As the Paris climate agreement pushes for more and more renewable installments globally, reports of failure of installed renewables, especially wind and solar, are also becoming increasingly common. Nobody wishes for wind and solar to fail. After all, billions of dollars have been invested in them. I, like many others, desire to see renewables strengthen the existing energy infrastructure globally. Sadly, and inevitably, though, the drawbacks and limitations of wind and solar keep … [Read more...]
Fox News Quotes Cornwall Scholars against “Five most over-the-top climate warnings”
Maxim Lott at Fox News lists 5 "most over-the-top climate warnings," and in discussing them he quotes two Cornwall Alliance network scholars. The five warnings---all bogus---are that: Warming causes declining human birth rates (Morning Consult).We have "12 years left to live" because of it (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez---and lots of her acolytes in and out of Congress).Warming causes more tornadoes (Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, and others).Warming causes Indian tigers to eat more people (website … [Read more...]
New UN Report on Looming Mass Extinctions Exposed in US House Testimony
A new UN report warns that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades.” That allegation was contained within the 1,800-page Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) “Summary for Policy Makers,” released on May 6. If “decades” means 30 to 40 years, then the IPBES estimates an extinction rate of about 25,000 to 30,000 species annually. Not only are there a lot of species in peril, they asserted that “the threat of … [Read more...]
A Million Here, a Million There—Pretty Soon You’re Talking about Real Penguins
Eighty years ago, a museum curator aboard a fishing trawler in the Indian Ocean got a shock felt around the world. In a net full of mundane fish, he found one he'd never expected to see. It was a coelecanth. Why hadn't he expected to see it? Because ichthyologists (fish scientists) believed it had gone extinct 65 million years before. Yet there it was, flopping around, all too alive to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. The discovery shook the world of marine biologists. Fast forward … [Read more...]
One Little Piece of Eco-madness Croaks
Sanity has not perished from the earth, or even from the United States Supreme Court. Yes, it's an endangered species, but it shows up every once in a while. The big questions: can it survive, can it regrow, can it thrive? One sighting of sanity occurred today when SCOTUS ruled, unanimously, that a piece of land in Mississippi that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had designated "critical habitat" for the endangered "dusky gopher frog" was no such thing. "Why?" you might ask. Because … [Read more...]
How Are Polar Bear Extinction Fears Like Global Warming Fears?
By now the message is old hat to everybody, but in case you've forgotten, here's how Greenpeace puts it: "polar bears could completely disappear from the Arctic in the next 100 years if we don’t take action soon." Ah, right. Except that it's dead wrong. The chief reason? Just as is the case with fears of dangerous manmade global warming, those making the claim depend entirely on computer models, models that are at best not verified and at worst falsified by empirical observation—the "key to … [Read more...]
Protect Endangered Species on Valentine’s Day?
Valentine's Day. A day for lovers. But according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), it could be a very bad day for biodiversity. That's because, so goes the argument, what lovers (heterosexual lovers, anyway) do---not just on Valentine's Day but all year long---threatens to increase human population. And, as everyone knows, growing human population leads to more species extinctions. The CBD, citing Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, claims that "30,000 species per year (or three … [Read more...]
A Christian Perspective on Biodiversity: Anthropocentric, Biocentric, and Theocentric Approaches to Bio-Stewardship
Maintaining Biodiversity: A Generally Good End Whatever our assumptions, I think all of us here would agree that, in general, maintaining biodiversity is a good end. None of us would favor the willy-nilly elimination of species, subspecies, varieties, or even distinct populations of varieties of life. Yet I say that maintaining biodiversity is a good end "in general" because there are some limits to this end. Although there are others, I mention here just three. First, I trust that no one … [Read more...]
Why do Ranchers Grouse about Federal Regulations to Protect Sage Grouse?
One of the basic principles of environmental stewardship is that the people closest to a problem are likely to understand it best. Yes, there might be exceptions when experts from outside can come to understand it better, but what really happens in those instances is that the outsiders get up close. If they don't, they won't. A great illustration of this is the unintended consequences of federal regulations meant to protect sage grouse, an allegedly endangered species in some of the American … [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...]
