Environmental Stewardship News Round-Up
The following items appear in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Newsletter, October 6, 2007:
1. NASA’s Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity
by James Lewis, American Thinker, August 27, 2007
James Hansen, NASA’s True Believer in the global warming credo, has just been quoted by the Globe & Mail of Canada as follows:
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. “Several meters” is only about 9-15 feet. That’s the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen’s predictions come to pass.
So you have a choice. You can either (a) hop in your car and head for the hills, or (b) consider the very real possibility that Dr. James Hansen has jumped the shark, and is rocketing upward fast enough to achieve orbital velocity. I personally think he has slipped the surly bonds of earth, as the poet says. NASA’s Prophet of Doom is up, up and away, with a beautiful vrroom.
Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It’s very simple. You build in “positive feedback loops.” That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It’s easy.
The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn’t burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)
[Editor’s note: As Cornwall Newsletter readers will recall, the climate system certainly does have negative feedback loops, as demonstrated by the work of Cornwall colleague Dr. Roy Spencer, et al., published in Geophysical Research Letters, showing that tropical cirrus clouds, which have a warming effect, diminish with rising surface temperature. See a University of Alabama press release about Spencer et al.’s work here and here. And that’s just one of many negative feedbacks, just what we’d expect in the work of a wise Creator.--ECB]
However, Dr. Hansen is a true True Believer. So he is not bothered by doubt. He is tremendously irritated by the very existence of doubters, however, like Steve MacIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, who has twice punctured Dr. Hansen’s beautiful balloon -- once by knocking down the infamous “hockey stick” curve, and more recently, by showing that Dr. Hansen blew it by claiming that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the continental United States. Turns out that the Dust Bowl was hotter than today, as any farmer might have guessed. Drat it, another beautiful hypothesis, crunched by ugly facts.
Not discouraged, however, Dr. Hansen has gone further out on a limb, and has now issued a challenge to our presidential candidates. He wants all the 2008 candidates to sign a Declaration of Stewardship for the Earth and all Creation. (Bold in the original). Dr. Hansen is out to Save the Planet from the fires and floods that he is sure will come, unless we all repent, as per specs.
Personally I’d be happy to volunteer for Stewardship over the Earth and All Creation, like my cats and family. But the humans keep telling me to butt out, and come to think of it, so do the cats. Dr. Hansen probably carries a lot more clout on his little piece of the Earth. But whether his Stewardship, or anybody else’s, extends to All Creation seems unlikely.
Instead, it sounds like Dr. Hansen has joined the Space Patrol.
Here’s the Hansen Declaration for our presidential candidates to sign.
Notice that James Hansen isn’t talking like a scientist any more. Among scientists there is lively skepticism about the possibility of human-caused global warming. But no one I know believes that climate change will “likely (have) devastating consequences for much of Creation.” Creation is a big place, as space explorers should realize.
A recent survey of climate researchers shows that less than 10 percent believe that mild warming, if it happens, will have negative effects, while about 40 percent think it will have positive effects -- such as maybe lowering the rate of seasonal depression among Dr. Hansen’s presumed relatives in wintry Scandinavia.
So Hansen’s Whereas Number 1 lacks evidence. As for Whereas Number 2, China has now passed the US in C02 emissions. Whereas Number 3 places the onus on the US either to perform the Miracle of Total Carbon Sequestration, or to freeze its economy. Thus the first three Whereases are not as obvious as Dr. H seems to think.
In Whereas Number 4 Dr. Hansen makes an ad hominem charge against skeptics who “appear to be unduly swayed by special interests.” It looks like there’s not an honest skeptic in the bunch. But that isn’t the language of normal science, where it’s considered bad manners to accuse skeptics of bad faith. This sounds like the language of Al Gore.
Hansen’s ideas carry weight only if they are supported by solid evidence. Otherwise he is just speaking ex cathedra, like the Pope in Rome. Science isn’t about religious authority. It’s about facts.
So here’s Dr. Hansen’s pledge for 2008 presidential candidates. Please chant in unison. (“Amens” are optional.)
These points are profoundly confused.
Number 1 insists that we stop new coal-fired plants that produce C02, until we can bury and “sequester” all that carbon dioxide. But the technology for burying all those C02 emissions doesn’t exist. Optimistic estimates are that by 2030 we may have “some valuable methods” for carbon sequestration. So this is either asking for a miracle, which is not very scientific, or a demand that we stop coal (and oil) power plants, which is neither good economics, nor good politics, nor compassionate social policy. Without oil and coal, people will freeze next winter, Dr. Hansen. (You don’t want that, do you?)
When you turn on your lights today remember that your power likely comes from C02-puffing industrial plants. If your electricity isn’t nuclear or hydro, it’s almost certainly generated by coal or oil or natural gas. Our population is constantly expanding, but Dr. Hansen would put a cap plus a rising tax on energy production. For all our new citizens, born here and immigrants, you can forget about joining our standard of living. Instead, we will have fewer lights, less heating, less air conditioning, less food, less medicine, less industry, and a smaller economy per capita. And yet, Dr. Hansen wants it all to be “economically sound.” This is a novel twist on economic soundness.
The key to it all, according to Hansen, is to institute “a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions reflecting costs to the environment.” But “the environment” is not a person, Dr.H. It’s a metaphor: The Environment doesn’t work to reach its goals, it doesn’t put food on the table, doesn’t argue about what’s fair, and doesn’t pay the costs Dr. Hansen imagines. Hansen’s argument is nothing but the rhetorical device of “personification” in the guise of public policy. It’s the Gaiafication of the Earth.
Coming from a scientist this is very weird, just as if Isaac Newton were to personify the force of gravity. It was Aristotle who said that things fell to earth because of the “increased jubilation” they experienced as they rushed closer to Mother Earth. But even Aristotle probably knew that was only a metaphor.
Personification is what young children do when they play with toys: Ken and Barbie dolls are treated like real people in those moments of suspended disbelief. But scientists don’t personify hypercomplex systems like the earth climate.
Yet the personification of Mother Earth is at the core of Dr. Hansen’s Declaration. Hansen demands that “the barriers to efficiency (e.g., utilities making more money if they sell more energy) must be removed.” There, too, he uses words like “efficiency” in his own way, having nothing in common with standard definitions. In Hansen’s economy your energy company won’t get rewarded if they just keep millions of people alive and working. And they certainly won’t get more money by producing more energy. Rather, our new power plants will only earn money if they achieve, let’s call it Hansen Efficiency, defined as “putting out less carbon for the same energy output at rising cost.” Hansen Efficiency is to be achieved with a formula that is “apolitical and economically sound.”
Evidently Dr. Hansen believes that we can escape the basic political question of Cui Bono? or “Who will get the goodies?” In real life, his “apolitical” formula is called a “tax” to punish carbon emissions. It’s a tax we will all pay, as long as we use energy. That includes poor people who want to eat and also get to work. Words mean things, even in economics and politics.
So our NASA eminento has gotten very badly confused. This is the kind of fantasy that Lenin and Stalin used to play with in all those Soviet Five Year Plans . . . .
[Read the full article here.]
2. There is no Average Global ‘Temperature’
by Christopher Essex, Financial Post, June 23, 2007
[Editor’s note: The article below escaped our attention when it first appeared, but it is well worth reading. It makes a fairly esoteric point that physicists and applied mathematicians generally understand but that most climatologists, meteorologists, and ordinary laypeople don’t. Yet it is of fundamental importance to the global warming debate. –ECB]
My dark secret needs little explanation for thermodynamically minded people. For them, it is really quite simple: The Earth is not in “thermodynamic equilibrium,” so there is no single temperature for the whole thing. No statistical hocus pocus can change that. However, global warming proponents and skeptics alike have been very busy averaging temperature data, unsupervised, on an industrial scale for years. . . .
. . . Many people think that you can make sense out of an average of anything at all. My usual reply is to ask what an average over telephone numbers means. Temperature is like that. When averaged, it does not produce an actual temperature of anything, any more than an average over telephone numbers must be a callable number, let alone a number you might care to call. . . .
. . . That recipe also calls for temperatures in Miami from, for example, 20 years ago. So the climate index story actually is: Long ago and far away, there was a single lonely temperature at a small unimportant airport that grew up to be so important that we all depend on it everywhere ever after. It is like saying that the ice cubes in your freezer are melting because Mike, down the block, lit his barbeque last summer. This “index” cannot possibly be a temperature with properties like that.
Not only is it not a temperature but temperature, even properly formulated, has the wrong character to understand what is going on. Climate and its change is about things that go: wind, heat flow, moisture flow, ocean currents, radiation etc. These are driven by differences -- differences in temperature and differences in other things such as pressure. So you need at least two different values, not one, to make things go. A single global “temperature” is dead, dead, dead for understanding processes!
-Christopher Essex is professor of applied mathematics and director of program in theoretical physics at University of Western Ontario, and co-author of Taken by Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.
Read the whole article here.
Essex co-authored the book Taken by Storm, in which he explains in detail why there is no global ‘temperature’. The book can be ordered here. Taken by Storm’s coauthor, Ross McKitrick, also co-authored the Cornwall Alliance’s Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming, available online here.
3. Might Warming be ‘Normal’?
by Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, September 20, 2007
Unlike most climate scientists, he [George Taylor, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists] does not believe that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases – mainly from coal-fired power plants and motor vehicles spewing carbon dioxide – are the main culprits. In fact, he says, “It’s my belief that in the last 100 years or so natural variations have played a bigger role.”
Among the forces of nature he cites are changes in solar radiation, “very significant influences” of the tropical Pacific (El Niño and La Niña events in decades-long cycles), as well as changes in Earth’s tilt and orbit over cycles lasting thousands of years.
Above all, says Mr. Taylor . . . “The climate system is very, very complex, and the more we learn, the more we see that we really don’t understand it.” . . .
. . . Looking at the data on temperature predictions from the IPCC, Meyer of the “Skeptical Layman’s Guide” concludes that “if anything, the United Nations is overstating it. Even taking the worst it could be, it’s not going to be that bad,” he says, referring to what he sees as alarmist forecasts by Mr. Gore and others. “Therefore under no circumstances should we be doing things [to combat climate change] that are extraordinarily intrusive.”
Read the whole article here.
4. Reducing CO2 Emissions won’t Work, will Hurt the Poor
by Bryan Fischer, Renew America, September 21, 2007
In evangelical circles, one of the primary justifications for urging dramatic limitations in greenhouse gas emissions is the supposed harm being done to the poor by environmental degradation.
However, the simple truth is that imposing severe restrictions on carbon emissions, which evangelical environmentalists unfortunately support, would confine the world’s poor to extended poverty, hunger and disease, and therefore such restrictions should be resisted in the name of Christian compassion alone.
Read the whole article here.
5. Is Geoengineering the Future?
by Pete Geddes, Technology Commerce Society, September 10, 2007
Regarding climate change, a geoengineering fix, e.g., pumping sunlight reflecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere, might prevent abrupt and catastrophic climate change. (We’ve had several experiences with the cooling effect of atmospheric sulfur. In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora caused 1816 to be labeled the “year without summer.”)
Stabilizing current atmospheric concentrations of CO2 requires a 60 to 80 percent cut in global emissions. Absent a global economic collapse, this will not happen.
Read the whole article here.
6. ’Hidden Hurricanes’ Upsetting Global Warming Theories?
by Dan Murtaugh, Press-Register, September 9, 2007
Recent research may shed new light on whether the increase in hurricane activity on the Gulf Coast is part of a cycle that could end in a couple of decades, or a long-term climate trend that could last for centuries.
Two studies published this summer contend that the number of hurricanes counted in the early 20th century is lower than the number that actually formed. The reason: Weather-recording technology has improved to the point that scientists can see tropical storms now that they never would have known about 100 years ago.
The findings are important because in recent years, several researchers have factored in historical data to show that hurricane seasons have become more active. They have theorized that the more active seasons are linked to global warming.
But those theories could come into question if there were more hurricanes in the past than previously believed.
Read the whole article here.
7. Study Shows Polar Bear Population Increasing Rapidly
by Stephanie McDonald, Northern News Services, September 17, 2007
Climate change is not hurting polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area of Nunavut, according to Dr. Mitch Taylor, manager of wildlife research and a polar bear biologist with the GN’s Department of Environment. In fact, polar bear populations along the Davis Strait are healthy and their numbers increasing, an ongoing study is indicating.
Reports in national and international press have projected that two-thirds of the world’s polar bear populations will be lost within 50 years due to the loss of sea ice. . . .
. . . Taylor and co-worker Dr. Lily Peacock have been working for the past three years on a polar bear inventory in the Davis Strait, the first in the area in 20 years. . . .
. . . The results of their study have yet to be released, but Taylor revealed last week that the numbers would be contrary to those released by the U.S. Geological Survey. . . .
. . . While Taylor doesn’t dispute that climate change is happening, he thinks that recent worries over polar bear population loss are extreme and premature. “They are generalizing to the rest of the world that we are losing them . . . How can our observations be in such dire opposition to theirs?”
Read the whole article here.
8. ’Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate
by John Tierney, New York Times, September 11, 2007
After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.
Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.
The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.
The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg’s new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.”
The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.
The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.
The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
Read the whole article here.
9. IPCC Peer Review Process an Illusion, Critic Claims (Including Reply)
by John McLean, Science & Public Policy Institute, September 6, 2007
The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. An analysis of the reviewers’ comments for the scientific assessment report by Working Group I show a very different and very worrying story.
The comments for Working Group I are the only set of reviewers’ comments to be made available to the public, and only then thanks to use of US Freedom of Information laws rather than a willingness on the part of the IPCC to allow people to examine the material. Surely all people should be able to examine the involvement and thinking of their governments and the reviewers from their own countries because it is the people who will most certainly bear the economic and political costs of any resultant actions.
Read the whole study here.
Later, John McLean wrote the following letter to Benny Peiser, editor of the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet) newsletter:
Dear Benny,
As the author of the article in question I’d like to point out that subsequent to the writing of that paper I have found that 2 more reviewers of the pivotal 9th chapter had a vested interest in the IPCC’s findings.
One was from an IPCC technical support group and the other was responsible for the “Frequently Asked Questions” in the report. (Yes, we can puzzle over who might have been frequently asking those questions!)
That brings the numbers to 62 reviewers in total for chapter 9, 8 of whom of were government representatives, 23 with a vested interest and just 21 who appear to be impartial. The total explicit support for the IPCC’s claim came from just 4 reviewers, one incidentally being a government representative.
Overwhelming endorsement? Not exactly...
But what of the peer review process? In this case it is more like the review of a literature survey and is limited to either suggesting additional or alternative references, or commenting on whether the conclusions presented are in accordance with the cited references.
As I said in the paper, the IPCC has for years been highly influential in the direction of research into climate science, and as is inevitable this research results in papers, so it is no surprise that most papers follow the accepted line. The consequent shortage of contrary papers places significant limits on the ability of the reviewers to point to alternative papers and it’s a point emphasized by a response that I quote “There are many more papers in support of the statement than against it.”
kind regards
John McLean
10. NASA’s Hansen’s 1971 Computer Program Predicted Global Cooling by 2020
by John McCaslin, The Washington Times, September 19, 2007
NASA scientist James E. Hansen, who has publicly criticized the Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting “court jesters,” appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an impending ice age within 50 years.
“U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming,” blares the headline of the July 9, 1971, article, which cautions readers that the world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts.”
The scientist was S.I. Rasool, a colleague of Mr. Hansen’s at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The article goes on to say that Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied clouds above Venus.
Read the whole article at here.
11. ’Green Evangelist’ Shares Environmental Message
by Jim Haug, Dayton Beach News-Journal Online: Environment, September 12, 2007
When we die and go to heaven, God is not going to ask us: “How was the world made?” but rather, “What did you do with what I created?”
Richard Cizik, the internationally known “Green Evangelist,” closed his speech at Stetson University on Tuesday night with this story, urging religious people who disagree with scientists over evolution to put aside their differences and work for the greater good of caring for the environment.
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: There are two important questions to ask in response to this article. First, is Cizik right about what God will ask us when we get to heaven? And second, should our response to Cizik’s question really be what he intends?
First, Matthew 25:31-46 makes it clear that God will judge us what we have done to “the least of these,” and as we have argued (PDF), draconian policies to reduce global warming will harm the world’s poor.
Second, how should we answer if God asks us, “What did you do with what I created?” Cizik’s agenda promotes an extreme and expensive solution to catastrophic human-induced global warming. However, even if CHIGW were real the solution should be different from what Cizik promotes (see article #3 in this Newsletter - “Reducing CO2 Emissions won’t Work; Will Hurt the Poor”). Carbon caps, carbon taxes, carbon trades, and other expensive plans are not the right answer.
Cizik’s solutions are extraordinarily expensive, not effective, and will have harmful impacts on the poor. Since global warming and cooling are cyclical and largely natural, pouring trillions into attempting to control earth’s temperature is exactly what we should not do (again, see article #3). Adaptation would be far less expensive and far more effective. But adaptation, too, is costly--and therefore we should promote economic development for the poor, not development-crushing restrictions on fossil fuel use. Our top priority should not be playing god over the weather, but doing the right thing with the weather the real God has created--helping the poor so that we and they can adapt to climate change.--ECB]
12. Global Warming not High on Evangelicals’ Priority List
From staff reports, Focus on the Family Action, August 27, 2007
Spiritual and moral issues get highest marks.
Evangelical Christians have radically different priorities from the rest of the country about the challenges the U.S. must confront in the next 10 years. According to a Barna poll, that’s especially true concerning global warming alarmism.
Only about a third of evangelicals gave global warming “top priority” status. They rated the issue lower than any of the other 80 groups in the survey. Topping the priority list for evangelicals was the health of churches.
Stuart Shepard, managing editor of CitizenLink, who is also a meteorologist, said major news outlets are largely to blame for the hype.
“If people get their information from the mainstream media, they’re only hearing one side of this,“ he told Family News in Focus. ”There are top scientists and researchers who are skeptical of the outrageous claims about global warming and they make some solid science-based arguments, but you’d never know it from the evening news.”
He said Focus on the Family Action has been strongly encouraging evangelicals to not allow global warming alarmism to become a defining or a dividing issue.
“Most evangelicals do not and should not see this as an issue that would rise to the level of evangelism, the sanctity of life, and the protection of marriage and religious liberty.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the poll doesn’t mean evangelicals are not interested in taking care of the planet.
“Despite what the media may want to project upon evangelicals,“ he said, ”they understand that if we, as a nation, get the spiritual issues right and build strong marriages and families — most of the other problems will be solved.”
[Editor’s note: Political leaders should take note. The loud claims of NAE Vice President Richard Cizik and others notwithstanding, evangelicals simply are not on board with global warming alarmism.--ECB]
13. Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History?
by Seth Borenstein, AP Science, September 22, 2007
http://news.esearchnet.com/1501/20070922/20070922161403_D8RQQ4BG0/science/science/
Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.
In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.
Global warming through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: This is pure hysteria. The IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report forecasts twenty-first century sea level rise at 23 inches at most (down from its 2001 projection of 35 inches), and that assumes population reaching 15 billion by 2100, and no advances in technology to reduce CO2 emissions per capita and per unit of GDP. Assuming population reaches only 9 billion and technology remains unchanged, it forecasts 17 inches. Neither of the population assumptions is credible. UN Population Division (the scientific UN body that studies demography, unlike the Fund for Population Activities, which unscientifically promotes population control programs) predicts that population peaks at under 9 billion around 2050 to 2065 and then declines; many other demographers predict that it peaks at under 8 billion around 2035 to 2050 and then declines. (Declines how far? See editorial comment on next item.)
And the notion that we’ll see no advances in energy technology is utterly unfounded; it would make as much sense as someone’s predicting likewise in 1900, or 1800, or 1700, etc.--in the century after each of which energy technologies changed in manners unimaginable. Further, IPCC’s SLR forecasts assume climate sensitivity (how much global temperature changes) of about 3.3 to 4.8 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas the better physics suggests about 1.1 degree and absolutely no credible physics or empirical measures suggest anything higher than about 3.3.
Further, IPCC’s SLR forecasts assume that CO2 drives temperature; but instead paleoclimate records indicate it’s the other way around; CO2 follows temperature. Finally, IPCC’s scientific assessment team, responsible for producing the 2007 report, included not a single expert on sea level rise. The world’s most august body on that subject is the Sea Level Commission of the International Union for Quaternary Research, which has been studying the matter for right near a hundred years. It forecasts SLR for this century of--hold onto your hat--0 to 7.88 inches, i.e., no different from the rate over the previous discernible centuries.--ECB]
14. Should Americans Have Fewer Babies to Save the Environment?
by Daniel Engber, Slate, September 10, 2007
Oh, if we all just disappeared. According to The World Without Us, Alan Weisman’s strangely comforting vision of human annihilation, the Earth would be a lot better off. In his doomsday scenario, freshwater floods would course through the New York subway system, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks, and a parade of coyotes, bears, and deer would eventually trot across the George Washington Bridge and repopulate Manhattan. Nature lovers can take solace in the idea that the planet will thrive once we’ve finally destroyed ourselves with global warming. But Weisman takes the fantasy one step further: Let’s not wait for climate change, he says. Let’s start depopulating right now.
Instead of burning down our numbers with oil and gas, we might follow the advice of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who tells Weisman that everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once. Weisman isn’t up for quite so drastic a measure, but he makes his own pitch, moderate in comparison: Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.” It seems like a notion from the fringe, but Weisman’s book has become a mainstream best seller. Could population control be the next big thing in green culture?
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: Nothing so clearly shows the anti-human attitudes of mainstream environmentalists as their own words. Of course, these folks seem unaware of the fact that the demographic transition is already well on the way to stopping and then reversing human population growth. Europe is already losing about 800,000 people per year. Russia is losing a million. There isn’t a single advanced economy in the world that has a fertility rate at, let alone above, replacement rate; many developing nations are already below replacement fertility; and all the rest are declining rapidly toward it. Consequently the U.N. Population Division predicts world population peak around 2050 to 2065, and some other demographers predict it even sooner--as early as 2035 to 2045. And the Hoover Institution forecasts that total world population could be as low as 300 million (less than the present U.S. population) by about 2300. The environmentalists will celebrate this news--if they can ever open their ears enough to hear it--because they have an unbiblical view of human beings as fundamentally consumers and polluters, failing to recognize that we are created in the image of God to be producers and stewards, not an evolutionary aberration that broke the animal contract a million or so years ago. People who respect the Bible’s teaching on human beings won’t be surprised, then, to learn that the demographers who predict falling population also point out (as do the Hoover Institution authors linked above) that there will be serious problems associated with it. For more on this, see Ben Wattenberg’s Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future--ECB]
15. Climate Corrections
by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2007
When millennial climate change patterns are mentioned, many people point to the “2,500 scientists from 130 countries” who have agreed that global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect. Yet not even the International Panel of Climate Change to which these people refer presents definitive scientific proof that the present warming is mostly caused by the greenhouse effect. It is simply an assumption that has morphed into a fact.
Since the physics behind CO2’s greenhouse effect has long been well known, the IPCC made the assumption that post-1900 warming was caused by it. They assembled a large number of scientists, mostly meteorologists and physicists (but, interestingly, not many climatologists), and tried to prove their hypothesis using supercomputer models. They have continued to work in this way despite important new evidence from ice-core data showing that temperature rises tend to precede CO2 increases by about 1,000 years. With all of the media attention that this assumption now enjoys, natural temperature changes have been mostly forgotten. Yet in reality they persist; they’re simply not being studied.
Read the whole article here.
16. A Denier’s Confession
by Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2007
The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934--and not 1998 or 2006--was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession
I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data.
But just how “meaningless” would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA’s James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that “2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006.” Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that “in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years.”
. . .
I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.
Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?
Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.
Read the whole article here.
17. Despite Many Challenges, World Faces a Brighter Future: UN Report
AFP, September 2007
Despite daunting challenges posed by global warming, water, energy, unemployment and terrorism, the world faces a brighter future with fewer wars, higher life expectancy and improved literacy, according to a report released Monday.
Read the whole article here.
18. China Asks for ‘Development Space’ While World Seeks to Curb Global Warming
International Herald Tribune, September 4, 2007
China said Tuesday it was working hard to increase its use of renewable energy, but needs to be given some leeway in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gasses.
China’s contribution over time to climate change has been relatively small, an economic planning official said when asked about China’s attitude toward the focus on the issue at a meeting of Pacific Rim nations in Australia this week.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, will propose an initiative on sustainable management of forests during the meeting.
“I hope the international media will give us some development rights, some development space and not overly blame us,” said Chen Deming, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top planning agency.
China’s soaring economy has produced an ever-greater amount of gases blamed for contributing to global warming, with one Dutch study saying it has overtaken the U.S. as the leading producer of carbon dioxide.
However, Chen said China shouldn’t be held overly accountable because its has only recently become a major producer, contributing just 9 percent of global CO2 emissions between 1950-2000. China’s per-capita rate of CO2 production also remains low given its population of 1.3 billion, he said.
Chen also reiterated a goal of producing 15 percent of total energy supplies from renewable sources such as wind, hydropower and biofuels by 2020.
He acknowledged environmental criticism of China’s many dams, but said the government would pay strict attention to such impacts while seeking to nearly triple hydropower capacity to 300 gigawatts.
Read the whole article here.
19. APEC Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development
Sydney APEC Leader’s Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2007
We, the APEC Economic Leaders, agree that economic growth, energy security and climate change are fundamental and interlinked challenges for the APEC region.
The dynamism of APEC, underpinned by open trade and investment, has reduced poverty, improved living standards and delivered economic and social development.
Our success has relied in part on secure supplies of energy, the use of which has also contributed to air quality problems and greenhouse gas emissions.
A great challenge for APEC, given the aspirations of 41 per cent of the world’s population in our region, is to chart new pathways for clean and sustainable development.
We are committed, through wide-ranging and ambitious actions, to ensuring the energy needs of the economies of the region while addressing the issue of environmental quality and contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the whole declaration here.
20. Cool It
by Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2007
In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They’ve heard Al Gore’s inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel “worried, very worried.” Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don’t think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don’t think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn’t clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.
Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with “Cool It,” a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.
Read the whole article here.
Cool It available here.
21. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
Hudson Institute, September 12, 2007
Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers’ names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions.
Read the whole article here.
Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years available here.
22. An Inconvenient Truth: A Convenient Fiction?
For a free download of the film go here.
For a free copy of the DVD e-mail Susan Martin.]
Mars, Like Earth, Has Cyclical Ice Ages
War of Worldviews: the Judeo-Christian Tradition vs. Environmentalists
The Return of the Old Gods: A Challenge to Green Evangelicals
The Snobbery Behind Zac and Dave’s Tax the Plebs Plan
Wouldn’t It be Nice?
Global Warming Insanity?
Japan Sweats It Out as It Wages War on Air Conditioning
The Sky’s Not Falling
New Approach to Global Warming
Climate Change’s Great Divide
Mammoth Dung May Speed Warming
FEATURED
1. NASA’s Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity
by James Lewis, American Thinker, August 27, 2007
James Hansen, NASA’s True Believer in the global warming credo, has just been quoted by the Globe & Mail of Canada as follows:
“Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago.”
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
“If we follow ‘business-as-usual’ growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose.”
For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. “Several meters” is only about 9-15 feet. That’s the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen’s predictions come to pass.
So you have a choice. You can either (a) hop in your car and head for the hills, or (b) consider the very real possibility that Dr. James Hansen has jumped the shark, and is rocketing upward fast enough to achieve orbital velocity. I personally think he has slipped the surly bonds of earth, as the poet says. NASA’s Prophet of Doom is up, up and away, with a beautiful vrroom.
Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It’s very simple. You build in “positive feedback loops.” That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It’s easy.
The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn’t burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)
[Editor’s note: As Cornwall Newsletter readers will recall, the climate system certainly does have negative feedback loops, as demonstrated by the work of Cornwall colleague Dr. Roy Spencer, et al., published in Geophysical Research Letters, showing that tropical cirrus clouds, which have a warming effect, diminish with rising surface temperature. See a University of Alabama press release about Spencer et al.’s work here and here. And that’s just one of many negative feedbacks, just what we’d expect in the work of a wise Creator.--ECB]
However, Dr. Hansen is a true True Believer. So he is not bothered by doubt. He is tremendously irritated by the very existence of doubters, however, like Steve MacIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, who has twice punctured Dr. Hansen’s beautiful balloon -- once by knocking down the infamous “hockey stick” curve, and more recently, by showing that Dr. Hansen blew it by claiming that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the continental United States. Turns out that the Dust Bowl was hotter than today, as any farmer might have guessed. Drat it, another beautiful hypothesis, crunched by ugly facts.
Not discouraged, however, Dr. Hansen has gone further out on a limb, and has now issued a challenge to our presidential candidates. He wants all the 2008 candidates to sign a Declaration of Stewardship for the Earth and all Creation. (Bold in the original). Dr. Hansen is out to Save the Planet from the fires and floods that he is sure will come, unless we all repent, as per specs.
Personally I’d be happy to volunteer for Stewardship over the Earth and All Creation, like my cats and family. But the humans keep telling me to butt out, and come to think of it, so do the cats. Dr. Hansen probably carries a lot more clout on his little piece of the Earth. But whether his Stewardship, or anybody else’s, extends to All Creation seems unlikely.
Instead, it sounds like Dr. Hansen has joined the Space Patrol.
Houston to Hansen: Do we have a problem?
Hansen: (static-hiss-crackle-click-pop-radio-silence)
Here’s the Hansen Declaration for our presidential candidates to sign.
"Whereas the climate system is nearing tipping points with likely devastating consequences for much of creation;
Whereas the responsibility of the United States for excess CO2 in the air exceeds that of any other nation by more than a factor of three;
Whereas the rest of the world cannot be expected to take needed actions until the United States exercises responsibility and leadership;
Whereas, some lawmakers and executives in the United States appear to be unduly swayed by special interests;
It therefore becomes important for citizens to be keenly aware of the position regarding global warming of all candidates for election."[italics added for clarity]
Notice that James Hansen isn’t talking like a scientist any more. Among scientists there is lively skepticism about the possibility of human-caused global warming. But no one I know believes that climate change will “likely (have) devastating consequences for much of Creation.” Creation is a big place, as space explorers should realize.
A recent survey of climate researchers shows that less than 10 percent believe that mild warming, if it happens, will have negative effects, while about 40 percent think it will have positive effects -- such as maybe lowering the rate of seasonal depression among Dr. Hansen’s presumed relatives in wintry Scandinavia.
So Hansen’s Whereas Number 1 lacks evidence. As for Whereas Number 2, China has now passed the US in C02 emissions. Whereas Number 3 places the onus on the US either to perform the Miracle of Total Carbon Sequestration, or to freeze its economy. Thus the first three Whereases are not as obvious as Dr. H seems to think.
In Whereas Number 4 Dr. Hansen makes an ad hominem charge against skeptics who “appear to be unduly swayed by special interests.” It looks like there’s not an honest skeptic in the bunch. But that isn’t the language of normal science, where it’s considered bad manners to accuse skeptics of bad faith. This sounds like the language of Al Gore.
Hansen’s ideas carry weight only if they are supported by solid evidence. Otherwise he is just speaking ex cathedra, like the Pope in Rome. Science isn’t about religious authority. It’s about facts.
So here’s Dr. Hansen’s pledge for 2008 presidential candidates. Please chant in unison. (“Amens” are optional.)
1. Moratorium on Dirty Coal - I will support a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2.
2. Price on Carbon Emissions - I will support a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions, reflecting costs to the environment. Mechanisms to adjust price should be apolitical and economically sound.
3. Energy Efficiency & Conservation Incentives - I will support measures to improve energy efficiency, e.g., rewarding utilities and others based on energy and carbon efficiencies, rather than on the amount of energy sold.[Bold in the original]
These points are profoundly confused.
Number 1 insists that we stop new coal-fired plants that produce C02, until we can bury and “sequester” all that carbon dioxide. But the technology for burying all those C02 emissions doesn’t exist. Optimistic estimates are that by 2030 we may have “some valuable methods” for carbon sequestration. So this is either asking for a miracle, which is not very scientific, or a demand that we stop coal (and oil) power plants, which is neither good economics, nor good politics, nor compassionate social policy. Without oil and coal, people will freeze next winter, Dr. Hansen. (You don’t want that, do you?)
When you turn on your lights today remember that your power likely comes from C02-puffing industrial plants. If your electricity isn’t nuclear or hydro, it’s almost certainly generated by coal or oil or natural gas. Our population is constantly expanding, but Dr. Hansen would put a cap plus a rising tax on energy production. For all our new citizens, born here and immigrants, you can forget about joining our standard of living. Instead, we will have fewer lights, less heating, less air conditioning, less food, less medicine, less industry, and a smaller economy per capita. And yet, Dr. Hansen wants it all to be “economically sound.” This is a novel twist on economic soundness.
The key to it all, according to Hansen, is to institute “a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions reflecting costs to the environment.” But “the environment” is not a person, Dr.H. It’s a metaphor: The Environment doesn’t work to reach its goals, it doesn’t put food on the table, doesn’t argue about what’s fair, and doesn’t pay the costs Dr. Hansen imagines. Hansen’s argument is nothing but the rhetorical device of “personification” in the guise of public policy. It’s the Gaiafication of the Earth.
Coming from a scientist this is very weird, just as if Isaac Newton were to personify the force of gravity. It was Aristotle who said that things fell to earth because of the “increased jubilation” they experienced as they rushed closer to Mother Earth. But even Aristotle probably knew that was only a metaphor.
Personification is what young children do when they play with toys: Ken and Barbie dolls are treated like real people in those moments of suspended disbelief. But scientists don’t personify hypercomplex systems like the earth climate.
Yet the personification of Mother Earth is at the core of Dr. Hansen’s Declaration. Hansen demands that “the barriers to efficiency (e.g., utilities making more money if they sell more energy) must be removed.” There, too, he uses words like “efficiency” in his own way, having nothing in common with standard definitions. In Hansen’s economy your energy company won’t get rewarded if they just keep millions of people alive and working. And they certainly won’t get more money by producing more energy. Rather, our new power plants will only earn money if they achieve, let’s call it Hansen Efficiency, defined as “putting out less carbon for the same energy output at rising cost.” Hansen Efficiency is to be achieved with a formula that is “apolitical and economically sound.”
Evidently Dr. Hansen believes that we can escape the basic political question of Cui Bono? or “Who will get the goodies?” In real life, his “apolitical” formula is called a “tax” to punish carbon emissions. It’s a tax we will all pay, as long as we use energy. That includes poor people who want to eat and also get to work. Words mean things, even in economics and politics.
So our NASA eminento has gotten very badly confused. This is the kind of fantasy that Lenin and Stalin used to play with in all those Soviet Five Year Plans . . . .
[Read the full article here.]
SCIENCE
2. There is no Average Global ‘Temperature’
by Christopher Essex, Financial Post, June 23, 2007
[Editor’s note: The article below escaped our attention when it first appeared, but it is well worth reading. It makes a fairly esoteric point that physicists and applied mathematicians generally understand but that most climatologists, meteorologists, and ordinary laypeople don’t. Yet it is of fundamental importance to the global warming debate. –ECB]
My dark secret needs little explanation for thermodynamically minded people. For them, it is really quite simple: The Earth is not in “thermodynamic equilibrium,” so there is no single temperature for the whole thing. No statistical hocus pocus can change that. However, global warming proponents and skeptics alike have been very busy averaging temperature data, unsupervised, on an industrial scale for years. . . .
. . . Many people think that you can make sense out of an average of anything at all. My usual reply is to ask what an average over telephone numbers means. Temperature is like that. When averaged, it does not produce an actual temperature of anything, any more than an average over telephone numbers must be a callable number, let alone a number you might care to call. . . .
. . . That recipe also calls for temperatures in Miami from, for example, 20 years ago. So the climate index story actually is: Long ago and far away, there was a single lonely temperature at a small unimportant airport that grew up to be so important that we all depend on it everywhere ever after. It is like saying that the ice cubes in your freezer are melting because Mike, down the block, lit his barbeque last summer. This “index” cannot possibly be a temperature with properties like that.
Not only is it not a temperature but temperature, even properly formulated, has the wrong character to understand what is going on. Climate and its change is about things that go: wind, heat flow, moisture flow, ocean currents, radiation etc. These are driven by differences -- differences in temperature and differences in other things such as pressure. So you need at least two different values, not one, to make things go. A single global “temperature” is dead, dead, dead for understanding processes!
-Christopher Essex is professor of applied mathematics and director of program in theoretical physics at University of Western Ontario, and co-author of Taken by Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.
Read the whole article here.
Essex co-authored the book Taken by Storm, in which he explains in detail why there is no global ‘temperature’. The book can be ordered here. Taken by Storm’s coauthor, Ross McKitrick, also co-authored the Cornwall Alliance’s Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming, available online here.
3. Might Warming be ‘Normal’?
by Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, September 20, 2007
Unlike most climate scientists, he [George Taylor, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists] does not believe that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases – mainly from coal-fired power plants and motor vehicles spewing carbon dioxide – are the main culprits. In fact, he says, “It’s my belief that in the last 100 years or so natural variations have played a bigger role.”
Among the forces of nature he cites are changes in solar radiation, “very significant influences” of the tropical Pacific (El Niño and La Niña events in decades-long cycles), as well as changes in Earth’s tilt and orbit over cycles lasting thousands of years.
Above all, says Mr. Taylor . . . “The climate system is very, very complex, and the more we learn, the more we see that we really don’t understand it.” . . .
. . . Looking at the data on temperature predictions from the IPCC, Meyer of the “Skeptical Layman’s Guide” concludes that “if anything, the United Nations is overstating it. Even taking the worst it could be, it’s not going to be that bad,” he says, referring to what he sees as alarmist forecasts by Mr. Gore and others. “Therefore under no circumstances should we be doing things [to combat climate change] that are extraordinarily intrusive.”
Read the whole article here.
4. Reducing CO2 Emissions won’t Work, will Hurt the Poor
by Bryan Fischer, Renew America, September 21, 2007
In evangelical circles, one of the primary justifications for urging dramatic limitations in greenhouse gas emissions is the supposed harm being done to the poor by environmental degradation.
However, the simple truth is that imposing severe restrictions on carbon emissions, which evangelical environmentalists unfortunately support, would confine the world’s poor to extended poverty, hunger and disease, and therefore such restrictions should be resisted in the name of Christian compassion alone.
Read the whole article here.
5. Is Geoengineering the Future?
by Pete Geddes, Technology Commerce Society, September 10, 2007
Regarding climate change, a geoengineering fix, e.g., pumping sunlight reflecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere, might prevent abrupt and catastrophic climate change. (We’ve had several experiences with the cooling effect of atmospheric sulfur. In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora caused 1816 to be labeled the “year without summer.”)
Stabilizing current atmospheric concentrations of CO2 requires a 60 to 80 percent cut in global emissions. Absent a global economic collapse, this will not happen.
Read the whole article here.
6. ’Hidden Hurricanes’ Upsetting Global Warming Theories?
by Dan Murtaugh, Press-Register, September 9, 2007
Recent research may shed new light on whether the increase in hurricane activity on the Gulf Coast is part of a cycle that could end in a couple of decades, or a long-term climate trend that could last for centuries.
Two studies published this summer contend that the number of hurricanes counted in the early 20th century is lower than the number that actually formed. The reason: Weather-recording technology has improved to the point that scientists can see tropical storms now that they never would have known about 100 years ago.
The findings are important because in recent years, several researchers have factored in historical data to show that hurricane seasons have become more active. They have theorized that the more active seasons are linked to global warming.
But those theories could come into question if there were more hurricanes in the past than previously believed.
Read the whole article here.
7. Study Shows Polar Bear Population Increasing Rapidly
by Stephanie McDonald, Northern News Services, September 17, 2007
Climate change is not hurting polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area of Nunavut, according to Dr. Mitch Taylor, manager of wildlife research and a polar bear biologist with the GN’s Department of Environment. In fact, polar bear populations along the Davis Strait are healthy and their numbers increasing, an ongoing study is indicating.
Reports in national and international press have projected that two-thirds of the world’s polar bear populations will be lost within 50 years due to the loss of sea ice. . . .
. . . Taylor and co-worker Dr. Lily Peacock have been working for the past three years on a polar bear inventory in the Davis Strait, the first in the area in 20 years. . . .
. . . The results of their study have yet to be released, but Taylor revealed last week that the numbers would be contrary to those released by the U.S. Geological Survey. . . .
. . . While Taylor doesn’t dispute that climate change is happening, he thinks that recent worries over polar bear population loss are extreme and premature. “They are generalizing to the rest of the world that we are losing them . . . How can our observations be in such dire opposition to theirs?”
Read the whole article here.
DEBATE
8. ’Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate
by John Tierney, New York Times, September 11, 2007
After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.
Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.
The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.
The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg’s new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.”
The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.
The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.
The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
Read the whole article here.
9. IPCC Peer Review Process an Illusion, Critic Claims (Including Reply)
by John McLean, Science & Public Policy Institute, September 6, 2007
The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. An analysis of the reviewers’ comments for the scientific assessment report by Working Group I show a very different and very worrying story.
The comments for Working Group I are the only set of reviewers’ comments to be made available to the public, and only then thanks to use of US Freedom of Information laws rather than a willingness on the part of the IPCC to allow people to examine the material. Surely all people should be able to examine the involvement and thinking of their governments and the reviewers from their own countries because it is the people who will most certainly bear the economic and political costs of any resultant actions.
Read the whole study here.
Later, John McLean wrote the following letter to Benny Peiser, editor of the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet) newsletter:
Dear Benny,
As the author of the article in question I’d like to point out that subsequent to the writing of that paper I have found that 2 more reviewers of the pivotal 9th chapter had a vested interest in the IPCC’s findings.
One was from an IPCC technical support group and the other was responsible for the “Frequently Asked Questions” in the report. (Yes, we can puzzle over who might have been frequently asking those questions!)
That brings the numbers to 62 reviewers in total for chapter 9, 8 of whom of were government representatives, 23 with a vested interest and just 21 who appear to be impartial. The total explicit support for the IPCC’s claim came from just 4 reviewers, one incidentally being a government representative.
Overwhelming endorsement? Not exactly...
But what of the peer review process? In this case it is more like the review of a literature survey and is limited to either suggesting additional or alternative references, or commenting on whether the conclusions presented are in accordance with the cited references.
As I said in the paper, the IPCC has for years been highly influential in the direction of research into climate science, and as is inevitable this research results in papers, so it is no surprise that most papers follow the accepted line. The consequent shortage of contrary papers places significant limits on the ability of the reviewers to point to alternative papers and it’s a point emphasized by a response that I quote “There are many more papers in support of the statement than against it.”
kind regards
John McLean
10. NASA’s Hansen’s 1971 Computer Program Predicted Global Cooling by 2020
by John McCaslin, The Washington Times, September 19, 2007
NASA scientist James E. Hansen, who has publicly criticized the Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting “court jesters,” appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an impending ice age within 50 years.
“U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming,” blares the headline of the July 9, 1971, article, which cautions readers that the world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts.”
The scientist was S.I. Rasool, a colleague of Mr. Hansen’s at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The article goes on to say that Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied clouds above Venus.
Read the whole article at here.
11. ’Green Evangelist’ Shares Environmental Message
by Jim Haug, Dayton Beach News-Journal Online: Environment, September 12, 2007
When we die and go to heaven, God is not going to ask us: “How was the world made?” but rather, “What did you do with what I created?”
Richard Cizik, the internationally known “Green Evangelist,” closed his speech at Stetson University on Tuesday night with this story, urging religious people who disagree with scientists over evolution to put aside their differences and work for the greater good of caring for the environment.
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: There are two important questions to ask in response to this article. First, is Cizik right about what God will ask us when we get to heaven? And second, should our response to Cizik’s question really be what he intends?
First, Matthew 25:31-46 makes it clear that God will judge us what we have done to “the least of these,” and as we have argued (PDF), draconian policies to reduce global warming will harm the world’s poor.
Second, how should we answer if God asks us, “What did you do with what I created?” Cizik’s agenda promotes an extreme and expensive solution to catastrophic human-induced global warming. However, even if CHIGW were real the solution should be different from what Cizik promotes (see article #3 in this Newsletter - “Reducing CO2 Emissions won’t Work; Will Hurt the Poor”). Carbon caps, carbon taxes, carbon trades, and other expensive plans are not the right answer.
Cizik’s solutions are extraordinarily expensive, not effective, and will have harmful impacts on the poor. Since global warming and cooling are cyclical and largely natural, pouring trillions into attempting to control earth’s temperature is exactly what we should not do (again, see article #3). Adaptation would be far less expensive and far more effective. But adaptation, too, is costly--and therefore we should promote economic development for the poor, not development-crushing restrictions on fossil fuel use. Our top priority should not be playing god over the weather, but doing the right thing with the weather the real God has created--helping the poor so that we and they can adapt to climate change.--ECB]
12. Global Warming not High on Evangelicals’ Priority List
From staff reports, Focus on the Family Action, August 27, 2007
Spiritual and moral issues get highest marks.
Evangelical Christians have radically different priorities from the rest of the country about the challenges the U.S. must confront in the next 10 years. According to a Barna poll, that’s especially true concerning global warming alarmism.
Only about a third of evangelicals gave global warming “top priority” status. They rated the issue lower than any of the other 80 groups in the survey. Topping the priority list for evangelicals was the health of churches.
Stuart Shepard, managing editor of CitizenLink, who is also a meteorologist, said major news outlets are largely to blame for the hype.
“If people get their information from the mainstream media, they’re only hearing one side of this,“ he told Family News in Focus. ”There are top scientists and researchers who are skeptical of the outrageous claims about global warming and they make some solid science-based arguments, but you’d never know it from the evening news.”
He said Focus on the Family Action has been strongly encouraging evangelicals to not allow global warming alarmism to become a defining or a dividing issue.
“Most evangelicals do not and should not see this as an issue that would rise to the level of evangelism, the sanctity of life, and the protection of marriage and religious liberty.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the poll doesn’t mean evangelicals are not interested in taking care of the planet.
“Despite what the media may want to project upon evangelicals,“ he said, ”they understand that if we, as a nation, get the spiritual issues right and build strong marriages and families — most of the other problems will be solved.”
[Editor’s note: Political leaders should take note. The loud claims of NAE Vice President Richard Cizik and others notwithstanding, evangelicals simply are not on board with global warming alarmism.--ECB]
13. Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History?
by Seth Borenstein, AP Science, September 22, 2007
http://news.esearchnet.com/1501/20070922/20070922161403_D8RQQ4BG0/science/science/
Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.
In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.
Global warming through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: This is pure hysteria. The IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report forecasts twenty-first century sea level rise at 23 inches at most (down from its 2001 projection of 35 inches), and that assumes population reaching 15 billion by 2100, and no advances in technology to reduce CO2 emissions per capita and per unit of GDP. Assuming population reaches only 9 billion and technology remains unchanged, it forecasts 17 inches. Neither of the population assumptions is credible. UN Population Division (the scientific UN body that studies demography, unlike the Fund for Population Activities, which unscientifically promotes population control programs) predicts that population peaks at under 9 billion around 2050 to 2065 and then declines; many other demographers predict that it peaks at under 8 billion around 2035 to 2050 and then declines. (Declines how far? See editorial comment on next item.)
And the notion that we’ll see no advances in energy technology is utterly unfounded; it would make as much sense as someone’s predicting likewise in 1900, or 1800, or 1700, etc.--in the century after each of which energy technologies changed in manners unimaginable. Further, IPCC’s SLR forecasts assume climate sensitivity (how much global temperature changes) of about 3.3 to 4.8 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas the better physics suggests about 1.1 degree and absolutely no credible physics or empirical measures suggest anything higher than about 3.3.
Further, IPCC’s SLR forecasts assume that CO2 drives temperature; but instead paleoclimate records indicate it’s the other way around; CO2 follows temperature. Finally, IPCC’s scientific assessment team, responsible for producing the 2007 report, included not a single expert on sea level rise. The world’s most august body on that subject is the Sea Level Commission of the International Union for Quaternary Research, which has been studying the matter for right near a hundred years. It forecasts SLR for this century of--hold onto your hat--0 to 7.88 inches, i.e., no different from the rate over the previous discernible centuries.--ECB]
14. Should Americans Have Fewer Babies to Save the Environment?
by Daniel Engber, Slate, September 10, 2007
Oh, if we all just disappeared. According to The World Without Us, Alan Weisman’s strangely comforting vision of human annihilation, the Earth would be a lot better off. In his doomsday scenario, freshwater floods would course through the New York subway system, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks, and a parade of coyotes, bears, and deer would eventually trot across the George Washington Bridge and repopulate Manhattan. Nature lovers can take solace in the idea that the planet will thrive once we’ve finally destroyed ourselves with global warming. But Weisman takes the fantasy one step further: Let’s not wait for climate change, he says. Let’s start depopulating right now.
Instead of burning down our numbers with oil and gas, we might follow the advice of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who tells Weisman that everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once. Weisman isn’t up for quite so drastic a measure, but he makes his own pitch, moderate in comparison: Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.” It seems like a notion from the fringe, but Weisman’s book has become a mainstream best seller. Could population control be the next big thing in green culture?
Read the whole article here.
[Editor’s note: Nothing so clearly shows the anti-human attitudes of mainstream environmentalists as their own words. Of course, these folks seem unaware of the fact that the demographic transition is already well on the way to stopping and then reversing human population growth. Europe is already losing about 800,000 people per year. Russia is losing a million. There isn’t a single advanced economy in the world that has a fertility rate at, let alone above, replacement rate; many developing nations are already below replacement fertility; and all the rest are declining rapidly toward it. Consequently the U.N. Population Division predicts world population peak around 2050 to 2065, and some other demographers predict it even sooner--as early as 2035 to 2045. And the Hoover Institution forecasts that total world population could be as low as 300 million (less than the present U.S. population) by about 2300. The environmentalists will celebrate this news--if they can ever open their ears enough to hear it--because they have an unbiblical view of human beings as fundamentally consumers and polluters, failing to recognize that we are created in the image of God to be producers and stewards, not an evolutionary aberration that broke the animal contract a million or so years ago. People who respect the Bible’s teaching on human beings won’t be surprised, then, to learn that the demographers who predict falling population also point out (as do the Hoover Institution authors linked above) that there will be serious problems associated with it. For more on this, see Ben Wattenberg’s Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future--ECB]
15. Climate Corrections
by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2007
When millennial climate change patterns are mentioned, many people point to the “2,500 scientists from 130 countries” who have agreed that global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect. Yet not even the International Panel of Climate Change to which these people refer presents definitive scientific proof that the present warming is mostly caused by the greenhouse effect. It is simply an assumption that has morphed into a fact.
Since the physics behind CO2’s greenhouse effect has long been well known, the IPCC made the assumption that post-1900 warming was caused by it. They assembled a large number of scientists, mostly meteorologists and physicists (but, interestingly, not many climatologists), and tried to prove their hypothesis using supercomputer models. They have continued to work in this way despite important new evidence from ice-core data showing that temperature rises tend to precede CO2 increases by about 1,000 years. With all of the media attention that this assumption now enjoys, natural temperature changes have been mostly forgotten. Yet in reality they persist; they’re simply not being studied.
Read the whole article here.
16. A Denier’s Confession
by Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2007
The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934--and not 1998 or 2006--was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession
I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data.
But just how “meaningless” would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA’s James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that “2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006.” Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that “in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years.”
. . .
I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.
Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?
Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.
Read the whole article here.
NEWS
17. Despite Many Challenges, World Faces a Brighter Future: UN Report
AFP, September 2007
Despite daunting challenges posed by global warming, water, energy, unemployment and terrorism, the world faces a brighter future with fewer wars, higher life expectancy and improved literacy, according to a report released Monday.
Read the whole article here.
18. China Asks for ‘Development Space’ While World Seeks to Curb Global Warming
International Herald Tribune, September 4, 2007
China said Tuesday it was working hard to increase its use of renewable energy, but needs to be given some leeway in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gasses.
China’s contribution over time to climate change has been relatively small, an economic planning official said when asked about China’s attitude toward the focus on the issue at a meeting of Pacific Rim nations in Australia this week.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, will propose an initiative on sustainable management of forests during the meeting.
“I hope the international media will give us some development rights, some development space and not overly blame us,” said Chen Deming, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top planning agency.
China’s soaring economy has produced an ever-greater amount of gases blamed for contributing to global warming, with one Dutch study saying it has overtaken the U.S. as the leading producer of carbon dioxide.
However, Chen said China shouldn’t be held overly accountable because its has only recently become a major producer, contributing just 9 percent of global CO2 emissions between 1950-2000. China’s per-capita rate of CO2 production also remains low given its population of 1.3 billion, he said.
Chen also reiterated a goal of producing 15 percent of total energy supplies from renewable sources such as wind, hydropower and biofuels by 2020.
He acknowledged environmental criticism of China’s many dams, but said the government would pay strict attention to such impacts while seeking to nearly triple hydropower capacity to 300 gigawatts.
Read the whole article here.
19. APEC Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development
Sydney APEC Leader’s Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2007
We, the APEC Economic Leaders, agree that economic growth, energy security and climate change are fundamental and interlinked challenges for the APEC region.
The dynamism of APEC, underpinned by open trade and investment, has reduced poverty, improved living standards and delivered economic and social development.
Our success has relied in part on secure supplies of energy, the use of which has also contributed to air quality problems and greenhouse gas emissions.
A great challenge for APEC, given the aspirations of 41 per cent of the world’s population in our region, is to chart new pathways for clean and sustainable development.
We are committed, through wide-ranging and ambitious actions, to ensuring the energy needs of the economies of the region while addressing the issue of environmental quality and contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the whole declaration here.
MEDIA
20. Cool It
by Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2007
In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They’ve heard Al Gore’s inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel “worried, very worried.” Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don’t think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don’t think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn’t clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.
Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with “Cool It,” a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.
Read the whole article here.
Cool It available here.
21. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
Hudson Institute, September 12, 2007
Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers’ names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions.
Read the whole article here.
Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years available here.
22. An Inconvenient Truth: A Convenient Fiction?
For a free download of the film go here.
For a free copy of the DVD e-mail Susan Martin.]
BRIEFLY NOTED
Mars, Like Earth, Has Cyclical Ice Ages
War of Worldviews: the Judeo-Christian Tradition vs. Environmentalists
The Return of the Old Gods: A Challenge to Green Evangelicals
The Snobbery Behind Zac and Dave’s Tax the Plebs Plan
Wouldn’t It be Nice?
Global Warming Insanity?
Japan Sweats It Out as It Wages War on Air Conditioning
The Sky’s Not Falling
New Approach to Global Warming
Climate Change’s Great Divide
Mammoth Dung May Speed Warming
Comments
#1 2007-10-09 15:42 (Reply)
Problem with Mr. Hansen is that he is bought and paid for by Moveon.org and other extreme groups and does not come to the table with all his marbles. He is guilty of the same treachery that the Environmentalist claim those who want a fairer discussion of the science would have. It seems that if you question their interpretation of the facts that you are either a puppet of the oil industry or you are some ignorant fundementalist. It is time for a level playing field. It is a time for real science not an expression of eco-religiosity. Climatology is incredibly complex and not worthy of knee jerk reactions. just a note. a single volcanic eruption can spew more CO2 than all of mans infernal combustion engines in the last 100 years. The single greatest climate moderating gas is not CO2 but H2O. our current average temperature has not reached historic highs, in the 1100’s there was very little glaciation in Greenland and the NorthWest Passage was a reality not a legend.