Mainstream media the world over breathlessly report that scientists say July 2016 was the “hottest” month in the global temperature record stretching back to 1880 (or as CNN wrongly reported, “ever”)! And future Julys will only become hotter! Repent, the end is near! Or maybe not. Consider: First, for most of the world, whether land or sea, raw data were nonexistent for most of the period before, roughly speaking, the 1960s, making precise claims about global temperature before then … [Read more...]
What Would the Precautionary Principle Imply for Ethanol?
In 2007 Congress passed a law requiring the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study and report every three years to Congress on the environmental impact of EPA’s ethanol mandate. And in the intervening nine years, EPA has complied with the law once—in 2011. Now it says it’ll be 2024 before it can manage it again. So by the time it should have filed five such reports and be working on its sixth, EPA expects to file its second. Meanwhile, multiple studies not done by EPA have … [Read more...]
Milk Prospects for Californians—Turning Sour?
It’s not enough that poor and low-income Californians already face some of the nation’s highest housing, electricity, gasoline, and tax costs. Soon, thanks to the ever-diligent California Air Resources Board (CARB), they’re likely to face higher prices for one of the most basic foodstuffs, especially for children: milk. That’s because CARB is targeting dairy cows’ flatulence as the next great front in its war against global warming. Because the methane in cow farts, though it stays in the air … [Read more...]
How are Climate Alarmists Like Icarus?
In Greek mythology, the god Icarus tries, with his father Daedalus, to escape from Crete by flying, using wings Daedalus made from wax and feathers. Proudly ignoring his father's warning not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax in the wings melt, Icarus did so and fell into the sea. Ever since then, Icarus has been synonymous with hubris---a foolish combination of pride and over-confidence. Michael Hart, Professor Emeritus and inaugural holder of the Simon Reisman chair in trade policy at … [Read more...]
From Climate to LGBTQ, Poor Discernment Knows No Boundaries
The ability to "test all things, hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21) is something that all Christian leaders/teachers are obligated to cultivate assiduously. Liberal Baptist theologian/ethicist David Gushee, discussed in Rod Dreher's blog post "We Have Been Warned," has failed in that and led many thousands of Christians into serious errors in theology, ethics, politics, even economics and science. Gushee supports government's forcing churches and religious schools to embrace LGBT … [Read more...]
Where the Buffalo Roamed—and Roam Again
As a child in a good elementary school in the small town of Owego, New York, in the early 1960s, I learned dozens of old folk songs. Among them was “Home on the Range,” which I, like many of my fellow students, loved to sing, feeling all romantic about life on the range—ridin’ your faithful horse, sleepin’ under the stars, shootin’ rattlesnakes, tamin’ wild horses, herdin’ cattle, and singin’ ’round the campfire. Of course, none of us had ever seen the range, other than in cowboy Westerns, but … [Read more...]
Louisiana’s Flooding: Brought to You by Climate Change?
Did climate change cause Louisiana’s flooding? The New York Times, Al Gore, Vox, Congressman Raul Girjálva, Chris Mooney (citing evangelical climate-alarmist darling Katharine Hayhoe) in the Washington Post, and lots of others in the mainstream media think so. But more sober voices disagree. Adam Sobel of the Earth Island Institute at Columbia University, no “climate-change skeptic,” writing at Phys.org, says, no study can tell us that climate change caused an event like this to happen, … [Read more...]
Solar Impulse: Poster Child for the Impracticality of Solar Power
Solar energy has some legitimate uses in isolated cases, such as providing electricity where there is no other source available, and when you need it so badly you are willing to pay a premium, say, for use on your sailboat. But the inherent physics limitation to solar energy is that it is so diffuse (so little solar energy falls on each square meter of ground), the efficiency of conversion to electricity is so low (typically 15% or so), and it is so expensive to convert it to electricity with … [Read more...]
Climate Models: Uncertain? Inaccurate? What’s the Difference? Why Does it Matter?
For years I have been pointing out that the super-sophisticated computer climate models on which the IPCC, national environment agencies, national academies of science, and of course the many climate-alarmist advocacy groups and journalists depend for their predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) predict, on average, 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed over the relevant periods; that they failed to predict the complete lack of statistically significant … [Read more...]
Record Warm 2016? What a Difference One Month Makes
With the rapid cooling now occurring in the global average tropospheric temperature, my previous prediction of a record warm year in the satellite data for 2016 looks…well…premature. Here’s an update of what the average temperature trend would have to be in the next 6 months for 2016 to tie 1998 as record warmest year in the 38 year satellite record: Basically, as long as the anomalies stay below the June value of 0.34 deg. C, 2016 won’t be a record warm year. If only I had kept my … [Read more...]
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