Radical Environmentalism – Is The Globe Warming, Or Isn’t It? (Part 7)

I’ve asked the question many times in this series of articles – does our society want to find the real truth about global warming, or are they more interested in pursuing the global warming agenda for some other reason?

We may be getting closer to that answer. Recently, Dr. Alan Carlin, a 35-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote a 98-page report calling into question whether or not the science being used to prop up the Climate Change Act is valid. Specifically, his report points out that, 1) global temperature trends have been on the downward side over the last eleven years, 2) scientists are not convinced that storms will actually worsen if global warming were true, and 3) that the theory behind Greenland’s melting ice pack has now been called into question.

All of these are good points, and they should be studied and better understood before we spend billions of dollars on carbon dioxide mitigation programs and potentially throw thousands or even millions of industrial jobs to the wind.

Wouldn’t it be sad and ironic if fifty years from now, after crippling our economy and giving up our global leadership in manufacturing to China, that we were to gain hard proof that manmade CO2 emissions have absolutely no effect on global temperature – that, in fact, something we can’t control, such as sunspots, causes the global temperature to rise and fall over a 400-year period? Now, wouldn’t that just make a few people upset?

What I have been pointing out is that we need to be concerned over what the truth is in regards to global warming. However, this is not what the current executive administration in our country cares about. Because, shortly after the release of his report, Dr. Carlin was asked by his EPA bosses to cease all activities related to climate change. Instead, he was reassigned to a project to update a grants database. There are also some very revealing memos to him from his boss that indicate pressure from on high to suppress his report.

So why would anyone want to stifle this report if it had some chance of avoiding future embarrassment – that is, avoiding job losses, economic disaster, and the discovery that manmade global warming is a falsehood? I can think of two very powerful reasons – 1) money, and 2) the loss of God in our culture (yes, really).

Money is the most obvious answer – most human decisions can be tracked to its pursuit. By creating the Climate Change Act, the government intends to generate revenue by literally selling us the air that we breathe. Instituting a cap-and-trade policy on CO2 emissions created by power plants and other major producers will result in the regulation of a large component of our breathing air. This regulation will result in an indirect tax on everything which requires energy to be produced – cars, gasoline, food, clothing, manufactured goods, etc. Corporations will have to raise prices to pay for the tax on their emissions. The government will collect that tax and proceed to use it far less efficiently than if they had let us keep the money. Economic disaster will result (while China will continue to ignore the environmentalist agenda, keep up its manufacturing investment, continue polluting, and eventually take over the global economy).

But even more importantly, I believe that the environmental movement and its worship of the earth and things created is simply a substitute…..for God. In a culture that largely ignores or denies God, the human spirit searches for something to put its efforts into – something that seems greater and more lasting than everyday material possessions. Hence, we see groups like PETA and Greenpeace appealing to the masses with a message of animal rights and earth worship. Almost invariably, these groups are led by individuals who deny the existence of God, having replaced Him with things that he created. Paul predicted this in Romans 1:25 – “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen.”

Aren’t we really, fundamentally, and ultimately interested in the truth?

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More information on Dr. Carlin and his report at The Heritage Foundation, FoxNews, and here is a link to his 98-page report, if you are interested. Please let me know if you find anything I’ve missed.
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Radical Environmentalism – Congress Gets Radical (Part 6)

I decided to buy a new house yesterday. Normally, I would research houses and neighborhoods and make sure that I purchased one in an area that had the potential for a good living environment and increasing value. And I would typically go look at the house first – you know, walk around inside it and make sure that it was in good shape and was the style that my family wanted. But instead, I just picked up the housing section of the paper, picked one out, and made a call to my realtor with the instructions to buy it. No big deal.

Okay, okay – so that’s not true. But before you make a judgment about how stupid and unlikely such a decision would be, consider this - two-hundred and nineteen Congressman did something even more radical than that, with consequences far more reaching.

The Waxman-Markey energy bill made its way through the House of Representatives this week, by a vote of 219-212. Investors Business Daily called it an “anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy”. I won’t go into many details about it here, except to say that it will 1) likely cost each taxpayer hundreds or thousands of additional dollars each year through a new energy tax, 2) create new “green” jobs, but will likely kill twice as many “non-green” jobs at the same time, as has happened in Spain through similar legislation, and 3) will cause America to become more uncompetitive in the global marketplace by hamstringing our industries who use energy to create things. You would think the federal government might learn a lesson or two from the budget crisis going on in California – a state which leads the nation in economy-stunting environmental legislation (and home of the bill’s sponsor Henry Waxman). And at a time when the government has essentially taken over the US auto industry, they should be aware how such a bill will further cripple our chances of competing with other countries who haven’t adopted such severe energy restrictions. Hmmm, maybe the government isn’t very good at running a successful corporation after all.

But the real travesty is that Congress didn’t even read the whole bill before they voted on it. When the original bill came out of the House committee, it was right at 1,000 pages. Earlier this week, the House added another 201 pages – post-committee approval – to the whole thing. And then, the night before the vote, the Rules Committee added another 300 pages to the overall bill. Henry Waxman slapped the 300 pages down on the podium and called for a vote the very next day.

Does that sound like responsible government? Should we just roll over and assume that our Congressman have our best interest in mind when they wrote the 300-page amendment? The consequences of this bill are far-reaching, both to individual pocketbooks and to our overall national economic health. Shouldn’t we expect there to be time for both study and individual opinions to be heard?

You see, except for the voting process, we individuals have been effectively removed from our government. There was a time when federalism (state’s rights) overshadowed the national government. Individuals could influence their local government, who would then instruct their national representatives exactly how to vote. It’s true! See this previous article for examples of US representatives who quit their job in Congress because they were in conflict with how they were being told to vote by their constituents.

Did we get a chance to read the energy bill and advise our representatives on how we want them to vote? There was no time for that. Most of our federal representatives now get themselves elected to office, and then abandon us. We are no longer involved in the process. Their motivation is to 1) please their party leaders, and 2) get re-elected. How could we not be given the time to read the 300-page amendment before going to a vote? How could our representatives vote on it without reading it? Is it any different than my example of buying a house without researching it? It is different in the aspect that the consequences of what Congress did are much greater. I can always put an unwanted house up for sale and get something out of it. Can Congress do the same with our economy once they wreck it and send our wealth and prosperity to China and India?

I am exceptionally angry at the folly of our government. I want to completely disconnect from these dishonest, selfish, deceptive men and women who are driving our nation into decadence and poverty. Part of me is ready to board the next Mayflower and sail away to a distant island where we can start over with the sane, Christian principles that our founding fathers adopted. Does anyone want to go with me?

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P.S. - If you’d like to do something about the climate change bill, please write your US Senators and ask them to read the bill…and then vote against it. The bill is not yet made law, and it will have a much tougher time making it through the Senate. But we need to make sure that it doesn’t see the light of day to cripple our economy. Tell them to vote “No” on the bill, or else you’ll vote that way when their name comes up for re-election. Here are some tips on how to write a short, meaningful note to a Congressman or Senator. The bill number you should reference is “H.R. 2998”.

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Radical Environmentalism – Abandoning the Scientific Process (Part 5)

Let’s talk about the scientific process. Wait, don’t click the back button! I’ll mention Al Gore to ensure that this stays interesting!

When I was in junior high and high school, we were taught the scientific process – repeatedly. You start with a hypothetical statement, such as “Do potato skins contain more vitamin C than potato flesh?” Under no circumstances are you able to draw any early conclusions without first proving your assumption. I would have been graded down severely if I had just assumed that potato skin contained more vitamin C and moved onto a follow-up question (I would have been wrong, too, as potato flesh actually has a higher concentration of the vitamin than the skin – I got to perform this experiment in Chemistry).

But science class back then never taught us that there will be times when science will mix with politics. This dangerous combination often throws aside the deductive process in favor of principles more akin to marketing (which some people will say is the same as lying). Making bold statements without the backing of facts becomes necessary in order to divert funds to pet political projects. It’s all about the money.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the world of environmental “science”. Environmental “experts” and prominent politicians make claims which go largely untested – all for the sake of scaring people into spending money on potentially useless programs. Here are a couple of examples.

Al Gore intimates in his film An Inconvenient Truth that we only have about ten years to act on global warming before it will be too late to make a reversal. This statement was so presumptuous that Rush Limbaugh started a ten-year clock on his website – counting down from ten years so that we will be prompted to evaluate just where things are at the end of that time period. Look at Gore’s statement in light of the same facts that he presented in the very same movie – that the average recorded temperature has risen less than one degree Celsius over the last 140 years (see his graph at the left)! It seems ludicrous to draw the conclusion that at this rate, we will be headed for an irreversible torching of the planet in just ten years time. But the statement was made by Mr. Gore, and he was lauded as a great environmentalist (and, incredibly, they gave him the Nobel prize).

Where was the scientific mistake made? There are two that I can see. First, Gore assumes that a 140-year trendline showing a rise of less than one degree Celsius will continue to trend in the same direction at the same rate, unless something is “done”. Now, 140 years may seem like a lot, but it is not nearly enough to build a case of irreversible global warming. For example, a trend chart of General Motors stock price value would show a healthy and fairly steady increase over time, from 1933 to 2006. A well-meaning investor might look at that chart and conclude that the trend must continue. They would be wrong. GM stock has dropped from a value of $40 per share in 2006 to just over a dollar today in 2009 (that was true when I originally wrote this entry, now it’s worth nothing). Did anyone see this coming before the shares started to dive? Few people had the foresight to avoid this loss. It was a wholly unexpected event, and there were factors involved which were much more complex than a simple algebraic linear rise.

Gore’s second mistake is assuming that we know the cause of global warming. He pins the warming trend as being relative to the carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and he assumes that carbon dioxide is primarily caused by human activity. Both assumptions are specious, and are not proven fact – not by a long shot. Do we claim to understand all of the factors that affect global temperatures? Here are a few – sunspot activity, ocean currents, El Niño, La Niña, the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation, and the Maunder Minimum. Now, please show me the study that proves that human activity swamps out these factors, and is the prime contributor to global warming. I would listen, truly I would, if the claim could be supported. The science simply isn’t there.

But lack of scientific evidence doesn’t stop people like Ted Danson from saying, in 1988, that “we have ten years to save the world's oceans”. Do the math – that was twenty-one years ago. So are we too late to do anything now? Or was Ted Danson wrong?

If you want to win me over to an idea or a cause, here is what you must do. To begin with, give me unimpeachable facts upon which to build a case – in the global warming debate, I need to see global temperatures from around the globe, not just in a few select locations, and preferably hard evidence over several hundred years. Next, from this data you must build models which duplicate the behavior seen in the data. For example, a good global warming model needs to be able to match the data obtained in the first step. To model the hype distributed by the environmental crowd, a good model would be able to relate the Industrial Revolution over the last hundred years to carbon dioxide levels during that period, and could correlate global temperature rises to the carbon dioxide level. If mankind is the greatest influence on warming, then I would expect to see a relatively flat global temp profile for the last several hundred years, followed by a sharp rise over the last hundred years. There should also be direct correlation to unusual events in history, such as volcanic eruptions which may cause temporary spikes in the data.

Finally, it is important to put the model to the test in the future. Does it accurately predict events over the next few years and on into decades? If not, then the model may be incorrect, and require revision. Some, like Ted Danson, will say that we have no time for this rigor, but it is equally irresponsible to radically alter public policy and business plans based on nothing more than rash statements and “feel-good” ethics.

For me, I personally believe that other factors, such as sunspot activity, overpower any changes that man makes to the climate. But I also am willing to concede that this is not yet proven. Will the other side make the same concession and work to follow the scientific process? Somehow, I think that is just a dream.
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