(1) Proof that feminists care more for Democrats than for women: Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky.
(2) Proof that the anti-war left cares more for Democrats than for peace: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, drone strikes, and (a) giving Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything at all in office for peace and (b) giving one to Al Gore for applying junk science to environmental extremism
(3) Proof that conservatives care more for Republicans than for the Constitution: John Boehner, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, the Patriot Act, NSA, picking the Social security lock box, and failure to defund Obamacare
(4) Proof that libertarians care more for straight-jacketed, lock-stepped, ideological purity than for actually making the world better: voting for Ron Paul over and over and over
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Friday, September 20, 2013
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Fragments: An Anti-Regime Potpourri
(1.) The Obama administration has practiced no
self-restraint when it comes to commandeering the auto industry, trying to
control and limit our exercise of second amendment rights, trampling boldly and
broadly on our first amendment rights, and hijacking health care. This administration has no trouble at all
extending its reach into broad areas of human life that the Constitution
sequesters from it. But it simply cannot
find the will to do the things the Constitution requires, like securing the
borders. Indeed, it will sue the states
that, desperate for the border control the federal government refuses to
provide, try to provide it for themselves.
(2.) The number of those no longer in the work force has
grown by more than 8 million under Obama.
Those millions hoped for change, but the change they got wasn't the change
they hoped for. Those 8 million aren't
counted in the unemployment percentage, so even if their number grew to 18.5
million, government unemployment numbers might still actually improve, at which
time the gov't would declare its pathetic record a rousing success, and the
benighted American voters would reward the economic wrecking crew by sending
them back into office.
(3.) At the moment, because of the staggering ignorance
of the American voter, America is becoming Detroit. Our electorate seems incapable of continued
self-government. I say this so that you
will know what your public schools too often produce: Relativistic sheep incapable of sustained logical,
historical or economic analysis. So let
me put it plainly -- save your
country: home school. If you are a Democrat, you don’t need to home
school. All you need to do is send Suzy
and Johnny off each morning to the local socialist indoctrination facility
where the teachers, the principal, and the NEA will produce millions of mind-benumbed
little lefties for you.
(4.) Confiscatory tax
rates and other anti-business government policies stifle investment and,
therefore, job production. So, after
Obama changes his policies, businesses will gladly invest the (literally)
trillions of dollars they now prudently are holding in reserve. But BHO won't do that. He's too busy trying to put the coal industry
out of business and investing in green energy offerings that keep dying. He is anti-big business, and he's getting what
he wants -- less and less big business. And
if, despite the currently bad investment environment, a number of courageous,
insightful, and hard-working entrepreneurs still succeed growing a thriving
business, he'll tell them that they didn't build that.
He's bad for America in more ways than
anyone can count. Period.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Douglas Gregory of Cornwall Alliance refutes Obama's claims about climate change
by Douglas Gregory
In his second inaugural address President Obama condemned climate skeptics, saying the devastating effects of increased floods, droughts, forest fires, and powerful storms were beyond denial, and climate change was to blame.
However, forest fires are down 15 percent since the 1950’s, cumulative cyclone energy is down, and droughts and floods are unchanged.
We would prefer a little more of an actual threat before we upend our whole economy.
But perhaps it doesn’t matter. President Obama’s thinking may just reflect that of leaders who have called us to fight global warming regardless whether it’s a real problem.
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), addressing the Earth Summit in 1992, said, “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.’”
At the same conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick said, “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
IPCC co-chairman Ottmar Edenhofer said just before the 2010 Climate Summit in Cancun, “… one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth. …”
The list goes on.
What’s so dangerous about this is the admission that climate change is not science informing policy, but policy dictating to science.
The Cornwall Alliance’s scientists, economists, theologians, and other experts promote a scientifically sound, Biblical Earth stewardship. Your prayers and tax-deductible donations help us continue educating the public and decision makers on this and many other issues. Thank you for your support!
Douglas Gregory is Research and Policy Analyst for the Cornwall Alliance.
In his second inaugural address President Obama condemned climate skeptics, saying the devastating effects of increased floods, droughts, forest fires, and powerful storms were beyond denial, and climate change was to blame.
However, forest fires are down 15 percent since the 1950’s, cumulative cyclone energy is down, and droughts and floods are unchanged.
We would prefer a little more of an actual threat before we upend our whole economy.
But perhaps it doesn’t matter. President Obama’s thinking may just reflect that of leaders who have called us to fight global warming regardless whether it’s a real problem.
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), addressing the Earth Summit in 1992, said, “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.’”
At the same conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick said, “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
IPCC co-chairman Ottmar Edenhofer said just before the 2010 Climate Summit in Cancun, “… one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth. …”
The list goes on.
What’s so dangerous about this is the admission that climate change is not science informing policy, but policy dictating to science.
The Cornwall Alliance’s scientists, economists, theologians, and other experts promote a scientifically sound, Biblical Earth stewardship. Your prayers and tax-deductible donations help us continue educating the public and decision makers on this and many other issues. Thank you for your support!
Douglas Gregory is Research and Policy Analyst for the Cornwall Alliance.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Biblical Environmentalism: Introducing the Cornwall Alliance
"Dear Friend,
When’s the last time you told friends about the Cornwall Alliance or forwarded this newsletter to them? We thought we’d give you the perfect opportunity to do that with today’s issue. It will introduce your friends to who we are, what we do, and why we do it. Please forward this to as many friends as possible, along with your encouragement for them to subscribe!
Our Mission
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation seeks to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our Identity
A coalition of theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, policy experts, and committed laymen, the Cornwall Alliance is the world’s leading evangelical voice promoting environmental stewardship and economic development built on Biblical principles.
Our Biblical Foundation
Scripture addresses our stewardship of the Earth in many places, but the most fundamental is Genesis 1:26–28: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” These verses reveal
The essence of man: Man is a creature, the product of direct, intentional, divine action; he is the image of God; and he is male and female. From these truths flow all truths about man’s relationships with and duties toward God and other men.
The mission of man: to multiply and fill the Earth; and, filling it, to subdue and rule it—not abuse it, but rule it as God does, enhancing its fruitfulness, safety, and beauty, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors, fulfilling the Two Great Commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor.
A Summary of Biblical Earth Stewardship
Biblical stewardship of God’s Earth happens when people, made in the image of God, reflecting God’s own creativity, work together to enhance the fruitfulness, beauty, and safety of the Earth, for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors, thus fulfilling the two Great Commandments to love God and love our neighbor.
The Challenge We Face
We carry out our mission in a world permeated by an environmental movement
whose worldview, theology, and ethics are overwhelmingly anti-Christian,
whose science and economics are often badly flawed,
whose policies therefore often are of little real benefit to the natural world but of significant harm to the world’s poor, and
whose doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation directly challenge the whole of the Christian faith, especially the gospel.
Environmentalism therefore—in distinction from Biblical stewardship of God’s Earth—threatens the people you care about both materially and spiritually.
The Current Situation
A hundred years ago, Darwinism robbed society of the blessings of Genesis 1:27. The result has been the tragic undermining of human dignity and the growing prevalence of all kinds of depravity. Today, the Christian church stands with regard to environmentalism where it stood a century ago with regard to Darwinism. At that time, some Christians strove valiantly, some were deceived, some were unaware, and some capitulated. We largely lost that battle, and the sad consequences are obvious all around us, with sexual confusion, abortion on demand, infanticide, and euthanasia, and general societal breakdown.
Our Response
Our response to environmentalism must be better than our forebears’ response to Darwinism. To restore the teaching and reclaim the blessings of Genesis 1:28, we must respond both critically and constructively:
Critically, we must exercise a wise, courageous, powerful, spiritual warfare, tearing down ideological strongholds, taking “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5). The Cornwall Alliance is leading the battle to recover the blessings of Genesis 1:28, and we need and want you to stand in the gap with us. We want to help you—whether you’re a pastor or a businessman, lead a non-profit ministry or serve in government, or are a parent trying to raise your sons and daughters to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord—to guard those under your care and preserve that great treasure of the Church, the gospel of Christ, which alone is the power of God to salvation for all who believe.
Constructively, we must teach people to exercise a wise, loving stewardship of God’s Earth and everything in it. The Bible begins in a garden, the Garden of Eden, and ends in a garden city, the New Jerusalem. Mankind starts with the mandate to multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it—to spread out from the Garden of Eden to transform wilderness into garden city. Man’s Fall into sin and God’s judgment of man and curse on the Earth make fulfilling that mandate more difficult, but they never negate it. Rather, the redeeming work of Christ, through His death, resurrection, and ascension, reaches to all of creation, and the Great Commission of Mathew 28:19–20, “Go … and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” is the means of achieving it.
Are We Effective?
Our opponents say so. People for the American way says, “The Religious Right’s relatively new antipathy to environmentalism is largely the result of the hard work of … The Cornwall Alliance …. [which] has been extraordinarily successful in convincing the Religious Right that environmentalism presents a threat to Christianity ….”
As CBN News Anchor Lee Webb puts it, “When the Cornwall Alliance calls, we at CBN News pay attention. And, in fact, when it comes to sorting through the complicated issues regarding the environment, it’s this organization that I think of first. I want our viewers to have their perspective. I know that the experts the Alliance has put together will provide us with a biblical view of those issues and provide a reasoned, articulate response to some of the radical views advanced by secularists and the establishment media.”
Our History in Highlights
March, 2000: The Interfaith Council on Environmental Stewardship first published The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which quickly gained endorsement by 1,500 religious leaders from around the world and many laymen.
August, 2005: We began as The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, adopting The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship as our founding document.
November, 2005: We published our first major study, An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy.
May, 2006: We began publishing the Cornwall Newsletter.
July, 2006: We published our second major study, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.
May, 2007: We took on our present name to reflect better our founding document, The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship.
July, 2008: We published our third major study, The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda, the work of 13 theologians, scientists, and economists, which is intended to grow with added chapters over the years.
October, 2010: During a one-hour program on Fox News, we released our 13-part video lecture series Resisting the Green Dragon.
December, 2010: We published our fourth major study, A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming, the work of 29 theologians, scientists, and economists.
December, 2010: We published An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, quickly endorsed by over 450 evangelical theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, and other scholars, followed by a continually growing number of laymen.
January, 2011: We published our first book, James Wanliss’s Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Net Death.
October, 2011: We published our fifth major study, The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy, the work of 15 economists, scientists, and theologians.
July, 2012: We launched our most ambitious initiative to date, In His Image 2012, a multi-year effort to educate evangelicals about the integrally related threats, arising from the denial of the doctrines of Genesis 1:27–28, to the sanctity of human life; the dignity of human sexuality, marriage and the family; and the God-given mandate for human beings to exercise godly dominion over the Earth. Our goal is to help evangelicals fighting on many battlefronts to see the interconnections and begin laboring more strategically and, we pray, effectively to reshape how people think of human beings and our role on Earth—to reassert the sanctity of human life and sexuality, the beauty and centrality of marriage, the goodness of human multiplication, and the dignity of human work and godly dominion over the Earth.
Throughout this time, we have
published articles in newspapers, magazines, and online sites, and been frequent guests on radio and television talk shows across the United States and around the world;
provided helpful answers to individuals’ questions about the theology, ethics, science, and economics of environment and energy policy and economic development for the poor;
constantly done research to stay abreast of current developments.
Our Network of Scholars
The Cornwall Alliance has 22 Senior Fellows, Fellows, and Adjunct Scholars, 40 Contributing Writers, and 33 Advisors. See them listed at http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/cornwall-alliance-scholars/ and http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/cornwall-alliance-advisory-board/.
Subscribe to Our Newsletter, Follow Us on Facebook
www.CornwallAlliance.org/Newsletter
www.Facebook.com/Groups/CornwallAlliance
www.Facebook.com/InHisImage2012
www.Facebook.com/ResistingtheGreenDragon
Read Our Statement of Faith
http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/statement-of-faith/
Schedule a Speaker for Your Church or School
Dr. Beisner and many of Fellows, Adjuncts, and Contributing Writers are available to lecture on many subjects for churches, seminaries, universities and colleges, schools, and other groups. To schedule a speaker, call 703-569-4653.
Support the Cornwall Alliance
The Cornwall Alliance is a ministry of The James Partnership, a 501(c)3 non-profit religious, educational, and charitable foundation. All gifts are tax deductible.
The Cornwall Alliance
9302-C Old Keene Mill Rd.
Burke, VA 22015
Phone 703-569-4653 | Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
www.CornwallAlliance.org www.InHisImage2012.org
www.ResistingtheGreenDragon.com
Beisner to Speak TONIGHT on Reclaiming the Blessings of Genesis 1:28 in Hollywood, FL
Cornwall National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner will speak on “Creation Care and Godly Dominion: Reclaiming the Blessings of Genesis 1:28 in the Search for a Genuinely Biblical Earth Stewardship” at Sheridan Hills Baptist Church, 3751 Sheridan St., Hollywood, FL, at 7 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, January 16, 2013, in the main sanctuary.
Cornwall National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner will speak Friday, January 25, at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, MO, on how national and state science curriculum standards undermine the Christian worldview and so challenge the faith of Christian students attending public schools. Sen. Rick Santorum, Fox News commentator Monica Crowley, Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, Last Ounce of Courage star Marshall Teague, author and commentator Michelle Malkin, Summit Ministries President Jeff Myers, Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming author Christopher Horner, and more than a dozen other speakers will also address the conference. The conference theme is The Five Pillars of the First Amendment: Preserving our Freedoms from School to Society.” To register, go to http://www.epcconference.net/register.cfm and use Promo Code 24.
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.
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation seeks to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. A coalition of theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, policy experts, and committed laymen, the Cornwall Alliance is the world’s leading evangelical voice promoting environmental stewardship and economic development built on Biblical principles. The Cornwall Alliance is a non-profit religious, charitable, and educational organization. All gifts are tax deductible."
When’s the last time you told friends about the Cornwall Alliance or forwarded this newsletter to them? We thought we’d give you the perfect opportunity to do that with today’s issue. It will introduce your friends to who we are, what we do, and why we do it. Please forward this to as many friends as possible, along with your encouragement for them to subscribe!
Our Mission
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation seeks to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our Identity
A coalition of theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, policy experts, and committed laymen, the Cornwall Alliance is the world’s leading evangelical voice promoting environmental stewardship and economic development built on Biblical principles.
Our Biblical Foundation
Scripture addresses our stewardship of the Earth in many places, but the most fundamental is Genesis 1:26–28: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” These verses reveal
The essence of man: Man is a creature, the product of direct, intentional, divine action; he is the image of God; and he is male and female. From these truths flow all truths about man’s relationships with and duties toward God and other men.
The mission of man: to multiply and fill the Earth; and, filling it, to subdue and rule it—not abuse it, but rule it as God does, enhancing its fruitfulness, safety, and beauty, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors, fulfilling the Two Great Commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor.
A Summary of Biblical Earth Stewardship
Biblical stewardship of God’s Earth happens when people, made in the image of God, reflecting God’s own creativity, work together to enhance the fruitfulness, beauty, and safety of the Earth, for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors, thus fulfilling the two Great Commandments to love God and love our neighbor.
The Challenge We Face
We carry out our mission in a world permeated by an environmental movement
whose worldview, theology, and ethics are overwhelmingly anti-Christian,
whose science and economics are often badly flawed,
whose policies therefore often are of little real benefit to the natural world but of significant harm to the world’s poor, and
whose doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation directly challenge the whole of the Christian faith, especially the gospel.
Environmentalism therefore—in distinction from Biblical stewardship of God’s Earth—threatens the people you care about both materially and spiritually.
The Current Situation
A hundred years ago, Darwinism robbed society of the blessings of Genesis 1:27. The result has been the tragic undermining of human dignity and the growing prevalence of all kinds of depravity. Today, the Christian church stands with regard to environmentalism where it stood a century ago with regard to Darwinism. At that time, some Christians strove valiantly, some were deceived, some were unaware, and some capitulated. We largely lost that battle, and the sad consequences are obvious all around us, with sexual confusion, abortion on demand, infanticide, and euthanasia, and general societal breakdown.
Our Response
Our response to environmentalism must be better than our forebears’ response to Darwinism. To restore the teaching and reclaim the blessings of Genesis 1:28, we must respond both critically and constructively:
Critically, we must exercise a wise, courageous, powerful, spiritual warfare, tearing down ideological strongholds, taking “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5). The Cornwall Alliance is leading the battle to recover the blessings of Genesis 1:28, and we need and want you to stand in the gap with us. We want to help you—whether you’re a pastor or a businessman, lead a non-profit ministry or serve in government, or are a parent trying to raise your sons and daughters to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord—to guard those under your care and preserve that great treasure of the Church, the gospel of Christ, which alone is the power of God to salvation for all who believe.
Constructively, we must teach people to exercise a wise, loving stewardship of God’s Earth and everything in it. The Bible begins in a garden, the Garden of Eden, and ends in a garden city, the New Jerusalem. Mankind starts with the mandate to multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it—to spread out from the Garden of Eden to transform wilderness into garden city. Man’s Fall into sin and God’s judgment of man and curse on the Earth make fulfilling that mandate more difficult, but they never negate it. Rather, the redeeming work of Christ, through His death, resurrection, and ascension, reaches to all of creation, and the Great Commission of Mathew 28:19–20, “Go … and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” is the means of achieving it.
Are We Effective?
Our opponents say so. People for the American way says, “The Religious Right’s relatively new antipathy to environmentalism is largely the result of the hard work of … The Cornwall Alliance …. [which] has been extraordinarily successful in convincing the Religious Right that environmentalism presents a threat to Christianity ….”
As CBN News Anchor Lee Webb puts it, “When the Cornwall Alliance calls, we at CBN News pay attention. And, in fact, when it comes to sorting through the complicated issues regarding the environment, it’s this organization that I think of first. I want our viewers to have their perspective. I know that the experts the Alliance has put together will provide us with a biblical view of those issues and provide a reasoned, articulate response to some of the radical views advanced by secularists and the establishment media.”
Our History in Highlights
March, 2000: The Interfaith Council on Environmental Stewardship first published The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which quickly gained endorsement by 1,500 religious leaders from around the world and many laymen.
August, 2005: We began as The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, adopting The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship as our founding document.
November, 2005: We published our first major study, An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy.
May, 2006: We began publishing the Cornwall Newsletter.
July, 2006: We published our second major study, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.
May, 2007: We took on our present name to reflect better our founding document, The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship.
July, 2008: We published our third major study, The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda, the work of 13 theologians, scientists, and economists, which is intended to grow with added chapters over the years.
October, 2010: During a one-hour program on Fox News, we released our 13-part video lecture series Resisting the Green Dragon.
December, 2010: We published our fourth major study, A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming, the work of 29 theologians, scientists, and economists.
December, 2010: We published An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, quickly endorsed by over 450 evangelical theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, and other scholars, followed by a continually growing number of laymen.
January, 2011: We published our first book, James Wanliss’s Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Net Death.
October, 2011: We published our fifth major study, The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy, the work of 15 economists, scientists, and theologians.
July, 2012: We launched our most ambitious initiative to date, In His Image 2012, a multi-year effort to educate evangelicals about the integrally related threats, arising from the denial of the doctrines of Genesis 1:27–28, to the sanctity of human life; the dignity of human sexuality, marriage and the family; and the God-given mandate for human beings to exercise godly dominion over the Earth. Our goal is to help evangelicals fighting on many battlefronts to see the interconnections and begin laboring more strategically and, we pray, effectively to reshape how people think of human beings and our role on Earth—to reassert the sanctity of human life and sexuality, the beauty and centrality of marriage, the goodness of human multiplication, and the dignity of human work and godly dominion over the Earth.
Throughout this time, we have
published articles in newspapers, magazines, and online sites, and been frequent guests on radio and television talk shows across the United States and around the world;
provided helpful answers to individuals’ questions about the theology, ethics, science, and economics of environment and energy policy and economic development for the poor;
constantly done research to stay abreast of current developments.
Our Network of Scholars
The Cornwall Alliance has 22 Senior Fellows, Fellows, and Adjunct Scholars, 40 Contributing Writers, and 33 Advisors. See them listed at http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/cornwall-alliance-scholars/ and http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/cornwall-alliance-advisory-board/.
Subscribe to Our Newsletter, Follow Us on Facebook
www.CornwallAlliance.org/Newsletter
www.Facebook.com/Groups/CornwallAlliance
www.Facebook.com/InHisImage2012
www.Facebook.com/ResistingtheGreenDragon
Read Our Statement of Faith
http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/statement-of-faith/
Schedule a Speaker for Your Church or School
Dr. Beisner and many of Fellows, Adjuncts, and Contributing Writers are available to lecture on many subjects for churches, seminaries, universities and colleges, schools, and other groups. To schedule a speaker, call 703-569-4653.
Support the Cornwall Alliance
The Cornwall Alliance is a ministry of The James Partnership, a 501(c)3 non-profit religious, educational, and charitable foundation. All gifts are tax deductible.
The Cornwall Alliance
9302-C Old Keene Mill Rd.
Burke, VA 22015
Phone 703-569-4653 | Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
www.CornwallAlliance.org www.InHisImage2012.org
www.ResistingtheGreenDragon.com
Beisner to Speak TONIGHT on Reclaiming the Blessings of Genesis 1:28 in Hollywood, FL
Cornwall National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner will speak on “Creation Care and Godly Dominion: Reclaiming the Blessings of Genesis 1:28 in the Search for a Genuinely Biblical Earth Stewardship” at Sheridan Hills Baptist Church, 3751 Sheridan St., Hollywood, FL, at 7 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, January 16, 2013, in the main sanctuary.
Cornwall National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner will speak Friday, January 25, at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, MO, on how national and state science curriculum standards undermine the Christian worldview and so challenge the faith of Christian students attending public schools. Sen. Rick Santorum, Fox News commentator Monica Crowley, Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, Last Ounce of Courage star Marshall Teague, author and commentator Michelle Malkin, Summit Ministries President Jeff Myers, Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming author Christopher Horner, and more than a dozen other speakers will also address the conference. The conference theme is The Five Pillars of the First Amendment: Preserving our Freedoms from School to Society.” To register, go to http://www.epcconference.net/register.cfm and use Promo Code 24.
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.
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation seeks to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. A coalition of theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, policy experts, and committed laymen, the Cornwall Alliance is the world’s leading evangelical voice promoting environmental stewardship and economic development built on Biblical principles. The Cornwall Alliance is a non-profit religious, charitable, and educational organization. All gifts are tax deductible."
Thursday, August 23, 2012
New Study Rejects Global Warming (from Noel Sheppard)
This from Noel Sheppard:
In the past several weeks as much of the nation suffered under a massive heatwave, global warming-obsessed media depicted the high temperatures as evidence of Nobel laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making scam.
A new study published in the journal Nature Sunday completely debunks all previous claims that temperatures in recent decades are in any way historic demonstrating instead that things were much hotter on this planet during Roman times:
"New evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicates that this cooling trend was stronger (−0.31 °C per 1,000 years, ±0.03 °C) than previously reported, and demonstrate that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records. The long-term trend now revealed in maximum latewood density data is in line with coupled general circulation models indicating albedo-driven feedback mechanisms and substantial summer cooling over the past two millennia in northern boreal and Arctic latitudes. These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times."
The website of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz published a more reader-friendly explanation of the study Monday:
Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods."
For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.
"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."
The UK Register observed Tuesday:
Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it - but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years.
A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.
This thoroughly debunks the claim that temperatures on the planet today are in any way historic or unprecedented.
The Register continued:
In the IPCC view, the planet was cooler during Roman times and the medieval warm spell. Overall the temperature is headed up - perhaps wildly up, according to the famous/infamous "hockey stick" graph.
The new study indicates that that's quite wrong, with the current warming less serious than the Romans and others since have seen - and the overall trend actually down by a noticeable 0.3°C per millennium, which the scientists believe is probably down to gradual long-term shifts in the position of the Sun and the Earth's path around it.
Just as many climate realists have been saying for years.
The only question remaining is whether America's global warming-obsessed media will pay any attention to this new information.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Evironmentalist Icon Says He Overstated Climate Change (from IBD)
He claimed in 2006 that "before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."
But he has told MSNBC that he overstated the case and now acknowledges that "we don't know what the climate is doing."
"We thought we knew 20 years ago," he said. "That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened."
The 92-year-old Lovelock notes that "the climate is doing its usual tricks" and concedes "there's nothing much really happening yet" even though "we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now."
Lovelock hasn't fully changed course yet. MSNBC says he still believes climate change is occurring, though not as rapidly as he once thought.
"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time," he said. Yet the temperature "has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."
As we have said before, linking human activity to climate and weather is a foolish proposition.
Rather than continuing to contend that man is driving temperatures to dangerous levels, it seems that is the explanation that Lovelock is moving toward, though apparently quite slowly.
But give the independent scientist credit for admitting his mistake as well as pointing out that a university or government researcher might not be so inclined to admit error due to fear he would lose funding for bucking the alarmist narrative. His honesty in the midst of an issue so shrouded in deceit is refreshing.
(From Investor's Business Daily)
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Tiny, Happy People: C. Ben Mitchell on Global Warming, Human Engineering, and Ethics
Just when you think you have heard it all, someone pushes the envelope. According to three ethicists writing in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment, because geoengineering might be too risky a way to combat global climate change, we should alter the human species instead.
Here is the argument offered by Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache. Climate change is the result of human corruption of the environment—so-called anthropogenic causes. Climate change affects food production, access to water, health, and the environment. Since, in their view, millions could suffer from the consequences of climate change something radical must be done. Recycling, tax-incentives, and large-scale manipulation of the environment are, according to the authors, either too negligible or too grand to be effective. Geoengineering, in particular, is disadvantageous because “in many cases, we lack the necessary scientific knowledge to devise and implement geoengineering without significant risk to ourselves and to future generations” (p. 4). So, in one breathtaking leap, the authors argue that we ought to consider “biomedical modification of humans to make them better at mitigating climate change.”
To be fair, they do offer a caveat: “Our central aim [in the paper] is to show that human engineering deserves consideration alongside other solutions in the debate about how to solve the problem of climate change. Also, as we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity—possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care—rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”
The suggestion that we ought to modify the human species as a means of mitigating climate change is at once both naive and hubristic. If they think modifying the environment may be difficult, successfully modifying the extraordinarily intricate balance of human homeostasis is a pipedream at best. Here is what they think might be desirable.
First, humans might be altered to be meat aversive. All one would have to do is stimulate the immune system so as to “induce mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance)” to meat. Or, since the “human ecological footprints are partly correlated to our size,” we can just make humans smaller! “Reducing the average US height by 15 cm would mean a mass reduction of 23% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction of metabolic rate (15%/18%), since less tissue means lower nutrients and energy needs.” One way to produce these tiny people would be through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, say the authors. Just select the embryos for transfer to a woman’s womb that have the genes for compactness; toss the embryos will tall genes. Smaller humans could also be produced through hormone therapy and reduction of birth-weight.
Second, the number of humans could be modified through cognitive enhancement. Why cognitive enhancement? Because apparently only stupid people have more than two children per family. “There seems to be a link,” the authors maintain, “between cognition itself and lower birth-rates.” Since two children per family is lower than the replacement rate (of roughly 2.1 per family in industrialized countries), population would decline.
Third, pharmacological enhancements could increase altruism and empathy. The result: generous and happy people through chemistry. Modifying altruism and empathy “by human engineering could be promising.” Testosterone, by the way, “appears to decrease aspects of empathy,” according to the authors. So, to follow their logic, since testosterone prepares both males and female for reproduction, reducing its levels in every human body would both reduce the number of people on the earth and, at the same time, make them more compliant.
Why undertake the re-engineering of the human species? Because, say the authors, “human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering. Second, human engineering could make behavior and market solutions more likely to succeed.” In other words, we would be far more likely to create tiny, happy people than we would be to modify the environment or create incentives that would encourage environmental stewardship.
Most readers will find the suggestion that re-engineering the species to control climate change is simply ludicrous on the face of it. But it is worse than ludicrous, it is dangerous. Although the authors say these alterations will come about voluntarily, it would, in fact, be parents who would make these decisions for the next generation without consent. Our children would become guinea pigs in a massive genetic and pharmacological engineering experiment—which, in many cases, we would be unable to reverse.
In an interview with Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, one of the authors, Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy at New York University, said that making these sorts of modifications in our children is not morally problematic. After all, the tiny, happy child will thank you for making him smaller and more altruistic. And why shouldn’t he? You modified him to be generous and altruistic.
Well, what about an individual’s free will? Wouldn’t giving a child behavior modifying drugs to make her detest meat violate her freedom? Says Liao, “ . . . in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have a steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing.” So, by extension, a little doping of the water supply would help people truly express their will. The logic is simply perverse.
In this paper we see another example of the human self-loathing that is so much a part of both the environmentalist and transhumanist movements. For environmentalists, human beings are parasitic threats. For the transhumanists, human beings are maladaptive and need re-engineering. Instead of seeing human creativity, innovation, and market forces applied in stewardly ways for the sake of the truly human good, the technologist (the human) becomes the technological artifact (the modified post-human). Human re-engineering, it seems to me, is a far greater threat to our humanity than climate change.
C. Ben Mitchell is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University.
Here is the argument offered by Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache. Climate change is the result of human corruption of the environment—so-called anthropogenic causes. Climate change affects food production, access to water, health, and the environment. Since, in their view, millions could suffer from the consequences of climate change something radical must be done. Recycling, tax-incentives, and large-scale manipulation of the environment are, according to the authors, either too negligible or too grand to be effective. Geoengineering, in particular, is disadvantageous because “in many cases, we lack the necessary scientific knowledge to devise and implement geoengineering without significant risk to ourselves and to future generations” (p. 4). So, in one breathtaking leap, the authors argue that we ought to consider “biomedical modification of humans to make them better at mitigating climate change.”
To be fair, they do offer a caveat: “Our central aim [in the paper] is to show that human engineering deserves consideration alongside other solutions in the debate about how to solve the problem of climate change. Also, as we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity—possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care—rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”
The suggestion that we ought to modify the human species as a means of mitigating climate change is at once both naive and hubristic. If they think modifying the environment may be difficult, successfully modifying the extraordinarily intricate balance of human homeostasis is a pipedream at best. Here is what they think might be desirable.
First, humans might be altered to be meat aversive. All one would have to do is stimulate the immune system so as to “induce mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance)” to meat. Or, since the “human ecological footprints are partly correlated to our size,” we can just make humans smaller! “Reducing the average US height by 15 cm would mean a mass reduction of 23% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction of metabolic rate (15%/18%), since less tissue means lower nutrients and energy needs.” One way to produce these tiny people would be through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, say the authors. Just select the embryos for transfer to a woman’s womb that have the genes for compactness; toss the embryos will tall genes. Smaller humans could also be produced through hormone therapy and reduction of birth-weight.
Second, the number of humans could be modified through cognitive enhancement. Why cognitive enhancement? Because apparently only stupid people have more than two children per family. “There seems to be a link,” the authors maintain, “between cognition itself and lower birth-rates.” Since two children per family is lower than the replacement rate (of roughly 2.1 per family in industrialized countries), population would decline.
Third, pharmacological enhancements could increase altruism and empathy. The result: generous and happy people through chemistry. Modifying altruism and empathy “by human engineering could be promising.” Testosterone, by the way, “appears to decrease aspects of empathy,” according to the authors. So, to follow their logic, since testosterone prepares both males and female for reproduction, reducing its levels in every human body would both reduce the number of people on the earth and, at the same time, make them more compliant.
Why undertake the re-engineering of the human species? Because, say the authors, “human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering. Second, human engineering could make behavior and market solutions more likely to succeed.” In other words, we would be far more likely to create tiny, happy people than we would be to modify the environment or create incentives that would encourage environmental stewardship.
Most readers will find the suggestion that re-engineering the species to control climate change is simply ludicrous on the face of it. But it is worse than ludicrous, it is dangerous. Although the authors say these alterations will come about voluntarily, it would, in fact, be parents who would make these decisions for the next generation without consent. Our children would become guinea pigs in a massive genetic and pharmacological engineering experiment—which, in many cases, we would be unable to reverse.
In an interview with Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, one of the authors, Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy at New York University, said that making these sorts of modifications in our children is not morally problematic. After all, the tiny, happy child will thank you for making him smaller and more altruistic. And why shouldn’t he? You modified him to be generous and altruistic.
Well, what about an individual’s free will? Wouldn’t giving a child behavior modifying drugs to make her detest meat violate her freedom? Says Liao, “ . . . in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have a steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing.” So, by extension, a little doping of the water supply would help people truly express their will. The logic is simply perverse.
In this paper we see another example of the human self-loathing that is so much a part of both the environmentalist and transhumanist movements. For environmentalists, human beings are parasitic threats. For the transhumanists, human beings are maladaptive and need re-engineering. Instead of seeing human creativity, innovation, and market forces applied in stewardly ways for the sake of the truly human good, the technologist (the human) becomes the technological artifact (the modified post-human). Human re-engineering, it seems to me, is a far greater threat to our humanity than climate change.
C. Ben Mitchell is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University.
(from First Things)
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Easter Dawns in the Laboratory
In the middle ages, we called science "natural philosophy" because we understood that science was the application of a particular philosophy to our understanding of the natural world. The philosophy then employed was the philosophy of Aristotle, with its mixed bag of insight and nonsense.
Science still is natural philosophy, even though we’ve dropped the name. The philosophy it now employs -- empiricism -- is exploded. Even though the finest philosophers now rarely advocate empiricism, modern science still insists on being its laboratory application. Someone needs to tell the scientists that the rest of the world has junked the scientists’ philosophy and might have been right to do so.
If bad ideas have bad consequences, and if empiricism is a philosophically bad idea, then one wonders what bad consequences flow from the bad philosophy that sits as the bedrock of modern science and is the engine of its movement.
Worth considering, that.
When challenged on the point, these otherwise empirical scientists often take resort to pragmatism: “We use empiricism because it works.” Pay no attention to the fact that as a worldview pragmatism has its own set of fatal flaws. Simply notice that a moment earlier the scientists were talking as if science yielded truth and empirical facts. Now they don’t. They move seamlessly yet schizophrenically back and forth between supreme confidence and self-effacing mealy-mouthedness, depending upon which one serves their purposes best at the moment.
The same nonsense holds true with the scientists’ faulty theology, which says that God, if He exists at all, is and ought to be irrelevant to scientific endeavor, that we can proceed quite nicely without Him, thank you very much. Put on this lab coat and leave your Bible at the door.
That's perfectly bad theology, pure and simple.
It might be well for scientists to consider Wolfhart Pannenberg’s hypothesis that God is not only a field of force without limitations of time or extension, but that He is the field of force and, if so, then the scientists have been dealing with Him all along in one way and another yet never once realized it because their suffocating worldview made such recognition simply impossible.
I'm not saying that the alternative to modern science is the bastardized nonsense that one gets at some Christian colleges, but neither ought it to be the bastardized nonsense one gets at shamelessly secular enclaves like Harvard or Oxford, as if Richard Dawkins, not John Lennox, John Polkinghorne, or Michael Polanyi were the master of interdisciplinary thinking on this subject (or any other).
All this academically myopic, self-congratulatory, under-informed, scientific delusion happens because we have divided human knowledge up into discreet and externally impenetrable academic disciplines, each with its own private set of presuppositions and methods, and each with the freedom to do as it sees fit without regard to the knowledge gained in other disciplines.
But it’s utterly unreal. It’s utterly a rejection of things as they really are: We don’t have, say, a mathematical universe alongside a historical universe, alongside a philosophical universe, alongside a chemical universe, alongside a theological universe, alongside a sociological universe, alongside a rhetorical universe, alongside a political universe. We have but one world, and the answers we offer to life’s fundamental and enduring questions need to be true across the board. Regarding origins, for example, it cannot be that (A.) the universe and matter are eternal and also that (B.) we have reached today -- any today. Why not? Because it is impossible to traverse infinity, and if the universe is infinitely old, then you can’t get from infinity past to here.
Yet, here we are.
Some scientists, I am pleased to say, have escaped this prison and its “mind-forged manacles.” They work at places like the Discovery Institute; they also have serious doubts about evolutionary theory and the very unpristine data concerning global warming.
The prominence of contemporary scientific silliness is the by-product of academic segregation; it's just Jim Crow in charge of the curriculum: “Separate (disciplines) but equal,” which means, we all know, separate but unequal. No scientist I know thinks we ought to give equal weight to science and to Karl Barth’s intellectual earthquake, which brought down the towers of natural philosophy and natural theology, or to the first Christians’ discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning. If, indeed, the tomb was empty, if Spirit reversed physical death -- doing what matter could never do -- then the scientific presupposition that only matter matters, and that only matter-based hypotheses are acceptable is simply false. In such a world, science misses out on some of the most important, perhaps even the most important, explanatory principle in or out of the universe: God. Easter has dawned in the laboratory and no one there even noticed.
That’s because scientists don’t really think that Theology yields knowledge, that Theology is really an academic discipline that needs to be heard and taken into account. But they do think the theologians ought to listen to the scientists. They also think that the traffic between the two disciplines, if it exists at all, ought to be a one-way street from the laboratory to Jesus’ gravesite, not the other way round.
They think that Theology must sit in the back of the bus.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Global Warming and The East Anglia Email Scandal (Global Warming 5)
Adapted from James Delingpole, of The Telegraph (UK), to whom full credit:
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies, you should start dumping them now. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (AGW) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet.
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest: Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change skeptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting: "In an odd way this is cheering news."
But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters:
Manipulation of evidence:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
Suppression of evidence:
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists:
“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
“……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….”
How best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. (How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.):
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”
Delingpole finishes his comments on the East Anglia email scandal this way:
Delingpole finishes his comments on the East Anglia email scandal this way:
“I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that's sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory . . . Unfortunately, we've a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight."
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Global Warming (2)
As a follow-up to my previous post on global warming, I want to draw attention here to French geophysicist Claude Allegre, who converted from a believer to a skeptic in man-made global warming.
Who is Claude Allegre?
He is a socialist, an ardent member of the French political left, groups typically known for their advocacy of the global warming agenda. He is a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, a man who has published more than 100 scientific articles and 11 books. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. His defection from the global warming camp reflects the influence of numerous scientific studies that both underscore the claims of climate skeptics, on the one hand, and that undermine the dire predictions the global warming alarmists, on the other.
According to Allegre, the real cause of climate change remains resolutely unknown. What is known is that not only has Antarctic snowfall remained stable over the past 30 years, but that continent is actually gaining ice. That ice gain is significant because the Antarctic is one of the places where the hole in the ozone layer allegedly has its greatest effect.
Allegre also forcefully contends that too many advocates of man-made catastrophic global warming are motivated by money, not by truth or evidence. Global warming, he says “has become a very lucrative business for some people!”
In America, those people include Al Gore and the folks in charge of government-backed companies like Solyndra.
Global Warming (by Roy W. Spenser)
“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. . . My group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.
Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is man made. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.
But first let’s examine the basics of why so many scientists think global warming is manmade. Earth’s atmosphere contains natural greenhouse gases (mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane) which act to keep the lower layers of the atmosphere warmer than they otherwise would be without those gases. Greenhouse gases trap infrared radiation — the radiant heat energy that the Earth naturally emits to outer space in response to solar heating. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal, petroleum, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is believed to be enhancing the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. As of 2008, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 40% to 45% higher than it was before the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800’s.
It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.
The “Holy Grail”: Climate Sensitivity Figuring out how much past warming is due to mankind, and how much more we can expect in the future, depends upon something called “climate sensitivity”. This is the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.
The ‘consensus’ of opinion is that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is quite high, and so warming of about 0.25 deg. C to 0.5 deg. C (about 0.5 deg. F to 0.9 deg. F) every 10 years can be expected for as long as mankind continues to use fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. NASA’s James Hansen claims that climate sensitivity is very high, and that we have already put too much extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Presumably this is why he and Al Gore are campaigning for a moratorium on the construction of any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.
The case for natural climate change I also present an analysis of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which shows that most climate change might well be the result of….the climate system itself! Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change. You don’t need the sun, or any other ‘external’ influence (although these are also possible…but for now I’ll let others work on that). It is simply what the climate system does. This is actually quite easy for meteorologists to believe, since we understand how complex weather processes are. Your local TV meteorologist is probably a closet ’skeptic’ regarding mankind’s influence on climate.
Climate change — it happens, with or without our help.
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