In "What The 'Rogue' EPA, NPS and NASA Twitter Accounts Teach Us About The Future Of Social," Kalev Leetaru peers inside the Pandora's box of the implications of "rogue" social media accounts---accounts that purport to express the views of people from within (or recently having left) government agencies, corporations, etc., in opposition to the official views of those agencies, corporations, etc., but the actual authors of which are not revealed. It's a frightening prospect. Before anyone … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2017
Strengths and Weaknesses of Tillerson and Zinke
Environmental ethicist H. Sterling Burnett (Ph.D., Applied Philosophy) knows how to make distinctions, and he does so nicely in his discussion of President Donald Trump's nominations of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State (now confirmed, though Burnett apparently wrote the piece before that) and Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) to be Secretary of the Interior. Zinke's strengths: advocate for energy independence; firsthand observation of federal mismanagement of national forests, … [Read more...]
10 Great Questions to Detect Propaganda
Stella Morabito, writing in the Intercollegiate Review, offers ten great questions by which to detect when you're being targeted by propaganda. They apply, each and every one, to how climate-change alarmists, and environmental alarmists generally, treat anyone who dares question their pronouncements. Here are the questions, but click through to get her valuable discussion of each: Is your natural curiosity being suppressed? Are you being threatened with slurs or labels? Do you feel … [Read more...]
Will Trump Administration Be the Death of Science?
Cornwall Alliance Contributing Writer Anthony Sadar, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail, published a great piece in The DC Caller today debunking fears of an anti-science mentality taking over the federal Environmental Protection Agency under Donald Trump's administration. Here's the intro: There is a lot of angst in the air over the future of climate science now that the White House is occupied by a president who has referred to the … [Read more...]
Did the Pause End, or Did El Niño Interrupt It?
While reading Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer's "UAH Global Temperature Update for January, 2017: +0.30 deg. C," I happened to notice that the anomaly for the globe as a whole for January 2017 was identical to that of January 2015, at 0.3˚C. Then I eyeballed the anomalies for the intervening months in the table Roy provided and noticed quickly how prominently the effect of the super-El Niño that ran from late 2015 through most of 2016 was. In light of widespread questions … [Read more...]
Godly Dominion vs. Environmentalism
Download the full PDF here. A newspaper reporter once asked me what I thought Biblical environmental stewardship would look like. I responded that, on the basis of Genesis 1:28, which says God blessed Adam and Eve “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth,’” it would look … [Read more...]
Can the Religious Right—and Left—Be Saved?
The 2016 Presidential election left lots of people on lots of sides (not just two!) bruised and, sad to say, many friendships torn, some perhaps beyond repair but by the grace of God. For both religious political conservatives and religious political liberals---whether evangelicals or mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics or Mormons or Jews---the two leading candidates left more than a little to be desired. This was one of those times when policy and character didn't line up very well for … [Read more...]