|
Newsletter (August 13, 2010)
Above the FoldIf you want to understand the world view, theology, ethics, and politics of the Green movement, and you want those subjected to a penetrating critique by a Biblically and theologically astute Christian with impeccable scientific credentials, this book is for you. Resisting the Green Dragon will not only help you understand atheistic, pantheistic, and animist environmentalism, but also help you define the nagging sense you’ve had that there’s not only a lot right but also something wrong with the attractive, Christianized version of environmentalism that calls itself creation care.
When many Christians think it pious to uncritically embrace doom-and-gloom ecology and demands for slowed economic development and growth, reduced consumption, and government-imposed austerity, James Wanliss shows how they compromise the Biblical faith and promote unbiblical asceticism supported by poor science and flawed economics leading to policies that oppress the poor while enriching the powerful.
But much more important, he outlines a clear, Biblical understanding of Earth stewardship—the fulfillment of God’s first command to humanity, the Dominion Mandate to “be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the Earth” (Genesis 1:28). At the same time he clearly and faithfully proclaims the gospel of reconciliation with God for sinners justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, thus obeying Christ’s last command on Earth, the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Sincere Christians searching for a clear understanding of how to be good stewards of God’s Earth while loving their neighbors and faithfully representing Jesus Christ and His glorious gospel will find Resisting the Green Dragon irresistible!
--E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman, The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Author, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate
and Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future Resisting the Green Dragon takes its cue from James 4:7, “Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Click here to take advantage of pre-publication discount for the book and the related 12-lecture DVD series, great for churches, Sunday schools, families, students, and small groups. Click here to register for regular email updates as more names and resources are announced in the coming weeks.In This Issue
Featured- America's Ruling Class - and the Perils of Revolution
Science & Ecology- The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010
- CO2 Is Not a Pollutant but a Huge Benefactor
Economics & Energy- Here Comes Ingenuity! Offshore Drilling Will Be Better, Cleaner, Safer in the New Era
- Dumb Policies Just Keep Coming
- Ethanol Opponents Launch Counterattack
- Drilling Moratorium Crippling Gulf, Says Industry
Politics & Debate- The Secret History of Climate Alarmism
- Target: Monckton
- NOAA’s Magic Wand Waves Away 2000-2009 Cooling
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: Mel Goldstein, Ph.D.
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Angelo M. Codevilla
Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Boston University
American Spectator, August, 2010
. . . Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." . . .
While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Science & EcologyWorld Climate Report, August 12, 2010
The longer and deadlier the heat wave in western Russia becomes, the more frequently it is being linked to anthropogenic global warming.
But global warming theory doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining why it’s so darn hot this summer in Moscow.
Long-term observations suggest a more basic cause—an unusual and unprecedented (at least since 1950) confluence of several naturally-occurring atmospheric circulation patterns that together combined to set the stage for extreme warmth. Add to that urbanization, changing forestry practices, and perhaps throw in a dash of global warming for good measure, and you take a situation that would otherwise be “very hot” and up it a notch to “record hot.”
The driving force of the 2010 heat wave has been a stationary weather system that has remained locked in place over western Russia since mid-June. The atmospheric is termed to be “blocked” when atmospheric circulation patterns remained fixed in place, instead of being progressive. The prolonged snow and cold in the eastern half of the U.S. last winter was caused by an atmospheric block which locked in a pattern which allowed arctic air to slide southward and storm systems to track up the east coast. The heat in Russia is caused by a blocking pattern which has locked in high pressure over Moscow and environs which favors southerly (warm) flow, a lot of sunshine, and little rain.
Atmospheric blocking is not unique to today’s climate. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Joseph D'Aleo
Founder and Director, International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project
. . . As a Synoptic Meteorologist and Climatologist over the years I have let the data do the talking. The data says that CO2 plays little or no role in climate change - which is cyclical and relates far better with the cycles in sun and ocean.
When correlating CO2 with temperature trends in various periods of cyclical warming and cooling the last 110 years we find a negative correlation from the late 1800s to 1917 (-0.35), positive from 1917 to 1940 (+0.43), negative during the WWII and post WWII boom from 1940 to around 1975 (-0.40), positive from 1975 to around 2000 (+0.36) and negative in the short period to 2009 (-0.56). . . .
As opposed to be a pollutant or an agent of harm, CO2 is a blessing, a plant fertilizer that has supported an agricultural revolution. Nurseries use CO2 to boost plant growth in greenhouses, pumping it in at levels maybe 3 times ambient levels.
Just the increase in the last century has improved crop yields as shown by NASA greening studies and the UN’s own graph. . . .
Read the rest (PDF).Back to top Economics & Energyby Robert L. Bradley, Jr.
Founder & CEO, Institute for Energy Research; Writer, MasterResource.org; Scholar, Cato Institute & Competitive Enterprise Institute; Research Fellow, Center for Energy Economics, University of Texas in Austin; Author, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy
August 11, 2010
If he were alive, Julian Simon (1932–1998) would apply his view that our problems can make us better to the worst-case scenario that BP uniquely brought to life in the Gulf of Mexico this year.
Simon argued that there was a third driving force or condition for human improvement beyond the the institutional framework for progress (private property, voluntary exchange, the rule of law) and the insightful reasons given for capitalistic progress (motivation, effective use of knowledge, trial and error feedback, etc.).
The third element is the very fact of problems and setbacks, which create challenges that human ingenuity would not need to confront and solve as much as in an incremental improvement process.
The recent Gulf oil spill was certainly not anticipated by anyone in government or in private industry. Yet it happened. And BOOM, the whole offshore industry had to lock heads to try to find the best way to contain the spill and to eventually stop the same. After 87 days, the runaway well was capped. After about 110 days, the cement held, and the well was entombed.
And now will come a new generation of offshore technology to ensure that such an accident does not happen again (see below). Whatever the combination of new regulation, insurance requirements, or just best practices for cost minimization, there must be sound, failsafe, redundant technology for safe, spillage-free deepwater exploration. The reprinted article before is one early recognition of this fact. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Paul K. Driessen
Columnist, Townhall; Senior Fellow, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and Congress of Racial Equality; Author, Eco-Imperialism.com
August 7, 2010
If 10% ethanol in gasoline is good, 15% (E15) will be even better. At least for some folks.
We’re certainly heading in that direction – thanks to animosity toward oil, natural gas and coal, fear-mongering about global warming, and superlative lobbying for “alternative,” “affordable,” “eco-friendly” biofuels. Whether the trend continues, and what unintended consequences will be unleashed, will depend on Corn Belt versus consumer politics and whether more people recognize the downsides of ethanol. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Robert Bryce
Managing Editor, Energy Tribune; Author, Gusher of Lies and Power Hungry
MasterResource, August 9, 2010
For months, the corn ethanol industry has been pushing the Obama administration for permission to increase the amount of ethanol that can be blended into the U.S. gasoline supply.
But the ethanol industry’s opponents are launching a counterattack. And it’s a big one. Last week, a coalition of 36 groups sent a letter to the leaders of the Senate asking them to reject “any attempt to attach a mid-level ethanol authorization amendment during the Senate’s consideration of energy legislation in the coming weeks and months. Such an amendment would be bad for consumers, bad for safety, bad for the environment, and, by placing politics over sound science, bad public policy.”
The group, which has dubbed itself FollowTheScience.org, may be the oddest coalition in modern American politics. Indeed, the ethanol scam is so offensive that it has united groups ranging from the American Petroleum Institute and the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by James Rosen
Correspondent, FOX News
August 11, 2010
. . . Dan V. Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington . . . said the original moratorium applied only to drilling rigs operating in 500 feet of water or deeper, but that the July 12 order by Salazar applies to all floating rigs in the Gulf.
What’s more, Kish said there are effectively two moratoria in place: the formal one, targeting deepwater drilling, and an informal one targeting shallow-water drilling operations. “About half of the rigs in the shallow waters of the Gulf are not operating,” said Kish, “because they can’t get permits from the government agency that is supposed to give them permits. So, in essence, what’s happening is that much of the fleet of deep- and shallow-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which supplies a third of our domestic oil, are being laid up, put in cold storage, awaiting the government to make a decision one way or the other.”
Analysts said that of the thirty-three deepwater rigs in the Gulf, along with another eight under construction and committed to operate in the Gulf, at least four have already left, or are preparing to leave, the U.S. for foreign shores, pursuing contracts in emerging markets like the Egypt, the Congo, Brazil, and Greenland.
Each rig, the analysts said, costs approximately $500-600 million to build, and is constructed under strict debt-financing terms that require the owners to have long-term drilling contracts secured in advance. “If those contracts, which have been abrogated by the federal government here, are not generating revenue to pay the debt on these rigs,” said Eric Smith, a professor at the Tulane University business school, “the rigs have to leave. And when they leave…we’ll finish our moratorium and we’ll say, ‘Go back to work,’ and the oil operator is going to say, ‘With what?’ because the equipment will be gone, without any reasonable chance of getting it back anytime soon.”
Smith calculated that current restrictions effectively halting shallow- and deepwater drilling in the Gulf account for the loss of a combined 137,000 jobs, and impose a cost of $3 billion in “payroll effects,” with Louisiana consequently suffering a loss of $300 - $400 million in tax receipts. Smith’s assessment is in line with some of the projections put forward by Dr. Joseph R. Mason of Louisiana State University, who estimated in a recent analysis that the moratoria will inflict “broad economic losses within the Gulf region and throughout the nation as a whole,” to the tune of $2.7 billion in economic activity. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Politics & Debateby John Rosenthal
Writer, Weekly Standard, Policy Review, and Daily Caller
August 9, 2010
Changes in the earth’s atmosphere, the additional greenhouse effect and the resultant changes in the climate . . . represent a global danger for humanity and the entire biosphere of the earth. If no effective counteracting measures are taken, dramatic consequences are to be expected for all of the earth’s regions. This warning will undoubtedly seem familiar, perhaps even mind-numbingly so. But if the substance sounds like the same-old same-old, the date on which it was issued might seem surprising. It was not in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit or indeed anytime in the last decade. The above passage is nearly two decades old. It comes from a resolution adopted by the German Bundestag in September 1991.
The resolution in question summarizes and endorses the recommendations of a parliamentary commission of inquiry on “Taking Precautionary Action to Protect the Earth’s Atmosphere.” The commission had been set up in October 1987. Appearing before the Bundestag some seven months earlier, Chancellor Helmut Kohl had warned that the “greenhouse effect” threatened to bring about “a grave pattern of climate change” and had called for the burning of fossil fuels to be limited, not just in Germany but “worldwide.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, August 12, 2010
. . . The warming propaganda machine has lost its momentum and is desperate to get it back. They want to silence Lord Monckton and remove him from the field. To that end they’ll say anything. They attack his title hoping we won’t notice that every British Viscount has a right and by long tradition is called “Lord.” They attack his graphs and charts, hoping we won’t bother to learn that most of his data comes straight from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the sources it cites. Lord Monckton had hoped that by using the IPCC’s data warming advocates would be forced to debate the merits. Sadly, they continue to alternate between mocking the data and restating their conclusions as received wisdom. Yet when granted a fair forum for debate, it is Monckton who triumphs. Just weeks ago his team of experts were voted the winners in a warming debate at the Oxford Union – a treasured haven of free thought.
Last year Lord Monckton gave a presentation on global warming in St. Paul Minnesota that became a sensation on YouTube. This inspired Prof. John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas to attack his presentation in a lengthy video. Lord Monckton has refuted Prof. Abraham using his own medium. The first [below] of a series of videos setting the record straight are being released today and we invite you to view them. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Paul MacRae
Professor, University of Victoria and University Canada West; Author, False Alarm: Global Warming - Facts Versus Fears
Canada Free Press, August 5, 2010
The recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that surface temperatures have increased in the past decade. In fact, the NOAA report, “State of the Climate in 2009,” says 2000-2009 was 0.2° Fahrenheit (0.11° Celsius) warmer than the decade previous. The press release was so splashy it made the front page of Toronto’s Globe and Mail with the headline: “Signs of warming earth ‘unmistakable’.” . . .
Let’s look at the NOAA claim that the surface temperature increased .11° C during 2000-2009. Although they did everything possible to hide this information from the public, media, politicians, and even fellow scientists, by the late 2000s even die-hard alarmists were eventually forced to accept that the surface temperature record showed no warming as of the late 1990s, and some cooling as of about 2002. In other words, overall, for the first decade of the 21st century, there was either no warming, or no warming and even some cooling. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly NotedCrandall: Arctic Energy Production: Let's Move Forward, Not Backwards
de Gorter and Taylor: The Ethanol Tax Credit - It's Worse Than You Think
Bakst: Texas Fight! What Other States can Learn from Texas vs. U.S. EPABack 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:
Mel Goldstein, Ph.D.
Famous Connecticut weatherman "Dr. Mel" is his state's news Channel 8 chief meteorologist and, teaching at Western Connecticut State University, created their Weather Center and established their bachelor's meteorology program. The author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weather and Dr. Mel's Connecticut Climate Book, Goldstein "become[s] skeptical when atmospheric models are used to project conditions 100 or 200 years from now." He explains, "When you are in the trenches and forecasting each and everyday, you begin to realize the inadequacies of our computer models."
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
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.
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
