The environment is again an important election issue. Some candidates have claimed religious support for their views, but there is no single “Christian” perspective on the environment. It is a question of fact and prudence, not theology. We all have a stake in a healthy environment. God gave humanity dominion over the earth and called us to be good stewards of his creation. But he gave us no particular policy agenda. Rather, we must work together to balance environmental protection, economic … [Read more...]
Courts Should Confront Evidence on Global Warming
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled late last year that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must consider the "risks of global warming" when setting gas-mileage standards for light trucks, minivans and SUVs. Central to the court's ruling was the claim that the federal agency, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, had ignored the benefits of reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Whatever their legal acumen, Judge Betty … [Read more...]
The Authoritarianism of Experts: Promoting a Green Dictatorship?
Have you ever heard anyone make the argument that we must take a certain course of action because the experts tell us we must? The issue might be the threat of another country or an environmental risk, but increasingly we see appeals to authority used as the basis for arguing for this or that action. In a new book, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith take the appeal to experts somewhat further and argue that in order to deal with climate change we need to replace liberal democracy with an … [Read more...]
Why ‘Global Warming’ Is Not a Global Crisis
I earned my Nobel Peace Prize by making the UN fix a deliberate error in its latest climate assessment. After the scientists had finalized the draft, UN bureaucrats inserted a new table, but with four decimal points right-shifted. The bureaucrats had multiplied tenfold the true contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise. Were they trying to support Al Gore’s fantasy that these two ice-sheets would imminently cause sea level to rise 20ft, displacing tens of … [Read more...]
H. L. Mencken’s Hoax and Gore’s Compared
From the "Why-Didn't-I-Think-of-This-Before?" Department If anybody needs proof of just how easily some of the smartest people can be fooled into believing absurdities, and refuse to recant even long after the absurdity has been exposed irrefutably, here is a short version of H. L. Mencken's famous "Tale of a Tub," from the year 1917. This is from the last chapter in Bergen Evans's classic, The Natural History of Nonsense (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, 275 pp. plus index). Copyright has … [Read more...]
Unresolved Issues with Assessment of Global Surface Temperature Trends
This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the … [Read more...]
Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming in 2007
Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member … [Read more...]
Contaminated Data
[Editor's Note: We don't usually publish such a long excerpt as this, but this is a very important, and very substantive, article. It adds to the many reasons to question seriously the reliability and scientific objectivity of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the magnitude of recent warming.--ECB] Below is the famous graph of "global average surface temperature," or "global temperature" for short. The data come from thermometers around the world, but between the thermometer … [Read more...]
Dishonest Political Tampering with the Science on Global Warming
Originally Published at Heartland.org As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror. Two detailed investigations by Committees of the … [Read more...]
Global Warming, Inc.
Originally Published in The Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook, November 20, 2007 Editors Note by Cornwall Founder Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. Click here to read the article at WSJ.com . Al Gore no longer needs to make claims about creating the Internet, because the former Vice President deserves much of the credit for creating an entire new industry -- the global warming business. And like the energy barons of an earlier age, Mr. Gore has the chance to achieve enormous wealth after being … [Read more...]
