Climate alarmists have long faced one uphill battle in public discourse: the very fact that they're thought of as alarmists, embracing positions that, tested by empirical science, seem at the outer---and scary---edges of possibility. What can make them seem moderate instead? Nothing better than for one of the world's most prominent science journals, Nature, to publish an article that is many times more extreme. That's what just happened September 26 when Nature published Carolyn … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2016
E. Calvin Beisner to Speak at Caffeinated Thoughts Briefing 2016
Caffeinated Thoughts and Caffeinated Thoughts Radio are pleased to announce that renowned Christian scholar, author and lecturer Dr. E. Calvin Beisner will be a keynote speaker at the 2016 Caffeinated Thoughts Briefing on Saturday, October 15, 2016 in Johnston, IA. Beisner was a keynote speaker at the inaugural Caffeinated Thoughts Briefing in 2014. “Since I never learned to like coffee, I search for other metaphors than ‘caffeinated’ when I think about super-charged thoughts, and what I … [Read more...]
What Will DC Circuit Do with Clean Power Plan?
Tomorrow the DC Circuit Court will hear, en banc, a case in which 28 states are suing the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alleging that it lacked statutory authority to impose President Obama's landmark environmental regulation, the Clean Power Plan (CPP), on the states. EPA claims the authority under an obscure piece of the Clean Air Act, Section 111(d), but a straight reading of that section in context with the rest of the Act implies otherwise. Congress never intended to … [Read more...]
Rescuing Science from Itself: How to Restore Rationality to an Increasingly Irrational Endeavor
“You can give respectability to mythology if you couch your myth in sufficiently academic language.” —Dr. R.C. Sproul Who in twenty-first century America would say that “science … our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble” because “much of [the] supposed knowledge” it brings us “is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong”? Obviously an anti-intellectual, benighted holdover from the Dark Ages. Right? Wrong. It’s Dr. Daniel Sarewitz, … [Read more...]
Why Not to Trust Wikipedia—and Search Engines—on Climate Change
The indefatigable James Delingpole, drawing on a lengthy and thoroughly documented blog post by Kenneth Richard, writing at No Tricks Zone, has a great little article exposing the intentional bias not only of Wikipedia but also of Google and other search engines when it comes to anthropogenic climate change. The gist: Wikipedia sends the global cooling scare of the 1960s and 1970s, which was a dominant scientific position, down the Orwellian memory hole in an attempt to prevent its use as an … [Read more...]
Statistician Matt Briggs Disembowels Climate Trend Presentations
Climate alarmists all over are having fun pushing the picture of historically unprecedented global warming in a recent cartoon timeline. It's fun stuff, and granted the scientific and statistical illiteracy of most Americans (and others), it seems compelling. But then a real statistician who's also a climate scientist steps in and spoils all the fun. In "Global Warming Alarmists Promote SKCD Time Series Cartoon, Ignore Its Mistakes," Matt Briggs explains, in as clear terms as seem possible, … [Read more...]
Radio Interview: Students Indoctrinated in Environmentalism
A couple days ago I did an hour-long live radio interview with Dr. Terry Lovell on “KYCA Talks,” originating at Yavapai College in Prescott, AZ. Terry is a veteran professor of business and economics. His statistics specialty enables him to recognize quickly the gross errors in climate alarmism. During that interview, Terry repeatedly mourned the fact that so many students arrive in his classes with their minds already made up about global warming and other alleged … [Read more...]
Will France Follow Britain on Climate and European Union?
French Presidential hopeful "Nicolas Sarkozy reckons that climate change is not caused by man and that the world has far bigger problems on its hands than global warming," as reported by The Local FR. Sarkozy was the President of France from 2007 to 2012, when he was defeated by Socialist François Hollande. He now hopes to regain the Presidency, and rejection of climate alarmism has become one of his talking points. Climate has been changing for four billion years. Sahara has become a … [Read more...]
Whom to Trust? NASA GISS, NASA, or Cornwall Alliance?
After citing a couple of Cornwall Alliance's articles in discussion, an educator friend got this response from one of his former students: The problem with referencing the Cornwall Alliance to discredit statistics from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is that one (the Cornwall Alliance) is a political advocacy organization with no scientific relevance while the other (NASA) has the weight of objective fact and science behind it. To me there is virtually no legitimate way one can … [Read more...]
Murder of the Scientific Method and Free Speech
As The Washington Times recently reported, a University of Colorado (at Colorado Springs) professor recently told his class that no debate would be allowed on climate change. The course is entitled, Medical Humanities in the Digital Age (whatever the heck that means and whatever the heck that has to do with climate change). The professor went on to quote a completely bogus statistic that is an ongoing favorite of climate alarmists saying, “Opening up a debate that 98% of climate … [Read more...]