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Newsletter (August 6, 2010)
Above the FoldDr. James Wanliss, a Biblically and theologically astute Christian with impeccable scientific credentials, offers a penetrating critique of the Green movement in this new book. Here's what two leading Christian thinkers have said about it:
If you believe in the God of the Bible and wonder about an appropriate response to global warming, this book is a must read. . . . As Wanliss points out, we live in a dangerous world, not because of the threat of climate change, but because of the dire consequences associated with worshiping the Green Dragon, aka Satan.
--G. Cornelis van Kooten, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, Research Chair
in Environmental Studies and Climate, University of Victoria, BC, Canada
Expert Reviewer, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Like a lion, the environmental movement has stalked its prey-in this case the Christian church. And many devout Christians have adopted a "green" message in response. But in Resisting the Green Dragon James Wanliss presents a vision of genuine stewardship, which worships God, places man at the center of creation, and cares for the poor. Wanliss's fine book warns Christians to avoid all idols, even green ones.
--Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow, The Cato Institute, and
Author, Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics 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.by Darren Samuelsohn
Reporter, POLITICO
August 5, 2010
Environmentalists went with an all-or-nothing strategy for the 111th Congress. Nothing won.
Now, green groups licking their wounds after spending tens of millions of dollars to pass a cap-and-trade bill must answer serious questions about whether they are capable of playing another round of hardball.
But D.C. environmental groups aren’t looking to clean house. Activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Union of Concerned Scientists and Clean Energy Works said leading officials won’t be fired because President Barack Obama isn’t signing a climate bill into law.
Steve Cochran, who ran EDF’s national climate campaign, actually got a promotion to run the entire global warming team, including state and international efforts.
“The reason why I’m not looking around, hearing a lot of people scared for their jobs, I think the general view within the environmental community is consistent with mine: We ran a very effective, well-coordinated effort,” said Dan Lashof, director of NRDC’s climate center.
“We fell victim to much broader politics that were beyond our control that really didn’t have to do with the specifics of either the issue or the campaign,” Lashof added.
After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last month scrapped plans for a vote, the White House made clear it wasn’t impressed with the environmentalists’ effort.
“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” an administration official told POLITICO just hours after Reid pulled the plug on the climate bill. “They spent like $100 million, and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”
How much money was spent is difficult to pin down. NRDC, the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Works declined to open up their books to show how much they spent on the climate campaign. EDF had spent $20 million on climate legislation since October 2008. Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection pledged in 2006 to spend $300 million, but it’s unclear how much it ended up using.
Enraged environmentalists flooded the White House with phone calls after the quotation appeared in publication. Publicly, they decried the finger-pointing and insisted they aren’t alone in deserving fault, saying Obama failed to use his bully pulpit and moderate Senate Republicans weren’t allowed by their leaders to fully negotiate. . . .
Read the rest.In This Issue
Featured- Clouding the Debate
- Environmentalism vs. Christianity and A Biblical View of the BP Oil Spill
- EPA, Don't Mess with Texas
Science & Ecology- Global Temperature Updates
- Mighty Oil-Eating Microbes Help Clean Up the Gulf
- Science Turns Authoritarian
Economics & Energy- Book: 'Hot Time in the Old Town'
Politics & Debate- Big Footed by the EPA in Brooklyn
- Why Cap-and-Trade Collapsed
- Climate Proposals Threaten Pursuit of Happiness and Justice
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: Stanley B. Goldenberg
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Daniel James Devine
Writer, WORLD Magazine
August, 2010
Roy W. Spencer believes in global warming. He just thinks it's the Earth's fault. Climate debate can be hazardous, but this former NASA scientist is preeminently qualified to weigh in: In 1989 Spencer and colleague John Christy pioneered a method of measuring global atmosphere temperature using satellite microwave sensors, an achievement that earned awards from NASA and the American Meteorological Society. Today Spencer oversees a research team for an Earth-monitoring satellite from his office at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In his spare time he writes books throwing cold water on the idea that global warming is mostly caused by people.
His latest, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists (Encounter Books, 2010), lays out Spencer's research into the effect of clouds on atmosphere temperature. Spencer became particularly interested in clouds when he learned about a key assumption climate modelers make when predicting future global warming: Warmer average temperatures will result in reduced cloud cover. What if that assumption had it backwards? What if reduced cloud cover were causing the warmer temperatures? "If you get that wrong," Spencer told me when I met him at a conference this summer, "then you get a totally wrong answer in terms of how much warming there will be as a result of us putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." . . .
Spencer's outspokenness is grounded in peer-reviewed research showing that prevailing climate models could be confusing cause and effect when it comes to clouds and temperature. By only looking at the effect temperature has on clouds, the models can overlook the effect clouds have on temperature by blocking sunlight. These climate models, Spencer said, "reduce cloud cover when the climate warms, when they should be increasing cloud cover when the climate warms. And the difference between those two gives the difference between man-made global warming being barely measurable versus it becoming Al Gore's Armageddon."
This mistake results in an overly sensitive climate model that Spencer says punishes us when we add CO2 to the atmosphere. Research outcomes are important because battling the wrong causes of global warming—with things like taxes and research into alternative fuels—gets expensive.
If, as Spencer believes, the climate responds to global warming by attempting to reverse the trend (a negative feedback) rather than amplify it (positive feedback), it would imply that the warming of the last 30 to 50 years has been caused by mostly natural forces. It would also imply that future man-made global warming will be relatively small—a degree Fahrenheit or less in the next 50 to 100 years, says Spencer.
Even if human activity has played a role in 20th-century warming, Spencer believes factors besides carbon dioxide emissions are leading the change. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Audio Interviews of E. Calvin Beisner, National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, on Truths That Transform
August 2, 2010: Environmentalism vs. Christianity
August 3, 2010: The BP Oil Spill: A Biblical View
Related item:
Allen: U.S. Says Most British Petroleum Oil Is GoneBack to top
Letter from Bryan Shaw (Chairman, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) and Greg Abbott (Attorney General of Texas) to Lisa Jackson (Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency) and Aflredo Armendariz (Region 6 Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency)
. . . On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.
You have declared that EPA's decision to enact autombile tailpipe emission limits for greenhouse gases pursuant to Title II of the federal Clean Air Act renders such gases immediately "subject to regulation" for all purposes under that Act, including the Title I Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) preconstruction permitting program and the Title V operating permit program. Simultaneously, however, you recognize that permitting greenhouse gases under the Act is "absurd." In the Tailoring Rule, EPA states: "Here, we have determined, through analysis of burden and emissions data as well as consideration of extensive public comment, that the costs to sources and administrative burdens to permitting authorities that would result from the application of the PSD and title V programs for GHG emisssions at the statutory levels as of January 2, 2011 should be considered 'absurd results.'" 75 Fed. Reg. at 31,517. We agree.
In order to avoid the absurd results of EPA's own creation, you have developed a "tailoring rule" in which you have substituted your own judgement for Congress's as to how deep and wide to spread the permitting burden. Notably absent from your rules is any evidence that they would achieve specific results; in fact, you assiduously (and correctly) avoid ascribing what environmental benefit may be achieved by mandating permits to emit a uniformly distributed, trace constituent of clean air, vital to all life, that is emitted by all productive activities on Earth.
Instead of acknowledging that congressionally set emission limits preclude the regulation of greenhoues gases, you instead re-write those statutorily-established limits stating, "For our authority to take this action, we rely in part on the 'absurd results' doctrine, because applying the PSD and title V requirements literally (as previously interpreted narrowly by EPA) would not only be inconsistent with congressional intent concerning the applicability of the PSD and title V programs, but in fact would severely undermine congressional purpose for those programs. We also rely on the 'administrative necessity' doctrine, which applies because construing the PSD and title V requirements literally (as previously interpreted narrowly by EPA) would render it impossible for permitting authorities to administer the PSD provisions." 75 Fed. Reg. at 31,541-42.
Because of your view that greenhouse gases become "subject to regulation" on the first day it becomes illegal to manufacture a car not meeting the new tailpipe emission limits for greenhouse gases (on January 2, 2011), you insist that states may not issue permits after that date without considering greenhouse gas emissions. Your view is not enough. Applicable law provides to the contrary. . .
Read the rest (PDF).Back to top Science & Ecology4. Global Temperature Updates: Sea Surface and Globalby Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion and The Great Global Warming Blunder
July 30, 2010: Global Sea Surface Temperature Update: The Cooling Continues
Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) measured by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite continue the fall which began several months ago. The following plot, updated through yesterday (July 29, 2010) shows that the cooling in the Nino34 region in the tropical east Pacific continue to be well ahead of the cooling in the global average SST, something we did not see during the 2007-08 La Nina event (click on it for the large, undistorted version; note the global SST values have been multiplied by 10):
August 3, 2010: July 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update: +0.49 deg. C
. . . The global-average lower tropospheric temperature remained high, +0.49 deg. C in July, 2010, although the tropics continued to cool as La Nina approaches.
As of Julian Day 212 (end of July), the race for warmest year in the 32-year satellite period of record is still too close to call with 1998 continuing its lead by only 0.07 C:
YEAR GL NH SH TRPCS
1998 +0.62 +0.73 +0.51 +0.90
2010 +0.55 +0.74 +0.36 +0.63
To exceed 1998 as the warmest year, the daily global average temperature for the remainder of this year (1 Aug to 31 Dec, 2010) will need to average above +0.466 deg. C. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Ball: Global Temperature and Data Distortions ContinueBack to top by John Carey
Environmental Writer, Yahoo! News
July 28, 2010
. . . Perhaps the most important cause of the oil’s disappearance, some researchers suspect, is that the oil has been devoured by microbes. The lesson from past spills is that the lion’s share of the cleanup work is done by nature in the form of oil-eating bacteria and fungi. The microbes break down the hydrocarbons in oil to use as fuel to grow and reproduce. A bit of oil in the water is like a feeding frenzy, causing microbial populations to grow exponentially.
Typically, there are enough microbes in the ocean to consume half of any oil spilled in a month or two, says Howarth. Such microbes have been found in every ocean of the world sampled, from the Arctic to Antarctica. But there are reasons to think that the process may occur more quickly in the Gulf than in other oceans.
Microbes grow faster in the warmer water of the Gulf than they do in, say, the cool waters off Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez spill occurred. Moreover, the Gulf is hardly pristine. Even before humans started drilling for oil in the Gulf — and spilling lots of it — oil naturally seeped into the water. As a result, the Gulf evolved a rich collection of petroleum-loving microbes, ready to pounce on any new spill. The microbes are clever and tough, observes Samantha Joye, microbial geochemist at the University of Georgia. Joye has shown that oxygen levels in parts of the Gulf contaminated with oil have dropped. Since microbes need oxygen to eat the petroleum, that’s evidence that the microbes are hard at work. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Grunwald: The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?
Reddy: While Oil Gently Seeps from the Seafloor
Whelan: When Seafloor Meets Ocean, the Chemistry Is AmazingBack to top by Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute (Green); Energy and Environment Research Assistant, American Enterprise Institute (Alaghebandian)
American, July 27, 2010
. . . Our theory is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by pressure groups who want the government to force people to change their behavior.
In the past, scientists were generally neutral on questions of what to do. Instead, they just told people what they found, such as “we have discovered that smoking vastly increases your risk of lung cancer” or “we have discovered that some people will have adverse health effects from consuming high levels of salt.” Or “we have found that obesity increases your risk of coronary heart disease.” Those were simply neutral observations that people could find empowering, useful, interesting, etc., but did not place demands on them. In fact, this kind of objectivity was the entire basis for trusting scientific claims.
But along the way, an assortment of publicity-seeking, and often socially activist, scientists stopped saying, “Here are our findings. Read it and believe.” Instead, activist scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen, heads of quasi-scientific governmental organizations such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, editors of major scientific journals, and heads of the various national scientific academies are more inclined to say, “Here are our findings, and those findings say that you must change your life in this way, that way, or the other way.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economics & EnergyReview by Terry Golway
Professor, University in Union, N.J.
Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2010
There's a good reason why Frank Sinatra crooned about "Autumn in New York." Autumn is the season New Yorkers ache for during the summer, especially after a blistering one, as 2010's has been so far. But thanks to modern marvels like air-conditioning, scorching days do not, except in unusual instances, bring death by heat stroke and exposure. Hot days don't often lead to crisis—except of course in the Con Edison utility's control rooms.
More than a century ago, though, New York was staggered by a heat wave during which temperatures reached the mid-90s—several degrees cooler than the 100-degree days already seen in the city this year. The 10-day heat wave, which began on Aug. 4, 1896, was a catastrophe. In Hot Time in the Old Town, an engrossing account of this forgotten episode, Edward P. Kohn estimates that 1,300 people died in Manhattan and Brooklyn (the latter was technically not part of New York City at the time) as a result of high temperatures, high humidity and the unforgiving sun. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Politics & Debateby Julia Vitullo-Martin
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2010
For a case study in how the Environmental Protection Agency inhibits economic and environmental revitalization, head straight to Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal.
Since 2004, New York developer Toll Brothers City Living has worked on a plan to revitalize the canal, which is one of the most toxic urban waterways in the country. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was completely on board, believing that Toll Brothers had a sensible plan for cleaning the 1.8 mile-long channel and transforming the mostly industrial neighborhood with 450 housing units and 2,000 square feet of retail.
But the EPA upended all of this six months ago when it declared the canal a Superfund site. "We're out. Completely out," David Von Spreckelsen, a senior vice president at Toll Brothers, tells me.
That's because under the EPA the cleanup is likely to take 12 years, perhaps more. The Superfund designation allows the EPA to go after the polluters ("responsible polluting partners"), which include dozens of private companies as well as the U.S. Navy and the City of New York. The city owned or operated several facilities on the canal during much of the 20th century, including an asphalt plant, a coal plant and an incinerator. According to EPA spokesperson Elizabeth Totman, the city could be liable for paying part of the EPA's estimated $300 million to $500 million bill. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Devon Swezey, Yael Borofsky, and Jesse Jenkins
Breakthrough Blog, July 23, 2010
. . . Cap and trade has encountered serial failure because it doesn't address the main barrier to the widespread deployment of clean energy technologies: the technology-based price gap between new clean energy and mature fossil fuels.
Unlike fossil fuels, which are energy dense and low cost, many renewables, like wind and solar power, are expensive, intermittent, and difficult to scale, while nuclear power is extremely capital intensive and faces substantial local opposition.
Because of higher costs and technical barriers to widespread clean energy adoption, efforts to move the U.S. energy system away from fossil fuels towards clean energy alternatives inevitably comes with a significant price tag.
Once a price tag is attached to cap and trade proposals, public support drops substantially, particularly at the high carbon prices necessary to actually impact the deployment of clean energy technologies.
The result is that every country in the world has been unwilling to raise the price of fossil fuels -- either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade system -- high enough to close this price gap. Placed in the context of the worst recession in seventy years, this dynamic doomed cap and trade to defeat. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Dalmia: The Death of the Global Warming MovementBack 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
July 31, 2010
. . . Human activities have not replaced the complex natural forces that drove climate change throughout Earth’s history. But even if manmade greenhouse gases do contribute to planetary warming, slashing US emissions to zero would bring no benefit, because steadily rising emissions from China, India, Brazil and other rapidly growing economies would almost instantly replace whatever gases we cease emitting.
Most important, fossil fuels power the economic engine that ensures justice and opportunity in America today. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable reduce business revenues and profits, shrink investment and innovation, imperil economic recovery, and hobble job creation, civil rights, and the pursuit of happiness and the American dream.
Whether they take the form of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, restrictions on drilling and coal mining, or EPA rules under its claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare, anti-energy policies frustrate the natural desire of poor and minority Americans to improve their lives. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly NotedICCC 4: Abdussamatov: The Sun Dictates the Climate (Video) (Audio)
Beisner: Poverty a Greater Threat than Climate Change
Bast: Cap-and-Trade's Market Failure
Driessen: It's Really About Controlling Our Lives
McCleese: The 'Scientific Consensus' Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up
Driessen: Malarial Mosquitoes, Not Bedbugs, Are the Real Pest
Climategate Inquiries: It's up to Graham Stringer and Andrew Montford Now
The Curry AgonistesBack 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:
Stanley B. Goldenberg
Stanley B. Goldenberg is a U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist in the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Mentioned on page 46 of the Senate report, Goldenberg states that "although there have been several recent articles suggesting that recent increases in activity are due to global warming, the scientists who have been in the hurricane climate field the longest, and are the most acquainted with the data base, see no substantial link." In a 2008 interview, Global Warming Not Linked to Increased Hurricane Activity, he says, "it is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't but into anthropogenic global warming." A very experienced meteorologist, Goldenberg has authored various papers, and has been received awards for his scientific work.
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.
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