A Place to Stand

A stream bed clearly created by running water which wasn't there 5 years ago, has been found on Mars.

The photographs provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water, essential for sustaining life, exists on the barren landscape of the 4.5 billion-year-old planet. Until now, only ice had been discovered in remote polar regions, suggesting the presence of water long ago.

Experts hailed the discovery as the "holy grail" of Mars exploration. "You've heard of a smoking gun; this is what we call a squirting gun," said Professor Ken Edgett, head of a team of scientists at the California-based Malin Space Science Systems laboratory that operated the spacecraft's high-resolution camera.

"We saw there was evidence of water billions of years ago, creating channels and things like that. Today we're talking about water that exists on Mars right now. No-one expected what we have today."

It does not prove that life exists.

What this proves is that the conditions which would allow the existence of miroscopic life currently exist. Thus if life is remotely common in the universe it will exist on Mars.

It may be that life is not common. You don't have to be a believer in God to realise that the statistical chances of the self replicating chemical reactions known as life are very long even in the life time of a planet. Since we are, im terms of the timecale of evolution, a gnat's whisker from occuping the entire galaxy it seems improbable that a much more advanced lifeform exists or has existed in the last billion years. This is consistent with life being rare. If it doesn't exist on Mars, where we now know it could survive then it is rare. If it does exist on Mars it is common.

Beagle II was a vey important project a few years ago - this news makes it very much moreso.

We should be building a Beagle III (a slightly improved version of the previous one). Almost all the development work has been done so another would be much cheaper. Since it came so close to working all the politicians & ESA apparatchiks have taken over the idea but instead decided they want to spent longer & 10 times as much on their version. This is entirely the wrong approach as NASA have repeatedly proven.

George Moonbat (sorry Monbiot) said that

Good job he isn't a Moslem fundamentalist. Let alone Nick Griffin. If either of them said that they would be done for incitement to violence.

Instead he said it in that self styled "liberal" (they don't know what the word means) newspaper the Guardian. I suppose any newspaper which says that anybody who doesn't support racism & murder by a former auxiliary to Hitler's SS (Izetbegovic the Moslem fundamentalist leader in Bosnia) should be denounced as guilty of antisemitism is a strang sort of "liberal".

I suppose one must expect such friends of Nazism to incite murder instead of discussion.

Nonetheless if he is anything other than a total hypocrite he must also be on record as saying:
"Every time some African kid dies of malaria we should string up another member of one of the "environmentalist" groups who pushed the DDT ban." (about 50 million so far)

or

"Every time another pensioner dies of fuel poverty we should defenestrate one of the bastards who stopped new cheap nuclear years ago. Moonbat will do." (24,000 pensioners a year in the UK)

However since the Greens have killed more people than Hitler I think such a reaction would be a little more bloody than I could stand. I wouldn't like it but then I'm a traditional liberal not a fascist like Monbiot & the Guardianistas.

chat@channel4.com
I have, for the 2nd time been banned from the C4 News discussion group for the crimes of not accepting the guilt of Milosevic, sea level rise, that our own leaders are not war criminals & for posting on a banned subject (though I couldn't know it was banned at the time).
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Dear C4 Communities,
In response to the decision of Channel 4 to prevent my participation in your news discussion group, yet again, may I confirm that I still consider C4 to be the best news provider on terrestrial UK television, though it must be admitted the competition isn't tough. May I also thank you for this time at least having the common courtesy to confirm why I was censored. Last time I received no explanation though I suspect it was because I had dared to mention that in the ITN vs LM "concentration camp video" even the judge, in summing up for ITN confirmed that ITN had indeed faked the video representing the most important single news story ever broken by them but that LM had erred in failing to bring to their reader's attention the possibility that ITN had been accidentally faking.

I thought this unfair since I had gone to considerable lengths to say that the video was allegedly "accidentally" faked & that ITN had conceivably accidentally failed to notice when it was used wrongly to suggest the existence of a concentration camp & conceivably accidentally not noticed when George Bush used it to support illegal war & conceivable not noticed when the judge said it was faked & conceivably not noticed in each of the succeeding years when ITN did not withdraw their conceivably accidental lie.

Since this has now undeniably been brought to ITN's attention it is, of course, inconceivable that you will be unable to apologise for this allegedly accidental lie this week.

Your current gagging is because of 5 instances.

1) I disputed vociferously that Milosevic was guilty with somebody who made the most outrageous claims, repeatedly & repeatedly refused to produce evidence. I remind you that the legal position is that ANYBODY is innocent until proven guilty & that, due to his murder in custody, Milosevic remains legally innocent. Your action is thus not merely censorship but flies in the face of our legal tradition. If this is your official position C4, or its employees, could not object if somebody, for example, accused John Snow of kidnapping raping & murdering dozens of pre-schoolers purely because there is no evidence. The other disputant was not banned despite what he said being clearly hundreds of times more offensive than anything I did.

2) I accepted that a statement made by another party that there had been no blood test of Milosevic containing rifampcin represented his standard of honesty. Considering that such a test exists & did show poison I believe my remark was as restrained as possible without disputing the proven facts. Since you have said that I may rejoin if "posts of this nature will not occur again" I must ask you what form of words would be within your code & truthful at the same time?

3) I asked a disputant to withdraw the claim that we are currently experiencing a 300 foot sea level rise & the claim that Stephen McIntyre had not shown the mathematics of the Hockey Stick theory of global warming nonviable. Since we aren't & he has I ask again what form of words would be within your code & still truthful?

4) That I attempted to put up a thread relating to the massive & spectacular attack & explosions in Camp Falcon, Iraq which you decided should be censored. One of the problems with censorship is that it is, by it's nature, difficult to tell that a subject has been censored because discussion is censored. Short of C4 publishing a list of subjects censored from C4 discussion I cannot see how it would have been possible for me to pre-censor myself. If you wish me to do so in future, as you suggest, I must ask for specific advice.

5) I referred to Ms Clare Short as an "obscene racist Nazi war criminal". Firstly it is a matter of law that anybody involved in planning or launching an aggressive war is a war criminal, as I proved she had done & the other points were similarly proven (& have not been disputed by you). Even if it is the case of C4 that people should not mention the effects of the law what I said about Ms Short was not as grave a criticism as that of a member of the racial "Untermensch" (i.e. ex-President Milosevic) about whom neither C4 nor anybody else has produced serious evidence. If, as you say, you wish me to stay within your guidelines, it is necessary for you to produce your guidelines. About whom, other than former cabinet members, is it impermissible to ever mention proven criminal activities. About which racial groups, other than the "Untermensch" (Slavs, Jews, Gypsies) is any sort of libel, no matter how obscene, to be supported by C4?

I would like it to be possible for myself, or indeed others of conscience, to participate on the C4 discussion group. I am prepared to avoid telling truths which C4 finds politically unacceptable but am not willing to lie. If you can answer these points about your guidelines it may be possible to progress.

Neil Craig

This letter was in the Scotsman a few days ago from Jim Sillars, who broke away from UK Labourto form the Scottish Labour Party & later joinrd the SNP

According to Canon Kenyon Wright (Letters, 23 November), there is to be no more discussion about the claims of the global warming brigade that will destroy the planet. But are we really to take him seriously when he calls for an end to any scientific debate?

We hear time and again that manmade is the cause of global warming. Yet it is an extremely small share of greenhouse gases and that the man-made content is minuscule, 0.117 per cent; that water vapour represents 95 per cent of such gases, with 99.9 per cent of it not man-made.

Take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's claim, based on model assumptions, that warming during the 20th century was entirely caused by man-made emissions. That may be true, but it may not be, because other climate scientists put forward the proposition that the cause could lie in land-use changes, particularly the explosion in urban development worldwide and deforestation.

Given the differences in opinion among scientists, the case for and against global warming by humans is not proven, and that more, not less, open debate is required.

JIM SILLARS
Grange Loan
Edinburgh

This was in response to the 2nd of 2 letters from Canon Kenyon Wright putting the Christian view - that global warming is the new armageddon & to avoid it we must all put on hair shirts & nobody discuss heretical ideas about us not heading for catastrophe.

Good to see Mr Sillars willing to put his head above the parapet like this while the numpties of Holyrood follow the catastrophe line. He also appears to have had an intellectual conversion to the sort of free marketism I support -"Jim Sillars argues that the left no longer offers a credible vision for an independent Scotland, and the centre-right, free-market ideology advocated by the SNP is the only way....it might only be the SNP's centre-right economic guru, Jim Mather, who is putting forward ideas for the future of an independent Scotland"

The Canon's first letter was in response to a short letter of mine & was replied to by 2 puting the sceptical line, to which he again replied which Mr Sillars & another letter from Dr Lindsay. If you have been following the online comments the debate where contributions are not subject to editorial policy, the response has been even more onesidedly sceptical. Progress is clearly being made.

My previous unprinted response to the Canon's first letter has already been put up here. This is my 2nd unprinted reply (basically a shortened version of the first) but I am happy since Sillars' words carry more weight than mine.

Canon Kenyon Wright's letters ( 9 & 23 Nov.), originally in response to mine ( 1 Nov.) have been certain of the existence of "scientific consensus" on warming because Al Gore has produced a book (which came out 10 years ago) & film. He did not comment on my previous mention of the Oregon Petition to which 17,100 scientists put their name against the claims of catastrophic warming. It seems that those loudest in claims of a scientific consensus are politicians, journalists & indeed theologians but the existence of this petition & organisations such as the very eminent Professor Singer's SEPP prove that the "consensus", as with so many consensii is not as wide as proponents say.

More important than the opinions of the "great & good", more important even than the opinions & computermodels of scientists, are the facts. It is a fact that since 1999 the world has not got warmer.

We are told "no past rate of warming comes anywhere near that of the present" but climatologists, historians & archaeologists agree that the Medieval Warming was as warm as now & the Late Roman (when grapes grew at York) probably significantly warmer. Sea levels are still only increasing at about 0.6mm a year as they have since the last ice age. The Hockey Stick theory of a current sudden sharp increase, of which both the IPCC & Gore made extensive use, has been shown to be mathematically flawed in that almost whatever figures are fed in out pops the same prediction,

That it took an independent sceptical researcher Stephen McIntyre to actually check the maths after the IPCC had been using it for years is not indicative of good science not being on the sceptical side.

Finally the Canon's previous letter included a plea that even if warming can't be proved we should take drastic (Kyoto has been costed at $400 million a day) action on the "precautionary principle". Of course under this same principle we should be currently forced to take equally drastic action to protect us from global cooling which used to be the "environmentalist's" bete noire. To be fair, this would not be as impossible as it sounds since their patent remedy for an ice age was ending air flights, pollution & modern technology generally - exactly the same as their remedy for warming. The "precautionary principle", in its current extreme form, once defined by the late Sir Humphrey Appleby as "while many things should be done nothing should ever or done for the first time" is merely the institutionalisation of Luddism (& civil service practice) & should be treated with suspicion.

The climate has always moved up & down, up normally being better, & those who wish to panic us into more restrictions & higher taxes are doing us no favours.