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Newsletter (July 16, 2010)
Above the FoldA Biblical Response to One of the Greatest Deceptions of Our Day
Project Update:
We're delighted that, in addition to the nine scholars who have already delivered the twelve lectures for us, several prominent leaders have agreed to speak for the project! Chuck Colson, Frank Wright (National Religious Broadcasters), Richard Land (Southern Baptist Convention ERLC), Tom Minnery (Focus on the Family), David Noebel (Summit Ministries), Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Wendy Wright (Concerned Women for America), and Bryan Fischer (American Family Association) are among the first to respond to our invitation to appear in the video series and its accompanying materials.
Without doubt one of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement. Now, this ground-breaking book and 12-week video series will help churches, Sunday schools, families, students, and small groups learn how the Bible powerfully confronts environmental fears and how—in God’s wise design—people and nature can thrive together.
Click here to register for regular email updates as more names and resources are announced in the coming weeks.
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 these outstanding learning tools!In This Issue
Featured- The Climategate Whitewash Continues
- Attention Whole Foods Shoppers
Science & Ecology- June 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update: +0.44 deg. C
- Destroying Biodiversity
Economics & Energy- Smart Meter Chaos: Maryland PSC Gets Real (Consumerism, Anyone?)
- All You Need to Know About Wind Power, in One Place
Religion & Ethics- The Problem with Blindly Trusting Scientists
- PennFuture's Lobbying
Politics & Debate- Amazongate: the Smoking Gun
- Climate Change: A Collective Flight from Reality
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: David Evans, Ph.D.
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Patrick J. Michaels
Chief Editor, WorldClimateReport.com; Research Professor, University of Virginia; Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; Visiting Scientist, Marshall Institute; Author, Climate of Extremes, Meltdown, The Satanic Gases, and Sound and Fury
Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2010
Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.
Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.
Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find."
No links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity." . . .
It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line "IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."
Mr. Jones emailed later that he had "deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, "Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."
The Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"
Then there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: "On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this."
Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann's work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.
But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that "I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: "I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."
Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that "I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute."
Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.
Of course, Mr. Russell didn't look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That's because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Climategate and the Big Green Lie
by Clive Crook
Senior Editor, Atlantic; Columnist, National Journal; Commentator, Financial Times
July 14, 2010
ClimateGate 'Whitewash' Helps 'Clear' Scientists, U.S., International Media Claim
by Julia A. Seymour
Assistant Editor and Analyst, Business & Media Institute
July 14, 2010
A 'Joke' Impossible to Parody
by Paul Chesser
Director, Climate Strategies Watch; Scholar, John Locke Foundation; Correspondent, Heartland Institute
American Spectator, July 14, 2010
Climategate: Reinstating Phil Jones Is Good News - the CRU Brand Remains Toxic
by Gerald Warner
Columnist, Telegraph
July 8, 2010
Great Academics Go Along With the Pack
by Warren Meyer
Author, Climate Skeptic
July 14, 2010
Parliament Misled Over Climategate Report, Says MP
by Andrew Orlowski
Columnist, The Register
July 9, 2010Back to top by Robert Paarlberg
Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College; Associate, Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; Author, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know
Foreign Policy, June, 2010
. . . Helping the world's poor feed themselves is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Food may be today's cause célèbre, but in the pampered West, that means trendy causes like making food "sustainable" -- in other words, organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most. . . .
Poverty -- caused by the low income productivity of farmers' labor -- is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of "food insecure" people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.
What's so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization . . . .
In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Video: One Hungry PlanetBack to top Science & Ecologyby Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion and The Great Global Warming Blunder
July 1, 2010
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature remains warm, +0.44 deg. C [above the 1979-1998 average] for June, 2010, but it appears the El Nino warmth is waning as a La Nina approaches.
For those keeping track of whether 2010 ends up being a record warm year, 1998 still leads with the daily average for 1 Jan to 30 June being +0.64 C in 1998 compared with +0.56 C for 2010. (John Christy says that the difference is not statistically significant.) As of 30 June 2010, there have been 181 days in the year. From our calibrated daily data, we find that 1998 was warmer than 2010 on 122 (two-thirds) of them.
As a reminder, four months ago we changed to Version 5.3 of our dataset, which accounts for the mismatch between the average seasonal cycle produced by the older MSU and the newer AMSU instruments. This affects the value of the individual monthly departures, but does not affect the year to year variations, and thus the overall trend remains the same as in Version 5.2. ALSO…we have added the NOAA-18 AMSU to the data processing in v5.3, which provides data since June of 2005. The local observation time of NOAA-18 (now close to 2 p.m., ascending node) is similar to that of NASA’s Aqua satellite (about 1:30 p.m.). The temperature anomalies listed above have changed somewhat as a result of adding NOAA-18. . . .
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
July 12, 2010
The Soviet Union’s demise ushered in manmade catastrophic global warming as the new “central organizing principle of civilization.” Now, global warming hysteria is giving way to a growing recognition that: climate change is primarily natural, cyclical and moderate; China, India and other poor countries will not sacrifice CO2-generating economic growth on the altar of speculative climate disaster; and carbon taxes strangle competitiveness, destroy jobs and send families into fuel poverty.
However, environmental activists know the key to power, control and fund-raising is the specter of disaster. Thus, even as climate chaos shrivels as an organizing principle, the United Nations and radical greens have inaugurated a new eco-Frankenstein monster.
The real threat to the planet, they now assert, is the impact of modern energy technologies and civilization on biodiversity. The case for saving species, they insist, is even “more powerful” than the need to address climate change. Of course, they have a plan.
They will preserve biodiversity by controlling not just land and energy use, but all human activity – under the auspices of the United Nations, expanded global government, and new regulations and taxes. Their efforts to preserve species, they claim, will generate benefits “worth $4-5 trillion per year” (based on computer models and unsupported assertions about the intrinsic value of species and biodiversity). . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Move Over, Global Warming
by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Washington Times, June 4, 2010Back to top Economics & Energyby Robert 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
June 25, 2010
The smartest guys in the electricity room believe that a path to energy efficiency and environmental goodness is to hook up so-called smart meters for us little users. The smart machines would signal (jolt?) us to use less power in peak times when the price is high and to use power more when the price is low.
But the very concept has problems aplenty. First, time-of-use pricing for residentials (versus commercial and industrial customers) is a nice ‘green’ theory, not fact. Some states like California do not want or allow such residential pricing because of equity concerns.
Second, so-called smart meters are all about government (taxpayer) and class ratepayer subsidies, not stand-alone economics between willing buyers and sellers.
Third, there is the hassle factor (called transaction costs) of setting up appliances with time-of-day usage. Relatedly, (in)flexibility costs are incurred.
And last but not least, smart meters are intrusive. Big Environmental Brother lurks behind each smart meter to tell you what to do and when to do it. Civil libertarians take note of this government-dependent machine. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
The Smart Grid Trojan Horse
by W. Grant Ellis
American Thinker, June 23, 2010Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
July 8, 2010
John Droz, Jr., a physicist and Cornwall Newsletter reader, recently wrote to tell us about his website, WindPowerFacts. There Droz--a long-time movement environmentalist and member of various environmental advocacy organizations--presents, in a cool and measured way, the scientific facts about why wind power is bad for the environment and the economy. The low-down: It uses up more resources, including especially land, than conventional fuels (fossil and nuclear) to produce unreliable electric power at much higher cost.
Particularly instructive is his slide presentation, "Electrical Energy, Science, and You." Take the time to view and read it carefully. You'll never be bamboozled by "renewable energy" advocates' anti-scientific and anti-economic arguments again.Back to top Religion & Ethicsby Rod Dreher
Director of Publications, John Templeton Foundation
beliefnet, July 8, 2010
You may have read that a British investigative panel cleared UK climate scientists of Climategate charges (that they had manipulated data to support political ends). But it was not a complete exoneration. Climate scientist Roger Pielke had this to say about the mess:
The e-mails don't at all change the fundamental tenets of the science," said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "But they changed the notion that people could blindly trust one authoritative group, when it turns out they're just like everybody else. This is a very, very good thing. We should be responsibly skeptical of authority -- not only religious authority, but scientific authority. We live in an age of Scientism, in which many people invest science with the power of ideology. Wendell Berry calls this "modern superstition," because people have given science the powers they used to give to religion. Berry wrote a fantastic book defending the integrity and value of art and religion as ways of knowing, against the idea that Science should be the undisputed master of all. He doesn't oppose science, but he thinks that all three ways of knowing -- art, science, religion -- must be understood as limited. The trouble comes when any one is elevated as supreme above all others, and their spheres. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
When to Doubt a Scientific 'Consensus'
by Jay W. Richards
Visiting Fellow, Heritage Foundation; Author, Money, Greed, and God
American, March 16, 2010
Book: 'The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict'
Review by Jack Shafer
Editor at large, Slate
July 14, 2010Back to top by Paul Chesser
Director, Climate Strategies Watch; Scholar, John Locke Foundation; Correspondent, Heartland Institute
Commonwealth Foundation, July, 2010
PennFuture (a.k.a. Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future), the organization founded by Pennsylvania Secretary of Environmental Protection John Hanger over 10 years ago, frequently criticizes the lobbying by traditional energy industries. But a close look at the environmental activist group shows at least questionable and hypocritical, if not unethical or illegal, advocacy practices.
While the organization condemns the natural gas industry for its lobbying against increased and selective taxation of its investments, PennFuture has received nearly $1 million during the last five years from alternative energy companies. These companies benefited from PennFuture's lobbying for corporate tax breaks and taxpayer-funded "economic development" funds for wind and solar projects in Pennsylvania.
And even as PennFuture solicited volunteer and member assistance to pressure legislators to pass or oppose specific pieces of legislation, the group reported to the Internal Revenue Service that it spent no money on grassroots lobbying on four of its past five tax returns.
Finally, PennFuture's lobbying of state officials is also funded by the taxpayers. Since 2002, the group has lobbied for and received over $1 million in taxpayer money, which is then used to lobby elected and appointed officials for additional taxpayer money.
To download the full PDF version, please click here.Back to top Politics & DebateEUReferendum, July 3, 2010
More than five months after the IPCC was accused of making assertions on the fate of the Amazon forest on the basis of a non-peer reviewed WWF report, it now appears that the original source of the IPPC's claim is a Brazilian educational website which was taken down in 2003 (pictured - click to enlarge).
Furthermore, it appears that this is the only source of the IPCC's claim that made up the basis of "Amazongate" – that the IPCC was, once again, using unsubstantiated material which exaggerated the threat. This website, therefore, is the "smoking gun", the latest evidence to suggest that the IPCC is breaking its own rules. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Another Bogus Claim by IPCC: 40% of Amazon Rainforest at Risk from Global Warming
by E. Calvin Beisner,
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
January 28, 2010Back to top by Roger Helmer
Member of Parliament, England
Washington Times, July 8, 2010
Climate change isn't a threat. CO2 isn't a significant factor. But the action we're proposing to take on climate mitigation will devastate our Western economies and impoverish a whole generation.
Over the last hundred years, mean global temperatures have increased by 0.7 of a degree Centigrade. That's all. The whole climate scare is all about a fraction of a degree. According to Professor Phil Jones of the infamous Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there has been no significant warming for the last 15 years. . . .
Our efforts to control climate by reducing emissions are doomed to failure. Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), has studied the economics of climate change and estimates that the European Union's 20 percent emissions-reduction target will cost around $250 billion a year. Yet the impact by 2100 on global temperatures is likely to be only 0.05 a degree Centigrade - almost too small to measure. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly Noted750 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of 'Man-Made' Global Warming (AGW) Alarm
Chesser: Environmentalists Lose Battle for Public Mind
Solomon: Wind's Bad Day
Hoffman: Chicken Little the Sky is Falling
IER: Kerry-Lieberman Cap-and-Trade Burden Calculator: What Would Climate Legislation Cost You?Back 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:
David Evans, Ph.D.
Head of Science Speak, David Evans worked as a consultant for the Australian Department of Climate Change, building models and doing carbon accounting. At the time, Evans believed in anthropogenic global warming, but since then, he says, "the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed," and further documents this claim in New Global Warming Science. Mentioned on page 101 of the Senate report, Evans has produced conclusive evidence against the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, notably, The Missing Greenhouse Signature. Along with some interviews, a few notable pieces are Evans's No Smoking Hot Spot, Are Carbon Emissions the Cause of Global Warming?, The ETS: Completely Unnecessary, and My Life With the AGO and Other Reflections.
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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