I love Japan.

While all you True Believers enjoy today’s dose of summery totty from the Land of the Rising Sun, consider also the fact that HOLY SHIT IT’S COLD.  Excerpt:

The number of days with subzero temperatures has reached record or near-record levels for many Midwest cities this winter. We have the rankings for several of these cities, starting with two locations that will log day 70 of subzero temperatures on Friday.

Note: A subzero day is one where the temperature fell below zero at any one point during a particular calendar day.

If you grew up in the upper Midwest, like yr. obdt., you’re used to cold winters.  But this year, with the jet stream still stuck somewhere around the Gulf Coast, sucking a bunch of Arctic air down across the country’s midsection, the cold is just hanging on.

And hanging on.

And on.

Now tomorrow is the first of March, and we’re still stuck in January temperatures.  Honestly, Mr. Gore, where is all this global warming?  We could use a little bit of that right now.

One thing, by the way, that’s hard to understand about the whole climate-change controversy.  The fact that the climate changes over time isn’t in doubt.  The question of how much human activity affects climate is subject to debate.  But consider this; what also isn’t in doubt is that over most of the Earth’s 4.55 billion year history, it’s been warmer than it is now.  As recently as 2,000 years ago, the Romans were growing wine grapes in Britain – an act of agronomy that requires warmer climes than those isles see today.

So who are we to say that the average climate we see today is the “correct” climate?  Who are we to say what the proper temperature is?  Just because this is where it’s been since, say, the Middle Ages?

The fact is, the planet doesn’t have any “correct” temperature.   Many factors affect climate – the Sun, volcanoes, plant life, the positions of the continents as they slide around the Earth at the rate of a fingernail growing, ocean currents and, yes, people.  And all of those factors add up to one thing – an unimaginably complex system that we can’t hope to understand completely, much less model.

And if the Earth were to warm up a few degrees?  Some bad things would happen – coastal areas in particular would have some problems.  But Siberia would blossom into an Asian breadbox.  Alaska’s Matanuska Valley would likewise bloom.

Those who would have us clamp down on all manner of economic activity, like the Keystone pipeline, in the name of “climate change” are peddling a line of buncombe.  Examine carefully their motives- it generally isn’t about science.

The other side of the unfortunate coin is this:  The unsettled question of climate change has led many – mostly on the right – to include other areas of scientific endeavor in their skepticism, whether their doubt is warranted or not.  And that’s not a good thing.

In the meantime, the deep freeze continues.

Brrr.

Meet Svante Pääbo.  Who is he and why is he interesting?  He’s the Neandertal Hunter, and he’s uncovering some fascinating new information on what makes up modern humans – at least those of us of European, Asian and Middle Eastern descent.

That information?  Neandertal DNA.  Excerpt:

Fired by his early success, Pääbo announced, in 2006, his group would sequence a full Neanderthal genome made of nuclear DNA within two years. In the end, the project was beset by tribulations – contamination, dastardly tricks by rival geneticists, dwindling supplies of Neanderthal bone – and Pääbo was more than a year late in completing the project.

His results provided a shock for both researchers and the public. When he compared his newly created Neanderthal genome with those of modern humans, he found a small but significant overlap in many of them. About 2% of Neanderthal genes could be found in people of European, Asian and far eastern origin. People from Africa had no Neanderthal genes, however. “This was not a technical error of some sort,” Pääbo insists. “Neanderthals had contributed DNA to people living today. It was amazingly cool. Neanderthals were not totally extinct.”

Most scientists, including Pääbo, now account for this result by arguing that modern humans – when they first emerged from Africa – encountered and mated with Neanderthals in the Middle East. Their offspring carried some Neanderthal genes and as modern humans swept through Asia and Europe they carried these genes with them.

There’s a down side, apart from the effect of the Neandertal genes on a couple of my cousins; as Pääbo’s work has uncovered, those genes may also be the cause of some chronic diseases:

Just what that input of Neanderthal DNA has done for Homo sapiens’s evolution is less clear. Pääbo speculates that changes in sperm mobility and alterations in skin cell structure could be involved. In addition, US researchers have recently proposed that Neanderthals passed on gene variants that may have had a beneficial effects in the past but which have now left people prone to type 2 diabetes and Crohn’s disease. “This is work that is going to go on for years,” he adds.

So what’s the upshot of these findings, when we seek to get a little insight into human behavior?  That’s simple:

Sex.  (Thus making this a great topic for a Rule Five Friday post.)

Humans like sex.  And sometimes – maybe much of the time – they aren’t too picky about who they have sex with.

The Neandertal were a controversy for many years.  Initially the preponderance of opinion was that smarter, more adaptable H. sapiens crowded the Neandertal out of Europe and the Levant.  A few enigmatic skeletons seemed to combine modern human and Neandertal features, but none of them were conclusive.

But now we have genetic evidence.   If your ancestry is European, Asian or Middle Eastern, you likely have some Neandertal DNA.  Interesting stuff.

Oh, and Pääbo’s work also uncovered an entire new species of early human – the enigmatic Denisovans.  (To be fair the discovery was made by Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, but Pääbo did the genetic analysis that established them as a distinct form.)

It’s a fascinating time to be working in paleoanthropology – or even have it as a particular interest.

This is interesting.  Not surprising, but interesting.  Popular Anti-Fracking Study Discredited by Colorado Health Department.  Relevant excerpts:

“It is difficult to draw conclusions from this study, due to its design and limitations,” Dr. Larry Wolk, CDPHE’s chief medical officer, said. “We appreciate continuing research about possible public health implications that may be associated with oil and gas operations in Colorado.

“With regard to this particular study, people should not rush to judgment.”

Why? Because the study didn’t distinguish between active wells and inactive wells. It also did not distinguish between vertical, horizontal, oil or natural gas wells.

“This makes it difficult to draw conclusions on the actual exposure people may have had,” Wolk said.

Further, the researchers never considered outside factors that may have resulted in birth defects, such as drinking or smoking.

“Without considering the effect of these personal risk factors, as well as the role of genetic factors, it is very difficult to draw conclusions from this study,” Wolk said.

Also:

The researchers noted in the study that they never bothered to check where the mother lived during conception or the first trimester. This is when most birth defects occur, so not knowing what was going on in the mother’s life at that time is a significant problem in determining whether fracking was to blame.

In other words, shoddy science.  A case in point; the study mentioned noted a decrease in birth defect among women who live closer to wells, a seeming contradiction that should have raised some alarms on the study’s methodology.  Why?

Because contradictions don’t exist.  When a seeming contradiction is found in a study of this nature, one should check their premises; one or more of them will be wrong.

Here’s the crux of this issue; there can be no absolute right or wrong answer in a policy issue of this nature.   There can only be tradeoffs.  There is a level of mess we will accept in order to increase our energy independence and lower the cost of energy.  Worried about our chronically high unemployment rate?  Stagnant tax revenues?  Runaway Federal debt? Explosion of numbers on welfare?  The answer is economic growth, and cheap energy is a supercharger for economic growth.

And no matter what side of any given issue you might take, relying on shoddy, self-contradictory  science makes for a shoddy, self-contradictory argument.