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Newsletter (July 24, 2009)
In this issue
Featured- Book Review: The Green Bible
- Video: John Christy on Energy Technology and Morality
- In Global Warming We Trust
- A Baker’s Dozen of Reasons to Oppose Cap-and-Trade
Debate- Gaia’s Right
- The IPCC Can't Count Its "Expert Scientists"
- Are Skeptics Really on Thin Ice?
Science- Walter Cronkite (RIP) Versus Irrational Fears of Environmental Trace Elements
Economics- Global Warming Is Manageable--if We're Smart
- Future Energy Choices Should Spare Landscapes
Meet the Critics: Craig Loehle & William M. Gray
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Alan Jacobs
Professor of English, Wheaton College; Contributing Writer, First Things
First Things, May, 2009
. . . The Green Bible presents us with a curious kind of natural theology: We start with things we know to be true from trusted sources—Al Gore, perhaps?—and then we turn to Scripture to measure it against those preexisting and reliable authorities. And what a relief to discover that God is green. Because we already know that it's good to be green—what we didn't know is whether God measures up to that standard. . . .
. . . It often seems that being green is a secondary good, something we should practice primarily because it helps the poor, with benefits to the earth being a kind of bonus. I am not complaining about this merging of values—it is right to note that Scripture often presents us with networks of virtues and mutually reinforcing practices. But the confluence does raise the question of why this is a Green Bible rather than, say, a Justice Bible. Could it be that greenness is a sexier commodity right now than justice or peaceableness? . . .
. . . But even if the theology here were rich and deep and uniformly brilliant, I would still be concerned about a Bible with so much ancillary material on a single subject. This strategy too easily conflates a particular agenda and the whole biblical message. If God is green, then are the green also godly? The essays in The Green Bible don't do anything to discourage that line of thought. . . .
. . . I would guess that The Green Bible is addressed to two constituencies. First, committed environmentalists, or those at least deeply attracted to it, who view Christianity with skepticism; people who might become more open to Christianity if they come to believe that God is green. And second, Christians who would like to find some biblical warrant for their attraction to environmental issues. Members of each group could benefit from this book, but only if they are able to maintain a critical distance from some of its claims, implicit and explicit. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by John Christy
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, July 18, 2009
. . . In 1900 the energy technology of the day supported 56 billion human life years. . . . Now the energy technology supports about 450 billion human life years. . . . View the one-and-a-half minute video at CO2 Science or YouTube.Back to top by Anthony J. Sadar and Susan T. Cammarata
Certified Consulting Meteorologist (Sadar); Environmental Lawyer (Cammarata)
Washington Times, February 23, 2009
Today, we are urged to believe that within the next few decades the globe will become intolerably warmer. The world as we know it will be drastically altered unless we act now to reverse our wayward lifestyles, especially our wasteful energy practices.
But wait. Aren't we all just essentially being pressured to believe in a long-range climate forecast? And isn't this pressure largely being applied by politicians and political organizations no less? Who today would bet serious money on a weather prediction made a month in advance let alone decades ahead? Yet the developed nations of the world are under the gun to invest hundreds of billions of dollars on a climate prophecy when worldwide financial stability is tottering. Doesn't President Barack Obama have enough global headaches to buffer to worry about a trillion-dollar climate prescription?
Many in the environmental profession have come to an epiphany like the one the late Michael Crichton had - that contemporary environmentalism, with its authoritative, unchallengeable proclamations and rigid tenets, is analogous to organized religion. This environmental religion is headed by politicians (or former politicians) as the high priests and an established political cathedral (read Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
These adored figureheads have selected verses from a collection of scientific data and climate effects to write their global-warming scriptures. Their holy writ includes a reworking of the Book of Revelation with planetary disasters as frightening as those alluded to in the authentic account.
Salvation comes from giving the priests control over our daily lives to redeem us from our carbonaceous sins. Penance and indulgence take the form of "offsets" to carbon-spewing offenses like frivolous exotic vacations, meaty outdoor barbecues, incandescent-bulb burning, and driving a Hummer (a mortal sin!). . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Nicolas Loris
Research Assistant, Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation, July 21, 2009
. . . 1.) It will destroy 1.15 million jobs. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found that, for the average year over the 2012-2035 timeline, job loss will be 1.1 million greater than the baseline assumptions. . . .
. . . 2.) It will reduce economic growth. . . . Heritage found the average GDP loss is $393 billion . . .
. . . 3.) It will increase your energy bills. Since 85 percent of America’s energy needs are met by carbon-emitting fossil fuels, cap-and-trade would be a massive tax on energy consumption. . . .
. . . 4.) It hits low-income households hardest. . . . since low-income households spend a larger percentage of their income on energy, the poor suffer most. . . .
. . . 5.) It will cost a family of four an additional $3,000 per year. . . .
. . . 6.) More subsidies for unproven technologies and energy sources. . . . Washington is forcing costlier energy options on the public. . . .
. . . 7.) It would hurt America’s farmers. . . . We estimate that farm income . . . will drop $8 billion in 2012, $25 billion in 2024, and over $50 billion in 2035. . . .
. . . 8.) It’s Robin Hood in reverse. The Waxman-Markey bill takes a lot of money from regular Americans and funnels it to Washington bureaucrats and the corporations with the best lobbyists. . . .
. . . 9.) It would disrupt free trade. . . . the bill includes protectionist carbon tariffs to offset the competitive disadvantage U.S. firms would face. . . .
. . . 10.) There’s no environmental benefit. . . . the bill would lower temperatures by only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century. . . .
. . . 11.) Those losing their jobs won’t get much help. . . . The Heritage Foundation estimates that between 2011 and 2019, an average of 987,440 Americans will be out of work because of Waxman-Markey. Using CBO’s guidelines, only one out of every 68 displaced workers would receive benefits. . . .
. . . 12.) Growing opposition. . . . opposition is growing as more taxpayers are beginning to recognize its true identity: it’s an energy tax. . . .
. . . 13.) Two-and-a-half minute video: Going Green with Cap and Trade!
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby Mark Steyn
Columnist, National Review
National Review, July 11, 2009
. . . I always enjoy it when the masks slip and the warm-mongers explicitly demand we adopt a massive Poverty Expansion Program to save the planet. “I don’t think a lot of electricity is a good thing,” said Gar Smith of San Francisco’s Earth Island Institute a few years back. “I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity,” he continued, regretting that African peasants “who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal powered sewing machines” are now slumped in front of Desperate Housewives reruns all day long.
One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when a hereditary prince starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses, he gives the real game away. Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by John McLean
IT Professional; Climate Data Analyst; Member, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
McLean's Global Warming Issues, January 18, 2009
How many times have you heard or read words to the effect that 4000 scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) supported the claims about a significant human influence on climate? I think I've seen it on television, radio and the Internet and I know that politicians at national levels have quoted such figures. There's no question whatsoever. It's utterly wrong.
In fact, once the duplicated names are removed that number falls below 2,900 and if we only want those who explicitly supported the claims it falls to only about 60. So how does 4,000 become 60 and were they all qualified and credible scientists? Let's take a closer look at the real numbers. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings
by John McLean
IT Professional; Climate Data Analyst; Member, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
Science & Public Policy Institute, July, 2008Back to top by Joel Connelly
SeattlePI.com, July 12, 2009 (Link)
. . . U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Missouri, introduced legislation to prohibit the United States from contributing to the United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). . . .
"We all know that the UN is incompetent when it comes to spending money, and that is why American taxpayers should not be forking over millions more to one of its organizations that not only is in need of significant reform but is engaged in dubious scientific questions," Luetkemeyer declared.
Actually, the congressman deserves kudos for restraint. Global warming deniers are hurling harsher verbal grenades these days.
Former U.S. Senate aide Marc Morano hailed Luetkemeyer's bid to "deny U.S. taxpayer funding for UN's junk science."
. . . Is the latest [National Aeronautics and Space Administration and University of Washington] finding [thinning Arctic sea ice] "junk science?"
Up in the Arctic, seasonal sea ice usually reaches about 6 feet in thickness, while older "multi-year" ice averages 9 feet.
Using satellite measurements, researchers found that the total area covered by ice that has survived more than one summer has shrunk by 42 percent. Between '04 and '08, multi-year ice shrank by 595,000 square miles -- nearly the size of Alaska's landmass.
. . . But nothing sways the doubters. . . . How, then, do we get doubters to understand a threat to the earth?
They might just listen to a new Kool-aid drinker, who is decidedly not a "liberal?"
"Water resources and climate change are subjects of great importance for the whole human family," Pope Benedict XVI declared 18 months ago. He warned against "poisons and pollution" that will harm future generations.
In a new encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" (Charity in Truth) released last week, Benedict XVI again takes up the subject:
"We must recognize our grave duty to hand the earth on to future generations in such a condition that they too can worthily inhabit it and continue to cultivate it."
Here is a man who can speak without error. He is, of course, speaking the truth.
Still, I expect e-mails debunking Caritas in Veritate as "junk theology."
Response by Mitch Taylor
Department of Environment, Canada
Special to the Cornwall Alliance
The mechanism by which Arctic sea ice "thinned" was mechanical transport of much of the multi-year ice out of the Arctic basin by anomalous winds that pushed the ice into the exit surface currents that carried it out of the arctic basin and into the North Atlantic.
The Bering Sea is ice free every year, so there is no accumulation of multi-year ice there. Most of the ice in the adjacent Chukchi Sea is and always has been annual ice.
Coffins are often exposed in arctic latitudes because it was once impossible to bury them in the winter permafrost if a person died during winter. These days, there is equipment used to dig in winter conditions, and a few "extra" graves are often dug, just in case. Exposed coffins are not a new development or caused by warming or erosion.
It is true that there is less sea ice (less mass, not coverage) now, and that makes the Arctic ice more vulnerable to influx of warm waters, wind and sea current export, and greenhouse effects from clouds generated by open water. Multi-year ice takes time to develop, so the period of vulnerability could be extended if there is a repeat of the same conditions that caused the current situation.Back to top Scienceby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, July 22, 2009
Some people fear carcinogenic trace chemicals in our environment, and such fears are promoted by many environmentalists and critics of industrial society.
The American Council on Science and Health produced a video, narrated by retired news anchor Walter Cronkite, who died July 17, titled Big Fears, Little Risks, that should calm many of those fears. I just came across the video for the first time, and wish I'd known of it long ago because it could be so helpful, especially to parents whose children face considerable propaganda in their schools.
The crucial lesson is that for any potentially dangerous chemical, "the poison is in the dose." At high enough level, thousands of chemicals are dangerously poisonous, carcinogenic, or mutagenic. But at trace levels, hardly any are.
View the video, and you'll not be fooled by bogus alarms about trace chemicals again.Back to top EconomicsInterview of Bjorn Lomborg
Director, Copenhagen Consensus; Associate Professor, University of Aarhus, Denmark; Author, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
Barron's, May 18, 2009
The next treaty to curb global warming will be negotiated this December in Copenhagen, Bjorn Lomborg's home city. Called by The Guardian (U.K.) "one of the 50 people who could save the planet," Lomborg, a statistician, is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007). He also maintains a Website on environmental issues at www.lomborg.com.
Contrary to widely held belief, Lomborg isn't at all skeptical of the fact that global warming is a problem, or that humanity is contributing to it. To get some idea of his real message, Barron's recently caught up with him at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, in which he presented his views on the major priorities for helping the world's poor. Afterward, he sat down to answer our questions in clear, unaccented English, marshalling facts and figures with stunning ease.
Barron's: Bjorn, what do you think will be the outcome of the negotiations to curb global warming this December?
Lomborg: The participating nations will again agree to spend quite a bit of money to cut carbon emissions and again achieve virtually nothing. We already tried that twice -- in Rio in 1992, and in Kyoto in 1997. Both of these treaties failed. We will see a lot of posturing, but presumably this isn't about having a lot of environmental ministries or even presidents and prime ministers come out and claim credit for making costly commitments that we won't be able to live up to, and which would barely make a dent in the problem anyway. When I first started in the global-warming debate, I was struck by the fact that the world was going to pay $180 billion a year for a protocol that could at best reduce the temperature by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century. The U.N. estimates that for less than half that amount, we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, and basic health care and education to every single human being on the planet. The same warped sense of priorities will continue to bedevil us this December in Copenhagen.
What role will be played by the U.S.?
The U.S. is talking about a very low commitment -- maybe cutting emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. That is much less than what the European Union wants, and certainly much less than what most of the environmental groups want. It is also going to be very, very hard for the U.S. to fulfill even that small promise. The Senate overwhelmingly declared in a vote on March 31 that any climate-change legislation considered by Congress must decrease greenhouse gas emissions "without increasing electricity or gasoline prices." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has even promised that energy prices won't go up. Take that seriously, and you have no hope of limiting demand for energy.
What would you do to curb the demand for carbon-emitting fossil fuels?
Global warming is definitely a problem, and we should definitely do something. But we shouldn't do just anything -- we should do the smart thing. The main difficulty with global warming is that fossil fuels are not only fairly cheap, they also make this world so rich and so good to live in by providing us with all the amenities that we see around us: light, heat, the ability to propel ourselves to many different places. So we aren't going to give up fossil fuels without having a great alternative. Right now there is no good alternative to fossil fuels. . . .
. . . Everybody seems to be saying, let's make carbon-emitting fossil fuels so expensive, nobody will want to use them. But that is bound to fail. So rather than making fossil fuels so expensive, we should try to make green energy so cheap that everybody will want to use it. That means investing in research and development to get better technologies available for 2020, but especially for 2040 and afterward. Investing in making solar panels so cheap that even China and India will want to buy them. . . .
. . . Cap-and-trade is essentially a system for trading permits to emit gases, like carbon dioxide, that are blamed for global warming. The problem is that it makes possible immense amounts of gaming the system through political lobbying. Because typically, most of these permits are given away, which is one of the big things the Obama Administration is talking about right now. The companies that had the most benefit from Kyoto in Europe were the energy companies. That is because, at least for the first three or four years, these companies got all the permits to pollute, but the companies still charged their customers -- me and everybody else. So they made tens of billions of euros each year from climate-change policies. Not surprisingly, they are very much in favor of these policies, but it doesn't mean that they are smart policies. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Pete Geddes
Executive Vice President, Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment
Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, May 27, 2009
Over millennia, plants and animals have adapted to changing climates by migrating to more favorable locales. If the climate continues to change in a manner consistent with current expectations, most warming will occur in the high latitudes. In order for plants and animals to adapt, large areas of habitat, especially those along north-south gradients, must be available for movement.
This has direct implications for future energy policies. Specifically, we should carefully consider the footprint our choices imply. In terms of sparing landscapes, energy sources with high energy densities (i.e., the amount of energy per unit of volume or mass) are important. Just as high-yield agriculture reduces pressure to convert native ecosystems to cropland, high-density fuels make it possible for the roughly 60 million residents of the United Kingdom to live on a small island while still protecting nearly a quarter of England’s landscape in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Regarding electricity production, today only two sources fit this bill: fossil fuels and nuclear power. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Craig Loehle, Ph.D.
Principal scientist for the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Craig Loehle has been an environmental researcher at Argonne National Laboratory and Savannah River Laboratory. A member of multiple ecological societies, Loehle has done extensive research, notably reconfirming the Medieval Warm Period (see graph below), and has concluded "that recent warming is part of natural trend." Among Loehle's hundred plus peer-reviewed papers are Cooling of the Global Ocean Since 2003, A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Treering Proxies, and A Mathematical Analysis of the Divergence Problem in Dendroclimatology, which join his 2009 International Conference on Climate Change presentation, 1,500-Year Climate Cycles, Broken Hockey Sticks, and Ocean Cooling as just a sample of his contribution to climate science.
William M. Gray, Ph.D.
Previously an Air Force weather forecaster and a meteorology researcher at the University of Chicago, award-winning hurricane forecaster William Gray serves as emeritus professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and as head of their Tropical Meteorology Project. Asked in an interview whether global warming causes increasing hurricanes, Gray answered "No" and remarked, "Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical . . . about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us." Along with another interview, some pieces of interest by Gray are his Senate testimony, his (2008 and 2009 International Conference on Climate Change presentations) Oceans, Not Carbon Dioxide, Are Driving Climate and Climate Change Is Primarily Driven by Salinity-Induced Deep Ocean Circulation Changes, and his article Get Off Warming Bandwagon.Back to top Briefly NotedVideo: Going Green with Cap and Trade!
Taxpayers Question Use of Public Funds for "Western Climate Initiative"
Poorer Nations Reject a Target on Emission Cut
Carbon Reality, Again
Obama's Science Czar: Traditional Family Is Obsolete, Punish Large Families
Obama's Science Czar Suggested Compulsory Abortion, Sterilization
Why Eyebrows Should Be Raised by Obama Science Czar's Support for Eugenics
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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