|
Newsletter (June 10, 2009)
Over the next couple of weeks we hope to put out several issues rapidly to catch up, as far as that’s possible, with developments since we put together the content of this issue. Thanks for your patience, and we hope you’ll agree the result is something more valuable than ever!--ECB
Above the Fold
by Gailon Totheroh
Science and Medical Reporter, CBN News
CBN News, April 22, 2009
. . . Christian environmental experts like Dr. Beisner say good stewardship of all earth’s natural wonders is God’s clear instruction. He says the effort starts with trusting the Creator, who wisely engineered check and balances into the world:
“He designs it with positive and negative mechanisms and consequently when there’s some change in a little bit of the system, the whole thing doesn’t go haywire,” Beisner told CBN News.
For instance, clouds produced by warmth in turn produce a net cooling effect. So Beisner says the world is less prone to theoretical disasters like global warming than many environmentalists and politicians would have us think. . . .
. . . Still, there’s plenty of air, water, and ground pollution. Beisner believes part of the answer could be found in solving another global problem - poverty. . . .
. . . Beisner recommends a group known as Churches and Villages Together. It is a partnership between U.S. churches and poor communities that encourages evangelism, small businesses, and environmental stewardship. . . .
Read the rest or watch the video.
Related items:
Cornwall Alliance: A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming
Churches & Villages Together
In this issue
Featured - New Climate Change Web Site Promises to be ‘Eco-News on Steroids’
- Only 34% Now Blame Humans for Global Warming
- Weather Vain?
- Bootleggers, Baptists, and Protectionists
Debate- Are We Causing Global Warming and Should We Fight It?
- Survival of the Fittest
- Richard Cizik’s New Venture
Science- Lindzen on Negative Climate Feedback
Economics- Green Stimulus Money Costs More Jobs Than It Creates
- Watch Out! Mankind May Yet Screw up a Good Thing!
Meet the Critics: David R. Legates & George H. Taylor
Briefly Noted
Featured
by Matt Cover
CNS News, April 8, 2009
An environmental news Web site that creators say will be “the most comprehensive information center for climate and energy news and information,” launched [April 8].
“ClimateDepot.com,” which is owned by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), is intended to be an information clearinghouse featuring investigative reports alongside policy briefs aimed at lawmakers, teachers, parents, and the general public, according to its managing editor, Marc Morano.
“The purpose is to provide the American people and, frankly, the international community with an alternative to the mainstream media and the environmental pablum they serve up to their viewers and readers every single day,” Morano told CNSNews.com.
Morano said that the Web site wouldn’t be “just another home” for climate change skeptics – it would expose readers to the entire spectrum of climate change debate.” . . .
Read the rest.
Back to top
Rasmussen Reports, April 17, 2009
Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame.
Forty-eight percent (48%) of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, while seven percent (7%) blame some other reason. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.
These numbers reflect a reversal from a year ago when 47% blamed human activity while 34% said long-term planetary trends. . . .
Read the rest.
Back to top
by Mark Bergin
Reporter, World Magazine
World Magazine, April 25, 2009
The idea is simple, really: Fill the skies with tiny reflective particles and global temperatures will fall. Sunlight will divert. Shrinking ice shelves will reverse course. Sea levels will drop. And climate-change alarmists will have lots of spare time.
Sound like a crank idea? Most scientists used to think so, too. Not anymore: “You could fly aircraft in the stratosphere and you could have a fire hose that would be squirting out sulfur. And the sulfur dioxide would form particles, the same kind of particles formed in a volcanic eruption,” explains New York University physics professor Marty Hoffert. With a Ph.D. in astronautics and numerous publications in respected journals, Hoffert seems the antithesis of a crank as he adds, “Another way to do it is to create boats that spray the ocean water up into the atmosphere and create cloud concentration nuclei. And by changing the reflectivity of the clouds over the ocean, they would be able to reflect more sunlight.”
A sulfur-spraying fire hose in the heavens or massive floating ocean fountains smack of science fiction, but these are serious ideas in an emerging field dubbed geoengineering. Things get only stranger from there: shooting mirrors into space; seeding the sea with iron; planting forests of metal, carbon-sucking trees.
Until recently, such innovative, quick-fix climate-change solutions were widely deemed little more than fantasy, dangerous ideas bent on absolving humanity from taking responsibility for its purported environmental sins. But over the past few years, a growing sense of political gridlock and urgency among global warming believers has pressed discussions of geoengineering into the mainstream of the climate-science community. A recent survey of 80 international climate-science specialists published in England’s The Independent found over two-thirds favoring more research in geoengineering. . . .
. . . Theological questions are also on the table. Cal Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical environmental stewardship group, doubts whether geoengineering strategies will ever be needed, since he considers the scientific case for manmade global warming dubious. But he does not object to the notion of people altering the atmosphere’s chemistry should global events call for it: “One of the nice things about the geoengineering approach is that most of the ideas do not entail enormous upfront costs that have year after year repercussions.”
Other Christians are not so sanguine. Philip Foster, a retired minister with a degree in natural science from Cambridge University, argues that weather and climate are outside the scope of human dominion and better left alone. In his book While the Earth Endures (St. Matthew Publishing Ltd., 2008), Foster attempts to make a biblical case against geoengineering: “When God gave Adam dominion over the earth he made no reference to the weather being in man’s dominion. God, if I might put it this way, reserves the control of weather for himself.” . . .
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, April 8, 2009
In 1983, Professor Bruce Yandle of Clemson provided an economic perspective on prohibition. His paper, “Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist,” described how an alliance of bootleggers and Baptists, who for quite different reasons, had incentives to seek restrictions on the Sunday sale of alcohol. Baptists sought moral improvement, while bootleggers supported prohibition to eliminate competitors.
Yandle helps us understand why companies often support regulation of their industry. While businesses frequently claim to support regulation out of concerns for safety or the environment, in reality they understand that the costs of regulatory compliance are often steep. This can work to their advantage as smaller competitors, unable to bear these costs, exit the market.
Ron Bailey, writing in Reason, offers a current example regarding climate change. The bootleggers are the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a group comprised of energy producers and users (e.g., General Motors and Shell). The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, and the World Resources Institute are the Baptists. The groups have formed a coalition to support federal legislation for a cap-and-trade system to lower CO2 emissions.
Bailey asks, “What’s in it for the members of USCAP?” Turns out quite a lot. The emissions allowances in a cap-and-trade system are valued in the trillions of dollars. The USCAP wants a big chunk of these allowances allocated to its members—for free. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Climate Change Baptist & Bootlegger Coalition Tells Congress Today They Want Free Money
by Ronald Bailey
Science Correspondent, Reason Magazine; Member, Society of Environmental Journalists and American Society for Bioethics and Humanities; Author, Liberation Biology
Reason Magazine, January 15, 2009
Back to top
Debate
by E. Peter Beisner
Assistant Newsletter Editor, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, April 21, 2009
A doctor fell in a deep well
and broke his collar bone.
The moral: Doctor, mind the sick
and leave the well alone.
This famous poem arrives, though somewhat absurdly, at a good moral: Tend to the sick, not the well. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” We should examine the debate, science, and economics of global climate change in light of this principle, arriving at a responsible course of action.
Debate: “The time for argument is over,” say countless environmentalist politicians. “All the scientists agree.” But is there really a consensus in favor of anthropogenic ("man-made") catastrophic global warming theory? Not a chance! Marc Morano, of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee recently published the report, ”More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.” So much for “consensus.” Besides, as Copernicus, Columbus, and others have demonstrated, “consensus” proves nothing (except, sometimes, where the money and power are).
Science: CO2 is not a significant factor in global warming. Human CO2 emissions are only a minuscule fraction of the whole of CO2, anyway. More and more scientists have been demonstrating sun- and cloud-driven climate change. Warming and cooling is cyclical, too, explaining the global cooling scare of the 1970’s. In the past several years the latest warming cycle seems to have stopped and the globe is cooling again.
Economics: Even if the globe were warming dangerously (which it is not) and human CO2 emissions played a sizable role (which they do not), the mitigation policies promoted by many liberal and conservative politicians alike would be ineffective and, in fact, highly detrimental. World-class economist Bjorn Lomborg, with the Copenhagen Consensus, demonstrated that adaption to climate change and aid for third world countries are far safer, more effective, and less costly than reducing Carbon emissions. CO2 is vital to the very lives of all humans and non-Carbon-emitting energy sources are comparatively rare and expensive. Popular “green” policies would be fatal to the poor who struggle to pay energy bills (if they have energy at all).
So what is a responsible course of action? Mind the sick and leave the well alone. Fighting “global warming” is ineffective, irresponsible, and even deadly. Instead, people should use their resources to help the poor enhance their lifestyles, which would better prepare the world to adapt to any temperature changes. But as far as climate change policies go, as Lord Christopher Monckton tells restless legislators, ”The right answer to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
Read the rest.
Back to top
by Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries
BreakPoint, April 17, 2009
The story is heartbreaking. A woman showed up at an abortion clinic “in flip-flops and in tears,” having walked for an hour to have her fourth child aborted after her boyfriend lost his job. “‘This was a desired pregnancy—she’d been getting prenatal care—but they re-evaluated expenses and decided not to continue,’ said Dr. Pratima Grupta,” in the Associated Press report.
Yes, it’s a heartbreaking story. But columnist Bonnie Erbe sees it quite differently. “In the long run,” she asks, “can we agree that this unwed couple’s decision not to bring a fourth child into the world when they are having trouble feeding themselves and three children is no tragedy?”
After a brief analysis of the expenses of raising a child, Erbe then reiterates that their “fact-based, rational decision” is “no tragedy: it’s a good decision.” In fact, she believes, we’d all be better off if we could recapture the national mood we had just after Roe v. Wade, when abortion “was not something women whined about publicly on the scale many seem to now.” Unbelievable! It’s as if abortion is a good thing. . . .
. . . Just the other week, you may remember, I talked about British official Jonathan Porritt and his desire to cut his country’s population in half for the sake of the environment. Although Erbe bases her concern on the scarcity of economic resources instead of environmental ones, the message is fundamentally the same: Fewer humans means better living for those of us who do get to live.
If you remember your history, the famous satire by Jonathan Swift, Modest Proposal, suggested that Irish children be eaten to save resources. That’s just about where the pro-abortion movement seems to be heading—except this time there’s no satire about it.
Maybe it’s just as well that the abortion movement is starting to show its true colors. In stark contrast with the crisis pregnancy centers and the church volunteers who would lovingly help provide for parents in need, the “pro-choice” movement can now be seen for what it truly is: “no-choice” movement. Death is your duty to save the environment or the economy.
Read the rest.
Related items:
UK Population Must Fall to 30 Million, Says Porritt
by Jonathan Leake and Brendan Montague
Times Online, March 22, 2009
Your ‘Carbon Legacy’ (Text) (Video)
by Sherwood Idso, Keith Idso, and Craig Idso
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, March 18, 2009
Decreasing the Surplus Population
by Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries
BreakPoint, April 3, 2009
Back to top
by Jacqueline L. Salmon
Religion Reporter, Washington Post
Washington Post, April 9, 2009
The Rev. Richard Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist who was forced to resign after expressing support for same-sex unions, is forming a new organization that will embrace a far broader agenda than the issues long claimed by the conservative Christian movement.
In his first published interview about his new venture, Cizik said yesterday that the new group will focus on the “new evangelicals,” or “new-agenda evangelicals” as he variously called them—those that, polls show, are eager to see the evangelical movement expand beyond opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research. . . .
. . . Before his ouster from the NAE, Cizik had increasingly earned enemies in the conservative evangelical movement for pushing to broaden the evangelical agenda, particularly into the area of “creation care,” which argues that there is a biblical mandate to take care of the earth. Cizik repeatedly teamed up with faith leaders outside of conservative Christianity to warn that climate change was a crisis that urgently needed attention.
Read the rest.
Back to top
Science
by Richard S. Lindzen
Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and American Association for the Advancement of Science
Watts Up With That?, March 30, 2009
. . . If one adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, one is adding to the ‘blanket’ that is inhibiting the emission of heat radiation (also commonly referred to as infrared radiation or long wave radiation). This causes the temperature of the earth to increase until equilibrium with the sun is reestablished.
For example, if one simply doubles the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature increase is about 1°C.
If, however, water vapor and clouds respond to the increase in temperature in such a manner as to further enhance the ‘blanketing,’ then we have what is called a positive feedback, and the temperature needed to reestablish equilibrium will be increased. In the climate GCMs (General Circulation Models) referred to by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), this new temperature ranges from roughly 1.5°C to 5°C.
The equilibrium response to a doubling of CO2 (including the effects of feedbacks) is commonly referred to as the climate sensitivity. . . .
. . . The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself.
Here is an easily appreciated example of positive and negative feedback. In your car, the gas and brake pedals act as negative feedbacks to reduce speed when you are going too fast and increase it when you are going too slow. If someone were to reverse the position of the pedals without informing you, then they would act as positive feedbacks: increasing your speed when you are going too fast, and slowing you down when you are going too slow.
Alarming climate predictions depend critically on the fact that models have large positive feedbacks. The crucial question is whether nature actually behaves this way? The answer, as we have just seen, is unambiguously no.
Read the rest.
Related item:
Satellite and Climate Model Evidence Against Substantial Manmade Climate Change
by Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion
Roy Spencer, Ph.D., December 27, 2008
Back to top
Economics
by Josiah Ryan
Staff Writer, CNSNews
CNSNews, April 13, 2009
Every “green job” created with government money in Spain over the last eight years came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job, says a new study released this month. The study draws parallels with the green jobs programs of the Obama administration.
President Obama, in fact, has used Spain’s green initiative as a blueprint for how the United States should use federal funds to stimulate the economy. Obama’s economic stimulus package,which Congress passed in February, allocates billions of dollars to the green jobs industry.
But the author of the study, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, said the United States should expect results similar to those in Spain: . . .
. . . Pat Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a free market group, told CNSNews.com that the study’s conclusions do not surprise him. He added that the United States should expect similar results with the stimulus money it spends on green initiatives.
“There is no reason to think things will be any different here,” Michaels said. “In the short run you have to ask who is doing the hiring, and in the long run how efficient is it to have people serving technology such as windmills. We are creating inefficiencies.” . . .
Read the rest.
Back to top
by George Anderson
Vice President, Engineering, Crown Iron Works Company
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, April 9, 2009
Even if you are one of the scientists who believes in the strictest and most inevitable versions of global warming theory, be practical and a bit humble.
1. It seems 100% evident that the earth system is in a very reliable balance with a norm that is beneficial to our survival and relative prosperity. It is quite possible that we are stressing this balance in one direction or the other–and perhaps global warming is to some extent true. Nevertheless, the earth has experienced extremely severe crises in the past, and given the extremes of temperature, chemistry, radiation, etc. throughout space, we remain in an extremely privileged place, incredibly robust.
2. The evidence is that extremes in our biosphere have existed in the past. CO2? It has been much higher than today and never much lower than it was at the 1800’s low point when it was near the point that vegetation seriously slows its growth. Temperature? Clearly Greenland was once warm enough to plant and colonize, yet during a cold period much of Minnesota was under a glacier. The climate oscillates in a fairly narrow range and is surely at all times near some optimum level at most times in history. At least it is near optimum given the horrific range of extremes that exist everywhere else we have seen in the universe, starting just about 5 miles up.
3. Keep in mind that we are worried about a 1 or 2 degree change, in a universe with absolute zero up to millions of degrees. If mankind does anything that does not quickly reverse itself, we will be the first suicidal species with enough brainpower to regret it. (My apologies to lemmings which are said to blindly follow their leader and run off cliffs en masse: perhaps they do have the brains to regret it.)
4. Example: Please don’t put mirrors or dust in orbit so it reflects away about 1% of the sunlight and makes the earth “better”. When the next cycle occurs, it will surely screw up our agriculture and may even force a permanent ice age and kill most or all of us. Always remember that economies falter or even fail. Electro-magnetic pulse, nuclear war, or simple lack of discipline (H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine” gives one possible future.) could take our technology backwards. If we stick something in orbit we may not be able to get back up there and take it down. I would suggest history tells us that soon enough every civilization drops back a step, and someday we definitely will not be able to get back up in space....
5. I heard a Russian speak of putting dust in high atmosphere so it falls back within a few short years. If we stop continually putting it up there, the effect ends. Basically, it is a short-term, controlled reflectance or absorption–much like volcanic effects. That is a far safer long-term plan (safer than dust above the air in orbit) because it self corrects (assuming we don’t discover that it does not really fall down as expected). However, a huge caution flag: if we cannot model and cure the economy, can we model and cure the far more complex earth weather system? What kind of “deficit” will we discover and play with in nature, just as we play (at our peril) with the national deficit in money?
Back to top
Meet the Critics
Have 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 650 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
Two notable critics are:
David R. Legates, Ph.D.
Delaware State Climatologist David Legates is Director of the Delaware Environmental Observing System at the University of Delaware, a Senior Scientist for the Marshall Institute, a Fellow of the Independent Institute, and a Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mentioned on page 192 of the Senate report, Legates says that “the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change.” A few important articles and presentations by Legates, of which there have been hundreds, are Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts, How Are the Occurrence of Floods, Droughts, and Storms Likely to Change?, A Scientific Stick Check, Cornwall’s Manmade Warming On Hold, or Errant Alarmists Seeking Cover?, and (at Heartland’s 2009 ICCC) Climate Change and Extreme Events.
George H. Taylor
Recently retired Oregon State Climatologist at Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and past President of the American Association of State Climatologists, George Taylor is President of Applied Climate Services of Corvallis, Oregon, and is a member of both the Marshall Institute and the Independent Institute. Mentioned on page 186 of the Senate report, Taylor cautions, “The climate system is very, very complex, and the more we learn, the more we see that we really don’t understand it.” Yet, he says, “Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations.” A couple notable presentations by Taylor are What’s Going On With the Arctic?, and (at Heartland’s 2009 ICCC) The Pacific Decadal Oscillation: A Dominant Mode of Climate Variability.
Back to top
Briefly Noted
Earth Day, 2009: The More You Know, the Less You Care
Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking
Temperature Control
Senate Blow to Climate Change Laws
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.
|
