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Newsletter (May 7, 2010)
In This Issue
Featured- Green Mind Control
- Anti-Fraud Investigators Swoop on EU Emissions Traders
Debate- Meteorologists Blast Global Warming Fears
- Exploring the World, Discovering God
- (Desperately) Looking for Arctic warming
- EPA Staffers Were Forced to Ignore Science, Investigation Finds
Science- Brand New Green
Economics- Grieving at Death, Living with Risk
- Coal Trade-Offs
- Turning Tragedy into Triumph
Upcoming Events
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: John Coleman
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Bethany Stotts
Staff Writer, Accuracy in Academia
April 29, 2010
A review of the Princeton Review’s Guide to 286 Green Colleges shows that environmental “literacy” has become a mandatory education component at over three dozen “green” colleges, with entries for 37 of the 286 campuses indicating that these schools have an “environmental literacy requirement” for the student body.
As examples given in the guide show, environmental “literacy” includes not only learning about environmental issues but teaching students to adopt green lifestyles and how to reduce their carbon footprint:
- For example, the guide states that at New England College “…every NEC student receives a primer in sustainability and climate change before graduation” (emphasis added).
- And at Prescott College, “Respect for the natural world, as well as specific training in sustainability, is incorporated into nearly every class (even those without a green focus).”
- At the University of Georgia, according to TPR, “…Engineering students have conducted energy audits on campus buildings; students in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication look for ways to promote energy conservation and recycling; and students in the River Basin Science and Policy Center research water quality in area streams.”
- The University of Maine entry contains similar language. “UM’s new student orientation includes sustainability programming, and Eco Reps in residence halls coordinate recycling programs and lead other environmental initiatives,” states The Princeton Review guide (emphasis added).
- As for the University of Northern Iowa, its “…liberal arts core program incorporates the issue of sustainability and environmental responsibility throughout the curriculum and the capstone course ‘Environment, Technology, and Society’ has specific modules devoted explicitly to the topic.” “UNI Energy! is a student organization that energizes students in residence halls to calculate their carbon footprint and commit to reducing it.”
- At the University of Southern Florida, “Undergraduates are taught sustainability as part of the school’s mandatory core curriculum,” states the guide (emphasis added).
Small wonder, then, that a 2010 Gallup poll on climate change attitudes showed that while most demographics had experienced a rise in skepticism about news coverage regarding climate change, Millennials, ages 18 to 29, showed no change. “Notably, all of the past year’s uptick in cynicism about the seriousness of global warming coverage occurred among Americans 30 and older,” wrote Lydia Saad for Gallup on March 11. “The views of 18- to 29-year-olds, the age group generally most concerned about global warming and most likely to say the problem is underestimated, didn’t change.”
“It’s not only about greening the campus, but the greening of the student mind,” said Iona College Environmental Concerns Committee Chair Dr. Frederica Rudell, according to the school’s website. “To that end, ECC has helped introduce green marketing programs into the curricula,” states the guide after quoting Rudell. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Leigh Phillips
Writer, EUObservor
May 3, 2010
. . . On Friday (30 April), it was revealed that UK tax authorities had raided 81 different offices and homes earlier in the week, arresting 22 individuals - 13 in England and further eight in Scotland.
The swoop, which occurred two days earlier, involved roughly 450 staff from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
German authorities simultaneously raided 230 premises, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
Three individuals in Germany were arrested. Seven of the suspects were employees of Deutsche Bank, although none were among those taken into custody.
The operation, which targetted a total of 50 companies and some 150 suspects in Europe's biggest economy, involved around a thousand investigators from Germany.
Authorities in eight other EU nations - Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Portugal, as well as Norway, outside the bloc - were approached by Frankfurt prosecutors for their help in the investigation.
Computers, mobiles, memory sticks and business records were seized, as well as undisclosed sums of cash. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
May 5, 2010
Well-known San Francisco-area television-meteorologist-turned-talk-show-host Brian Sussman, author of Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, which addresses both the faulty science and the dangerous politics and economics of global warming alarmism, interviewed long-time Cornwall Alliance friend and meteorologist Anthony Sadar, an adjunct professor at Geneva College, on his radio program May 3. The two did a masterful job of discussing, from meteorologists' standpoint, the weaknesses of the case for dangerous manmade global warming as well as some of the dire economic impacts of proposed policies to fight it. Click to hear the program and fast forward to 28:00 to hear their discussion.Back to top by Tom Sheahen
President, Institute for Theological Encounter with Science & Technology (ITEST is the parent organization of EWDG)
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, May 5, 2010
It is well known that children of middle-school age have a strong interest in ecology. The program Exploring the World, Discovering God (EWDG) is a series of classroom lessons that teach concepts in science and faith side-by-side, to demonstrate their compatibility, that religion and science are both paths to a knowledge of God. Learning modules for grades K – 4 already are in circulation (see www.creationlens.org), and lessons for grades 5 – 8 are currently being developed.
From the point of view of Exploring the World, Discovering God (EWDG), an essential message to be drawn from observing our earth is that God is a very clever creator, who has brought into being different forms of life that thrive explicitly because they use the waste from the other form. . . .
EWDG wants to give our school-children the basic scientific capabilities that will enable them to comprehend much more in later life, and we want them to be motivated by understanding that God devised all that science in the first place.
An entire year-long science curriculum (grade 5 ? grade 6?) could be focused on the science of ecology, excursioning into chemistry and physics to learn supporting principles. Coupling that with the Christian perspective that it’s God’s creation we are concerned with, could be a great achievement for a participating school.
The complementarity of plant and animal life is a terrific place to start, because the student just naturally wonders “Gee, who thought this up?” The only permissible answer in public-school is “I dunno.” From the very outset, EWDG replies “God is a whole lot smarter than us, isn’t he?”
Read the rest.Back to top by Paul Driessen and Willie Soon
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 (Driessen); Physicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Chief Science Adviser, Science & Public Policy Institute; Science Director, Tech Central Station; Senior Scientist, Marshall Institute; Co-Author, Global Warming and Maunder Minimum (Soon)
Canada Free Press, May 3, 2010
“Global warming can mean colder. It can mean wetter. It can mean drier. That’s what we’re talking about,” Greenpeace activist Stephen Guilbeault chimed in.
Who was it that defined insanity as hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer, expecting it won’t hurt the next time? And who’s paying for all these [operations to rescue activists who originally set off to illustrate warming in the Arctic]? Mostly the same taxpayers who are also paying for the junk science that insists the entire ice cap will melt away by 2014.
Actually, the Arctic ice has been rebounding since its latest low ebb around September 2007. And despite steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – from 0.0285% or 285 ppm in 1870 to 0.0388% or 388 ppm today – average global temperatures have been stable or declining since 1995.
Even UK Climate Research Unit chief Phil Jones and other Climategate emailers acknowledge that now. “We can’t account for the lack of warming, and it’s a travesty that we can’t,” Kevin Trenberth moaned in one of the infamous Climategate emails. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Sheila Kaplan
Journalist; Fellow, Nation Institute
Politics Daily, April 29, 2010
Environmental Protection Agency staffers have been forced to ignore relevant science, have lacked key monitoring data on human health and environmental impacts, and have worked without crucial information needed to protect the public, according to the preliminary findings of a scientific advisory board.
The Committee on Science Integration for Decision Making is still working on its investigation, but has quietly posted draft summaries on the agency's website of 73 interviews with 450 EPA employees -- an unusual bottom-up examination that could bring sweeping changes to the 40-year-old federal agency. Some staffers traced the problems in the agency to the Bush administration, while others said the obstacles are longstanding and continue to this day. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Peter W. Huber
Contributor, Forbes.com; Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
City Journal, Spring, 2010
. . . Consider Stewart Brand’s meaty, well-informed, and mostly sensible new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The man who used to be so California Hip that in 1968 he made a cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now presents himself as a “hacker (lazy engineer) at heart,” ready to promote realistic responses to the great eco-existential crisis of our time—climate change. How can Greens fulfill their new mission, which is to save not only birds and trees but all humanity? The man who founded and then edited the Whole Earth Catalog for 16 years—a magazine guided by “biological understanding” and enamored with the planet-saving power of organic farming, solar, wind, insulation, bicycles, and handmade houses—now concludes: “Cities are Green. Nuclear energy is Green. Genetic engineering is Green.” . . .
The question I ask myself now,” [Stewart] Brand tells us when he gets to nuclear power, is: “What took me so long? I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.” When he got over his nuclear sloth, here’s what Brand learned. (Most of the words quoted here are Brand’s own, but some are Brand quoting others approvingly.) “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” “Reactor safety is a problem already solved,” and the new reactors are even safer than the old. Waste isn’t a problem; we need the $10 billion Yucca mountain disposal site “about as much as we need a facility for imprisoning dangerous extraterrestrials.” Nuclear power isn’t just the cheapest practical carbon-free option around, but the cheapest, period, when not snarled up in green tape. Scientists “invariably poll high in support of nuclear.” The people so pragmatic that they actually keep the lights lit, he might have added, have polled that way for 40 years, on the strength of reams of data and analyses, as well as the operating experience of our nuclear navy and a wide range of commercial reactors scattered across the planet. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
April 30, 2010
My email today brought me this poignant note from a sensitive, caring evangelical proponent of creation care:
When 29 miners die in a coal mine, 11 oil rig workers die on a platform, and a whole ecosystem is in imminent peril because of the oil slick, explain how pursuing unlimited fossil fuels is protecting the sanctity of life? What can we say to such things? I replied:
Grace and peace to you in Christ. Thank you for your note.
I hear in it the voice of one crying out in sorrow at the suffering of others, and I share that sorrow. I share your anguish at the deaths in both instances, and at the ecological damage done in them. Both are tragic. They make me, as I'm sure they make you, long for the eschaton, when--and only then--"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4), and "There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever" (Revelation 22:3-5). Until then, because of our sin and God's righteous curse, we continue to live in a world in which "it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). And we shall not all die peacefully, or even in mental torment, of old age (as did my father-in-law, who went through years of confusion and often terror as Alzheimer's disease, little by little, robbed him of his mind, and nothing we could do in taking care of him, when he lived with us through his last four years, could spare him from it). Many of us shall die well before that, from illness or injury, accidentally or as victims of wickedness. As one much wiser than I put it, "He who digs a pit may fall into it, and a serpent may bite him who breaks through a wall. He who quarries stones may be hurt by them, and he who splits logs may be endangered by them" (Ecclesiastes 10:8-9). Risk is woven into the warp and woof of our world, post-Fall. . . . Read the rest.Back to top by Pete Geddes
Executive Vice President, Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment
May 5, 2010
The disaster earlier this month in a West Virginia coal mine killing at least 29 miners (and the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico) reminds us of the extreme hazards of that occupation; the human cost of supplying fifty percent of the nation’s electricity at an affordable price is indeed high.
We all know that underground coal mining is a dangerous business; especially in Appalachia, where 150 years of digging has gathered the low hanging fruit. Remaining coal is difficult and hazardous to dig.
The coal industry’s safety record has improved in recent years with fatalities one-tenth of several decades ago. But the reason for this is the shift to surface mining in Montana (home to one-third of all U.S. coal deposits) and Wyoming. Although western coal has a slightly lower BTU content, it is low in sulfur and far cheaper and safer to extract. In sum, its net social costs are far lower than the eastern analog, which entails removing entire mountaintops and dumping them into streambeds. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Richard W. Fulmer
Writer, The Freeman; Co-Author, Energy: The Master Resource
MasterResource, May 3, 2010
April saw two devastating disasters in the energy industry: a methane explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia that claimed 29 lives, and another explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which took 11 more. The latter incident, because of the tens of thousands of gallons of oil now pouring from the ocean floor each day, will impact the Gulf region for years if not for decades to come.
These tragedies are a terrible reminder of the trial-and-error nature of life. Humans have accomplished many wonders over the millennia – wonders that ended the vicious cycle of crushing poverty that has been mankind’s lot throughout most of history.
But these accomplishments have often come at a very high price. Because it is in our nature to strive to better our condition and that of our children, life will never be without risk. As terrible as the consequences of failure can be, it brings with it the seeds of hope. Hope that we can learn from our mistakes and, if not succeed next time, at least not fail in the same way. From such tragic lessons come knowledge and strength. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Upcoming EventsThe answers to [questions regarding the science of climate change] directly impact the legislative and regulatory debates underway in the Congress and the Obama Administration. On May 14, Dr. William Happer and Dr. Roger Cohen will review key features of climate science. Dr. Happer is Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Chairman of the Marshall Institute. Dr. Cohen is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and retired from ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company.
Register online.Back to top The purpose of ICCC-4 is the same as it was for the first three events: to build momentum and public awareness of the global warming “realism” movement, a network of scientists, economists, policymakers, and concerned citizens who believe sound science and economics, rather than exaggeration and hype, ought to determine what actions, if any, are taken to address the problem of climate change. Speakers will include over a hundred scientists, economists, and other scholars from around the world.
Register online.Back to top Briefly NotedD'Aleo: EPA: 'Deaths from Heat Waves'
Michaels: The ClimateGate Scandals: What Has Been Revealed and What Does It Mean?
Pielke, Sr: Documentation of Bias in the 2007 IPCC WG1 ReportBack 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:
John Coleman
John Coleman, Founder of the Weather Channel and former ABC Meteorologist, works in his retirement as a weather forecaster for San Diego's KUSI. Mentioned on page 155 of the Senate report, Coleman calls global warming alarmism "a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history." Coleman recently created Coleman's Comments, a climate blog at the Coleman Corner, which also links to an informative and entertaining video interview. Two fascinating pieces by Coleman are The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam and his thorough Comments on 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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