Pursuing Holiness

The North Pole may soon be entirely bereft of ice and this report at The Independent is entirely bereft of the most obvious reason why. Rather than mention the volcanoes they pound the global warming drum.

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

So what about those volcanoes of which The Independent wants you to remain ignorant?

The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the “fountains” of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole.

“Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process,” according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice.

They returned with images and data showing that red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the ice. “Jets or fountains of material were probably blasted one, maybe even two, kilometres up into the water,” says geophysicist Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led the expedition.

McQ has another example of this disgraceful propaganda.

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Photo credit: North Pole sign, originally uploaded by Andy Revkin.

written by Laura

The sun in the news -
The lack of activity may not lead to another ice age:

The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

Could a new sunspot drought plunge us into another decades-long cold spell?

It’s not very likely, says David Hathaway a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

but it may lead to famine?

…worrisome indicators suggest dramatic drops in the bee population of the US are likely to impact crop production. This is not a small agricultural sector that is being impacted either. In the US bees pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops each year.

And one reason (of several) may be the sunspot drought:

The other cause odd though it may seem, relates to so-called “sunspots” - the effect of solar activity.

… Where the sunspot theory does hold up is that bees appear to be very sensitive to energy fluctuations.

If the mainstream media gets hold of this, doubtless it’ll be hyped beyond all recognition as the crisis du jour, and the next thing you know politicians will try to tax and regulate us…

My grandmother used to say, a change is as good as a rest, and I have to admit, a break from the horrors of carbon dioxide would be refreshing.

written by Laura

The destruction of our already weak (though not recessed!) economy has been prevented for the time being.  But the debate had some great moments, including this speech by Dana Rohrabacher I found at Anthony Watts’ blog.  A few scathing excerpts, including gems like actress Meryl Streep’s testimony before Congress how apples are dangerous to children, are below - click through for the entire speech.  Continue reading »

written by Laura

Jay Tea at Wizbang has an amusing post on his frustrations with the global warming faith:

I’ve dealt with the annoying evangelicals many times in my life. Usually, they’re the most irritating sorts of Christians — EVERYTHING is “proof” that God exists. …

I see the same mentality in the global-warming arguments. Every single incident, every single datum point, every single observation, every single measurement, is proof of the theory, and anything cited as evidence against their precious belief is treated much like many cult-like religions treat heresy and apostasy and blasphemy. (Scientology and Islam come to mind.)

Oddly enough, we were talking about global warming in our small group last night and noted the same thing about the cult of global warming. Someone queried the teenagers on whether they thought Christians had a religious obligation to take care of the earth. I immediately thought, oh, here, we go… it was like the time I discovered a Truther in my kitchen. My daughter replied that of course we need to steward the earth responsibly, but that she didn’t buy all the hysteria about global warming. I chimed in on how so much of what we think are scientific facts are actually media hype, and listed the five climate change scares going back to 1895 (including the current switchover to global cooling.)

Another guy chimed in with his expertise (which turned out to be substantial) on how America is cleaner than ever, burning food while people are going hungry is immoral, and there is no kind of pollution we can make that can’t be cleaned up. In fact, this topic had quite a lot to do with his major in college, he used to work at Accuweather, and went on to jobs at companies that cleaned up pollution - including designing bacteria that eats pollutants like creosote. He reminded everyone that C02 is a natural byproduct of life, and plant food, not a pollutant. He also made the extremely pertinent point that hysteria over the environment indicates a lack of faith in God, the concept that we, not He, are in control is antithetical to Christianity. Is He sovereign, or not? In our friend’s efforts to get more bike paths in and around New Orleans, he’s noticed that environmentalists commit idolatry; worshiping the planet and (seemingly unaware of the contradiction) themselves as being in control of the planet.

We agreed that the planet goes through natural cycles as part of God’s plan and design as evidenced by the fact that long before people drove cars the climate was different in various places. We agreed that it’s irrational to expect things to remain the same. We noted the fact that Greenland was once, in fact, green; that IF the icecaps melt and the seas rise, then while we will have lost a lot of current coastal land, we will have gained land in other places. God has a knack for balancing things out!

Everyone agreed that it’s sinful to waste, that we are called to live frugally, spend resources wisely, and show love for our neighbors by not polluting. (i.e. dump waste or chemicals in the river is not showing Christian love for our brothers downstream.) But we also agreed that we clearly have dominion over the earth and it’s not immoral to use it as such. The common sense approach prevailed. Reduce, reuse, recycle, share.

So is it fair to describe this as the Christian consensus on global warming? Well, everyone present was a Christian, and we all agreed. It’s as fair to describe us as indicative of Christians as it is to declare that all scientists agree that facts are all in and the global warming debate is over.

Oh, and the reason the guy brought it up in the first place wasn’t to promote it. He knows it’s taught in schools now, and - as we all acknowledge, there’s at least some good in the tenets of the faith; waste is bad, conservation is good, etc. He wanted to make sure the kids were being discerning about what they believe and who they follow, because, as he pointed out - the leaders of the movement are about as anti-Christian as you can get.

written by Laura

Media driven global warming panic declares a hudna but insists that it’s still winning the fight.

Good news: Global warming to take a little break for the next, er, decade
Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.

The long war against media driven climate change continues.  Since the New York Times insisted, back in 1895, that the world was freezing and we were in danger of a new ice age, there have been four more climate scares.  From the turn of the century to the 1920s, the media reported that the world threatened to freeze.  After a brief pause in hostilities, the media declared that the world was angrily heating up again, from 1933 until well into the 1950s.  Then a brief pause in fighting was implemented so that the media could thank God that Google hadn’t yet been invented.

By the 1970s, the truce ended and it was announced that “a major cooling widely considered to be inevitable.”  Opposition forces allied with the media instituted Earth Day in 1970.  Still, people fought back and our side prevailed for a while - until the 1980s when it seemed the only cure for global warming would be nuclear winter.  By the late 1990s, some people began to realize that these reports seemed vaguely familiar.  Why, they wondered, did the media keep reporting opposite climate scares?  They began to join the fight, carefully deconstructing faulty computer models and pointing out serious problems with weather station data only to be viciously attacked and called “deniers.”

The time between battles in this long war keeps getting shorter, and soon we may be in a constant state of combat with panicky “Bagdad Bob” media coverage over every change in the weather.

Oh, wait.  We’re already there.

written by Laura

Nature’s carbon balance confirmed
Scientists have found new evidence that the Earth’s natural feedback mechanism regulated carbon dioxide levels for hundreds of thousands of years.

But they say humans are now emitting CO2 so fast that the planet’s natural balancing mechanism cannot keep up.

So a biofuel-engineered famine is a good thing?

written by Laura