Destruction of the US Economy Stopped - For Now

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.  Read more

The Christian Consensus on Global Warming

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.

Global warming declares a hudna, insists it’s still winning the fight

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.

So a biofuel-engineered famine is a good thing?

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?

Mark Steyn on Biofuels

As always, Steyn cuts right to the chase:

Mark Steyn on Time & Global Warming on National Review Online
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you.

I think he may be the best import we’ve ever gotten from Canada.

We recently watched the South Park episode on hybrids - the world’s leading cause of smug.
(profanity alert)

There’s slightly less smug being emitted from Great Britain today:

Sting and wife: Yes, yes, we’re hypocrites!: Call it a case of Gulfstream liberal guilt. The environmental activist wife of musician Sting is ‘fessing up to her Green hypocrisy.

Climate Change. Also known as “the weather.”

Okay, I’m being simplistic with the post title but the point I’m attempting to make is that there is a rather ridiculous expectation that the climate should remain basically static. Why should it? Everything else in science is subject to change, and there are cycles for… well, pretty much everything in nature.  The difference is that in recent history - since the NY Times started it in 1895 - we’ve gotten hysterical about it.

We may finally be seeing a return to sanity on the part of the media with this article:

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess - WSJ.com
The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of “Warming Island,” a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn’t been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.

But every climatologist must know that Greenland’s last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland’s ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.

Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, “Arctic Riviera,” published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There’s a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.

That book was published right about the time this show was made:

Of course, at the same time that there are signs of rationality returning on the global warming front, we’re seeing the global cooling scare start up again, just as it has twice before - at the turn of the century and in the 1970s. What’s interesting is how much of a religion it seems to have become this time. “Scientists” are protecting their belief system with the same zeal that some Christians protect their young-earth creationist beliefs:

Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick). Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug. Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed.

How the religion is going to adjust to the fact that we’re not warming but cooling (as we have many times before) is going to be very interesting. Like offering a panhandler exactly what they ask for and then seeing how their story changes, the alarmists will simply switch sides. Al Gore knows exactly what he’s doing with this and like any good capitalist is adjusting to a changing market:

“Live Earth was phenomenal”, Gore reports. “My only concern is that it worked too well. According to my most recent numbers, we’re beginning to see global cooling emerge as a legitimate threat.”

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Photo credit: Uploaded on February 25, 2006 by pratt

Weather Channel Founder: Global Warming Is A Scam

From a related link:

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose. “[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

I hope someone does sue. Not only is it a scam, it’s not even original. This video was made before the great cooling scare of the 1970s. When I was a kid, I was advised more than once to enjoy my summers because there wouldn’t be any when I grew up - it would be too cold.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg[/youtube]

Here is the first of ten questions every manmade global warming believer should consider:

1. What is the perfect temperature? If we are to embark on a lifestyle-altering quest to lower the temperature (or at least minimize its rise), what is our goal? I don’t ask this flippantly. Can we demonstrate that one setting on the global thermostat is preferable over another? If so, what is it, and how do we get there? And, once there, how do we maintain it? Will we ever have to “heat things up” again if it drops below that point?

Read the rest, it’s a very enlightening article from an unexpected source.

I’ll say it again: this current switch to global cooling (it’s early, but clearly in progress) is the fifth climate change scare since 1895 when the New York Times hyped the upcoming ice age. And the demand during all of these “crises” is that we empower government to regulate more and more of our lives.

The Switch from Global Warming to Global Cooling

I was too young to really notice last time, but the switch from one climate scare to another is fascinating to watch. The NYT - who started it all in 1895 - is beginning to walk back the “we’re all gonna die!” narrative. Another five years should do it, I think, and then five after that the cooling scare will start in earnest.

NYT Takes on Al Gore and Climate Alarmists…Happy New Year! | NewsBusters.org
Moments after Investor’s Business Daily presaged that “2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack,” the New York Times of all entities published a rather shocking piece pointing fingers at folks like Nobel Laureate Al Gore for being part of a group of “activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.”

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