Reformation Faith Today

for the recovery and propagation of the faith of the reformation

September 1, 2008 • 12:49 am

Cornwall Alliance-Environmental News

Below is the Cornwall Alliance’s latest e-newsletter. This is the best information out there on the truth about the environment. Scroll down and get informed.

1. Climate Policy: The Holy Grail for Social Engineers
by Dr. Roy Cordato
Carolina Journal, August 8, 2008
At the present time the North Carolina Legislative Commission on Climate Change — co-chaired by Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, and John Garrou, lawyer, environmental activist, and husband of Sen. Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth — is considering a set of policy proposals that, if enacted, would dramatically reduce our freedoms and impact our prosperity. The alleged goal of these proposals is to change the climate a hundred or so years from now. The actual effect is to micromanage our lives today. If enacted, these mandates would, through regulations and taxes, attempt to tell the citizens of North Carolina:
- How we can travel and commute,
- Where we can live,
- The size homes we can live in,
- The amount of land we can live on,
- The size cars we can drive,
- How we can generate electricity,
- How much energy we can use,
- The kinds of appliances we can have in our homes,
- How we can light, heat, and cool our homes, and even
- How we can purchase automobile insurance.
And there is no evidence that these restrictions on our freedom, even if enacted by every country on the planet, will have any noticeable impact on the climate — not in 100 years, not in 200 years.
Let me point out that this list represents only a fraction of the 56 proposals that, if enacted, begin the process of remaking the lifestyles of North Carolinians in the image of environmental ideologues and extremists. As Al Gore has pointed out, the fight against global warming will require “a wrenching transformation of American society,” and as Barack Obama has warned (threatened?): “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on … 72 degrees at all times….”
This power grab is happening in the name of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and fighting global warming — a warming that, according to all temperature records, stopped about 10 years ago. That’s right, there’s been no net warming this decade. And for the last 60 years warming has occurred for less than a 25-year period from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. The real “deniers” in this debate are those who ignore these facts.
Carbon dioxide is unlike other regulated emissions. First, it has no toxic effect on human beings, unlike real pollutants such as lead or carbon monoxide. But more importantly there is nothing that humans can do, including breathing, that does not involve emitting CO2, and its presence in the atmosphere is essential for all life on earth. Without it we die, the plants die, and the earth freezes over. And yet the environmental zealots in and out of government have propagandized us into calling this life-giving gas in our atmosphere a pollutant. . . .
Dr. Roy Cordato, Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation. This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Americans for Prosperity Hot Air Tour rally July 9.
2. Global Warming Not Linked to Increased Hurricane Activity
by Ara Trembly
The Insurance Tech Guru, August 18, 2008
Despite a number of conflicting research findings, the general consensus among weather and climate researchers is that global warming, whether natural or man-made, is unlikely to increase the frequency of hurricanes in the years to come.
In consensus statements found on the Web site of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scientists involved note that, “Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.  No individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change.”
Indeed, according to Stanley Goldenberg, meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, based in Miami, “Numerous hurricane meteorologists agree that the historical data has not produced any evidence of changes [due to climate change] in the number or intensity of hurricanes, particularly in the Atlantic Basin, and even globally.
“There are some who have done studies that do claim a link, [but] virtually all those studies have been heavily rebutted by others in the hurricane community,” he noted. “In my opinion, the flaw in those studies is an improper utilization of historical databases.  I have been a specialist in hurricane climate data for close to three decades, and others who know the databases well agree with what I am saying.”
Mr. Goldenberg pointed to a number of confounding problems in such studies, including the time frame chosen, the techniques available now and in the past to measure hurricane activity, the ways in which such activity was recorded, and the availability of satellite data—or lack thereof.
“The biggest fallacy is that people think that a hurricane feeds off a warm ocean, and if the ocean gets warmer, we will have more intense hurricanes,” he explained.  “But there are other factors involved, such as vertical wind shear, which is the difference between the upper and lower layers of the atmosphere.  You could also have drier air.  These are far more critical factors than the ocean being warmer.
“Everything else being equal, if you warm the ocean under a storm, you might get a stronger storm—but everything else is not equal,” said Mr. Goldenberg.  “Warming may increase vertical shear and therefore inhibit storms.  The ocean itself warming is such a little effect.” . . .
3. Center for Climate Strategies: Their Advocacy Consultants
by Paul Chesser
GlobalWarming.org, August 21, 2008
[Editor's note: In the article excerpted below Paul Chesser Climate Strategies Watch (http://www.climatestrategieswatch.com/) demonstrates some of the connections that create significant conflicts of interest for people involved in many state climate policy initiatives. The incentive for corruption is rampant. Our brief excerpt gives you but the tip of the iceberg; see the whole article for much more.--ECB]
Earlier this week Climate Strategies Watch showed, mostly with documents it posted from tax returns, how the Center for Climate Strategies has its origins in global warming alarmism advocacy (despite their claims to the contrary). Today we will look at the contractors they have running the many state climate commissions where CCS has set up shop.
Instead of hiring their own people, CCS uses staff from the Pennsylvania Environmental Council to handle administrative work and contracts out for their technical and facilitation service work for states. You can view their top five highest paid contractors in both FY2006 (PDF) and FY2007 (PDF) (these tax returns are for Enterprising Environmental Solutions, Inc., where CCS is housed).
So, who are these people? Well, it’s best to start with the person identified as CCS’s executive director, Thomas D. (Tom) Peterson, who received nearly $180,000 in each of the last two years from EESI/CCS. Peterson is at the forefront of this state-level effort despite not being a formal employee for CCS, as he owns all the domain names for current and potentially future climate commission Web sites. More on him in a future post.
E.H. Pechan & Associates
Consultants E.H. Pechan received $195,819 in FY2006 and $287,682 in FY2007. Pechan provides “climate change services” including emissions inventories for governments and businesses.”For our clients,” the company’s Web site explains, “Pechan develops emission inventories (e.g., developing baselines), verifies inventory and reduction projects, develops data management systems, and assists with GHG mitigation plans.” Pechan’s client list reads like a “Who’s-Who” of environmental alarmist groups: Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Climate Trust, the Energy Foundation, and the Pacific Forest Trust.
You could say climate change is big business . . . .
Read the whole article at http://www.globalwarming.org/node/2534.
DEBATE
4. Climate Hysterics vs. Heretics in an Age of Unreason
by Arthur Herman
The Australian, August 4, 2008
It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’s article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
The reason is precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.
But what kind of religion? More than 200 years ago, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume put his finger on the process. His essay, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilized societies the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions when real worries are missing.
As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today’s greenhouse gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations, mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and petrol-driven lawnmowers.
Fear and ignorance, Hume concludes, are the true source of superstition. They lead a blind and terrified public to embrace any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends.
The knaves today, of course, are the would-be high priests of the global warming orthodoxy, with former US vice-president Gore as their supreme pontiff.
As Hume points out, the stronger mixture there is of superstition, with its ambience of ignorance and fear, the higher is the authority of the priesthood.
As with the Church in the Dark Ages or the Inquisition during the Reformation, they denounce all doubters, such as Evans or Britain’s Gilbert Monckton [The author surely meant not Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount of Brenchley, but Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley and former science advisor to the Thatcher government, whose writings have often been linked in the Cornwall Alliance's newsletter.--ECB] as dangerous heretics, outliers in Gore’s phrase: or as willing tools of the evil enemy of a healthy planet, Big Oil.
This is not the first time, of course, that superstition has paraded itself as science, or created a priesthood masquerading as the exponents of reason. At the beginning of the previous century we had the fascination with eugenics, when the Gores of the age such as E.A. Ross and Ernst Haeckel warned that modern industrial society was headed for race suicide.
The list of otherwise sensible people who endorsed this hokum, from Winston Churchill to Oliver Wendell Holmes, is embarrassing to read today.
Then as now, money was poured into foundations, institutes, and university chairs for the study of eugenics and racial hygiene. Then as now, it was claimed that there was a scientific consensus that modern man was degenerating himself into extinction.
Doubters such as German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow were dismissed as reactionaries or even as tools of the principal contaminators of racial purity, the Jews. . . .
Real science rests on a solid bedrock of skepticism, a skepticism not only about certain religious or cultural assumptions, for example about race, but also about itself.
It constantly re-examines what it regards as evidence, and the connections it draws between cause and effect. It never rushes to judgment, as race science did in Germany in the 1930s and as the high priests of climate change are doing today.
Politicians everywhere should be forced to take an oath similar to the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors: above all else, do no harm. The debate in Australia on this issue is rapidly building to a climax.
Before they make decisions that could trim Australia’s gross domestic product by several percentage points a year and impose heavy penalties on Australians’ lifestyle, Labour and Liberal alike need to re-examine the superstition of global warming.
Otherwise, the only thing it will melt away is everyone’s civil liberty.
Arthur Herman is a historian and author, his most recent book is “Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age”. He and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will speak at the Centre for Independent Studies Big Ideas Forum tonight at Sydney Opera House on the Ideas of the Enlightenment.
5. Video: Is Al Gore a Hypocrite?
by Sean Hannity
FOX News, 2008
6. Waning Warming Debate
by Amy Harder
National Journal, August 11, 2008
For all the recent coverage of the pollution surrounding Beijing’s Olympic Games, global warming has gotten relatively little attention, whether on the nightly news or on the campaign trail. While the majority of Americans still say they consider climate change a serious issue, a new poll suggests public concern over the issue has ebbed since last year.
According to a survey [PDF] from ABC News, Planet Green and Stanford University, fewer than half — 47 percent — of Americans consider global warming an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007. Although a vast majority still think the planet is warming — 8 in 10 respondents — that figure is also down from last year, having dropped 4 percentage points. Furthermore, in an open-ended question, the number of respondents who called global warming the biggest environmental challenge facing the world fell 8 points from 2007 and currently hovers at 25 percent.
According to an analysis by ABC News’ Gary Langer, the drop in these numbers coincides with decreased media attention to climate change, in favor of the election and economy. “A database search finds 50 percent fewer news stories on global warming in the month before this poll was conducted, compared with the month before last year’s survey,” Langer wrote.
SCIENCE
7. Global Warming Could Increase Middle East Rainfall
by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, August 13, 2008

The IPCC’s global climate models not only have a tough time predicting future temperatures globally but also have a tough time predicting any aspect of weather on a small enough scale to be useful for predicting climate impacts on given regions.

The IPCC has predicted that the manmade global warming it forecasts for this century could reduce rainfall in the Middle East by 15 to 25 percent. But the prediction attempts to extrapolate from global climate models to regional climate–something for which the global models aren’t adequate.

A new study (http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/37910), based on regional rather than global climate models, predicts the opposite: that such warming would increase Middle East rainfall, including particularly the Fertile Crescent, by 50 percent. That would be welcome news for the thirsty region. It would improve agriculture and reduce pressure on fresh water supplies for the area’s growing population.

We bet you didn’t read about this in your mainstream media report–where the focus is always on the risks, not the benefits, of global warming.

We must add our own caveat, though: the regional climate models are only marginally more reliable than the global ones. Frankly, there is little ground for confidence in any long-term predictions about either global or regional climate.

ECONOMICS
8. Gang Green
by Stephen Moore
The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2008
Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”
The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.
“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America! . . .
. . . There are also new federal and state proposals to snoop on citizens in our own homes. California is considering a plan to police the temperature settings on residents’ thermostats. The feds are checking on the flush capacity of our toilets and the kinds of light bulbs we use. A new game called Climate Crime Cards urges kids to spy on and keep an online record of their family’s environmental faux pas — noting when their parents fail to turn off the TV, plug in too many appliances or use the clothes dryer on a sunny day. Sen. John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, wants to bring back the reviled 55-mile-per-hour federal speed limit law so that America can reduce gasoline consumption. Barack Obama believes that properly inflating the tires on our cars is the solution to our energy woes. Is the government going to start giving tickets for failure to inflate?
The latest rage among the more radical environmental groups is to encourage the government to monitor and ration every individual’s carbon footprint — how much you eat, drive, fly, heat, air condition, throw away and so on. Why? Because the average American emits twice as much carbon as the average European (which is another way of saying we are more productive than they are). This is all promoted as a form of shared sacrifice. But under this system some people are more equal than others. People with enough money like Al Gore can purchase carbon offset credits to justify chartering a plane rather than having to fly commercial. Seems like this is the very kind of elitist policy — reminiscent of the practice during the Civil War of allowing the rich and privileged to buy their way out of the draft — that liberals used to be against.
9. The Left’s Sure Fire Plan to Reduce Carbon Emissions: Less People
by Conn Carroll
The Heritage Foundation, August 7, 2008
On Tuesday of this week, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom announced that according to a study by the city’s Department of the Environment, San Francisco had cut greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent between 2000 and 2005. Which sounds impressive until you begin to look at what is really happening in San Francisco.
The USA Today has a front page story out today reporting that: “Among large counties, San Francisco lost the highest percentage of whites with that group dropping 17% from 2000 to 2007.” But if you look at the table that accompanies the article you will also discover that, not counting New Orleans, San Francisco also lost the 3rd most minorities from 2000 to 2007. In other words, San Francisco is just plain loosing people. According to the Census Bureau an estimated 32,692 left San Francisco between 2000 and 2006.
And who has been driven out? The middle class. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this June: “The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells … Many worry it’s increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.”
No wonder Speaker Nancy Pelosi feels so empowered to prioritize polar bears over lower energy costs. The working class people hardest hit by high energy prices are fleeing her city and being replaced by wealthy childless households who can easily afford $4 a gallon gas.
10. Climate Talks Stymied as Priorities Conflict
by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, August 20, 2008
Negotiators striving toward a new climate change treaty face a major challenge persuading developing countries to join the fight against global warming.
As a recent Associated Press report (http://www.pr-inside.com/climate-negotiators-reconvene-this-week-r764040.htm) put it, “the latest round of talks comes at an awkward moment, with the world’s poor more worried about the immediate cost of food and fuel than the uncertain long-term effects of climate change.”
The poorer nations’ resistance rests on common sense. Food and energy shortages are far greater threats, and far better understood, to poor countries than manmade climate change. It’s no wonder, then, that they aren’t eager for their economies to be crippled by policies meant to fight global warming. They have more immediate concerns.
BRIEFLY NOTED
We CAN Drill Ourselves Out of the Energy Crisis
Global Warming Did It! Well, Maybe Not.
Al Gore’s Money Isn’t Where His Mouth Is
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/

Filed under: AlGore, Environment, Global Alarming, Global Warming

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