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Newsletter (August 21, 2009)
Above the FoldOn Friday, August 28, 2009 the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture [Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary] will host a colloquium titled Creation Care: Perspectives in Dialogue. The colloquium features Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, a founder and the national spokesperson for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and Dr. Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics at University of Edinburgh. Both men are influential voices in the subject of creation stewardship and have contributed much to the ongoing discussion on this topic.
The colloquium presents an opportunity for an increased and clearer understanding of the issues and concerns embedded in this much debated subject. There will be two sessions with each concluding in a Q & A time.In this issue
Featured- Manmade Global Warming’s Unlucky Number
- Video: Policy Peril: The Truth About Global Warming
- One Cheer for WaPo’s Abandonment of Cap and Trade
- Lindzen and Choi Paper on Radiation Shows 'Global Warming' Scare Over
Debate- Science Czar and Crimes Against Humanity
- Video: Greenpeace Leader Admits Ice Exaggeration but Defends 'Emotionalizing'
Science- Who Is Really Making Up the Facts?
- Senator Stabenow's Absurd Statement on Global Warming
Economics- Video: How Energy Prices Affect One Family
- Cash for Clunkers: What Is Seen and What Is Unseen
Meet the Critics: Arthur B. Robinson & John S. Theon
Briefly Noted
Featuredby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
August 21, 2009
13 facts that falsify the hypothesis of CO2-driven climate change and show costly carbon emission reductions needless and harmful:
1. Global warming’s real . . .
2. It’s been warmer before. . . .
3. Recent warming gave way to cooling and is no cause for alarm. . . .
4. Oceans are cooling, too. . . .
5. CO2 rises, temperature falls. . . .
6. Manmade CO2 emissions have no significant influence on global temperature. . . .
7. Some alarmist CO2 data are questionable. . . .
8. The Sun dominates. . . .
9. Temperature leads CO2, not vice versa. . . .
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Antarctic ice core estimates of carbon dioxide and methane concentrations and temperature variations over the last 400,000 years. All published studies of the carbon dioxide-temperature relationships seen here suggest that the temperature changes preceded the carbon dioxide changes by many hundreds of years–not the other way around. (Source: Roy W. Spencer)
10. Man’s contribution to CO2 is minor. . . .
From these 10 facts we can deduce these three factual conclusions:
11. Human-induced CO2 increase is not a significant cause of global temperature changes. . . .
12. CO2 emission reductions won’t significantly reduce future temperature . . .
13. A CO2 emission reductions policy will harm, not help. . . .
Read the full article, including further evidence, graphs, and references, here.Back to top by Marlo Lewis
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
July 16, 2009
View the video.Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
August 21, 2009
Put simply, Waxman-Markey is a mess. The longer Americans examine the cap-and-trade bill before Congress, the worse it looks. It picks winners and losers. It's filled with special favors doled out, on the one hand, to rent-seeking corporations who sought competitive edges not through better service to the public but through political favors, and, on the other hand, to politicians whose votes were, quite frankly, for sale.
Will cap and trade even work? The European experience suggests it won't work. It fails to yield a stable and predictable price for carbon, which is essential if businesses are to make long-term investments relative to it. It hasn't brought European emissions down.
The Washington Post's call to switch from cap and trade to a straightforward carbon tax is therefore, so far as it goes, welcome. It makes much better economic sense than cap and trade.
But this isn't the time for opponents of cap and trade to fold their hands in smug relief and say, "Okay, bring on the carbon tax instead."
Why not? Because the best reason to oppose cap and trade was not that it was economically inefficient and riddled with pitfalls, but that its purported rationale (lost sight of in the Washington sausage making) was to fight global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Scientific study after study after study after study after study after study has confirmed that carbon dioxide's effect on global temperature is only about one-sixth that claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (let alone by extremists like Al Gore and James Hansen) and that solar cycles, cosmic cycles, and planetary oceanic and atmospheric cycles, not human emissions of carbon dioxide or any other greenhouse gases, control global climate.
That means we have nothing to fear from carbon dioxide emissions and much to gain from their enhancement of plant growth (and hence crop yields) all over the world. It also means reducing emissions will have no significant effect on future global temperature. Even the 0.09 degree C reduction (itself undetectable and with no biological/ecological effect) calculated from successful implementation of Waxman-Markey must be cut to one-sixth: 0.015 degree C.
Reducing emissions won't work. It won't help us. It will hurt us.
Environmental lobbies and others committed to growing government have repeatedly used the tactic of first trying for extreme legislation and then settling for something less extreme--but still a step in the preferred direction. Now is not the time--if it ever was--to cave in to such incrementalism. The problem with CO2 emission reduction legislation isn't just that it's extreme. It's that it's wrong. It doesn't just go too far in a good direction. It goes in the wrong direction.Back to top by Christopher Monckton
Viscount of Brenchley; Chief Policy Adviser, Science & Public Policy Institute
July, 2009
Observed reality vs. erroneous computer predictions: Scatter-plots of net flux of outgoing long-wave radiation, as measured by the satellites of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment over a 15-year period (upper left panel) and as predicted by 11 of the computer models relied upon by the UN (all other panels), against anomalies in global mean sea surface temperature over the period.
The mismatch between reality and prediction is entirely clear. It is this astonishing graph that provides the final evidence that the UN has absurdly exaggerated the effect not only of CO2 but of all greenhouse gases on global mean surface temperature.
What it means: If the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubles, global temperature will rise not by the 6 F imagined by the UN’s climate panel, but by a harmless 1 F.
Read the paper: On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data
by Richard S. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi
Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (Lindzen); Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Choi)
Geophysical Research Letters, Revised August 9, 2009Back to top Debateby Michael Egnor
Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics, Stony Brook University Hospital and Health Sciences Center; Contributor, Evolution News & Views
Science & Public Policy Institute, August 7, 2009
. . . The moderator asked Holdren:
Dr. John Holdren, do you agree with James Hansen’s statement that the CEO’s of large energy companies are guilty of should be tried (sic) for crimes against humanity? Holdren replied:
I couldn’t really say. I’m not qualified to assess what the heads of oil companies, past or present, have done in this domain. My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing and the human role in causing it. Whether that sort of activity really constitutes crimes against humanity is something for those more embedded in the legal system than I to judge. . . . . . . Here’s an example of crimes against humanity that are much more explicit. In 1977, the authors of Ecoscience, a textbook on environmental issues and population control, endorsed a cornucopia of policies to address the overpopulation crisis and to reduce human fertility. Their recommendations included forced abortions, forced sterilizations, involuntary removal of children from families of limited means, government-issued licenses as a requirement to have children, and even the intentional infliction of economic catastrophes on poor countries to reduce population. . . .
. . . The measures the authors endorsed met several of the criteria for genocide established by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. . . .
. . . The authors of Ecoscience were Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren. Dr. Holdren is now our nation's top science administrator.
Read the rest.Back to top by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney
Director and Producers, Not Evil Just Wrong
August 19, 2009
The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization's recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was "a mistake." . . .
. . . Although he admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization's practice of "emotionalizing issues" in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion. . . .
View the video and read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Joseph D'Aleo
Founder and Director, International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project
August 17, 2009
When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious, almost plaintive: "You know, it's totally irresponsible. You're not supposed to make up the facts." I agree with the very last sentence. NOAA, NASA GISS and Hadley though are guilty of exactly that. They have created or enhanced man-made global warming by careless and possibly fraudulent methods. They started by dropping 80% of the world’s stations from their calculations, most rural, by not ensuring the instruments are not improperly sited (90% of the approximately 1000 surveyed and photographed by Anthony Watts volunteers do not meet the government’s own published standards), by not adjusting properly for the urbanization warming that has taken place as the world’s population rose from 1.6 to 6.7 billion people since 1900 (in the case of the US data, actually removing a very good urban adjustment), by employing and using instruments not really meant for precision temperature measurements or with warm biases, and most recently by eliminating ocean data sources like satellite or not using promising new sources like the Argo buoys because they are showing a cold ‘bias’ or cooling when the goal is to show warming in agreement with the models and their forecasts.
With the data they perform then a homogenization adjustment that blends the good with the bad (a little like the toxic assets in the mortgage crises). Though this may improve some of the bad data, it degrades the good data. This is a little like mixing pure spring water with sludge, the sludge is a little less disgusting, but the result is not potable. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
You'll Just Have to Take Our Word on the Global Warming Stuff
by Kevin Libin
Columnist, National Post
August 18, 2009Back to top by Christopher Monckton
Viscount of Brenchley; Chief Policy Adviser, Science & Public Policy Institute
August 14, 2009
Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich), in an interview with the Detroit News in mid-August 2009, said: “Climate change is very real.” She endorsed cap and trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry, saying it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. “Global warming creates volatility," said Senator Stabenow. “I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”
Every part of Senator Stabenow’s statement is misleading at best, false at worst. Her statement that “global warming” creates “volatility”, which she feels when she is flying, is entirely without scientific foundation, for the simple reason that there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. Indeed, there has been rapid and statistically-significant global cooling for almost eight years. So the “volatility” which she feels when flying – no doubt usually at the taxpayer’s expense – cannot be caused by “global warming”, because there has not been any. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
August 17, 2009
This mom disconnected the hot water in her home and made turning off the lights into a game with her 8-year-old daughter. The video excerpted below highlights the plight of poor and working families who are facing ever-increasing energy prices. As the cost of energy goes up, so do prices for food, housing, transportation, and other necessities. . . .
View the video and read the rest.Back to top by Pete Geddes
Executive Vice President, Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment
August 19, 2009
Can one create wealth by destroying value? That is precisely what the cash for clunkers program purports to do. At least $3 billion in taxpayer dollars are being used to destroy $2 billion of productive assets, on the premise that this is somehow good for the economy. This is crackpot economics. Taken to its logical conclusion, why doesn’t the Congress require all car owners to destroy their vehicle every six months? Or, that the Navy torpedo fully loaded cargo ships as they leave port? (Their hulks would at least provide environmental benefits in the form of artificial reefs, far outweighing the alleged environmental benefits of cash for clunkers.)
This economic illiteracy has roots in the New Deal. One of the more lamentable features of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (an attempt to prop up agricultural prices for farmers) was that government subsidies required farmers to slaughter livestock, plow under crops, and pour milk on the ground. This at a time when over one-third of U.S. households had someone out of work and many people experienced real hunger. Again, if destroying useful goods somehow made the nation wealthier, why not simply order the periodic wholesale destruction of entire industries? . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Arthur B. Robinson, Ph.D.
Co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, laboratory researcher Art Robinson edits the Access to Energy newsletter, has directed the Global Warming Petition Project, and has developed the Robinson curriculum for home schoolers. "Carbon dioxide and methane," Robinson explains, are "greenhouse gases, but their physical properties render their greenhouse effects very weak. Neither warms the Earth significantly, and no greenhouse warming caused by these two substances has ever been unequivocally observed. The warming and cooling of the Earth is correlated most closely with fluctuations in solar activity and is entirely uncorrelated with human hydrocarbon use." A few publications of Robinson's are Nobel Prize for Death, The Virtues of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Yes to Energy Freedom - No to Cap-and-Trade, The Science of the UN, and the scientific study Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
John S. Theon, Ph.D.
John Theon, former senior atmospheric scientist at NASA, where he was chief of both the Climate Processes Research Program and the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch, has won numerous awards and honors. When at NASA, Theon supervised global warming alarmist James Hansen, who champions absurd catastrophic manmade warming scenarios and claims to have been muzzled. But Theon denies catastrophic human-induced climate change and denies that Hansen was suppressed, saying that Hansen is an embarassment to NASA and should be fired for illegally endorsing John Kerry in 2004. "Some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results," says Theon. "There is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy." Theon has authored numerous reports and articles and recently delivered a speech entitled Is Climate Change Driven by Mankind: My Personal Journey (audio here) at the 2009 ICCC.Back to top Briefly NotedKey Temperature Data Goes Missing
'People Are the Enemy'
Senator Kerry Misfires About Global Warming and National Security
Video: The True-Believer Mindset
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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