De la Creation Research

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5. MORE AUSSIE FOSSILS IN SOUTH AMERICA, according to Fossil Science 15 January 2014 and ScienceDaily 9 January 2014. Scientists from USA and Argentina have found fossils of Kauri Pines in two sites in Patagonia, Argentina. One site, Laguna del Hunco is dated at 52.2 million years old, and the other, Río Pichileufú is dated as 47.7 million years old. The fossils consist of leaves, branches, pollen cones, and seed cones, including a winged seed still attached to a cone. These enabled scientists to compare them to living Kauri Pines. The botanical name for Kauri Pines is Agathis. According to Peter Wilf of Penn State University, “There is a fossil record of Agathis in Australia and New Zealand, where it still lives. However, Agathis fossils have never been found anywhere else until now, and they have never been as complete as these”. Living Kauri Pines are found in Queensland (Australia), New Guinea, Borneo, New Zealand and some western Pacific islands, and the new fossils are most similar to a species in Borneo. Kauri pines will grow in South America, as some have been imported and planted. Wilf suggests they once grew across Australia, Antarctica and South America but “Climate change in Antarctica – the cold and ice – killed them there, and a change to seasonal dryness in southern South America put an end to them in Patagonia”.

Links: Fossil Science, ScienceDaily

ED. COM. Several points can be made: The fossils were able to be identified as Kauri pines because they are the same as living Kauri Pines. Therefore, these trees have reproduced after their kind, just as Genesis says, from the time the fossils were formed until the present. Evolution does not work as an explanation at all. The only change in Kauri Pines is that they once grew more widely across the world, but due to degeneration of the environment they are now more restricted. Genesis 1:31 tells us all that God made was “very good,” so earth’s first climate would have been mild and pleasant worldwide. None of the cold and ice or seasonal dryness, so today’s tropical and subtropical trees could have lived all over the world. However, following the worldwide flood God told Noah there would be times of cold and heat, and by the time of Job there was ice and snow, and periods of drought. These extremes of climate caused Kauri pines to die off in many places, and only survive where there was sufficient warmth and moisture. This is natural selection at work, but it is not evolution. Natural selection is a real process, but it is the result living things struggling to survive in a world going downhill, not a process that produces new and more abundant living things. (Ref. botany, trees, conifers, palaeontology, palaeobotany)

6. ONE HOUR TO MAKE CRUDE OIL reports the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory News, 17 December 2013 and Algal Research, 29 September 2013, DOI: 10.1016/j.algal.2013.08.005. Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, Washington state, USA, have developed a process that converts algae into crude oil in one hour. Algae have already been used as raw material for producing biofuels, but previous processes have used dried algae, and involve using organic solvents, such as hexane, to extract oils. Drying the algae takes much energy, making the process expensive and inefficient. The new process starts with an algal slurry, described by PNNL News as “a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup”, which can be 80 to 90 percent water, and does not need the solvents. Instead, the PNNL researchers use hot water at high pressure to fragment the algae and convert most of the biomass into liquid and gas fuels. The process is called hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) and runs at temperatures around 350 degrees C and a pressure of 20 MPa. The crude oil that results can be then refined into usable fuels, such as aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. The process also produces fuel gas, which can be made into natural gas or burned in an electricity generator. It also produces water and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which can be recycled and used to grow more algae. Douglas Elliott, who led the research team explained: “It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher. In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster”.

Link: PNNL News

ED. COM. In spite of these engineers’ belief in millions of years, their own experiments are proof that time does not create fossil fuels, process does. The temperature and pressure involved in the PNNL process may be greater than a kitchen pressure cooker, but they are possible in the natural world with a combination of volcanic activity and rapid deep burial of organic matter, which would have first occurred when the fountains of the great deep broke open at the beginning of Noah’s flood. Prior to Noah’s flood, in the original “very good world”, there would have been an abundance of algae, (which includes seaweed as well as microscopic plants that make up the green sludge we normally think of as algae) in the seas, lakes and rivers, so there would have been plenty of raw material to be transformed by heat and pressure as one of the first blessings for the future to come out of God’s judgement on our past. (Ref. organic chemistry, time)

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7. COLOURFUL CHAMELEON LANGUAGE, described in reports in ScienceDaily, ABC News in Science 11 December 2013 and Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.089. Chameleons are well known for their ability to rapidly change their skin colours, but contrary to popular belief, this cannot be solely for camouflage, as such colour changes often make them more conspicuous. Russell Ligon and Kevin McGraw from Arizona State University studied the rapid changes in colours of male chameleons when they confronted one another. They reported their results as: “Males that achieved brighter stripe coloration were more likely to approach their opponent, and those that attained brighter head coloration were more likely to win fights; speed of head colour change was also an important predictor of contest outcome”. The researchers found the colour changes involved complex communication with different body regions conveying different information, and the rate of colour change, as well as the vividness of the colours, being an important part of the communication. Ligon and McGraw suggest this signalling helps avoid actual physical fights between mismatched opponents who are competing for territory and females. Ligon explained: “By using bright colour signals and drastically changing their physical appearance, the chameleons’ bodies become almost like a billboard – the winner of a fight is often decided before they actually make physical contact. The winner is the one that causes its opponent to retreat. While sometimes they do engage in physical combat, these contests are very short – 5 to 15 seconds. More often than not, their colour displays end the contest before they even get started”. He also commented: “It’s definitely a social signal. Most extreme changes in colour are to make chameleons more conspicuous rather than for camouflage”.

Links: ABC, ScienceDaily

ED. COM. It has been known for a long time the chameleon colour changes occur with many factors such as temperature, light, the presence of the opposite sex, and anger or fear, rather than being camouflage. This is an interesting example of how education and educators perpetuate myths in spite of observations proving them wrong. According to Karl Kruszelnicki, “The myth (of camouflage) first appeared in print around 240BC, when the Greek, Antigonus of Carystus, first mentioned it. But we have no idea exactly how he came to this conclusion. You see, a whole century earlier, the Greek thinker Aristotle got it right when he wrote that the chameleon’s colour change could be related to fear”. (See Great Moments in Science, 9 December 2008.) We, the editors, suspect the myth has been preserved over the last century, because it suits the evolutionary world view of the struggle for existence and survival by aggression or hiding, in spite of scientific research showing the opposite. Consider chameleons from a Biblical perspective. In the beginning the world was very good, which meant no struggle or aggression. Chameleon colours would therefore have helped maintain body temperature, and served as a means of communication without any aggression at all. In a well-balanced ecology, animals could have had territory and attracted mates without any fighting at all. As the world degraded after the Fall of Man and Noah’s flood, resources became scarier, animal behaviour degenerated, and some animals resorted to physical aggression to survive and compete for mates. The creature that used to change its colour purely for attraction, can now use its brains to choose to use this ability to break up its outline and become invisible or camouflaged. Natural selection? Yes. Evolution? No. (Ref. reptiles, pigmentation, communication)

8. FLEXIBLE FORAGING FOR POLAR BEARS, reported in ScienceDaily 22 December 1013 and BMC Ecology 21 December 2013. Polar Bears are well known for going out on the sea ice to hunt ringed seal pups, but what do they eat during the ice free season? Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have studied the feeding habits of polar bears in the western Hudson’s Bay region during the ice free periods, and found they are developing “flexible foraging strategies while on land, such as prey-switching and eating a mixed diet of plants and animals”. The researchers found the bears prey on snow geese and caribou, and also eat snow geese eggs. As part of their research the scientists examined the scats (droppings) of the bears and noted 84.9% of the scats contained at least one type of plant. The most common plants consumed were Lyme grass seed heads (Leymus arenarius), berries and marine algae (seaweed). The researchers concluded the bears were “foraging opportunistically in a manner consistent with maximizing intake while minimizing energy expenditure associated with movement”. The scientists also suggested the omnivorous diet had other benefits such as providing vitamins and minerals, diluting toxins and “assessing new foods for potential switching”. The researchers suggest polar bears are able to eat a mixed diet because they share a genetic heritage with brown bears.

Links: ScienceDaily, BMC Ecology

ED. COM. Having done expeditions into the cold wilds of Alaska this editor can confirm that all the blue poo we look for to tell us what bears are around comes from their digesting blueberries, and the strands of roughage in it are from grass which they eat with their “carnivorous teeth”. These new research results also fly in the face of the global warming activists’ predictions that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct because they won’t be able to hunt seal pups on the non-existent melted sea ice. In fact, this research confirms what people who live with polar bears have known all along, i.e. polar bears are opportunistic feeders, and they will eat whatever is available. Genesis tells us in the beginning all animals ate plants so the dark bear ancestors of polar bears would have done very well on a diet of plant food. After Noah’s flood the environment degenerated, and snow and ice came to the world. Animals degenerated and lost their pigment and retreated to the arctic snow fields for “camouflage”, could no longer live exclusively on plant foods, as plants don’t grow in the almost perpetual winter. Therefore, they ate whatever they could catch and eat. Polar bears were able to eat seals because they can move over the ice, they are big bullies, and they also have almost no competition to catch baby seals. But when there is no ice they can, and will, survive quite well, and at present despite the gore of the climate change/global warmists, the POLAR Bears are increasing in number. (Ref. diet, climate, Ursus maritimus)

9. AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: We are sure you saw the well publicised plight of the climate researchers whose ship was trapped in Antarctic ice over the Christmas/New Year period, and had to be rescued by helicopter. It was supposedly following the voyage of polar explorer Douglas Mawson a century ago. However, Mawson did not get trapped in the ice. There were numerous reports in the media, but we think the Australian Daily Telegraph summed it up best: “Global warming activists still trapped by inconvenient ice”. Daily Telegraph, 1 Jan 2014.

SEE THE FUNNY SIDE OF CLIMATE IN NEW TOON – click.