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Newsletter (April 9, 2010)
In This Issue
Featured- Circling the Bandwagons: McKitrick's Adventures Correcting the IPCC
- Radio Interview: Social Justice Goes to Church
Debate- The Battle Between Image and Reality
- Caveat Emptor: Make Sure of the Facts on Climate Change
- What's the Next 'Global Warming'?
Science- Dread Rising Carbon Dioxide? Think Again
- Activists Seek to Derail Agriculture
- Video: Does More Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Lead to More Interglacial Warmth?
Economics- EPA's Global Warming Regulations: A Threat to American Agriculture
- Another California Dream
Upcoming Events
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: Reid A. Bryson, Ph.D.
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Ross McKitrick
Associate Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph; Co-author, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming
March, 2010
This is the story of how I spent 2 years trying to publish a paper that refutes an important claim in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The claim in question is not just wrong, but based on fabricated evidence. Showing that the claim is fabricated is easy: it suffices merely to quote the section of the report, since no supporting evidence is given. But unsupported guesses may turn out to be true. Showing the IPCC claim is also false took some mundane statistical work, but the results were clear. Once the numbers were crunched and the paper was written up, I began sending it to science journals. That is when the runaround began. Having published several against-the-flow papers in climatology journals I did not expect a smooth ride, but the process eventually became surreal.
In the end the paper was accepted for publication, but not in a climatology journal. From my perspective the episode has some comic value, but I can afford to laugh about it since I am an economist, not a climatologist, and my career doesn’t depend on getting published in climatology journals. If I was a young climatologist I would have learned that my career prospects would be much better if I never write papers that question the IPCC.
I am taking this story public because of what it reveals about the journal peer review process in the field of climatology. Whether climatologists like it or not, the general public has taken a large and legitimate interest in how the peer review process for climatology journals works, because they have been told for years that they will have to face lots of new taxes and charges and fees and regulations because of what has been printed in climatology journals. Because of the policy stakes, a bent peer review process is no longer a private matter to be sorted out among academic specialists. And to the extent the specialists are unable or unwilling to fix the process, they cannot complain that the public credibility of their discipline suffers. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Radio interview by Ingrid Schlueter of E. Calvin Beisner
Crosstalk, April 7, 2010
. . . Many evangelical Christians are aware that the Bible says we are to execute justice. However, as Dr. Beisner points out, the meaning of the term tends to get twisted when the word “social” is used before it.
The phrase “social justice” grew up in the progressive movement of the early 20th century. This movement was committed to the ideology of diminishing the gap between the rich and the poor. Founded upon a Marxist definition of justice, this philosophy is contrary to the Bible as it advocates for a radical redistribution of wealth.
This edition of Crosstalk continues by covering the following:
- The prominent individuals supporting the idea of alleged, Bible-based social justice;
- The misuse of scripture references that social justice advocates use to support their cause;
- The concept of the worthy poor vs. the non-worthy poor;
- The idea that fear of global warming is being used as a rationale for public policies designed to redistribute wealth from wealthy industrial countries to poor, non-industrial nations.
Listen to the show.
Related items:
Video: Olasky vs. Wallis: A Critical Evaluation of Christian Responses to Poverty and Affluence (Audio Version)Back to top Debateby William O'Keefe
CEO, George C. Marshall Institute
March, 2010
Several events, including record snow falls in many parts of the country have brought climate change, also known as global warming, back to the public’s attention. These events include the release of emails indicating manipulation of temperature data, admissions by the former head of the Climate Research Unit about recent and historical temperature, and the reluctant acknowledgement that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) last assessment report contained several glaring errors. The image, carefully crafted and marketed for over two decades, that temperature increases have been accelerating in recent decades, as a result of human activity, is now suspect. Without that image it is hard to convince the public that a climate apocalypse is likely later this century.
The image that human activity is radically changing our climate does not conform with factual data. The facts suggest claims about accelerating temperatures are an exaggeration and temperature records are of questionable accuracy.
The apocalyptic rhetoric about rapidly rising temperatures is matched with similar rhetoric about sea levels, flooding of small islands and coastal regions, increased drought, diseases, and other ecological effects. This vision of a dismal future pervaded the recent global climate meeting in Copenhagen. Here in the U.S. such images were used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to justify issuing an endangerment finding which alleges that temperature increases from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a threat to human health and the environment.
Whenever advocacy groups and the media use scary images, it is always wise to be more than a little skeptical and to check the underlying facts. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Mark Herlong
Program Director, George C. Marshall Institute
March, 2010
The two largest purchases most people make today are houses and cars. Because of the amount of money involved, prudent consumers do thorough research before buying. When buying a car, the purchaser looks at the manual and test-drives the vehicle, but also talks to owners of the same model and reads reviews in car and consumer magazines and websites. The prospective homebuyer walks around the neighborhood and looks at the house in person, but also gets reliable information on area home prices, crime statistics, local schools, and of course, a home inspection by a qualified expert.
In the legal field, this is called performing due diligence and as a popular business motto has it, “an informed consumer is our best customer.”
If an individual buyer is willing to put hours of work into researching a purchase of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, how much effort should the nation put into investigating a proposal which will cost the nation trillions? That is the estimated cost of the climate legislation before Congress.
Much of the information relevant to houses and cars is easily understood by the general public – safety statistics or the presence or absence of radon and termites – but in the case of climate science, the way in which relevant information is developed and synthesized is far more complex and opaque. Enough errors and misstatements by reputable climate researchers and organizations have come out recently to provoke a reaction in the public and this provides a good starting point for a discussion of how scientific data is generated, analyzed, stored and used.
Our understanding of the physical world will always be imperfect, but we still have a responsibility to test, validate and revalidate, to be as certain as we can be about the climate data on which our future well-being depends. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Bret Stephens
Foreign-Affairs Columnist and Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Wall Street Journal
April 6, 2010
. . . The world is now several decades into the era of environmental panic. The subject of the panic changes every few years, but the basic ingredients tend to remain fairly constant. A trend, a hypothesis, an invention or a discovery disturbs the sense of global equilibrium. Often the agent of distress is undetectable to the senses, like a malign spirit. A villain—invariably corporate and right-wing—is identified.
Then money begins to flow toward grant-seeking institutions and bureaucracies, which have an interest in raising the level of alarm. Environmentalists counsel their version of virtue, typically some quasi-totalitarian demands on the pattern of human behavior. Politicians assemble expert panels and propose sweeping and expensive legislation. Eventually, the problem vanishes. Few people stop to consider that perhaps it wasn't such a crisis in the first place. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
April 6, 2010
Yesterday a new book arrived in my mail. Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam is by Brian Sussman, who for over twenty years served as the San Francisco area's most celebrated science reporter and meteorologist, receiving honors from the Associated Press, Radio and TV News Directors' Association, National Education Association, and National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2001, Sussman left his position as TV meteorologist to become a talk show host, and his program on KSFO-AM has become one of America's top-rated radio shows.
Sussman's years as a broadcast journalist combine with his abilities as a scientist to produce a book that laymen intimidated by more technical treatments can handle well but that still conveys excellent factual information.
One example of the clarity with which he writes is his quick summary of the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere:
Research gathered by Michigan State Unviersity professor emeritus of horticulture, Sylvan H. Wittwer, indicates that with a tripling of CO2, roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums experience earlier maturity, have longer stems and larger, longer-lasting, more colorful flowers with yields increasing up to 15%. Rice, wheat, barley, oats, and rye perform yield increases ranging to 64%. Potatoes and sweet potatoes produce as much as 75% more. Legumes, including peas, beans, and soybeans, show increases to 46%. The effects of carbon dioxide on trees, which cover one-third of Earth's land mass, may be even more dramatic. According to Michigan State's forestry department, trees have been raised to maturity in months instead of years when the seedlings were raised in a tripled CO2 environment. Remember that the next time somebody talks about the Armageddon rising CO2 will cause. Its minuscule effect on temperature (doubled CO2 perhaps raising temperature, after feedbacks, by about 0.5 degree C, and mostly near the poles, at night, in winter) pales into insignificance compared with its beneficial effect on plants--and, through them, on all the rest of life on Earth.Back to top by Jeff Stier
Associate Director, American Council on Science and Health
Forbes, April 2, 2010
. . . A finding against Syngenta, which manufacturers atrazine, would set a very dangerous precedent, with repercussions for farmers and anyone who enjoys their bounty. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), unfortunately, has now loaned its weight to the activists' Luddite effort to restrict or ban a number of safe and useful agricultural chemicals in common use--with atrazine, the most effective weed-killer available, only one of the targets.
Atrazine has been widely used for over 50 years and is credited with dramatically increasing yields of corn and sugar cane (among other crops) while reducing the need for other, cruder weed-killers, saving embattled farmers precious money. There has never been a single instance of adverse health effects in humans reliably attributed to exposure to atrazine when used as licensed. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Sherwood B. Idso
President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Former USDA Research Physicist; Former Adjunct Professor of Geology, Botany, and Microbiology, Arizona State University; Author, Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
December 16, 2009
View the video.Back to top Economicsby Ben Lieberman
Senior Policy Analyst, Heritage Foundation
April 1, 2010
. . . Cap-and-trade measures would drive up fossil energy prices, and the results for agriculture would be severe.
An analysis conducted by The Heritage Foundation found that the Waxman-Markey bill would reduce farm profits by an estimated 28 percent starting in 2012, the first year the bill's provisions take effect, and average 57 percent lower through 2035. A study of a several Missouri farms ranging from 800 to 1,900 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat estimated annual cost increases of $4,903 to $11,649 by 2020, mostly from higher costs of natural-gas-derived fertilizer as well as overall increased energy costs.
Moreover, provisions in the Senate Boxer-Kerry bill purporting to provide agriculture with profit opportunities--such as earning valuable emissions credits by planting trees or engaging in emissions-reducing farming practices--are very limited and are unlikely to compensate for the higher costs imposed on farmers. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2010
. . . [California's] AB32 creates a statewide cap-and-trade program and imposes numerous command-and-control mandates that CARB calls "complementary measures" on businesses, such as low-carbon fuel standards and a goal of achieving 33% energy from renewable sources by 2020. Companies say compliance costs will force them to cut jobs and raise prices.
To meet renewable energy goals, the Southern California Public Power Authority has warned of a 30% rate hike. L.A.'s Department of Water and Power has told businesses to expect a 21% hike this year, though the city council recently nixed a three-month 5.7% rate increase. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Upcoming EventsThe purpose of ICCC-4 is the same as it was for the first three events: to build momentum and public awareness of the global warming “realism” movement, a network of scientists, economists, policymakers, and concerned citizens who believe sound science and economics, rather than exaggeration and hype, ought to determine what actions, if any, are taken to address the problem of climate change. Speakers will include over a hundred scientists, economists, and other scholars from around the world.
Register online.Back to top Briefly NotedMichaels: Endangered Findings
IBD: Backdoor Energy Tax
Hertzmark: U.S. EPA’s Adventures in Arithmetic: A Look at the CO2 Car Standards
AFP: Taiwanese Urged to Worship Online to Protect Environment
Beisner: Congressman Expresses Grave Environmental Concerns About Marine RelocationBack to top Meet the CriticsMeet the Critics gives you basic information on 64 of the leading critics of dangerous manmade global warming. Today's critic:
Reid A. Bryson, Ph.D.
Known as "the father of scientific climatology," the late Reid Bryson received the 30th Ph.D. in Meteorology in American education's history. Bryson served as a major in the Air Weather Service of the U.S. Army Air Corps before beginning a career teaching at the University of Wisconsin, where he was the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology. The most cited climatologist in the world, according to the British Institute of Geographers, Bryson said, "All this argument--'is the temperature going up or not?'--it's absurd! Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800's, before the industrial revolution, because we're coming out of the little ice age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air." A couple of Bryson's works, which include a number of books and over 230 publications, are Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World's Changing Weather and Global Warming? Some Common Sense Thoughts.
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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