Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”
Afterward, according to science, the dinosaurs took 100,000 years to die off — a “heartbeat” in geological time, we’re told. But 100,000 years is an eternity in a dinosaur’s time. It still doesn’t make sense.
Grab a coffee. (And then marvel at the lack of self-awareness in the concluding paragraphs.)
I fail to see why the two theories are mutually exclusive? Keller’s min-critters were allegedly dying out for 300K yrs. prior to the mass extinction; so what? How does that make the asteroid impact a non-event??? And vice-versa.
If the claim is that an asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction, and someone presents evidence that the extinction was already occurring BEFORE the impact, then it WASN’T THE IMPACT! The impact was just coincidental.
Pete; “If the claim is that an asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction, and someone presents evidence that the extinction was already occurring BEFORE the impact, then it WASN’T THE IMPACT! ”
There are always some species dying off; that’s not the same thing as a mass extinction. Not even close.
pete….NOPE
Mutual theories don’t attract government and/or University funding.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to find funding for a study that theorizes Co2 can rise sharply, while the planet remains within “normal” ranges of temperature. Nope. Heresy!! Heretic!!!
..doesn’t sell ‘news’ either
latest science documentary I watched suggested that it was the difference of a matter of minutes, teensy time lapse compared, the yucatan asteroid would have hit deep water and far far less of the huge atmospheric dust cloud of pulverized rock.
when are the leftosaurs going extinct?
It takes a lot more faith to believe this hooey than it does to believe the Bible account.
You should look up the definition of faith. It is the opposite of logic and evidence based reasoning.
Hardly. Faith is the application of logic and evidence-based reasoning. A child doesn’t have to test everything its parents forbid them from doing, like putting forks in wall sockets and touching hot surfaces. After awhile, a child has faith that its parents have his/her best interest at heart.
Lol no it’s not, stop fooling yourself
Definition of faith
plural faiths play \ˈfāths, sometimes ˈfāt͟hz\
1 a : allegiance to duty or a person
One could choose a different definition, but this is the first one commonly listed.
watto, faith is an emotion, and fMRI studies show that religious belief actually shuts down the part of the brain were logic is processed
You just proved his point. By stating your faith in academic studies instead of your own personal experience with faith. The faith in academic authority that you just now showed. The exact same faith in the example given of a child heeding his parents.
That’s because the Bible texts were written down, long before man had become so ‘advanced’ that he (Xe, for my Canadian Friends) actually ‘believed’ he (Xe) held the power over life and death of the planet. So much of this science extends from the arrogance of our newly-discovered know-it-all mentality.
Man(person)kind’s ‘theories’ of the (scientific) origin of life have existed for less than one thousand, thousandth, of a millisecond of geologic time. Yet we have still not developed the ability to add one cubit to our own mortal lives (although Google is promising to deliver Godlike eternal life) Yes, we have many reasons for feeling so confident. Because we’ve sufficiently tamed our environment to no longer be lying in the bush, coving ourselves with branches for warmth … for, oh the last few thousand years. We even invented the printing press with which to propagate our ‘theories’ wayyyy back 700 years ago. We discovered cheap, plentiful, energy allllll the way back in the 1800’s! We formed Universities where the most advanced of the advanced thinkers congregated allll the way back in the 1600’s! Yes, mankind (personhood) has been so advanced, for so long, that WE are now the CENTER of the Universe. We’ve tamed heaven and earth, and placed ourselves on a cushy, padded faux-Ermine lined throne (no animals were harmed in my analogy).
We’ve become so clever, that the complex and convoluted language of (some) science has become more ponderous than life’s great riddle itself. Scientists seek to out-science each other with ever more clever algorithms of life. Yet … nature remains elegantly simple. Nature is stripped of all extraneous bits that serve no functional purpose. Everything is symmetrical and balanced. Two eyes, ears, arms, legs. Spheres, and branching tributaries dominate the patterns of life. If the earth warms … feedback loops return the planet to stasis. In the midst of this elegant … natural … simplicity, man has created a labyrinth of complicated formulae and language.
And there sits the the Bible. First thing mass-printed on the Gutenberg press. Elegant, and simple … in the allegorical language written in men’s and women’s hearts (sorry, xe’s … you’re a genetic defect). Never intended as a scientific text (sorry, Christian ‘Scientists’), but as simple communication between God and mankind. A text that describes life in the most simple and essential simplicity … when read for ‘content’ and ‘intent’ … not as a legalistic bludgeon. Christ was necessary to remind mankind HOW to read and understand this allegorical user manual … to find the intent and deep meaning of the texts and not as dismembered bits and pieces.
That is why the ancient text resonates in a way that ‘science’ rarely does. It is simple, essential, knowledge and understanding. But as nature instructs, “simple”, and “essential” is hardly to be mocked by arrogant know-it-all’s. All TRUTH returns to simplistic formulae … E=mc2.
Well said.
I’d posit that most of the Bible is not allegorical, and that it is a scientific text.
When evidence appears to contradict the Bible, I’d take a closer look at the evidence. Especially at those presenting the evidence.
Far too often, you’ll find a Jesuit.
I’d posit that you’re delusional.
yah watto, it rained 40 daz and 40 nites, butt the bible forgot to tell you that all that moisture in the atmosphere would make air so “heavy” that it killed all the animals and people on the ark. The bible is mostly bullshiite, with a sprinkling of facts
James Delingpole “It’s not science I don’t trust – it’s the scientists”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/its-not-science-i-dont-trust-its-the-scientists/
Via
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/why-the-paris-agreem
Agreed. Science is an active, ongoing pursuit of truth and understanding. A scientist is prone to bias introduced into science.
The Bible is a text of truth and understanding. A Priest, Pastor, or Religion is prone to bias superceeding the text.
kenji, the bibles authors are suspect for the same reasons scientists are suspect. Most of the bible is written so long after the fact, that the authors were not alive during the event. The rest was written 20 years or more after the fact and that is long past the “accuracy” of the minds ability to remember accurately. Hell, ask some who observes and accident happen, what happened about 20 minutes after the event, and you are lucky to get an answer that is 50% accurate
NME, my friend … an excellent, irrefutable Point. However, just as with human genius (or the improbable election of Donald J Trump as “savior” of America) … I believe that God is able to inspire thought in mortal man. To communicate with mortal man. Yeah … I know … I might as well “believe” in ghosts or fairies you will say. Except, in my own life I have experienced moments of thoughtful clarity that have turned my life in a re-vectored positive direction, and had multiple, random people, under random circumstances, come into my life and quite literally SAVE me from overwhelming circumstances. All of this while my own parents and childhood were shit. Followed by young adulthood which was even shittier, which included the untimely death of my older brother who was my rock of stability, and sudden-out-of-nowhere divorce from my first wife (who quite literally turned into a completely different person overnight), poverty, etc. Yet in the midst of all this … I have felt God, quite literally, speak to me. Encourage me. Help me. … in very practical and physical ways. God has revealed himself (xeself…*snicker*) in so many ways as to make disbelief intellectually untenable.
Forgive me for “witnessing” to you as I am not really the proselytizing kind. I am just a hardcore pragmatist who has made it through life by confronting TRUTH at every turn.
I always ask people the following. What would you sooner believe, that you are a piece of meat the result of unproven theory, or a being that has the potential to become immortal based on a belief? One you are in the ground and worm food, the other you leave the body and become something wonderful and immortal? Looks like captcha is not recognizing names or email addresses. Oh well.
I refuse to read that much without 3 hours of college credit.
I admit … I got thru about 5-pages of the unnecessary novel-ization of this story … then skipped ahead to the last idiotically-preachy. self-unaware, paragraph … to realize the author’s bias and intent. Silly Warmists. They think themselves so clever … while failing to recognize their own ignorant inability to connect the dots.
Very interesting article. Keller has a lot of facts and supporting data on her side. Always amazed how supposedly intelligent scientists refuse to even consider the basic tenet of science which is nothing is ever totally proven, it is always open to new theories and facts. How stupid for them to attack Keller for daring to challenge Alvarez’s theory.
By the way the Maldives are to be underwater in 2018, New York’s subways were to be flooded by the rising oceans in 2003. The Arctic ice is to have disappeared this year and on and on.
And none of that was supposed to happen, because we were all to have died in the worldwide (fill in the blank) food, energy, water WARS before the turn of the millennia.
There’s a difference between the fissure eruptions we’ve witnessed in modern times and what formed the Deccan Traps. The Deccan Traps are one of the largest volcanic formations on the planet. A half-million square kilometers, two kilometers thick. And that’s what’s left of it after 65 million years of erosion. Imagine a volcanically active area half the size of India.
There’s a pretty big shithole near India – its called Pakistan.
Heh.
The AGW religion and its practitioners never let facts get in the way of their smear, scare, and fear campaign to redistribute wealth and control everyone’s lives.
There are a lot of unsupported assumptions in Keller’s theory, too. Fissure eruptions are usually relatively placid events, as volcanic eruptions go. Very fluid lava wells up, and floods out over the ground. Not terribly explosive at all. And then when she starts quacking about global warming, and man-made self extinction in the last paragraph, that sort of calls into question her judgement.
I am not a scientist, but am always amazed by the mysteries written in the layers of rock around us.
History written in the layers
I agree. I can’t help but marvel every time we drive through an area like that.
One of my favorite classes at UC Berkeley had us take field trips to local freeway cuts into the sedimentary schists … later upon layer distinctly laid down and upset on edge … there to study, plain as day. Right next to the freeway cut at the Caldecott tunnel. Amazing. Lots of fossilized sea bed life, snails everywhere. Reminding us that California may become a vast inland sea … again … after the San Andreas cleaves the State off the mainland … ha ha ha
@2:01 foobert
Beauty in the layers of time! I lost my balance and almost fell when I was there last year in that same spot. I guess that happened because of shock and awe as in a happy kind of ‘good madness.’ It is so beautiful that one goes completely silent and is most compelled to just take it all in. (Yes there is a God… and in all of Creation) Also visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology which has a Center of Research with it’s collection of more than 130,000 fossils. It is very interesting, and awesome!
No. The Science is never settled. It is not a Court case.
foobert, and only flood waters layer sediments that way. We had a massive flood where I live about 5 years ago and the waters separated and sorted all the rocks on a nearby island that was totally covered with rushing waters. When the waters receded, we found piles of really big, big, medium and small, all sorted as if organized by OCD team.
The Deccan eruptions covered a large area, much larger than a normal fissure eruption. What effect did they have on climate? Who really knows.
Agree with you on global warming. The earth has been a lot warmer, and a lot colder than it is now. Those who say any of this is settled science do not know what science is.
It amazes me how a simple debate over the cause of an extinction will result in scientists actually fighting, trying to ruin careers, and silencing anyone who disagrees, instead of merely putting your own theory forward for anyone to judge. Given that neither event has happened again in 65 million years, an argument with a friend over who will win the next Stanley Cup has more relevance to most of us, yet rarely results in attempts to cause your buddy to lose his job. It also demonstrates the big problem with CAGW. It isn’t enough for them to propose a theory, they also need to silence and ruin anyone who doesn’t fully agree.
Agreed. The article had me enthralled until near the end when it turned out to be nothing but an ad for AGW/Climate Change.
“…chartreuse rice paddies…”
chartreuse
No need or desire to read further than that.
I had to ‘Google’ that color … *snicker*
Chartreuse= shit-brindle green
So all science advances via lies, backbiting, slander and ad hominem, it’s not just climate science.
Got as far as chapter 3 and got hungry and thirsty and …
Asteroid Impact vs Deccan Volcanism ? And climate change?
Propagandist mutter…? Now I’ll have to finish the piece!!
and reciting Al Gores stupid poem while showsing the world going ka blooiiee
“Keller sees a bleak future when she looks at our present.”
Based on what, exactly?
One hundred years ago the Great War was grinding on and the Spanish flu was beginning to sweep across the globe. Compared to that – and the horrors of the war that followed it in 1939 – things look pretty good at present. Such conflicts as there are now, are limited in scope. And even the Third World is doing better over all.
People who worry on a vast scale about “the future of the world” seem to lack any sense of proportion.* I find that they are invariably either cranks or neurotics or fanatics. Or all three.
* Or humility, for that matter. No, Ms Keller, there is nothing you can do at all about whatever mankind might decide to do a century from now.
So. Very. True.
I think it was Jordan Peterson who made an interesting point of distinction between science and a cult having to do with how they handle doubt. A true scientist will always entertain doubt, even encourage it. It’s the core of science — constantly questioning and modifying. By contrast a cult sees doubt as anathema. Cultists will fly into apoplectic rages if their dogma is doubted and call for the silencing of anyone doubting the received wisdom of the cult. It probably has to do with the strength of evidence supporting the belief system. A robust system founded in the laws of nature open to direct observation and testing will stand up quite well to intense scrutiny, a flimsy dogma — not so much. It’s one of the (many) issues I have with CAGW — the ferocity with which its adherents attempt to silence anyone criticizing or even so much as asking difficult questions of the belief system.
Sheesh … still another reason to admire J.Peterson’s keen intellect and bold communication style. I agree 100%. And I believe one of my favorite groups … The Spiritual Counterfeits Project would agree.
http://scp-inc.org/
Yes, he does have a way of cutting through the cultist verbiage of all sorts in a way all are able to understand.
There’s science and there’s scientism. When scientists moralize over science, they’re engaging in the latter.
(Science doesn’t care whether you use nuclear technology to produce electricity or use it to build ballistic missiles. That silly “Doomsday Clock” touted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board is perhaps the most longstanding example of scientism there is.)
In the 1960s the left was saying that if our population exceeded 3 billion we’d have massive starvation. We are now over 7 billion, and fewer people are starving than in 1960.
Gotta love these leftist “scientists”.
Personally I prefer engineers – they spend their time actually solving problems.
joe, I’v worked with a lot of engineers, and don’t agree with you all that much. Engineers can be real a$$holes:-)))
This is a story I’ve read before, albeit different players.
“Egyptologists” so cemented in their belief that a stone age civilization built a monument on the Giza plateau to a precision that we have yet to equal today AND left no record of how they did it. To challenge their theories with solid geological evidence is to become a pariah, chastised and beaten down with all the fervour the SJW employ – in an “academic” theatre of course.
Kenji does touch on where the correct answers lie, however I would venture the Bible alone isn’t a complete source of unbiased reference material. Once you compile enough scripture, myths and legends from as many cultures as possible from around the planet, then you will begin to see a clearer picture of this planet’s ancient past.
Human vanity clouds our critical thinking just enough for us to believe that this civilization is the best and only this spinning rock has seen, reality is we’re just above a pimple on a gnat’s ass so far this go around….
I’m going out on a limb here and accept that The Bible isn’t the only source of God’s wisdom imparted to mankind. Sorry … but I believe that MY GOD who says … “nobody comes to the father but through me” is even larger still than Biblical texts. I detect God’s hand/voice in many other cultural and spiritual traditions. God has even revealed himself in nature, and in the elegance of science, math, and physics … as St. Paul wrote (via God’s inspiration) …
Romans 1:20 New International Version (NIV)
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse
Sorry … my apologies for quoting Bible verses here. It’s not my style. And implied in the text … it’s not God’s style either.
Dreck.
So basically what she is saying is we have about 100,000 year to come up with solutions and technology that will keep us from going extinct.
Dinosaurs could not do that, did not have big enough brains.
We went from candle light and horse buggy to remote controlled robot sent to land on mars in less than 100 years, and GPS, and cell phones, and heart transplants and a million other things
I think we will be fine
I’m placing my wager on mankind to “survive” a more comfy planet … but not before literally multiple $Trillions are spent trying to convince people otherwise. What a SHOCKING waste of money.