So Much for Global Warming

Forerunner, "WorldWatch," January-February 2009

If nothing else, it would be great theater to watch Al Gore and all the other apostles of global warming have to explain before Congress why America should spend billions of dollars on "green" initiatives like "cap and trade" when the data show the earth has not experienced overall warming since 2001. Of course, this will never happen because, as Gore and the mainstream media have already stated, the debate is over. Global warming, caused by human activity, is a fact and here to stay, whether we like it or not and all facts to the contrary notwithstanding.

Other than this "debate is over" statement being an out-and-out lie, it is audacious and tyrannical in its dismissal of the opposing viewpoint and its adherents. The idea of imminent and catastrophic climate change has become so politically correct that any naysaying is summarily condemned as heresy—and the naysayer, be he genius or merely commonsensical, is hysterically tagged as a "climate-change skeptic," a label that will kill any of his hopes for promotion, grant money, or media attention, should he desire it.

But the rest of us, the average Joe and Jane Public, have noticed that the weather patterns over the past few years have not supported all the hot air coming from the global warming crowd. In fact, Lord Christopher Monckton, who once advised British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, reported in his keynote address to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change that temperatures "have been plummeting at a rate equivalent to 11 Fahrenheit degrees per century throughout the four years since Gore launched his mawkish, sci-fi comedy horror B-movie [An Inconvenient Truth]."¹ In other words, the earth is cooling faster than it was warming!

How has this happened? Clearly, despite humanity's tendency to pollute and corrupt various areas on the planet—a tendency God promises to punish mankind for (Revelation 11:18)—the ability of man to effect drastic, catastrophic climate change, short of a nuclear exchange, is nominal. While many scientists claim that routine human activities like driving automobiles and mowing lawns cause global warming, they have so far been unable to marshal the facts to support this assertion. Even adding bovine flatulence to the mix—an action gaining support among greens worldwide—cannot account for climate change.

David mused, though admittedly on another subject, "What is man?" (Psalm 8:4). Next to the great processes of nature that God designed and that we still do not understand or appreciate, mankind stands puny and weak. It would take a force of far greater energy and magnitude to produce sudden, global climate change. That colossal force is our own sun.

Recent observations of the sun, compared to historical records of sunspot activity, tell us what is actually happening. John L. Casey, Director of the Space and Science Research Center, states in a January 1, 2009, letter to then-President-elect Barack Obama's nominated science adviser, Dr. John Holdren, and nominated NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco: "[G]lobal warming is over; a new cold climate has arrived."

Casey's letter explains that our instruments are detecting no significant sunspot or solar flare activity. Solar activity is a measure of the sun's overall power output, which varies in cycles of 11 years. Yet, in this cycle, the sun has been alarmingly quiet—so quiet that some scientists wonder if we are entering a new Maunder Minimum, a climate event that signals frigid winters and cold summers and that can last as long as a century. Writes Casey:

According to national and international sources that monitor the Sun, what is happening on and in the Sun is nothing short of record setting, astounding, and at the same time worrisome. The solar wind is at its lowest level in fifty years. The surface movement on the Sun has slowed to record rates and according to NASA's previous announcements is "off the bottom of the charts." Most telling is the current prolonged lack of sunspots between the normal 11 year solar cycles 23 and 24 which is about to set a one hundred year record for time without sunspots. NASA also has long since forecast that cycle 25 will be "one of the weakest in centuries." All of these events in combination leave little doubt that a "solar hibernation" lasting several decades delivering the coldest weather in over two centuries has in fact arrived.²

The unfortunate—and perhaps ultimately tragic—reality is that these scientific facts make no difference to those pushing the global warming agenda. The reason for this political shrug of the shoulders is that for a long time the environmental movement has been less interested in nature than in money and control. Its adherents have rather used nature to their advantage to extort money from both the public and private sectors and to wrest political control to force draconian changes on governments, particularly the United States. That nature is not cooperating by cooling instead of warming has forced the environmental movement cynically to change its focus from "global warming" to "climate change."

This means that its aims to legislate "cap and trade" rules will move forward. Its insistence on often unreliable³ compact fluorescent light bulbs—which due to containing five milligrams of mercury are themselves hazardous if broken, and thus they cannot simply be thrown away⁴—will continue. Though on-site measurements show the opposite, its hysterical claims that sea levels are rising and that various Pacific islands such as the Maldives and Tuvalu will succumb to the waves will still be brought forward as "proof" of catastrophic climate change.⁵ And most famously, pictures of polar bears on supposedly shrinking icebergs will still be used to tug at our heartstrings (of course, data that the polar bear population is actually holding steady or even rising slightly will go unmentioned).⁶

In the meantime, we might do well to buy a good coat.

Endnotes

¹ Lord Christopher Monckton, "Great Is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things," Telegraph.co.uk, March 12, 2009 (http://www.heartland.org/full/24881/Great_Is_Truth_and_Mighty_Above_All_Things.html).
² John L. Casey, Space and Science Research Center Press Release, January 8, 2009 (http://www.spaceandscience.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/ssrcpressrelease12009.doc).
³ Leora Broydo Vestel, "Do New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don't Work?" NYTimes.com, March 27, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/business/energy-environment/28bulbs.html?_r=2&hp).
⁴ Joseph Farah, "Consumers in dark over risks of new light bulbs," WND.com, March 16, 2007 (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55213).
⁵ Christopher Booker, "Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told,'" Telegraph.co.uk, March 28, 2009 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html).
⁶ Juliet O'Neill, "Canada not holding back on polar bear protection: Prentice," Canwest News Service, March 19, 2009(http://www.canada.com/Technology/story.html?id=1406966).

Climate Change and World Peace

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All hail Al Gore, the winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize!

This is the near-unanimous cry of the mainstream media news hawkers this morning. Gore—former U.S. Vice President and darling of liberals, Hollywood, and tree-huggers everywhere—received the Peace Prize for preaching the gospel of manmade climate change around the world and urging radical measures to counteract the "imminent" threat. Supporters here in the U.S. are hoping that this honor will convince Gore to reconsider running for President in 2008.

Gore shares the prestigious award with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous IPCC. Gore lauds the IPCC as the "world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis." The vast majority of news reports on this story will ignore the fact that the IPCC's reports on climate change have been repeatedly shown to be U.N. policy statements hiding behind a tissue of dubious scientific research. A quick comparison of the last several reports by the panel reveals the IPCC backtracking on its estimates on the severity of global warming—to the point that its projections now fit comfortably into historical warming and cooling trends. After removing the hysteria caused by activists like Al Gore, the global warming "threat" turns out to be little more than a normal temperature fluctuation.

Gore himself, along with his so-called documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, has recently come under fire for false and misleading statements. London's Daily Mail reports that a British High Court judge ruled this week that the movie is "alarmist," "exaggerated," and "one-sided." Further, showing the film in schools disregards British education policies unless accompanied by guidance notes to balance its partisan stance. While opining that An Inconvenient Truth was "broadly accurate" on climate change, High Court Justice Burton listed nine scientific errors asserted as facts in the film. These included the estimated rise of sea levels (Gore claimed a catastrophic rise of twenty feet in the "near future"), the correlation between the increase in the CO₂ level and temperature, and his declarations that global warming has caused or will cause the shut down of the Gulf Stream, the drying of Lake Chad, the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, the evacuation of Pacific Ocean atolls, the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the bleaching of coral reefs, and the drowning of polar bears. Although the film's supporters will never admit it, the judge's findings, which the Daily Mail dubs "inconvenient untruths," effectively gut the documentary of its most essential, emotional points.

In the months leading up to the bestowal of the prize on Gore and the IPCC, there was little doubt about who would win it. Several other candidates had been under consideration by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but Gore was the frontrunner from the beginning of the process. According to its press release, the Committee's reason for awarding the Peace Prize to Gore and the IPCC is "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." In justifying its choice, the Committee attempts to link the prospect of "extensive climate changes [that] may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind" with the possibility that such change "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. . . . There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, with and between states" (emphasis ours).

So, the most prestigious award in all the world is given because the Nobel Committee, determining from backpedaling IPCC reports that manmade climate change is real, foresees that it might cause groups to migrate, compete, and engage in conflict over resources. As the Committee also wrote, "Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds." Such is the tenuous link between climate change and world peace. Rather than awarding the prize to someone or some group that is actually doing something now to foster peace between peoples, the Committee chose to laud Gore and the IPCC for perhaps reducing future conflicts by increasing awareness that climate change may disturb the present harmony among nations and ethnic groups over resources.

It appears that the members of the Nobel Committee live in a sealed environment cut off from the real world. There are many real conflicts raging right now over earth's precious resources. In fact, one can argue that the world's spotlighted conflict, the Iraq War and its aftermath, is a struggle over Middle East oil, the fuel of the world's economy. In addition, the migrations of workers from poor to rich countries—for example, Hispanics into America and Muslims into Europe—are related to a lack of resources in their homelands and an abundance of them in the developed nations, and they are creating conflict. Yet, none of these present-day confrontations have been set off by manmade climate change, today's cause célèbre, so the supposed prevention of hypothetical future conflicts becomes the reason for Gore's selection. What a peacemaker he might be!

What a mockery of peacemaking! The Nobel Peace Prize has degenerated into a political farce to legitimatize select globalist ideas and movements. The climate change mantra is not being used to bring peace but to assert control over human activity, to urge the ratification and enforcement of treaties, laws, and regulations that limit rights and progress, especially in industrialized, developed nations in the West. Peace is liberating, but the politics of green are ultimately to gain power over large segments of humanity in the name of environmental sustainability. Such control and power in human hands will not bring peace but more war.

God says, "The way of peace they have not known, and there is no justice in their ways; they have made themselves crooked paths; whoever takes that way shall not know peace" (Isaiah 59:8). Human nature makes it impossible for mankind to make a lasting peace; men and women are always too willing to fight for their self-interests (see James 4:1-3). Peace will come to mankind only when Christ returns in power and, ironically, forces humanity to live His way of peace. As Zechariah 9:9-10 says of Him, "Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation. . . . [T]he battle bow shall be cut off. He shall speak peace to the nations; His dominion shall be 'from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.'" This is the real, glorious peace prize we seek.

A Day of Inconvenient Truths

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Former presidential candidate and senator from Tennessee, Albert Gore, Jr., spent the first half of 2006 jet setting throughout the United States and Europe to tout his new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In it, he proclaimed the end of the world as we know it, but despite his Bible Belt origins, his apocalyptic vision does not include even a whiff of biblical prophecy. He is a proponent of sudden, disastrous, worldwide climate change due to global warming, the kind imagined in another recent movie, The Day After Tomorrow. So, any day now—perhaps even as soon as this coming Sunday—everyone north of the Tropic of Cancer or thereabouts will either be frozen solid or huddled, shivering and blue, in their own custom igloos.

The irony of the Gore movie's title is delicious, right alongside Bill "The Gambler" Bennett's Book of Virtues and the late Sam Walton's Made in America. An Inconvenient Truth purports to marshal the facts on global warming and predicts the dire consequences of ignoring them. Yet, the movie itself turns a blind eye to the mounds of scientific evidence that contradict its premise. They are themselves rather inconvenient.

For instance, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels has written two well-documented books, The Satanic Gases and Meltdown, both of which conclusively explain that, while there has been some increase in global temperatures over the past few decades, the warming trend has been quite gradual and natural—and certainly will not produce catastrophic results. In fact, temperatures rose much more rapidly in the decades before 1940, and there were no adverse effects then. Michaels' offerings are just a few of the many books and studies published in the last few years to balance the environmentalist left's Chicken Little scenario.

That is exactly what it is: a fake crisis, based loosely on debatable science, promoted to advance a political agenda. As Michael Crichton explained in his book, State of Fear, movers and shakers of all stripes have learned that manufacturing crises, producing doubt and fear in the populace, opens the electorate to suggestion and manipulation. Although these influential members of society and advocacy groups assert the truth is on their side, they really care little about it. Their first rule is "the ends justify the means."

In the past few weeks, another issue has moved forward in the face of inconvenient facts. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel, a Democrat and soon-to-be powerful House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, has pledged to introduce a bill to reinstate involuntary conscription to the U.S. military—the draft. The crisis he has created, along with willing abettors in the mainstream media, is that of class warfare. He claims that the poor and disadvantaged comprise a disproportional percentage of the armed forces. In other words, the wealthy and elite in this country do not contribute their fair share to the nation's defense in terms of manpower.

What are the inconvenient truths that Rangel ignores? The Heritage Foundation's Dr. Tim Kane has engaged in an exhaustive study of the composition of U.S. military recruits since 1999. He and his associates have found that Representative Rangel has reached the exact opposite conclusion to the facts. For instance, Kane's "Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003–2005" relates:

The current findings show that the demographic characteristics of volunteers have continued to show signs of higher, not lower, quality. . . . Those who have been so quick to suggest that today's wartime recruits represent lesser quality, lower standards, or lower class should be expected [to] make an airtight case. Instead, they have cited selective evidence, which is balanced by a much clearer set of evidence showing improving troop quality.

. . . For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. This claim has been advanced without any rigorous evidence. Our review of Pentagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005. . . .

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004–2005) support the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight differences are that wartime U.S. military enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on average than their civilian peers. (Emphasis ours.)

What is Representative Rangel up to? How can he ignore such obvious facts? He is advancing a political agenda to punish the wealthy and privileged, as he imagines them, and to extort money and benefits for his poor and downtrodden constituents, as they are only in his own mind. Stripped of all its rhetoric, his proposal is sheer socialism, arbitrarily redistributing wealth and advantage to those who have shown no inclination to earn it for themselves. But then, socialists have never let the truth weigh them down.

As Christians, as keepers of the Ten Commandments, we are bound to the truth. Whatever kind of truth it is—religious, scientific, political, social, financial—we must give it its due regard. Yet, we live in a nation—in a world—in which the pursuit and respect for truth is waning and almost gone. God says through Jeremiah: "'And like their bow they have bent their tongues for lies. They are not valiant for the truth on the earth. For they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know Me,' says the LORD" (Jeremiah 9:3).

But we do know Him, and we have a responsibility to "buy the truth, and sell it not" (Proverbs 23:23, KJV). As liars and deceivers increase (II Timothy 3:13), we must be on the lookout for those who press on with their agendas despite the inconvenient truths of reality. No good end will come on those whose lives are built on lies.

Storm of the Century

Over the past two days, more than fifteen inches of snow fell on south Charlotte where I live, encasing everything in a thick, crystalline blanket. My house, topped with more than a foot of white stuff, looks like some mad, Southern imitation of a Courier and Ives picture, even to the wisps of smoke escaping from the chimney. Sadly, the old, grey car parked in my driveway in no way resembles the ubiquitous sleigh in those wintry illustrations.

Statistically, this weather system produced the storm of the century for the region. The Charlotte area—which averages about one snowstorm a year, and that of only a few inches—had not received this much snow at once since 1902. In this metropolitan area of more than a million people, a frozen deluge like this one brings everything to a slippery halt, since the city owns only two-dozen trucks that can be used for salting and plowing the roads. According to the city fathers (and mothers), its money is better spent on building an arena for billionaire Robert "Bobcat" Johnson and implementing an unnecessary light-rail system. No amount of money is too much to spend to make Charlotte a "World-Class City"! Meanwhile, they warn that our dire financial circumstances warrant future tax increases.

Children love days like this. For starters, they are out of school, even my home-schooled kids. There is no sense making them slog away at the books when all their neighborhood friends are out sledding (down my driveway, of course), throwing snowballs at each other (from behind their newly constructed "forts"), eating snow (either inadvertently from a snowball in the face or deliberately), carving snow angels (and—mothers love this—getting soaking wet in the process), and building snow men (and women). On days like these, our clothes dryer gets a good workout, as each kid comes in at least twice to disrobe, go to the bathroom, grab a snack, and don a new set of warm clothes for the next go-round. In the meantime, Mom loads the dryer to be prepared for their inevitable return to repeat the process.

Dogs enjoy days like this too—at least my dog, Sydney, does. She is a black Labrador Retriever-Border Collie mix, but her genes seem heavy on the Lab part. In the snow, stark black against the glistening white, she is in her element (Labrador Retrievers were developed in Newfoundland). Even though the snow had piled higher than her back, she was game, bounding over the drifts as a dolphin hurdles the waves. She ate the snow just as much as the boys did, and then she was back to racing among them and trying her best to involve herself in their games.

Around here, though, the fun of a snowstorm is over all too quickly. The temperatures rarely remain cold enough for the snow to linger very long. Two days, maybe three, and the snow has melted, making the ground sodden and in some places muddy. The pristine glitter and excitement of freshly fallen snow give way to a big, wet mess.

Certainly, the city cannot remain under the spell of a rare snowfall for more than a day or so. Parents have to get back to the old grind, businesses need to make their profits, and government must return to spending its citizens' money profligately. The supermarkets need to restock their bread and milk, and the hardware stores must reorder batteries, snow shovels, and space heaters. And the snowplow drivers, electrical linemen, and emergency workers need a little time off—not to mention the intrepid meteorologists.

I have learned one lesson from this massive, once-in-a-century storm: As technologically advanced as we are, as much as we claim to have conquered nature, it is an empty boast. The forces involved in something this huge are far beyond mankind's ability to influence, much less control. This storm should give even the environmentalists pause in their wrong-headed push to convince us that man has caused global warming.

It reminds me of what God said to Job to cut him down to size: "Have you entered the treasury of snow, or have you seen the treasury of hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war?" (Job 38:22-23). Or, what David said to God, "What is man that You are mindful of him? And the son of man that You visit him?" (Psalm 8:4). We are so puny, and if it takes the storm of the century to make this point, then it is a good thing. Fun too.