Environmental Stewardship News Round-Up
The following items appear in the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance Newsletter, April 13, 2007:
“ISA Representatives to Be on Coral Ridge Hour”
Several Interfaith Stewardship Alliance colleagues will be guests on The Coral Ridge Hour in “end segments” the weekends of April 21-22, dealing with propaganda on the climate change issue; and April 28-29, dealing with a Biblical view of the environment. ISA national spokesman E. Calvin Beisner and colleagues Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Dr. Ken Chilton, director of the Institute for Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO, will all be interviewed. Other participants will be climatologist Dr. John Christy and Dr. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
The program airs on TBN at 7 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. Sundays and is syndicated around the country. Listings are available here.
“Should we believe the latest UN Climate Report? Natural variability may play a larger role in climate change”
By Dennis T. Avery, Monday, April 02, 2007
“Increasing bias at the IPCC as contributors drop out”
By E. Calvin Beisner
One reason why each report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must be taken with a heavy grain of salt is that over time dissenting scientists once involved in the IPCC have dropped out in protest over the bias. Ironically, their departure increases the bias.
Two recent examples:
Dr. Christopher Landsea, a climatologist and the Science and Operations Officer at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, withdrew in protest over the politicization of the IPCC and its dismissal of his concerns over unsubstantiated claims by some other IPCC members that manmade global warming was the cause of the active 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. See his open letter here.
Dr. Paul Reiter, one of the world’s leading scientists studying mosquitos, the diseases they carry, and how to combat them and those diseases, has criticized the IPCC for exaggerated claims of increasing rates of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in response to global warming. Although involved as a lead author on the relevant part of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), he did not participate in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), though he had been nominated as lead author by the U.S. government. See his testimony on this before the U.K. House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
A consequence is that “the IPCC peer review process provides no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions. This is particularly so as, over time, dissenting panelists have withdrawn from the IPCC process, thereby reducing it to a restricted professional milieu within which close colleagues frequently review their own work or that of close colleagues,” as the authors of “The Stern Review: A Dual Critique” put it (see p. 193 of the PDF here).
“Why So Gloomy?”
By Richard S. Lindzen, Special to Newsweek
“Hurricane forecaster: Al Gore does ‘great disservice’ with film”
By Cain Burdeau, Associated Press Writer
“Bill ties climate to national security; Seeks assessments by CIA, Pentagon”
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff, April 9, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The CIA and Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue.
The bipartisan proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass the Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever “national intelligence estimate” on global warming.
The effort would include pinpointing the regions at highest risk of humanitarian suffering and assessing the likelihood of wars erupting over diminishing water and other resources.
The measure also would order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including “direct physical threats to the United States posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes.”
The growing attention to global warming as a national security issue could open new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases, according to specialists. . . .
Read the whole story here.
Comment: One might question just how much expertise the Pentagon has on long-term climate change causes, magnitudes, and impacts. (Ironically, one of the endorsers of the ISA’s “Call to Truth” is a recently retired Army meteorologist as well as a pastor--Charles Clough--and he rejects the manmade catastrophic global warming dogma!) But let us leave that aside. This development offers a great opportunity to mention the inherently tenuous nature of all climate change impacts assessments. As Indur Goklany has put it in a yet-to-be-published brief critique of the IPCC’s Working Group II (Impacts) Summary for Policymakers, released April 6 and all the rage in the media:
Look back over that paragraph and you’ll see that the typical impact assessment is the last of a series of eight models. Even assuming a 90 percent confidence level (very generous) for each model in the series, the final step in the series would have a confidence level of only 43 percent. Drop the confidence level for each step just slightly, to 85 percent (still higher than justified for many of the steps), and the final step registers 16 percent. Add another step--for assessing the national security implications of possible climate-change-generated warfare--and you bring those down to 38 and 13 percent, respectively. They are, essentially, worthless for forecasting. But they make good drama and help promote the cause of opening “new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases.”--ECB
“’Global Warming’ as Myth”
By Philip Stott
ECB: Lately I was reminded of the work of Philip Stott (whom you might have seen in the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”), professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, and in quickly checking out one of his websites found this that I thought you might find interesting:
In any discussion of climate change, it is essential to distinguish between the complex science of climate and the myth, in the sense of Roland Barthes, or the ‘hybrid’, following Bruno Latour, of ‘global warming’.
The latter is a politico-(pseudo)scientific construct, developed since the late-1980s, in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’, such as carbon dioxide and methane, is unquestioningly taken as the prime-driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years and which will inevitably lead to catastrophe for both humanity and the Earth. This, in turn, has morphed, since 1992 and the Rio Conference, into a legitimising myth for a gamut of interconnected political agendas, above all for a range of European sensibilities with regards to America, oil, the car, transport, economic growth, trade, and international corporations. The language employed tends to be authoritarian and religious in character, involving the use of what the physicist, P. H. Borcherds, has termed the ‘hysterical subjunctive’. Indeed, for many, the myth has become an article of a secular faith that exhibits all the characteristics of a pre-modern religion, above all demanding sacrifice to the Earth.
By contrast, the science of climate change starts from the principle that we are concerned with the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known and that it is distinctly unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically-convenient that factor might prove to be. Above all, in approaching the science, as distinct from the myth, it is necessary to exercise precision with regard to three specific questions. . .
Read the whole article here. Stott, a very creative man (who also teaches children music and has written a clarinet symphony), also has a lively blog.--ECB
“The media and global warming [Or: Which is more environmentally friendly: a Hummer or a Prius?]”
By George Will, Townhall.com, April 12, 2007
“12 reasons why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is an environmental and economic failure”
“ISA Representatives to Be on Coral Ridge Hour”
Several Interfaith Stewardship Alliance colleagues will be guests on The Coral Ridge Hour in “end segments” the weekends of April 21-22, dealing with propaganda on the climate change issue; and April 28-29, dealing with a Biblical view of the environment. ISA national spokesman E. Calvin Beisner and colleagues Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Dr. Ken Chilton, director of the Institute for Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO, will all be interviewed. Other participants will be climatologist Dr. John Christy and Dr. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
The program airs on TBN at 7 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. Sundays and is syndicated around the country. Listings are available here.
“Should we believe the latest UN Climate Report? Natural variability may play a larger role in climate change”
By Dennis T. Avery, Monday, April 02, 2007
“Increasing bias at the IPCC as contributors drop out”
By E. Calvin Beisner
One reason why each report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must be taken with a heavy grain of salt is that over time dissenting scientists once involved in the IPCC have dropped out in protest over the bias. Ironically, their departure increases the bias.
Two recent examples:
Dr. Christopher Landsea, a climatologist and the Science and Operations Officer at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, withdrew in protest over the politicization of the IPCC and its dismissal of his concerns over unsubstantiated claims by some other IPCC members that manmade global warming was the cause of the active 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. See his open letter here.
Dr. Paul Reiter, one of the world’s leading scientists studying mosquitos, the diseases they carry, and how to combat them and those diseases, has criticized the IPCC for exaggerated claims of increasing rates of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in response to global warming. Although involved as a lead author on the relevant part of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), he did not participate in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), though he had been nominated as lead author by the U.S. government. See his testimony on this before the U.K. House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
A consequence is that “the IPCC peer review process provides no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions. This is particularly so as, over time, dissenting panelists have withdrawn from the IPCC process, thereby reducing it to a restricted professional milieu within which close colleagues frequently review their own work or that of close colleagues,” as the authors of “The Stern Review: A Dual Critique” put it (see p. 193 of the PDF here).
“Why So Gloomy?”
By Richard S. Lindzen, Special to Newsweek
“Hurricane forecaster: Al Gore does ‘great disservice’ with film”
By Cain Burdeau, Associated Press Writer
“Bill ties climate to national security; Seeks assessments by CIA, Pentagon”
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff, April 9, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The CIA and Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue.
The bipartisan proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass the Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever “national intelligence estimate” on global warming.
The effort would include pinpointing the regions at highest risk of humanitarian suffering and assessing the likelihood of wars erupting over diminishing water and other resources.
The measure also would order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including “direct physical threats to the United States posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes.”
The growing attention to global warming as a national security issue could open new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases, according to specialists. . . .
Read the whole story here.
Comment: One might question just how much expertise the Pentagon has on long-term climate change causes, magnitudes, and impacts. (Ironically, one of the endorsers of the ISA’s “Call to Truth” is a recently retired Army meteorologist as well as a pastor--Charles Clough--and he rejects the manmade catastrophic global warming dogma!) But let us leave that aside. This development offers a great opportunity to mention the inherently tenuous nature of all climate change impacts assessments. As Indur Goklany has put it in a yet-to-be-published brief critique of the IPCC’s Working Group II (Impacts) Summary for Policymakers, released April 6 and all the rage in the media:
Impacts assessments generally employ a series of models in which the uncertain output of each model provides the inputs for the next model. To compound matters, each model is itself based on uncertain assumptions and is necessarily a simplification of reality. Usually the series of models starts with assumptions of population growth, economic growth and technological development from 1990-2100 in order to generate emission scenarios. These emission scenarios then are used to generate atmospheric concentrations of the various greenhouse gases (ideally based on models of the global cycles involving each of the greenhouse gases). Next, these concentrations are used to calculate radiative forcing to estimate temporal and spatial changes in climatic variables. These variables are then fed into biophysical models to estimate location-specific biophysical changes (e.g., changes in the distribution of vegetation and species, sea level, timber and crop yields, etc.). Then depending on the system under consideration, these outputs may be used to drive socioeconomic models to estimate impacts on human beings, e.g., food production, hunger, etc. And, as noted previously, there are egregious oversimplifications and systematic errors in this step which overestimate net negative impacts. Thus, we have a system where uncertainties build on each other. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, analyses that show how these errors and uncertainties propagate through the system of models. Given this, the SPM’s characterization of the level of confidence attached to impacts estimates is overstated. It’s hard to see how one can with a straight face claim that we have anything other than low confidence in the estimates.
Look back over that paragraph and you’ll see that the typical impact assessment is the last of a series of eight models. Even assuming a 90 percent confidence level (very generous) for each model in the series, the final step in the series would have a confidence level of only 43 percent. Drop the confidence level for each step just slightly, to 85 percent (still higher than justified for many of the steps), and the final step registers 16 percent. Add another step--for assessing the national security implications of possible climate-change-generated warfare--and you bring those down to 38 and 13 percent, respectively. They are, essentially, worthless for forecasting. But they make good drama and help promote the cause of opening “new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases.”--ECB
“’Global Warming’ as Myth”
By Philip Stott
ECB: Lately I was reminded of the work of Philip Stott (whom you might have seen in the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”), professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, and in quickly checking out one of his websites found this that I thought you might find interesting:
In any discussion of climate change, it is essential to distinguish between the complex science of climate and the myth, in the sense of Roland Barthes, or the ‘hybrid’, following Bruno Latour, of ‘global warming’.
The latter is a politico-(pseudo)scientific construct, developed since the late-1980s, in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’, such as carbon dioxide and methane, is unquestioningly taken as the prime-driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years and which will inevitably lead to catastrophe for both humanity and the Earth. This, in turn, has morphed, since 1992 and the Rio Conference, into a legitimising myth for a gamut of interconnected political agendas, above all for a range of European sensibilities with regards to America, oil, the car, transport, economic growth, trade, and international corporations. The language employed tends to be authoritarian and religious in character, involving the use of what the physicist, P. H. Borcherds, has termed the ‘hysterical subjunctive’. Indeed, for many, the myth has become an article of a secular faith that exhibits all the characteristics of a pre-modern religion, above all demanding sacrifice to the Earth.
By contrast, the science of climate change starts from the principle that we are concerned with the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known and that it is distinctly unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically-convenient that factor might prove to be. Above all, in approaching the science, as distinct from the myth, it is necessary to exercise precision with regard to three specific questions. . .
Read the whole article here. Stott, a very creative man (who also teaches children music and has written a clarinet symphony), also has a lively blog.--ECB
“The media and global warming [Or: Which is more environmentally friendly: a Hummer or a Prius?]”
By George Will, Townhall.com, April 12, 2007
“12 reasons why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is an environmental and economic failure”
Comments
#1 2007-08-24 10:27 (Reply)
Read Calvin Beisner’s letter today (August 24, 2007) in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Thank you very much for the statement that evidence is needed on global warming.
Blessings on your ministry.
Dr. Andrew J. Waskey
Professor of Social Science (Dalton State College)
Presbyterian minister