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Newsletter (October 17, 2009)
Above the Foldby Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries; Host, BreakPoint
October 15, 2009
What’s more dangerous—global warming or the proposed “solutions” to global warming? One new documentary sets to find out.
Global warming is a fact of life. Not a fact in a scientific sense. Far from it. But a fact in that it is an issue—an issue that will shape public policy, international relations, and the economies of the world for decades to come.
An eye-opening documentary called Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria is being released this week by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation—an outfit I endorse.
I dare say the film will be controversial because it tackles head on the sacred cows of the man-made global warming crowd. . . .
Read the rest.
Get your own copy today!
In this segment from a much longer interview, we hear about the choices faced by families on fixed incomes.
One woman moved to a different state because of the rising cost of gas made her commute impractical. She also shares how rising energy prices affect people (like her elderly mother) who live on a fixed income.In this issue
Featured- BBC Finally Admits Climate Debate Is Not Over
- A Tale of Two Nobel Peace Prize Winners
- Scientists Rebut Claim That Man Causes Climate Change
Debate- The Phoney War on Climate Change
- Corporations and Left-Wing Activists Join Hands to Promote Cap-and-Trade
- India: 'Negotiations Have Broken Down'
- Environmental Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God
Science- Natural Gas Reserves Much Bigger Than Thought
Economics- The Business of Global Warming
- Bold, Decisive Folly: Punishing the Poor
Meet the Critics: Philip Lloyd, Ph.D. & Alexandre Amaral de Aguiar
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Paul Hudson
Climate Correspondent, BBC News
October 9, 2009
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.
They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun. . . .
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. . . .
So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.
They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Shifting PDO Signals Three Decades of Cooling
by Don J. Easterbrook
Professor of Geology, Western Washington University
Watts Up With That?, July 20, 2008
Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Change Associated With the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
by Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion
October 210, 2008
The British Are for Turning on Climate Change
by Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director, Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute; Writer, National Post and Financial Post; Author, The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud
October 12, 2009
The Global Warming Consensus Cools
by Debra J. Saunders
Writer, San Francisco Chronicle
October 13, 2009
Sceptics Welcome BBC Report on 'Global Cooling'
by Richard Savill
Telegraph, October 12, 2009
The BBC's Amazing U-Turn on Climate Change
by Damian Thompson
Blogs Editor, Telegraph
October 11, 2009Back to top by Dennis T. Avery
Director, Center for Global Food Issues; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute and Heartland Institute; Scientific Advisor, American Council on Science and Health; Co-Author, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
Canada Free Press, October 11, 2009
I was still mourning the loss of my friend, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, at age 95, and reminiscing on his magnificent life when the news flashed across the wires that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. What a startling contrast!
Dr. Borlaug literally saved a billion people from starvation, and his high-yield farming systems are still feeding the hungry and saving millions of hectares of wildlife habitat from being plowed for low-yield crops. “Food wars” such as Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia for “living room” and Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria for soybean fields were rendered needless and counterproductive. Any of those Borlaug achievements would have been worth the Peace Prize, but his achieving all three together was incredible.
In 2007, the Peace Prize went to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The awards ceremony was hardly over before the global temperatures turned downward, essentially falsifying all those learned predictions of runaway warming triggered by burning fossil fuels. It’s not just that the global temperature is declining, it’s that the world has never seen any evidence of the runaway warming they predicted. The world’s sea ice has been stable for 30 years, and the Antarctic is gaining 45 billion tons of ice per year. Worse, the UN’s Nobel Peace Prize seems to have rested on a few tree rings in the Sierra and in Siberia that turned out to be aberrations.
Gore’s Nobel contribution was especially iffy, since his Inconvenient Truth told us the Antarctic ice record showed higher CO2 levels inevitably led to higher temperatures. Research, even then, had already documented the reality that past temperatures in the Antarctic have changed 800 years before the CO2 levels! Gore had it backwards and must have known it! Does he have to give back the Nobel and but keep the Oscar for his acting?
I don’t want to demean President Obama, a young politician whose career is still pretty much in front of him. . . . Obama’s place in history is still on the drawing-board of history. For our country’s sake, I hope he achieves something worthwhile during the next three years. But, he hasn’t yet; and hadn’t even unpacked 12 days after the inauguration when he was nominated for the 2009 Nobel. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Penny Starr
Senior Staff Writer, CNSNews
October 12, 2009
As the world focused on President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a small group of determined scientists gathered in a Senate office building to present evidence backing their claim that climate change is caused not by man but by nature, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but the hope for a greener planet.
John Kwapisz, organizer and moderator at the panel discussion, recalled Obama’s speech at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pa., last month as a way of illustrating the dramatic tone used by those who embrace global warming as a dire and eminent threat. . . .
The scientists said they were on Capitol Hill to challenge the president’s claims and show that Mother Nature controls climate around the world and that CO2 in the atmosphere benefits people, plants and animals.
“Nature, not human activity rules the planet,” said Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physicist and research professor at George Mason University and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. “And once you’ve decided that on the basis of evidence, then everything else falls into place.” . . .
“When there’s more carbon dioxide put into the air, the plants respond in an astonishing fashion,” said H. Leighton Steward, geologist, environmentalist, author and founder of the Web site plantsneedco2.org. . . .
Roy W. Spencer, researcher at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, author, and a former senior scientist at NASA, presented his research on natural global warming and cooling, including the role that cloud cover and the sun play in the changes of the earth’s climate. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby Dominic Lawson
Columnist, The Independent
October 13, 2009
The phrase "publishing sensation" is standard hyperbole from marketing men anxious to push book sales. Sometimes, however, a book comes along which justifies the term. One such is Freakonomics, which since its publication in 2005 has sold well over 3 million copies. This would be a remarkable figure for a popular fiction writer; but the author of this non-fiction work was a university economist called Steven Levitt, aided and abetted by the New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner. . . .
Now Levitt and Dubner are launching the follow up to Freakonomics - but this time it is conventional left-liberal thought which will be outraged by their assertions. A clue is given in the work's full title, Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Yes, the authors have this time addressed their dispassionate intellectual blowtorch to the conventional wisdom about climate change, its causes and remedies.
In this investigation they have called upon a number of experts with relevant expertise, including Nathan Myhrvold, a former colleague of Professor Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, who went on to become Bill Gates' futurist-in-chief at Microsoft; and Ken Caldeira, an ecologist from Stanford University and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Caldeira points out that if our concern is for the planet, and if we choose to measure that concern by biodiversity, then increases in carbon dioxide can be a positive benefit. A rise in atmospheric CO2 means that plants need less by way of water for their growth; Caldera's study demonstrated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide, while holding steady all other inputs, such as water and nutrients, yielded a 70 per cent increase in plant growth. This would not come remotely as a surprise to people of my generation, who were taught at school that carbon dioxide was the lifeblood of plants, but will perhaps be a shock to the present generation of schoolchildren who are being lectured that man-made CO2 is tantamount to poison.
Myhrvold goes on to tell the freakonomists that while the IPCC is fretting fearfully about the CO2 in the atmosphere increasing from about 280 parts per million to 380, our mammalian ancestors successfully evolved at a time when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was over 1,000 parts per million. Myhrvold then commits true apostasy by pointing out that "nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, rather than before it."
This might help to explain why the recorded temperature of the planet has not increased at all over the past 11 years. As the BBC's climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, reported with thinly disguised amazement three days ago, "Our climate models did not forecast this." Hudson then spoke to Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University, who explained that global temperatures were correlated much more with cyclical oceanic oscillations of warming and cooling than anything man does. Easterbrook argued that the global cooling from 1945 to 1977 was linked to one of these cold Pacific cycles, and that "the Pacific decadal oscillation cool mode has replaced the warm mode [of 1978 to 1998], virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling." . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Thomas J. Borelli
Editor, Free Enterpriser; Director, Free Enterprise Project, National Center for Public Policy Research
Townhall.com, October 10, 2009
Big business continues to undermine our liberties. On the heels of the major drug companies working a deal with President Obama on health care reform, other corporations are partnering with environmental, labor and left-wing special interest groups in a last-ditch effort to jumpstart cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate.
This high-profile corporate support of Obama’s energy policy exposes a long-simmering development in public policy: the progressive takeover of the boardroom.
For years, left-wing activists have targeted big business in order to co-opt its resources to advance the liberal agenda. Today’s aggressive corporate support of cap-and-trade legislation is the culmination of that effort. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Anil Padmanabhan
Deputy Managing Editor, Mint
October 12, 2009
A day after the European Union (EU) sought to join the US to scupper the paradigm for emission control defined under the Kyoto Protocol, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh became probably the first politician to signal that a deal in December at Copenhagen was unlikely and that it would require another meeting “next summer”. . . .
The Indian environment minister did not mince words when he said that the “negotiations have broken down” and that the reversal had “cast a long shadow” on climate change talks. For further measure, he added that a deal was not possible “if the basic architecture of (the) Kyoto (Protocol) was not preserved”. Ramesh was delivering the keynote address on Saturday at the conference, From Kyoto to Copenhagen, hosted by Project Syndicate in Copenhagen. The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement, which the US has not signed, that aims to limit emissions of greenhouse gases to prevent global warming and climate change. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries; Host, BreakPoint
September 17, 2009
At the British Science Association Festival, Lord May, the group’s president, said that population growth, climate change, and other environmental offenses “threaten our existence on this planet.”
This litany is a familiar one whose power, judging by recent events, has diminished. May, the former chief science adviser to the British government, told attendees that better motivation for changing behavior is needed.
So what better motivator than religion? May noted that “religion had historically played a major role in policing social behavior through the notion of a supernatural ‘enforcer.’” Since “religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past,” it may be able to do it again by invoking this “supernatural punisher.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
International Business Editor, Telegraph
October 11, 2009
. . . The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years' supply – and rising fast. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby Dan Holler
Senate Relations Deputy, Heritage Foundation
Human Events, October 13, 2009
Soon, fast-talking Senators will take up the Kerry-Boxer bill to supposedly limit global warming. Meanwhile, corporate America is doing a global warming kabuki dance.
Over the past several weeks, several high-profile companies have left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Liberals and environmentalists hope that will make it easier for the Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill. After all, these defections happened because of the Chamber’s blinkered position on global warming. Right?
Not entirely. As National Public Radio (no conservative outlet) reported last week, “some of the defections may reflect these companies’ own business interests. Utilities that rely heavily on nuclear power, or that have made big investments in alternative energy, could profit from a cap-and-trade system.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries; Host, BreakPoint
October 8, 2009
This December, world leaders will gather in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. There they—and we—will be told that if they don’t take “decisive” or “bold” measures, catastrophes of biblical proportions await humanity. . . .
Bjorn Lomborg, a former supporter of Greenpeace, believes that “panic is neither warranted nor a constructive place from which to deal with any of humanity’s problems, not just global warming.” . . .
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Lomborg noted that it will require extraordinary effort for advanced nations like, for instance, Japan, to meet their already-existing promises to reduce CO2 emissions. The kind of reductions being bandied about in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference are, in Lomborg’s estimation, the stuff of fantasy.
If the only result of these fantasies were broken promises and some recriminations, it wouldn't matter. But, if some politicians have their way, the consequences will be far worse, and they will be disproportionately visited on the poor. . . .
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:
Philip Lloyd, Ph.D.
Chemical engineer & nuclear physicist Philip Lloyd has overseen coal engineering projects, has been the president of the SAT Institution of Chemical Engineers, the Federation of Societies of Professional Engineers, and the Associated Scientific and Technical Societies of Southern Africa, has been a professor at University of the Witwatersrand, and is an honorary research fellow at the University of Cape Town's Energy Research Institute. "I am particularly concerned that the rigor of science seems to have been sacrificed on an altar of fundraising," said Lloyd, a UN IPCC coordinating lead author. "I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a Summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said." After personal studies and experimentation, Lloyd noted that he has "grave difficulties in finding any but the most circumstantial evidence for any human impact on the climate."
Alexandre Amaral de Aguiar
Alexandre de Aguiar is the MetSul Weather Center communications director and an Ulbra TV weatherman in Porto Alegre, Brazil. De Aguiar refuted scientific claims of Al Gore's in late 2007: "October 14th, 1997, Al Gore forecast a future without (cooling) La Niña events. El Niño (warming) events, according to him and his fellow scientists, would become permanent." He continued, "Gore's theory bankrupted exactly ten years after its release. The largest ocean in Earth is much colder than average and global climate starts to feel the impacts of a moderate La Niña event that may reach the strong threshold" "It will take some more years for 'Mother Nature' to dismiss some or all of Gore forecasts," he concluded, "but earlier predictions made by him are already proving to be an inconvenient mistake."Back to top Briefly NotedU.S. Chamber CEO: Enviros Waging 'Orchestrated Pressure Campaign'
Secretary Chu Crosses the Line
Warning of Energy Price Rise
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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