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Jarrah rants through nine minutes of Exhibit D, Part 1 and Part 2, building his case that
the scientific community has been blind for 40 years to the existence of water in NASA's
moon rocks.
His parade of "scientists" who say there is no water in NASA's moon rocks include the
infamous RedZero, whose website no longer exists; the apparent moon rock expert and
YouTuber, MrCraig41; and Jarrah's favorite three antagonists, Phil Plait, Jay Windley,
and Robert Braeunig.
Then he attempts to prove them all wrong using nothing less than a space.com article.
Jarrah: It is simply false to say that the lunar samples contain no water.
On July 9th, 2008, space.com announced that "water has been found conclusively for the
first time inside ancient moon samples brought back by Apollo astronauts.
The discovery may force scientists to rethink the lunar past and future."
The operative word in the space.com title is "samples."
Water was found in moon "samples."
This space.com article covers a report published in Nature magazine on July 10, 2008.
Several other scientific news services also covered this report.
Scientific America named their article, "Lunar Lava Beads Show Moon Once Harbored Water."
Chemical and Engineering News titled their article "Moon Glass Contains Water."
Oddly, Jarrah found a cover on this story with possibly the most ambiguous title,
one that did not include the words "glass" or "beads."
The space.com article doesn't make that particular distinction until the second paragraph.
These volcanic beads, or spherules, were ejected from the lunar volcanoes as tiny droplets of molten
glass that quickly cooled on the outside, forming a smooth eggshell-like container,
trapping the water and other goodies on the inside to cool later, while keeping unwanted
environmental contaminants out.
Such spherules are found in the lunar regolith and range in diameter from 2 micrometers to
several millimeters.
Since they formed in the low lunar gravity, many of them are perfect spheres, unlike their
counterparts on earth.
The first fallacy that Jarrah uses here is called "cherry picking," choosing a statement,
or in this case an article title, that is most favorable to his claim.
Jarrah: Interestingly, it seems that the space.com article is nothing new.
In February 2001, Dr. Mark Norman, of the University of Tasmania had this to say when
interviewed for "Science at NASA."
"Lunar samples have almost no water [trapped] in their crystal structure."
Jarrah: There is a huge difference between "almost no water" and "no water."
When I first saw this article, it seemed odd to me that the scientific community could
have missed the presence of water all these years.
And, with Dr Norman's statement, long predating this discovery, we have to conclude that NASA
and the propagandists have known all these years about the water in the moon rocks and
they intentionally misled the public into believing otherwise.
This excerpt is a veritable tsunami of misinformation that contains at least three different logical
fallacies.
First, inferring that since these volcanic spherules contain water, then ALL moon rocks
must contain water is called a fallacy of composition.
The 276 spherules examined by Alberto Saal and his colleagues at Brown University, make
up only a few grams of the total haul that the Apollo astronauts brought back from the
lunar surface.
And because of their structure, they are the least permeable of all the samples to water
that may have been introduced from terrestrial sources.
Although this finding indicates that water may exist - or at one time existed - deep
in the lunar interior, you cannot deduce from this article alone that ALL moon rocks contain
measurable water.
Second, the fact that scientists had not previously found conclusive evidence of water in these
tiny spherules wouldn't have seemed so odd to Jarrah if he had just read halfway through
the space.com article, because it clearly explains, in plain English, that this discovery
was made possible by recent improvements in detection methods.
The article states that for the past 40 years, the limit for detecting water in any geological
samples was 50 ppm.
Now, with the aid of secondary ion mass spectrometry, they can detect the presence of water down to 5 ppm.
That means that nobody over the past 40 years has lied when they've said that there is no
measurable water in moon rocks.
And as of July 2008, when this space.com article was published, the only measurable water that
had been detected in lunar "samples" not previously attributed to contamination was in these tiny
volcanic spherules.
Ignoring facts that are staring him right in the face is a tactic that Jarrah uses quite
often - the fallacy of omission.
Third, Dr. Marc Norman's statement in the 2001 NASA article, "The Great Moon Hoax,"
that "lunar samples have ALMOST no water trapped in their crystal structure," does not blow
the whistle on any NASA cover-up.
All you need to do is look back to when the moon rocks first arrived on earth.
From the very beginning, scientists had detected trace water in the moon rocks brought back
by the Apollo astronauts.
But, since those rocks contained no mica, clay minerals, or hydrous iron oxides, minerals
that would be present if water had actually played a part in their formation, it was assumed
that the trace water was contamination that had leaked into the containers used to house
the moon rocks during their long trip from the moon to Houston.
Some scientists like Dr. Norman mention this trace water, while other scientists dismiss
it because other indicators suggested it was not of lunar origin.
Jarrah basically builds a straw man argument that NASA and the scientific community at
large have been trying to hide the existence of water in moon rocks for forty years but
occasionally someone like Dr. Norman slips and exposes the cover-up.
This is absurd.
Nobody is hiding anything.
In fact, Friedman, Gleason, and Hardcastle presented one of the first reports discussing
the presence of water in lunar materials at the Apollo 11 Lunar Science Conference in
January 1970.
And their report was subsequently published in February 1970.
It's kind of hard to keep something a secret when you present a report on it at a conference
in front of your peers and the press and later publish it.
So much for Jarrah's first straw man of the series.
If you're interested, you'll find a link to this fascinating report in the sidebar for
this video.
Jarrah: But as we've just learned, there is water in those rocks, meaning there is no big
difference between moon rocks and earth materials.
Of course, using this logic, you could say that there's no big difference between spaghetti and
lima beans.
They both contain water.
Don't they?
Obviously, that's a wrong assumption.
Jarrah's hasty conclusion, that moon rocks are identical to earth materials simply because
they both contain water, or any single characteristic for that matter, is a fallacy of equivalence
and Jarrah uses this tactic boldly throughout his entire Exhibit D series.
The truth is that the lunar spherules contain only 40 to 70 ppm of water compared to about
750 ppm or more in their terrestrial cousins.
This is a BIG quantitative difference.
Also, the trace water detected in the lunar basalts when they first arrived on earth amounts
to less than 0.01% by weight, compared to 0.2% to 1% by weight for their terrestrial
cousins, another BIG quantitative difference.
So clearly, earth rocks and moon rocks cannot be construed to be identical based on their
water content alone.
After Jarrah published his Exhibit D series, this space.com article was updated to reflect
the findings from the Cassini, Chandrayaan-1 and Deep Impact spacecraft, which have remotely
detected the same signature of water, or at least hydroxyl, on the lunar surface that
was originally detected in the Apollo moon rocks.
Sadly, for Jarrah, this quantitative finding only serves to validate the Apollo moon rocks
as having come from nowhere else but the equatorial region of moon.
So, what have we learned?
Well, we've learned that you can't point at every scientist and geologist who over the
past 40 years has said that moon rocks have no measurable water in them, call them all
liars, and then provide a source as evidence that says they had no way to measure it.
And suggesting that moon rocks are "identical" to earth rocks, simply because they both contain
water, in far different proportions, is nothing short of obfuscation.
Oh well, better luck next time Jarrah.
Ciao moon hoax conspirators, wherever you are.