) is now perfectly fine and Christian.

Additionally, we can now place money above morality. We can bow to special interest groups that line our back pockets with green and then we go and do their bidding, even if it flies against national and humane interests. We operate as back pocket gophers and persuade ourselves that this is in everyone’s best interests. Yes, our Christian implants say; yes, yes, we can worship both God and money (Matthew 6:24).

The two references I gave are to actual words of Jesus. The rest of the Bible, both old and new, has many prohibitions that are either ignored or simply flouted by these professed Christians. In fairness, I should point out, though, that when it comes to health care, the biggest back pocket gopher seems to be Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, who is neither Republican nor Christian, but the political conservative Christians are not far behind.

Prejean defended her implants by saying that there was nothing in the Bible against them. But the actions of the super-conservative Christian Republicans fly directly in the face of what is proscribed in the Bible. Clearly, they must have implants that allow them to put on this front.

The wind is blowing.

Your implants are showing

And you don’t care.

God is all knowing

And you will be going

To you know where.

Tea Parties

Republicans around the country have organized “Tea Party Rallies” to protest health care reform, among other things. They draw their inspiration from the Boston Tea Party, which helped spark the American Revolution. Protestors turn up in support wearing teabags; that is to say, they go “tea bagging.” Little do they realize that tea bagging is also a fraternity ritual, drawn from the similarity of a tea bag to a scrotum.  So the sweet conservative ladies turn up at the rallies with their tea testicles hanging from their hats.

At these rallies the tea baggers listen to rants against the government. At a recent rally, they witnessed the Minority Leader of the House, John Boehner (Republican, Ohio), commit a big boner to go with the teabags. Waving his pocket copy of the Constitution in his right hand, he declared he would quote from it, and went on to orate, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!” Oopsie! Your ignorance is showing, sir! These words are not from the Constitution, but from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

Boehner’s ignorance is a gaffe that a congressman should not make, let alone a potential leader of the house, but it was not much more than a gaffe. There are, however, errors around the Boston Tea Party, which are not gaffes, but which are consciously perpetuated. In a fifth grade classroom last week, I had to listen to ignorance among the patriotic hogwash that was being inculcated into their young minds. Not all of it was hogwash, of course, but not one item was free of it.

There is no doubt that the Boston Tea Party was a very important spark leading to the American Revolution, and that generally it was about taxation without representation. One reading told the fifth graders that King George removed all the taxes, except the one on tea as a lesson to the colonists who then had to pay high taxes on tea. This is bullshit. The Tea Act of 1773, passed by the British Parliament, removed the tax on tea, requiring only American duty to be paid on tea coming into the colonies. The effect was that the price of tea, legally entering the colonies, now cost half the original price. In fact, tea in the colonies was cheaper than tea in Britain, since the British still had to pay the tax.

The main importer of tea was the East India Company, and the Tea Act was seen as favoring the company, enabling them to undercut American importers and (above all) tea smugglers. And there is truth in that, and there was understandable resentment by leaders in the colonies. But it was NOT about high taxes. Significantly, among the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, the group who engineered the Tea Party, was the wealthy John Hancock, who made his pile from … smuggling tea.

Halloween Costumes and Illegal Aliens

This year’s Halloween costumes for sale include one adult jumpsuit with a space alien mask and the words “ILLEGAL ALIEN” printed across the chest. This has upset a Los Angeles immigrant rights group, who feels it is “racist”, that it hurts the sensitivities of people from south of the border who are illegally in the USA. Target took it off its website (it was not available in stores), but other sites were selling out of the costume, no doubt helped by the publicity of the group who objected.

The costume, of course, was a play on words intended as a bit of fun. The same kind of pun is made at the beginning of the movie Men in Black, here at the border between the USA and Mexico. Unlike the movie, there was nothing on the Halloween costume that specifically targeted Hispanic illegal aliens, though the sales spiel did make that reference in a humorous way. (“He didn’t just cross a border, he crossed a galaxy! He’s got his green card, but it’s from another planet!”)

This is not the only illegal alien costume. There is another costume that those groups have not objected to. This is the  “sexy illegal alien” costume, and this one clearly refers to Mexican illegal aliens through its pointed use of a sombrero and handcuffs.

My objection is not to the costume or to the outcry by some groups against it. These kinds of objections are symptomatic of our hypersensitive P.C. society, something we have to put up with as part of wanting to respect all people. However, do we have to sacrifice our sense of humor?

The irony is that “sexy illegal alien” costume, which was not objected to, is actually more objectionable than the “adult illegal alien” one, because it is sexist, it pointedly refers to Mexicans, it suggests they should be handcuffed, and it is almost totally without humor. (You do get shades with it, shaped like “alien” eyes.)

I do object to groups fudging the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. They say they are concerned about the rights of “all” immigrants, but they do more damage to the acceptance of legal immigration than good, as they continue to advocate and encourage acceptance of illegal activity.

The Nobel Peace Prize

So Obama got the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize is supposed to be given to whomever has done the most “during the preceding year” to promote fraternity between nations, to abolish or reduce standing armies and for holding or promoting “peace congresses.”

Although the peace prize committee tried to justify it, I don’t think Obama has done enough to warrant the award, especially if by “preceding year” is meant the year 2008.

One joke (by Jay Leno) is that he got the prize for inviting a black Harvard professor and a white policeman to the White House to make peace over a few beers.

I have respect for the other Nobel awards, but the Peace Prize awards are often laughable, and I tend to view these with a degree of cynicism. With other Nobel awards, there is the passage of years that allows the honored achievement to be evaluated with the hindsight of time. This perspective is not given to the peace committee or it is not taken. So there is a danger of getting sucked into what appears now, rather than what is effective over a period of time.

In this way the 1973 peace prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Doc Tho for the “Paris Peace Accords”. The latter refused it, pointing out that there was no peace in his country, something that the Peace prize committee should have taken into account. But the war-mongering hawk Kissinger was only too happy to accept his for what turned out to be little more than a cynical exercise, for the United States continued bombing North Vietnam. In this category we could include the peace prizes that were awarded to leaders in the Middle East conflicts.

In the past, nominees for the peace prize have included Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and (for a short time) Adolf Hitler.

Some awards make you wonder what the honoree has done with regard to fraternity between nations, army reduction or peace congresses. Most notable here is the 1979 award to Mother Teresa. She was deserving of some award, but what she did had nothing within the parameters of the Nobel Peace Prize, and, as her acceptance speech showed, she had no concept of what was needed for world peace.

The Nobel Peace Prize is deserving of the least respect among the Nobel Prize awards.

Where Was Moses?

When I was still in elementary school in Wau, Papua New Guinea, I was asked the riddle, “Where was Moses when the lights went out?” The answer was, “In the dark.” Whether it was my age, or my weak English, I was puzzled at first before I could make the leap and “get” it. There is a bigger riddle about Moses, which is intriguingly puzzling: “Where was Moses when his lights went out?” In other words, where was Moses when he died?

The children of Israel had come to the end of their “forty years” of wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. They now had a younger leader Joshua who was about to take them into the low land, Canaan, seen as their Promised Land. This is the time when Moses, their former leader, departed from them.

In Deuteronomy 3.27, Moses is told to “get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine eyes: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan.”  Mount Pisgah is usually said to be in the mountains on the other side of the river Jordan, collectively known as Mount Abarim.  (Looking eastward, Moses would have seen nothing of Palestine.) We have a description of what Moses sees. “On this side Jordan, in the valley over against Bethpeor, in the land of Sihon king of the Amorites, who dwelt at Heshbon … And all the plain on this side Jordan eastward, even unto the sea of the plain, under the springs of Pisgah” (Deut. 4.46, 49). Finally,  “Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho, and the Lord shewed him” the Promised Land. Moses died and the Lord “buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day” (Deut. 34. 1-6).

These sites, Bethpeor, Heshbon and Pisgah, are still unidentified. There is a Mount Nebo, but as Wikipedia points out, scholars continue to dispute whether the modern day Nebo is the same mountain referred to in the Torah.

Here now is the riddle. These places have not been identified in and around Palestine, but they are all in Kashmir, India. How did Moses get there?

Bethpeor (meaning “place of opening”) is Behat-poor (now called Bandipur) where the Jehlum (formerly Behat) river valley opens up. Heshbon (often referred to in the Bible as “the pools of Heshbon”) is the same as Hashba, known for its pools. Pisgah is the easiest to identify, for it is a place with “springs” three miles north west of Hashba. Mount Nebo is Baal Nabu, a peak eight miles north west of Behat-poor (Bandipur). From here the entire Kashmir valley is visible, including Wullar Lake. And here also, near the top of the mountain, there is a tomb, known as the tomb of Moses.

The Lord’s Promised Land is a heaven on earth, a land of hills and valleys that “drinketh the water of the rain of heaven” (Deut. 11.11), a land that is naturally irrigated, and that has a “sea of the plain under the springs of Pisgah” (Deut. 4.49). There are more references of a similar nature. These hardly describe Palestine, but they very well describe Kashmir, down to its very large lake of fresh water.

So the answer to the question, where was Moses when his lights went out, seems to be: in Kashmir, of all places.

(Note that there are other references in the Bible that describe the Promised Land in terms that befit Kashmir, rather than Palestine. The ones in Isaiah seem to suggest that this is the Promised Land for the ten “lost” tribes of Israel after their captivity. These references are detailed in Jesus in Heaven on Earth by K. N. Ahmad, of which Chapter 18 is the reference source for this blog.)

The Origin of Australian Aborigines: A Speculation

Aborigines have been in Australia for at least 40,000 to 60,000 years. The later time is still the main one given, but there is enough evidence to push that back to the earlier date, perhaps even to 70,000 years. What is intriguing is not where they came from, which is from Asia, but how they got to Australia.

The people in Asia that they most resemble are the original people of India. Although this is not universally accepted, I think they are the most likely ancestors. The peoples who now live in Southeast Asia between India and Australia were later arrivals, supplanting the original inhabitants. The most common assumption is that the Aborigines arrived via a land bridge, like the aboriginal Americans arrived from Siberia. Unfortunately, there was never a land bridge between Asia and Australia anywhere near a time when the Aborigines needed to have crossed (or since). Even at the most optimum, there were 150 miles of ocean that had to be navigated, and this was at a time long before early man took to the sea, before boats, before canoes, before rafts, before anything made to float on. At 150 miles, no land on the other side or loom of land is visible.

It is possible that by accident, a person clinging to a log could drift across to Australia, but even at the shortest distance of 150 miles, it would take many days, assuming a steady progress. One person is not enough; two are needed for procreation. But even that is a stretch. A scientist, whose work I read while still in Australia, writing on this problem, said that it would take a group of at least 27 or 28, for survival to be viable. That figure is the bare minimum. Is it possible that such a large group could have drifted across?

Actually, and here comes the speculation, it is possible, more than 28, possibly hundreds, but they were not drifting. They were washed over. This speculative scenario occurred to me while I was rereading Velikovsky’s Earth in Upheaval.

Velikovsky wrote Earth in Upheaval to counteract criticism that there was no hard evidence for major catastrophes in the past, as he postulated in Worlds in Collision, which was based on ancient records and mythologized remembrances of ancient peoples. The evidence he gathered for Earth in Upheaval does show massive catastrophes that not only suddenly wiped out large numbers of ancient animals, like mammoths, hippopotami, various predators, and so forth, all mixed up and smashed into crevices and caves, so suddenly that the food was undigested and grass being eaten was still between the teeth. Mixed in amongst them were also human remains. Errant boulders were pushed long distances, even uphill, and much, much more.

The part that I focused on was the evidence of vast tidal waves that swept over large areas of the world. There are no precise times for these, but the range of animals involved roughly match our years of interest.  (Later in the book, he focuses on the last millennium BCE.) The cause for the tidal waves may have been some kind of cosmological ping-pong in our solar system, but the cause is not really relevant here. Such a huge tsunami could have swept enough survivors onto the Australian continent. In their new country, these new Aborigines would have found plenty of large game (assuming it survived), and a new environment to adapt to and gradually to make their own.

One final speculation can be made, assuming cosmological origins of the catastrophe. In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky links the concept of dragons and the like to apparitions seen in the sky during planetary close encounters. For the aborigines, the Rainbow Serpent is the most important concept in their mythology. Is there a corresponding origin here with that of the dragons?

(To give a perspective on the time span involved, I should add that Aborigines were in Australia well before humans got to Europe.)

The Chronology of the Ancient World

Last week, archaeologists reported the unearthing of a couple from the ancient city of Troy. They believed the two had died around 1200 BCE about the time when the best-known Troy was thought to have fallen. The date given for Homer’s Troy is usually in the late Bronze Age in the 13th century BCE. Radiocarbon testing may well confirm the year of their death, but this is not the time of Homer’s Troy. Homer’s Troy belongs in the 8th century BCE.

Ancient history of the Mediterranean basin is based on two chronologies. On the one side, there is the Egyptian one, which includes the Mycenaean and Minoan cultures; on the other is everyone else’s. Homer’s Troy has been placed with the Mycenaean. The trouble is that the chronologies are about 500 years out of sync. So we end up with situations such as the Mycenaean civilization flourishing in isolation from the rest of Greece, and then suddenly dying out to be followed by five centuries of dark ages. Then, lo and behold, half a millennium later, the same civilization appears nearby on the Greek mainland! These kinds of anomalies appear everywhere, requiring ingenious solutions and other fictions.

As an example of fiction, one major problem was the identification of a hostile people—hostile to the Egyptians, that is. Who were these people of Hatti? No record could be found of them, except in Egyptian records. The problem was “solved” when an English missionary, just back from the field, suggested that they should be called the Hittites. Problem solved, yes, except for the lack of corroboration outside of Egypt. These “Hittites” had many similarities to the Chaldeans who were active around Babylon 500 years later. That there should be such similarities is no surprise, for when the chronologies are realigned, the “Hittites” turn out to be the Chaldeans, and Hatti is nothing more than the Egyptian word for the general area around Babylon.

Here is another, absurd example. A tomb was found in what is now Syria. The grave clearly belonged to the 7th century BCE in all respects. It contained a number of vessels, all but two of them belonging to the time of the tomb. The problem was that the two other vessels were Egyptian, and, because Egyptian chronology takes precedence over any other, the grave had to be dated some 500 to 600 years earlier! Now the mystery was how did those later vessels get into the tomb. Finally, an acceptable “solution” was devised: 500 years later, thieves entered the tomb, looking for jewelry, and they must have left those vessels there. Brilliant! It’s like thieves breaking into your house, looking for money, and leaving a couple plasma TV sets. I can just visualize those would-be thieves of the 7th century BCE, climbing over mounds, looking for ancient tombs, carrying vessels with them, so they can leave them in the tomb. The obvious answer, that the vessels were all contemporary, was never considered.

I also wonder how the Egyptian workmen of the 13th century BCE could chisel their records into rock surfaces, some of which were harder than granite, using Bronze Age tools and soft meteorite iron. Some centuries later, it would have been so much easier with the forging of iron and the ability to harden that iron into a kind of steel. Egyptians could not have been making steel hundreds of years before their neighbors; because the quality of their iron ore was so poor, they had to import from other countries, notably Greece.

The fault in all this lies with the Egyptian chronology, which in the last 200 years has been considered inviolate.  In itself, this chronology does account for all the required years. The problem is that some of the kings (pharaohs) about whom very little is known, around 500 years worth of these guys, are really duplicates of earlier pharaohs, but listed under their Greek names or one of their many other ones.

Would not radiocarbon dating show the errors in the dates? Very little carbon dating has been done. As one Egyptologist said, radiocarbon dating is unnecessary since we already know the date. Dating of wood gives the time when the wood was growing, not when it was cut down and used. One piece that was carbon dated, indicated that the wood was at least a hundred years later than the level it was found in. The explanation? Somehow that piece of wood got pushed down from a higher level.

Once the chronologies are realigned, everything falls into place. And there are other bonuses. The Queen of Sheba, who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, is identified as Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt. The detailed record of her visit to Punt matches the record in the Bible. The pharaoh of the exodus of the Israelites is identified, and it is not Ramses II, but Thom. There is even a record of Thom’s death in the whirlpool, the closing of the Red Sea waters as recorded in the book Exodus.

All this is detailed by Immanuel Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and His Time, The Peoples of the Sea, and in the outline drafts of two other books, The Dark Age of Greece and The Assyrian Conquest, which were unfinished at his death and may be found at www.varchive.org. While one may question his theories of major world catastrophes in our recent past, there is no doubt that he is correct on the chronologies of ancient history.

More than 50 years have passed since he first proposed bringing the chronologies into alignment, but it is going to be a long time before the error is fixed. The problem is not just human ego (i.e. a reluctance to admit one’s errors) that prevents acceptance of the new chronology; it’s the enormity of the problem.

(References to Velikovsky are appearing in my blogs around this time, since I have been rereading his works.)

Scientific Orthodoxy and Venus

Progress in science is achieved through open-minded investigation of phenomena, the acquisition of new knowledge, and the correction and integration of previous knowledge. The main obstacle to scientific progress is not general ignorance or the lack of application of the scientific method, but scientific orthodoxy. This phenomenon takes place when a certain theory, such as the current greenhouse/global warming theory, becomes so pervasive that it is unquestioningly adopted as established fact, and this “fact” is used to hinder or even stifle further progress, and prevent critical investigation of the theory or the examination of alternative theories.

History can provide many examples. I give just one. In 1912 Alfred Wegener first put forward the idea of continental drift and he later expanded it. He proposed that the continents were once joined together in a single landmass, and that they drifted apart to their present positions. This is all too familiar to us now, but Wegener met nothing but opposition, much of it extremely hostile. His proposal had come up against scientific orthodoxy. Wegener spent the rest of his life trying to find convincing proof of his theory and in the end died on one of his expeditions. Even the theory of plate junctions, proposed by Arthur Holmes in 1920, and his later suggestion that convection currents in the mantle could cause movement in the plates, did not bring about acceptance of continental drift. It was only in the late 1950s that Wegener’s theory became generally accepted. Now, of course, it has achieved the status of orthodoxy. Woe be to anyone who might come up with an alternate hypothesis!

We may have a similar situation with the planet Venus. Until the beginning of exploration in the 1960s, little was known about the planet. The common view was that it was a cold, cloudy and wet planet. C.S. Lewis’ 1943 novel Perelandia represents this understanding of the planet’s surface.

The first researcher to postulate that the surface of Venus was actually very hot was Immanuel Velikovsky in the 1940s. He was ridiculed for this, not just because it flew in the face of scientific orthodoxy, but because of his myth-based methodology, which was not acceptable to scientists. In addition, he proposed that Venus was ejected by Jupiter (which he said was also hot and a radio source). After causing some planetary havoc, Venus was finally captured in its present orbit by the sun. The suggestion of such a huge catastrophic occurrence ran in the face of Uniformitarianism, the prevailing scientific view of development and evolution. We know now that both Venus and Jupiter are very hot planets, and the Jupiter is a radio source. These facts, however, have not redeemed any of Velikovsky’s ideas.

Mariner 2 in a flyby in 1962 found that the surface was indeed extremely hot, and Venera 4, which landed on the planet in 1967, made the first accurate temperature measurement at almost 500 degrees C – a far cry from the supposed cold and wet planet. The planetary explorations of Venus have produced facts, but they have also produced theories that are not yet proven. Nevertheless, these theories are promulgated as though they are beyond all doubt. They turn up in school textbooks as facts. The planet is described as once being like the earth, but now it is covered with clouds of sulphuric acid, and its heat is the result of a runaway greenhouse effect. Almost in the same metaphoric breath, the text goes on to warn mankind that the same thing could happen here on earth if we don’t change our profligate habits.

Linking what is supposed to have happened on Venus with what might happen on Earth is a common feature in explanations of the atmosphere of Venus. It does not just happen in textbooks; it is part of the orthodoxy of Venus. This is no coincidence: the idea of a planetary greenhouse was first proposed for Venus in an attempt to explain its great heat. The term “runaway” conveniently captured the planet’s supposed descent into hellish conditions. Only later was the greenhouse idea applied to Earth.

There are some problems with the orthodox view of Venus. First of all, the impression is given, especially in the elementary school textbooks, that the atmosphere is mostly sulphuric acid, which it is not. It is actually somewhere in the order of 98 percent carbon dioxide; only the clouds are supposed to be sulphuric acid.

Questions can also be raised about the “runaway greenhouse effect”; these would probably be howled down by scientific orthodoxy. It is assumed that the planet was once like Earth. Due to factors such as its proximity to the sun and the absence of a moon, an Earth-like environment could not have happened in the first place. Venus was never like Earth. Another problem with the greenhouse idea is that Venus is entirely covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds, the most reflective natural surface in the entire solar system. These clouds very efficiently turn back heat radiation, far more efficiently than clouds do on Earth. The extreme heat of Venus is actually internally generated.

Planetary exploration of Venus is of course incomplete. Missions to return to Venus are currently in the works, and future explorations will no doubt produce evidence that will challenge and correct the shortcomings in the current orthodox view.

Venus, therefore, is not a blueprint for what might happen on Earth. There are too many assumptions in the Venus scenario to be solid evidence. Orthodoxy aside, any global warming that is taking place here on Earth, is not and cannot be a copy of whatever happened or is happening now on Venus.

Also see “A Note on Global Warming” below.

A Note of Global Warming

Today we are constantly deluged with material on climate change, some more alarming than others. Of course, there is no question that global warming has happened, but on this matter we with our usual human arrogance blame ourselves. True, we have aggravated the situation and true, we can lessen the problem, but the ultimate cause has little to do with mankind (and little to do with carbon dioxide, for that matter), just as the Little Ice Age that went from the 13th to the 18/19th century had little to do with human causes.

In the time before the Little Ice Age, the world was considerably warmer than it is now, even though the so-called greenhouse gases were very low. Here are two bits of evidence – in brief.

In England, grapes were grown throughout the country. In fact, so much wine was being made that the French complained about the influx of English wines. When the ice age began to take hold, the grape crops started to fail. People had to stop drinking wine, and turn to beer because barley (especially) and other grains did OK. As we got to the coldest time of the Little Ice Age, the years leading up to the French Revolution, even the grain crops started to fail. The French were particularly affected, because the peasants had refused to make the switch to potatoes, which were less affected. These famines contributed significantly to the revolution.

Another piece of evidence is Greenland. I have seen it suggested that Eric the Red called it “green land” to attract settlers, but this is not true. Greenland was in fact green, with luscious pastures for grazing, etc. The Greenland colony traded with Norway via ships that arrived at least once a month. After some 200 years of the colony’s existence, the climate began to change. The Little Ice Age had arrived. Snow and ice advanced, while the green fields retreated. Summers became very short. Ships could only rarely arrive through the ice bound seas. Finally, they couldn’t get through any more. The colony hung on as well as it could, but by the fifteenth century it had disappeared.

The real causes of global warming (and cooling) are of cosmic origin, as detailed in The Chilling Stars by Henrik Svensmark and increasingly verified by his subsequent work. The book is highly recommended reading.

I think the reason why Svensmark’s work is not at the forefront of discussion is threefold: (1) Svensmark is Danish, not American; (2) in the early years of awareness of climate change, any voices that appeared to be against mankind’s contribution to global warming were downplayed or attacked (Svensmark, however, supports the human contribution); and (3) the idea that humans are the cause of global warming is now so orthodox, so established, and everyone is jumping on the band wagon, that more rational investigatory voices are not being heard.

If the cause of global warming is not human, should we just go ahead on our own merry way? I think not. Apart from making sure that we adapt to climate change, the steps we are taking (or are being encouraged to take) will still be beneficial to the environment. Cutting down carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles or coal-driven power plants also cuts down other pollutants. Driving cars with better mileage, conservation and recycling—all these environmentally beneficial habits help to conserve our natural resources.