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Newsletter (February 15, 2010)
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Washington, D.C., Feb. 12, 2009 - Two science groups joined with the Competitive Enterprise Institute on Friday to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its December decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
In the wake of new disclosures and studies, some as recent as last week, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change and the Science and Environmental Policy Project joined with CEI to formally petition the agency to reconsider its rule.
. . . “EPA’s Endangerment Finding is based on non-scientific reports by the IPCC and scientifically indefensible global temperature datasets,” the petitioners charge in the February 12 EPA filing.
View the February 12 petition to the EPA (PDF).In this issue
Featured- Does Faith Have a Role in Global Warming Debates?
Debate- The Real Way to Save the Planet
- Has Time Rewritten Every Line?
- Climate Scientist Foretells 'Big Changes' at U.N. Global Warming Agency
Science- The Great IPCC Meltdown Continues
- Global Warming and Malaria: Knowing the Horse Before Hitching the Cart
Economics and Politics- Democratic Climate Revolt: A Bipartisan Effort to Stop the EPA's Anticarbon Crusade
- House Republicans Join Suit Over EPA Greenhouse Finding
Religion and Ethics- Dark Green Religion
- Unethical Greenpeace Actions Threaten the Livelihoods and Lives of Millions
Briefly Noted
Featuredby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
January 26, 2010
Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist in climatology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and lead scientist on NASA's Aqua satellite program, is a scientist. (The redundancy there is intentional.) Unlike many scientists, though, he recognizes that underlying faith commitments guide the interpretation of observational data, thus shaping the formation of hypotheses and of new observations by which they're tested. The underlying faith commitments are not the result of observation, but the precondition of it--or at least of its interpretation.
As Dr. Spencer here shows, different faith commitments can lead to very different hypotheses about the warming effects of added greenhouse gases, and those in turn can lead to very different conclusions about impacts and, consequently, policy.
This is why the Cornwall Alliance treats theology (underlying faith commitments), science (observations, the interpretation of which is colored by the underlying faith commitments), and economics (the analysis policymakers need to foresee the effects of various options) all together in A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming, our 76-page study underlying An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming. All truth is God's truth. All knowledge is interrelated. As Francis Schaeffer put it, there is no "upper story" of theological truths divorced from a "lower story" of scientific truths with no overlap between the two.
Recognizing this doesn't mean observations can never correct faith commitments. But it does mean the more central and fundamental the faith commitment, the more difficult it will be for observation to correct it. One will probably have to find not only a paucity of observations consistent with one's hypothesis to have one's confidence in it shaken, but also at least one observation, probably several, that are inconsistent with it.
A statement by D.M.S. Watson (1886-1973), professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at University College, London, from 1921 to 1951, illustrates the point well. In his article “Adaptation” (Nature, vol. 124[1929], 231-234), Watson called evolution "a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible."
Now, I'm not saying Watson embraced evolution by blind faith contrary to observational evidence. Elsewhere in the article he wrote, "Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palæontology, and geographical distribution . . . ." That is, he embraced evolution because he found it consistent with observations.
But the consistency of a hypothesis with observations doesn't prove it true. To think so is to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. ("If it rains today, I'll stay inside. I stayed inside. Therefore it rained today." That's a fallacy because other things might also have led me to stay inside, even if it didn't rain.) Watson reached his conclusion (Evolution is true.) not only on the ground that the "facts of taxonomy, of palæontology, and geographical distribution" were consistent with it (the fallacy of affirming the consequent: "If evolution is true, the facts of taxonomy, palæontology, and geographical distribution will be such-and-such. The facts are such-and-such. Therefore evolution is true." Something other than evolution might have caused the facts to be such-and-such.) but also on the ground that his underlying faith commitment had ruled out any other possible explanation of the facts.
What reveals the indispensable role of faith commitment in Watson's thinking is the clause that completed that sentence: ". . . and because no alternative explanation is credible." Watson's atheism made it impossible to consider a theistic explanation of the "facts of taxonomy, of palæontology, and geographical distribution."
It's no accident that no atheists are creationists, for their underlying faith commitment rules out creationism in advance. No creator, no creation. No matter how consistent observations might be with a theistic explanation, atheists can't entertain the theistic explanation because their underlying faith commitment rules it out.
It's also no accident that theists are found among both creationists and evolutionists, for their underlying faith commitment is consistent with both evolutionary and creationist explanations of the observational data. Other faith commitments (e.g., belief that the Bible is God's Word and that it teaches things contrary to evolution) may lead some theists to rule out evolution as an explanation of observational data, but such theists are doing nothing different, epistemologically, from what atheistic evolutionists are doing: interpreting data consistently with their underlying faith commitments, and other theists deny some of those other faith commitments and so be able to embrace evolution. One of the interesting consequences of this is that theists tend to be able to consider not lessobservational evidence and interpretation than atheists but more, because their theism is consistent with more.
Dr. Spencer's discussion of how faith commitments shape the interpretation of climatological data is helpful in that it explains how, using the same observations, different scientists can reach different hypotheses about future global temperatures. Dialogue about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) would benefit considerably from die-hard alarmists' coming to grips with this and ceasing their insistence that "the science is settled."
Also needed are some predictions based on the hypothesis of AGW that are observationally testable such that a negative result would falsify the hypothesis. AGW critics have suggested some and think the negative results have occurred. E.g.:
- If AGW is true, there should be a mid-tropospheric "hot spot" over the tropics. There isn't. Therefore AGW is false.
- If AGW is true, warming should continue steadily, decade after decade, as carbon dioxide concentration rises. There's been cooling now for 8 to 13 or 14 years. Therefore AGW is false.
- If AGW is true in its claim that recent warming has been unprecedented, then there will have been no Medieval Warm Period, no Roman Warming, no Holocene Climate Optimum. (Eliminating the MWP was a major agenda of those paleoclimatologists whose serious mishandling of data was recently revealed in Climategate.) But the MWP, RW, and HCO happened. Therefore AGW is not true. But there's a catch to this argument, since AGW proponents can respond that other things might have caused those earlier warmings, while enhanced greenhouse gases caused the recent warming. But there's a catch to this argument, in turn: critics can then reply, "But how then can you rule out other causes of the recent warming?"
Whether their premises are found true or false, such arguments advance the discussion.
God is one. Truth--which is all that God affirms and nothing that God denies--is consistent. Creation is consistent. So in the end theology, science, economics, and all the other disciplines must be consistent. And one of the great delights of the human mind is seeking to expand understanding of that consistency. That's one of the reasons why Dr. Spencer's discussion is not only important to the AGW debate but also just plain fun.
Does faith have a role in global warming debates? Yes, of course it does. It has a role in all debates. For, as the late philosopher Gordon H. Clark argued in Religion, Reason, and Revelation and Three Types of Religious Philosophy, presuppositions are indispensable to all reasoning. No axioms, no starting points; no starting points, no reasoning.Back to top Debateby Paul Johnson
Historian; Author, Churchill, Modern Times, Intellectuals, and A History of the American People.
American Spectator, February 3, 2010
The Copenhagen Summit was bound to fail if only because politicians are beginning to realize that ordinary voters do not believe in man-made Global Warming, as polls plainly show. They did not believe in Marxist Dialectical Materialism either, or Freudianism. These three pseudo-sciences have a lot in common, not least their ability to inspire a religious kind of belief in highly educated people who lack a genuine creed.
When I was an undergraduate the philosopher I studied most carefully was Karl Popper, especially his writings on the evaluation of evidence and criteria to distinguish a genuine scientific theory from a false one. He made two key points. First, a theory must include the falsifiability principle. It must be susceptible to empirical tests and, if it fails to meet them, be scrapped. He gave as an example of a genuine theory Einstein's General Relativity of 1915. Einstein insisted that it must survive three practical tests, and if it failed any one of them be dropped as untrue. In fact it passed triumphantly all three, beginning in 1919, and many other since.
Popper argued that prima facie evidence of a bogus theory was the practice of altering or enlarging it, by its authors, to accommodate new evidence since its original formulation. . . .
It is a pity Popper did not live to see that Global Warming fit perfectly into his model of a pseudo-theory. It is vaguely and imprecisely formulated. It fails the falsifiability test, because all new evidence is made to fit by enlarging the theory. When originally formulated in the 1980s, Global Warming produced by man-made emissions would lead, it was argued, to much higher temperatures and desiccation. There would be a huge drop in rainfall and an imperative need to build seawater desalination plants. I recall an unusually dry summer (1987) in the English Lake District, normally rainy, was triumphantly presented as "absolute proof" of the theory. This autumn, the Lake District had an unusually wet spell, culminating in floods that engulfed the delightful town of Cockermouth, where Wordsworth was born. This was pounced upon by Global Warming "experts" as "absolute proof" of their theory, and paraded as such in Copenhagen.
The fact is that the theory has now been expanded to include any unusual form of weather, anywhere. Hot summers, warm winters -- global warming. Cold weather at an unusual time of year -- global warming. Drought, storms, floods -- global warming. No snow on the ski slopes, sudden snow, out of season snow, very heavy snow -- global warming. Of course in countries like Japan or the UK, where unusual, unpredictable, and tiresomely variable weather is the norm (it was first commented on in the UK by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century), the public does not swallow global warming, and polls show majorities of 55 to 60 percent reject it.
Of course vested interests accept it. It is regarded as a splendid way of damaging the American economy, by the same kind of left-wing intellectuals who supported the Club of Rome in the 1960s, which argued that world resources were on the brink of exhaustion. It is a form of pantheism and a useful emotional outlet for people who have renounced Judeo-Christianity. If someone is anti-American, left-liberal, and atheist, it is virtually certain he (or even she: women are notoriously more skeptical about it than men are) is a Global Warmer.
Then again, global warming now has a powerful, worldwide institutional substructure. If a media outlet has an environment correspondent, or a university a Department of Climate Studies, or a government a Ministry of Global Warming, those involved are certain to be not just believers but fanatical propagandists for the cause. Their livelihood depends on it. I calculate that the lobby now includes over 20,000 full-time, well-paid professionals whose entire life is spent in pushing "proofs." The existence of this enormous phalanx of well-placed, articulate enthusiasts has inevitably led to the capture of powerful institutions -- in Britain, for instance, the Meteorological Office, the Royal Society, and the BBC, together with many universities and newspapers. . . .
So vast sums of money will continue to be spent on an unproven and unprovable theory, predicting a global catastrophe from the realms of fantasy. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Paul Chesser
Director, Climate Strategies Watch; Scholar, John Locke Foundation; Correspondent, Heartland Institute
American Spectator, February 2, 2010
Looky here today: The Lancet, a medical journal, retracts a 1998 paper that linked a measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism because of unethical conduct by its author, and the media is all over it:
The study subsequently had been discredited, and last week, the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was found to have acted unethically in conducting the research.
The General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Britain, said that "there was a biased selection of patients in The Lancet paper" and that his "conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible." You can't visit the sites of most of the so-called mainstream American media this afternoon and not find this story.
Contrast this with how quickly they reported the Climategate story -- which is, not quickly at all. But never mind that -- as Rick Moran writes at American Thinker, U.S. outlets are completely ignoring multiple reports out of the British media about "discredited" (see Lancet story, above), "unethical" (see Lancet story, above), "biased" (see Lancet story, above), "dishonest" (see Lancet story, above) and "irresponsible" (see Lancet story, above) behavior on the part of researchers from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Global Climate Change:
The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the "consensus" of 2500 of the world's climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.
We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus "science" on was written by a food safety advocate . . . . And the please-tell-me-this-is-a-joke latest: The IPCC cited a boot-cleaning guide from an Antarctic tour operator as a source. This is what passed for "consensus science" -- a premise the U.S. media swallowed completely and still does. What fools.
Ah, misty water-colored memories . . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Diane Carol Bast
Executive Editor, Heartland Institute
February 3, 2010
Climate scientist William Sprigg delivered a bold challenge to his fellow climate scientists in a blockbuster address to EUEC 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona on February 2.
Sprigg, an adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990.
In his address to the Thirteenth Annual Energy and Environment Expo, Sprigg took on the ClimateGate scandal and called for "serious reforms" of the global scientific community. He warned of a growing perception that "the IPCC is biased, conflicted, [and] pushing political agendas."
Sprigg called for a new climate research agency supported not entirely by the government, but in conjunction with the private sector.
"We need to stick to our scientific principles," Sprigg said, referring at least in part to the critical importance of sharing data with other scientists so that hypotheses and methodologies can be checked and double-checked. "We need to improve our peer preview process, and expand the stakeholders' role to keep us all honest." . . .
Heartland Senior Fellow James M. Taylor, managing editor of Environment & Climate News, also attended the event, and during the Q&A following Sprigg's presentation asked the scientist what he thinks the future holds for the IPCC.
Sprigg nodded as Taylor referred to "mounting scandals" at the IPCC and then responded, "There will be some reform. I think there's going to be big changes in the peer review process for the IPCC. There will be--there are--calls for the head of [IPCC Chairman Raj] Pachauri. Some of my colleagues have written letters saying that he needs to be taken off the job . . . ."
The video is available on YouTube and also on the Web sites of Environment and Climate News, The Heartland Institute, and Global Warming Facts.
Read the rest.
Related items:
E. Calvin Beisner on Truths that Transform: The Copenhagen Conference and The 'Climategate' ScandalBack to top Scienceby Walter Russell Mead
Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
American Interest, February 7, 2010
It’s not just the threat of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035.
Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away. A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC.
“The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.”
There is however one teensy-weensy little problem. As Professor Chris Field, the lead author of the IPCC’s climate impact team has now told reporters that he can find “no evidence” to support the claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report.
There’s more. When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.
But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report.
So the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes. The former head of IPCC has publicly said the organization risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act. The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC. (At Greenpeace, they want Pachauri to resign.) The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in the need to address global warming.
More significantly, there’s an editorial in today’s Guardian that criticizes shortcomings at the IPCC and calls for a wholesale change in the way climate scientists do their work and communicate with the public.
In my February 1 post on The Death of Global Warming, I said that the movement had been killed by two things: bad science and bad politics. The Guardian hopes that the parrot isn’t dead yet, but it seems to agree with my basic diagnosis: “It is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain,” write the editors.
The editors pick up another theme that is familiar to readers of this blog:
In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman.
It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science. When the IPCC has its former chief, the Guardian newspaper, and the Dutch government demanding change, something has got to give.
I just wish all these stories were a little easier to find in the American press. These stories have been and continue to be on the front pages of UK newspapers; American newspapers by and large aren’t, yet, taking them as seriously and the growing numbers of Americans who are following the scandals are mostly tracking them from internet reports like this one or directly in the British press. This too needs to change, and the sooner the better.
Read the rest.
Related items:
The Great Global Warming Collapse: As the Science Scandals Keep Coming, the Air has Gone out of the Climate-Change Movement
The Globe and Mail
Climate Götterdämmerung
National Review Online
Global Warming Snow Job: Climate-Change Pseudoscience Is Fraught With Fraud
Washington TimesBack to top by Paul Reiter
Professor and Chief of Insects and Infectious Disease Unit, Institut Pasteur
Science & Public Policy Institute, December 15, 2009 (Reprinted from Malaria Journal 2008)
Abstract
Speculations on the potential impact of climate change on human health frequently focus on malaria. Predictions are common that in the coming decades, tens – even hundreds – of millions more cases will occur in regions where the disease is already present, and that transmission will extend to higher latitudes and altitudes. Such predictions, sometimes supported by simple models, are persuasive because they are intuitive, but they sidestep factors that are key to the transmission and epidemiology of the disease: the ecology and behaviour of both humans and vectors, and the immunity of the human population. A holistic view of the natural history of the disease, in the context of these factors and in the precise setting where it is transmitted, is the only valid starting point for assessing the likely significance of future changes in climate.
Review
. . . . Man-made climate change has become a defining moral and political issue of our age. Speculations on its potential impact often focus on infectious diseases, and on malaria in particular. Predictions are common that in the coming decades, tens – even hundreds – of millions more cases will occur in regions where the disease is already present, and that the vectors and the pathogens will move to higher latitudes and altitudes.
Numerous review publications and substantial media attention have had a major impact on public perceptions of the issue. In most cases, these publications make brief mention of where malaria occurs and how it is transmitted, followed by a succession of statements on the action of temperature, rainfall and other climate variables on specific components of the transmission cycle. These statements – often valid in themselves – are used to justify disquieting predictions that are persuasive because they are intuitive. Some are based on mathematical models that select a climate variable (usually temperature), propose a direct interaction with a transmission parameter (e.g. multiplication of the parasite, survival of the vector), and inevitably arrive at the same conclusions. Many focus on the vulnerability of people in poorer countries and place the blame squarely on the activities of the industrial nations. A deplorable trend in the scientific press is the inclusion of a political message, much as in the popular media. . . .
Common Misconceptions
There is a widespread misconception that mosquito-borne diseases require tropical temperatures, or at least the temperatures of the warmer temperate regions. A glance at a map of global isotherms reveals that summer temperatures in many temperate regions are at least as high as in the warmest seasons of many regions in the tropics. The crucial difference is that the tropics do not have cold winters. Moreover, if tropical mosquito-borne pathogens are introduced to temperate regions in the right season, they can be transmitted, if suitable vectors are present.
There is also a misconception that mosquitoes die in winter, and that more die in colder winters, but it is obvious that mosquitoes – and indeed all life-forms that are native to temperate regions – have evolved strategies to survive low temperatures. . . .
Malaria in Temperate Regions
Few people are aware that it is less than forty years since the final eradication of malaria in Europe and the United States. Indeed, the disease was common in the period from the 16th to 18th centuries that climatologists term the Little Ice Age, and data from burial records around the Thames estuary reveal that mortality in "marsh parishes" of England was comparable to that in areas of transmission in sub-Saharan Africa today.
Until the mid-19th century, the northern limit of transmission was roughly defined by the present 15°C July isotherm. Denmark and parts of Sweden suffered devastating epidemics until the 1860s. Incidence diminished thereafter and the disease had essentially disappeared around the turn of the 20th Century. The same was true in Finland, except for a brief recrudescence in 1941, during the Russo-Finnish war. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economics and PolicyWall Street Journal, February 7, 2010
The Obama Administration has been moving full-speed ahead on anticarbon regulation, never mind waiting for Congress to pass a bill. But now opposition is building among senior Democrats, with two powerful committee Chairmen introducing a bill last week to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from declaring that carbon is a dangerous pollutant.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is busy writing new rules that would let her drive a tax-and-regulation bulldozer through the U.S. economy under laws never meant to apply to greenhouse gases. Ms. Jackson is expected to issue new anticarbon regulations for cars and trucks next month before moving on to power plants and other industries.
This is all too much for Missouri's Ike Skelton and Minnesota's Collin Peterson, the Chairmen of the House Armed Services and Agriculture Committees, respectively. Along with Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson, they are pushing a two-page bill that would amend the Clean Air Act to restore Congress's original intent and strip CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the statutory language.
This is bipartisanship we can believe in. Such legislation would vaporize the EPA's "endangerment finding" for carbon and thus require the Administration to use democratic debate and persuasion if it really wants to reshape the energy markets and impose huge new costs on American consumers. What a thought.
"If Congress doesn't do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own," Mr. Peterson said. "I have no confidence that EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without severe harm to all taxpayers."
Added Mr. Skelton: "Simply put, we cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats at EPA. America's energy and environmental policies should be set by Congress." Yes, they should be.
The Skelton-Peterson-Emerson bill follows a similar effort by North Dakota Democrat Earl Pomeroy, not to mention Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski's coming "disapproval resolution" in the Senate that has the support of Democrats Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln.
Our one caveat here is that Messrs. Skelton and Peterson are doing the right thing for the wrong reason—specifically, to defend the ethanol industry. . . .
Yet in the case of carbon regulation—an even dumber policy—we'll take what we can get. If the power of farm-state politicians ends up stopping the EPA's global-warming power grab, it would be the first good thing ethanol has done for the country.
Read the rest.Back to top by Chris Holly
Energy Daily, February 11, 2010
In an escalation of the legal battle royale over the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, a coalition of 13 Republican House members and 17 southeastern companies and industry associations Wednesday asked a federal court to review the landmark ruling, charging that an influential 2007 scientific assessment on which it is largely based is fatally flawed.
In their petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the lawmakers join the companies and industry groups in asserting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on which EPA heavily relied in making the endangerment finding is based on faulty science.
The suit was brought by Reps. John Linder (Ga.), Dana Rohrabacker (Calif.), John Shimkus (Ill.), Phil Gingrey (Ga.), Lynn Westmoreland (Ga.), Tom Price (Ga.), Paul Broun (Ga.), Steve King (Iowa), Nathan Deal (Ga.), Jack Kingston (Ga.), Michele Bachman (Minn.), Kevin Brady (Texas) and Joe Barton (Texas), senior GOP member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and perhaps the most outspoken House skeptic on climate change.
The industries joining Wednesday’s lawsuit are spearheaded by Valdosta, Ga.-based Langdale Co. and seven Langdale affiliates, six southeastern trucking companies, the Georgia Motor Trucking Association and the Georgia Agribusiness Council.
The legal attack on the EPA endangerment finding is based on the contents of some 1,000 private e-mails, documents and computer codes hacked from the servers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University in Great Britain, which houses one of numerous sets of climate change data and other materials used in preparing the 2007 IPCC report. . . .
. . . Republican lawmakers have seized on what they refer to as “Climategate” as proof that the scientific research driving global warming concerns is fraudulent.
“As is more fully shown below, newly revealed information, in what is being referred to as“Climategate1,” indicates that the purportedly ‘scientific’ information on which [EPA] relied was the subject of a number of systematic manipulations, including collusion to withhold scientific information, deletion of e-mails and raw data to prevent discovery of key facts, manipulation of data and computer code to create false impressions, and concerted efforts to boycott key journals and exclude disagreement,” said the suit, which was filed on behalf of the lawmakers and industry groups by the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), a self-described “national constitutional public interest law firm and policy center that advocates limited government, individual economic freedom, and the free enterprise system in the courts of law and public opinion.” . . .
In the suit, the groups assert that since “Climategate” raises questions about the validity of the IPCC report, EPA is bound by law to reconsider its endangerment finding and provide a new opportunity for public comment so that the allegations stemming from the stolen e-mails can be addressed.
“Failure to investigate this new evidence that supports leading credible scientists’ observations that ‘global warming’/climate change is not caused by humans (anthropogenic), but is natural, cyclical, and not as extreme as reported by the IPCC, creates significant legal problems for the EPA’s regulatory effort,” the SLF said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
The SLF comes on the heels of a January 25 legal challenge against the EPA endangerment finding brought by Massey Energy Co., National Beef Cattlemen’s Association and Alpha Natural Resources Inc.
That suit led 16 states—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington—to intervene in EPA’s behalf in support of the finding. These states also participated in the original legal battle that culminated in the 2007 Supreme Court ruling.
Read the rest.
Related items:
EPA Lawsuit Information--Provided by the Southeastern Legal Foundation
An EPA Power Grab: CO2 Ruling a Sure Job Killer
Testimony of Marlo Lewis on Greenhouse Gas Regulation Under the Clean Air Act
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, September 23, 2008
Submission to the EPA on Endangerment Finding
by Stephen McIntyre
Author, ClimateAudit.org
Science & Public Policy Institute, February 2, 2010 (originally submitted to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency June 23, 2009)
67. . . . OMB Section III Guidelines “bar the participation” of scientists employed by the sponsoring agency in peer review of a highly influential scientific assessment. Nonetheless, one of the 12 expert reviewers of the TSD [Technical Support Document] is “Anne Grambsch, EPA”.
68. OMB and EPA Guidelines both discourage the repeated use of the same reviewers in multiple assessments. Nonetheless, several of the expert reviewers held senior positions in the assessment studies that were relied upon by the TSD, notably Susan Solomon who had been Chairman of the IPCC AR4 Working Group I and Thomas Karl, who was a senior participant in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
69. Contrary to OMB [Office of Management and Budget] Guidelines, EPA has not published a peer review record of the activities of the expert reviewers of the TSD.
Conclusion
70. The Finding and the TSD are highly influential scientific assessments that relied on assessments carried out by parties external to the EPA, including the IPCC. In order for EPA to use an assessment with external party peer review, EPA Guidelines require that IPCC submit the assessment report together with a complete peer review record to EPA and that EPA officials evaluate the assessment and peer review record for compliance with EPA (and OMB) Guidelines. It is highly doubtful that either such a submission or such an evaluation ever happened. In addition, there is considerable evidence that IPCC peer review procedures fall well short of the “rigorous” standard required for highly influential scientific assessments including non-compliance with standards on data availability, due diligence and transparency. In the particular case of 1000-year temperature reconstructions, the TSD applied a graphic that employed proxies which the NRC 2006 panel had said should be avoided. The peer review of the TSD itself did not comply with relevant guidelines.
Read the whole study.Back to top Religion and Ethicsby Jay W. Richards
Visiting Fellow, Heritage Foundation; Author, Money, Greed, and God
Enterprise Blog, February 1, 2010
Religion Dispatches has an interesting interview with Bron Taylor, the author of a new book called Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future. From his years of observations of grassroots environmental movements, Taylor came to the conclusion that
something new and critically important was emerging that could decisively reshape the political, environmental, and religious landscape. I called this phenomena Dark Green Religion, and by this I mean religious (or religion-resembling) beliefs and practices that consider nature to be sacred and worthy of reverent care, and non-human organisms to be kin and as having intrinsic value. His basic thesis (to judge from the interview) is that Darwin’s theory of evolution (natural selection and random variation)
shattered traditional religious explanations for the fecundity and diversity of the biosphere. Where this cognitive shift has been made, traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline. The desire for a spiritually meaningful understanding of the cosmos, however, did not wither away, and new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects. So apparently he thinks that Gaia worship is more adaptive than worshiping a supernatural sky god, or something like that. Therefore, natural spirituality is likely to predominate in the future—just as natural selection makes sure that the faster-running gazelles predominate in the long run. The obstacle is that people don’t realize they’re dependent on the material eco-system, and so they stick with their gods, guns, and gas-guzzlers. The good news, in his view, is that the ecological crisis we hear so much about might dislodge our old ways of thinking.
I’ll need to read the whole book to justify a full evaluation and critique of Taylor’s thesis; so I’ll offer just a few comments here.
First, it’s simply false to claim (as environmentalists have been claiming since Lynn White’s famous article in Science in 1967) that Judeo-Christian religions do not “consider nature to be sacred and worthy of reverent care, and non-human organisms to be kin and as having intrinsic value.” The Judeo-Christian tradition certainly distinguishes human beings from other animal life, but it also makes them stewards over the creation—stewards who have responsibility to God for how they care for creation. And since everything is created by God for some purpose, everything has intrinsic value. This has always been a part of the Christian tradition at the very least, and it’s just the impression you’d get from reading the first several chapters of Genesis. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Earth is the Lord’s, even if it’s not the Lord.
Second, his claim that nature spiritualities are more adaptive than (presumably) theistic religions seems to be a pure deduction based on his assumptions, rather than being based on the empirical evidence. He assumes that ecological catastrophe is imminent, and that nature religions “promote ecologically adaptive behaviors.” But it’s not clear what nature religions he has in mind, since the ones that have actually existed historically don’t obviously qualify. In fact, over the last few thousand years, various nature religions have been largely displaced by theistic religions. (My northern European ancestors were probably practicing nature religions two thousand years ago, for instance.) And those places where theistic religions have displaced nature religion seem, at least in broad economic and environmental terms, to be doing a lot better than the places where nature religions have held on. This is less than obvious to Taylor, perhaps, because he thinks carbon dioxide, that footprint of industrial civilization, is a destructive pollutant.
Still, I do think he’s onto something. It’s clear that there is a movement afoot, which is hostile to traditional theistic religion and inclined toward nature worship. It’s infiltrating the traditional religions themselves. I’m hoping that those Christian activists who so uncritically baptize environmentalist orthodoxies will notice Taylor’s book and start to think more critically about the incompatibility of those environmental orthodoxies with Christian orthodoxy.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
January 16, 2010
. . . Greenpeace publicity stunts, anti-corporate campaigns and fund-raising appeals are often laden with false and misleading claims about companies and their operations. The Warriors justify their actions as necessary to advancing their legal, legislative and regulatory agenda – and getting people and foundations to write a check or click their website’s “donate now” button. Almost anything goes, because Greenpeace and its comrades in eco-warfare are apparently beyond the reach of the Lanham Act and mail fraud or tax laws that apply to ordinary corporations and citizens. . . .
In 1995, Greenpeace attacked Shell Oil, claiming the company was going to dump tons of oil and toxic wastes in the ocean, by sinking an obsolete North Sea oil production platform as an artificial reef. A year later, after raking in millions in contributions and free publicity, the Warriors admitted they’d known all along there had been no oil or chemicals on the platform.
Their shiny armor got tarnished, but there were no legal repercussions. A few years later, the Rainbow Warriors were caught diverting funds raised for tax-exempt educational purposes into non-exempt, and sometimes illegal, lobbyist and activist programs. Donors got charitable deductions, and Greenpeace got more millions to stage protests against drilling, manufacturing and free trade; lobby Congress and EPA; and vandalize crops and corporate facilities.
The IRS sent Greenpeace a strong reprimand, demanding that it cease its money laundering, but again no real penalties. Canada, by contrast, refused to recognize the Greenpeace Environmental Foundation as a charity, saying its activities provided no discernable benefits to the public and, in fact, could send families “into poverty.”
But back in the USA, former EPA Administrator-turned-Climate-Czar Carol Browner and other federal agency heads continue to fork over large sums of taxpayer money to Greenpeace and similar eco-activists, to subsidize their anti-corporate, global warming, “sustainable” energy and regulatory thumbscrew campaigns. Meanwhile, the taxpayers are precluded from writing off contributions to congressional candidates who might support long overdue investigations, reforms and penalties. The truly odious ethical violations, however, involve activities that directly damage the livelihoods and lives of innocent people, particularly in impoverished countries.
In Britain, France and elsewhere, Greenpeace vandals have destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research to develop food plants that require fewer pesticides, are more nutritious, reduce dangerous mold toxins, withstand floods and droughts, and increase crop yields. The people who would benefit most from this research are the poorest, most malnourished on Earth. They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton or soybean seeds. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly Noted
How MET Office Blocked Questions on its Own Man's Role in 'Hockey Stick' Climtae Row
New Errors in IPCC Climate Change Report
Africagate: Top British Scientist Says UN Panel Is Losing Credibility
£8 Billion BBC Eco-Bias
Robin McKie (Believer) Debates Benny Peiser (Skeptic) on Catastrophic Manmade Climate Change
Philip Stott Explains Why The Observor Is Wrong About the McKie vs. Peiser Debate
David King Admits to Speculation Over Source of Climate Science Emails
So All These Climate Revelations Were a Dastardly Foreign Plot: It Hasn't occurred to King that the Emails Might Have Been Leaked by an Insider
Strange Case of Moving Weather Posts and a Scientist Under Siege
Leaked Climate Change Emails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws
Ed Miliband Needs to Listen--Fails to Heed Advice of Government's Chief Scientific Advisor
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
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