by E. Calvin Beisner

The mainstream media and global warming alarmists are at it again—confusing weather with climate, appealing to “tipping points,” doing their best to scare the public into the kind of panic that would let politicians commit us to budget-busting, economy-crippling, liberty-destroying policies to fight it.

Last week CNN breathlessly reported, “More record warmth as scientists warn of global tipping point.” The article began:

It's hot out there. But this time, it's more than idle watercooler talk, according to weather scientists.

At the same time the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center has released a report noting that this spring in the United States has been the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895, a group of scientists has published a paper in the journal Nature warning that the planet is approaching a critical tipping point because of climate and other factors.

Rampant population growth and changes to the environment caused by humans, including the burning of fossil fuels and the conversion of nearly 43% of the planet's land to farms or cities, threaten to cause an abrupt and unpredictable shift in the global ecosystem, 22 scientists from five countries said in their paper.

In its report issued Thursday, the climate data center said the average U.S. temperature between March and May was 57.1 degrees, 5.2 degrees above the long-term average from 1901 to 2000.

While May was only the second-warmest on record, it was still in the top third for monthly average temperatures, marking 12 consecutive months with temperatures in that range, said Jake Crouch, a NOAA climate scientist.

"For that to happen 12 times in a row in a random circumstance is one in 540,000," he said.

Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Until you realize a few things:

1. An “unpredictable shift in the global ecosystem” is precisely that: unpredictable—and therefore no basis for any policy response.
2. When you’re in a long-term upward swing of an up-and-down cycle, it’s inevitable that the most recent months are going to be higher than the average of the past century—and their being that way doesn’t mean the upward trend will continue or reach unprecedented heights.
3. The chance of having “12 consecutive months with temperatures in [the top third for monthly temperature averages]” would be “one in 540,000” IF it were in a random circumstance—but even without reference to any human activity, the circumstance isn’t random: it’s part of a long-term series of overlapping natural cycles of solar energy output, solar magnetic wind concentration, and ocean currents. Hence, see #2 above.

But, hey, maybe they don’t teach “climate scientists” such mundane things as logic. They do, however, teach them, lately, to use “post-normal science” to scare the living daylights out of unsuspecting laymen. As post-normalist and University of East Anglia Professor of Climate Change Mike Hulme put it in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change,

The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved… It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come. …

The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs. …

. . . climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences…climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes…climate change has become “the mother of all issues”, the key narrative within which all environmental politics – from global to local – is now framed…Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations …?”

Educating the public, and our nation’s decision makers, to recognize and resist such unscientific fear mongering is an important part of Cornwall Alliance’s work, whether in major papers like A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protecting the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming or The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy, or in widely embraced public statements like the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming or the We Get It Declaration, or by conducting briefings on Capitol Hill, publishing articles in newspapers, magazines, and websites, or being guests on radio talk shows. Your donations can help us continue this work.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and author of Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate.

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