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Newsletter (July 9, 2010)
Above the FoldA Biblical Response to One of the Greatest Deceptions of Our Day
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.
Project Update:
We're excited that the filming for this project has been completed! Many thanks to the all-star cast of speakers who generously gave of their time for this project, including
- Dr. Peter Jones, President, truthXchange, author, and editor of On Global Wizardry
- Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi, author and producer of the made-for-TV series, “Must the Sun Set on the West?”
- Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President, Americans United for Life (the country’s oldest pro-life organization)
- Dr. Michael Farris, Chairman, Home School Legal Defense Association, and Chancellor, Patrick Henry College
- Dr. Steven Hayward, Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, and coauthor (since 2003) of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators
- Dr. David Legates, Climatologist, and Professor, University of Delaware
- Hon. Becky Norton Dunlop, Vice President for External Relations, Heritage Foundation, and former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources
- Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance, and an internationally recognized expert on the issue of Biblical creation stewardship
- Rev. Dr. James Tonkowich, Senior Fellow, Cornwall Alliance and former president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy
This explosive video series is scheduled to be released in August, and will include a leader's guide with discussion questions and practical applications for individuals, families, and groups. For a limited time, you can order both the video series and the accompanying book at a discount--click here for details.
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- Ixtoc: The Gulf's Other Massive Oil Spill No Longer Apparent--Creation's Resilience Demonstrated
- Book: 'Climate: The Great Delusion'
Science & Ecology- Solar Influences
- The Muir Russell CRU Apologia Is Out
- Climategate Report: 'Campaign to Win Hearts and Minds' Needed
Economics & Energy- The Economic Impact of an Offshore Drilling Ban
- EU Fatigue Towards Renewables
Politics & Debate- The Complex and Expensive Procedures of a Federally Approved Paint Job
- Greenhouse Protection Racket
- Solutions Galore That Ignore the Poor
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: Christopher Essex, Ph.D.
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Glenn Garvin
Staff Writer, Miami Herald
McClatchy Newspapers, June 12, 2010
MALAQUITE BEACH, Texas ... The oil was everywhere, long black sheets of it, 15 inches thick in some places. Even if you stepped in what looked like a clean patch of sand, it quickly and gooily puddled around your feet. And Wes Tunnell, as he surveyed the mess, had only one bleak thought: "Oh, my God, this is horrible! It's all gonna die!''
But it didn't. Thirty-one years since the worst oil spill in North American history blanketed 150 miles of Texas beach, tourists noisily splash in the surf and turtles drag themselves into the dunes to lay eggs.
"You look around and it's like the spill never happened,'' shrugs Tunnell, a marine biologist. "There's a lot of perplexity in it for many of us.
For Tunnell and others involved in the fight to contain the June 3, 1979, spill from Mexico's Ixtoc 1 offshore well in the Gulf of Campeche, the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico conjures an eerie sense of deja vu.
Like the BP spill, the Ixtoc disaster began with a burst of gas followed by an explosion and fire, followed by a relentless gush of oil that resisted all attempts to block it. Plugs of mud and debris, chemical dispersants, booms skimming the surface of the water: Mexico's Pemex oil company tried them all, but still the spill inexorably crept ashore, first in southeast Mexico, later in Texas.
But if the BP spill seems to be repeating one truth already demonstrated in the Ixtoc spill ... that human technology is no match for a high-pressure undersea oil blowout ... scientists are hoping that it may eventually confirm another: that the environment has a stunning capacity to heal itself from manmade insults.
"The environment is amazingly resilient, more so than most people understand,'' says Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist with advanced degrees from Florida State University and the University of Miami who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
"To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades ...But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again.'' . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Review by Michael J. Economides
Editor-in-Chief, Energy Tribune; Professor, University of Houston
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, July 6, 2010
Christian Gerondeau, a well-known French scientist and engineer, with more than ten books to his credit, has just published in English one of the most devastating, lucid and convincing books on the climate debate. It is a short book, just about 150 pages, and it comes at the heels of the French edition of the book, which made the best-seller list there under the title CO2: Un Mythe Planétaire. . . .
Gerondeau does not take a real position nor does he seem to care much about the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. But he deflates both sides on the effects of emissions, mine included, as actually irrelevant. His questions:
Question 1: “Is it possible that mankind would leave any oil, natural gas or coal that would be economically exploited in the planet’s underground?”
Question 2: “Is it possible to stop mankind’s use of oil, natural gas and coal resulting in the release of CO2 when burned?”
Question 3: “Is it realistic to try to prevent the continued increase in the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere?”
For all three questions, the answer is an unequivocal no. For obvious economic reasons even if the developed world gets together, as attempted first in Kyoto and last year in Copenhagen, to put mandatory limits or stops on carbon emissions, the developing world headed by China and India, and not just them, will continue to burn fossil fuels. The overall production of CO2 and its concentration in the atmosphere will not change from its current trends. Gerondeau, like me, has grave doubts of the feasibility of sequestration and he goes further to say that the current official wish in Europe and the United States to halve CO2 emissions by 2050 from the current level and therefore to a quarter of the current trends is just “wishful thinking”.
What is his take on the future of the planet becomes clear with the next two questions.
Question 4: “Will CO2 emissions continue indefinitely?”
Question 5: “Are we heading for disaster?”
Again the answer to both questions is a no. Since most emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels, their peak will bring about the eventual exhaustion of these fuels and their emissions. He thinks this will happen by the end of the twenty first century. For the catastrophe Cassandras he has this to say. “In the distant past, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been… twenty times what it is today and life on earth was not harmed. No serious examination backs the apocalyptic predictions we are fed daily about the consequences of the inevitable increase in the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. We are told so many obvious falsehoods… which have no basis in scientific truth that is hard to trust those who express them.”
In a methodical and classic engineering and scientific mode, Gerondeau continues in the rest of his book to demolish myth after myth in stunningly simple and, at times witty, prose. . . .
Read the rest.
Purchase Climate: The Great Delusion.Back to top Science & Ecologyby David Whitehouse
Science Editor, The Observatory
July 2, 2010
In the early 1990’s a paper by Christensen was published that showed a striking correlation between the length of the sun’s sunspot cycle and the global average annual temperature, Fig 1. The shorter the cycle (short cycles are more intense) the higher was the earth’s annual temperature. It seemed to indicate that the sun was the dominant influence on the earth’s temperature variations.
. . . However, a few years after the work was published others found flaws in the way the final four (out of 24) data points were plotted. In Christensen’s paper the length of the solar cycle decreased between 1950 – 1990 with the last data point showing that the cycle length shortened at the same time that the recent global warming period started (post 1980). When this was corrected the concordance between the solar cycle length and the earth’s rising temperature broke down as it became apparent that the length of the solar cycle showed no trend as the earth’s temperature rose post-1980.
It was heralded as proof of the hypothesis that the recent, post-1980 warming spell could not be due to the sun. Whereas many argued that the sun was the dominant factor prior to this period, the rate of warming was recently too great to be accounted for without a human influence. . . .
Scrutinising the gradient of sunspot cycle rise and falls it is obvious that usually the cycle rise is more rapid than the fall. During the Dalton Minima however they became equal. Then they resumed their normal relationship only to move once more to equality around 1910 when there were a few relatively weaker sunspot cycles. It is possible that the same thing is happening again. If so this would imply an approx 100 year periodicity, though this is only am impression, as we only have reliable sunspot records since about 1750.
It is possible that changes in solar cycle lengths take place before periods of low solar activity, like the one we may be entering at present, and that might influence the later part of figure 1. If this is the case then the breakdown in the Christensen relationship post 1980 cannot be said with certainty to be due to the rise of human influences on the climate above solar ones.
Read the rest.Back to top by Anthony Watts
Author, Watts Up With That?
July 7, 2010
The Muir Russell Report is out. Read here in PDF. Unfortunately Russell is another apologist who doesn’t ask relevant questions of both sides, only one side. Even BBC now thinks the CRU wears a halo:
Compare that to:
CRU’s Dr. Phil Jones’s response of 21/02/2005 to Warwick Hughes’s request for Jones’s raw climate data:
Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years 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. . . . Read the rest.
Read the report (PDF).
Related items:
The Muir Russell Review
by Roger Pielke, Jr.
Professor in the Environmental Studies Program, University of Colorado; Fellow, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
Rogre Pielke Jr.'s Blog, July 7, 2010
Muir Russell--What to Look For
by Steve McIntyre
Author, ClimateAudit.org
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
July 6, 2010
A Ruling More Significant Than Russell Review
by David Holland
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
July 7, 2010
Back to top by Andrew Orlowski
Columnist, The Register
July 7, 2010
The University of East Anglia's enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct - but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.
The CRU played an important role in writing the UN's IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for "a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds" to restore confidence in the team's work.
Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics' own making, stating that they were "united in defence against criticism". Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to "redefine" the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their "rigour" and "honesty" were beyond question. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economics & Energyby David Kreutzer and John Ligon
Research Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change, Heritage Foundation (Kreutzer); Policy Analyst, Heritage Foundation (Ligon)
July 1, 2010
. . . To help policymakers evaluate the arguments for limiting or eliminating offshore drilling, this paper analyzes the economic impact of a total offshore drilling ban on the U.S. economy. The authors use a mainstream model of the U.S. economy to simulate a policy change that prevents new wells from being drilled and allows offshore production to decline as the current set of wells reach the end of their productive lives. . . .
. . . between now and 2035 an offshore drilling ban would:
- Reduce GDP by $5.5 trillion,
- Reduce the average consumption expenditures for a family of four by $2,381 per year (and exceeding $4,000 in 2035),
- Reduce job growth by more than 1 million jobs by 2015 and more than 1.5 million jobs by 2030, and
- Increase the total expenditures for imported oil by nearly $737 billion. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Blowout Prevention Act Would Blowout Domestic Oil Production
by Marlo Lewis
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
OpenMarket.org, July 1, 2010
Time for a Little Perspective on Oil Spills
by James Simpson
Writer, American Thinker
July 5, 2010Back to top by Matthew Sinclair
MasterResource, July 7, 2010
. . . Renewable energy has proved an expensive and unreliable source of energy everywhere it has been tried on a significant scale. And now there is a big divide among the major European economies that have enthusiastically adopted wind, solar and the other renewables. . . .
Some countries are waking up to the disaster of extravagant subsidies to renewable energy. But Britain isn’t. The lesson for Americans is simply that throwing money at renewable energy tends to be an economic disaster, but that politicians buttressed by expensive lobbyists can keep the racket going regardless.
It will take robust opposition to stop the United States repeating Europe’s mistakes.
Read the rest.Back to top Politics & Debateby Andrée Seu
Writer, World Magazine
July 3, 2010
John came over to install my new electric dryer. It was a straightforward operation.
If he had come for a paint job or replacement window, he would have been required to read to me from a pamphlet entitled "Renovate Right: Important Lead Hazard Information for Families." Then he would have cordoned off the "contaminated" area, put out "Lead hazard area" signs, and laid plastic (not drop cloths) six feet in every direction from the work site (10 feet, if outside). These are the EPA regs that went into effect on April 22 and apply nationally to everyone with a station wagon, ladder, and "handyman" sign. At the kitchen table John consulted his shiny EPA manual:
"Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations: Established as Federal Executive Policy on Environmental Justice. Its main provision directs federal agencies to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law to make environmental justice part of their mission. . . ."
Read the rest.Back to top by Marlo Lewis
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
OpenMarket.org, July 6, 2010
Climate policymaking in our Nation’s capital often resembles the heavy-handed dialogue of old-time mobster films.
“Are you gonna come along quietly, or do I have let the California Air Resources Board (CARB) muss ya up?” That was pretty much the line White House Environment Czarina Carol Browner took to obtain the auto industry’s support for the joint EPA/National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTSHA) greenhouse gas (GHG) emission/fuel economy standards rule. EPA is now in a position both to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry and to set climate policy for the nation. Yet the Clean Air Act provides no authority to regulate fuel economy and says nothing about greenhouse gases or global climate change. ”Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Anthony J. Sadar
Certified Consulting Meteorologist
Washington Times, June 23, 2010
. . . So, it can be seen that more scientific, technical folks like biologists, atmospheric physicists and engineers have a stake in anthropogenic climate change. And joining the other scientists and mechanical and civil engineers in correcting the perceived off-balance climate are a wide variety of additional professionals, such as software engineers for carbon-emission tracking and reporting programs, economists, "cap-and-trade" brokers, entrepreneurs, investors and, of course, politicians and lawyers, lots and lots of politicians and lawyers. . . .
However, once all this fixing begins, when does it stop? Can it be stopped, especially when government bureaucracies and alliances are established and bags of grant money are stuffed to perpetuate the climate-change crisis? . . .
For now, whether humans are culpable for climate change or not, everyone is finding his place in this airy gold mine, with some climate-fixers poised to reap billions of dollars within a few years of cap-and-trade regulation imposition. Too bad that the ones who will not have their conditions fixed with all the grandiose, opulent schemes are the ones who ostensibly are being helped by all the professional concern - the world's poor.
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly NotedLewis: Bio Jet Fuel--the Real $600 Tiolet Seat?
Lewis: Enron & BP: Global Warming as the Great DistractionBack 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:
Christopher Essex, Ph.D.
Christopher Essex is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, and the Associate Director of the Collaborative Program in Theoretical Physics. Mentioned on page 133 of the Senate report, Essex has done much to refute the idea of a "average global temperature". Some important related pieces (the last two authored at least partially by himself) are Researchers Question Validity of a 'Global Temperature', Does a Global Temperature Exist? (co-authored with Ross McKitrick and Bjarne Andresen), and There Is No Global 'Temperature'. Essex and McKitrick include further rebuttal of "average global temperature" in their book, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming.
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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