Earth Rising Blog

The climate change/global warming alarmist movement is desperate. Now, rather than openly debate the science surrounding this issue, attorneys general in multiple states are attempting to criminalize dissent. This seems an excellent time to review the theory of man-made climate change, the basics of which theory haven’t changed despite volumes of hot rhetoric by celebrities, politicians, beneficiaries of green subsidies, and climate alarmists in the scientific community whose funding depends on the existence of a climate crisis.

The brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking once said, “… you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.”

The original theory of global warming can be summarized thusly:

* Fossil fuels (including coal) give off carbon dioxide when burned.

* As the world’s population increases so does the burning of fossil fuels and thus the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

* Increased CO2 in the atmosphere creates a “greenhouse affect” (a blanketing of the earth’s upper atmosphere that reduces the escape of heat from the surface of the earth to outer space).

* Therefore as population and CO2 continue to increase, there will be a corresponding increase in the GLOBAL AVERAGE (Those two words are key. Climate alarmists would have us go into a policy panic over temperature increases in one region of the US. However those temperatures are not relevant to the discussion of GLOBAL warming. The theory is that GLOBAL average temperature will increase not the temperature of a single region) temperature of the earth.

* This increase is expected to result in the melting of polar ice, flooding, and more violent storms.

Skeptics did not define the theory of global warming; they merely tested it, which is what scientists should do. According to the scientific method, the presence or absence of warming in conjunction with CO2 increase is where the rubber meets the road in the climate debate. However, when we utilize our most accurate instrument data, we discover that over the past 18 years there has indeed been an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere but there has been no corresponding increase in global average temperature as was theorized.

Graph courtesy of Dr. Roy Spencer.com

As the graph shows, the centered average for Global Average Temperature (GAT) shows no upward trend since 1999. In addition, there were natural causes for the minor temperature delta prior to the year 2010 and in April and May of this year (The y-axis is shown in tenths of a degree and 2016 is an El Nino year.) Now, looking back to Hawking’s’ comment above, we can ask, “Have we not found the single scientific observation he was speaking about?”

I am not skeptical that there has been some warming over some timescales in our century, particularly through the 90’s; however, I am extremely skeptical that we have scientifically established causality. I do not believe that changes in climate are caused by man. Therefore, I do not believe the abandonment of fossil fuels is the solution to climate change. I do not even believe that a solution is needed because there can be no significant environmental impact to such miniscule changes in GAT. Those of us who believe that our God given coal resource should remain a viable component of our energy policy should also be allowed to drive the climate debate toward potential natural causes of climate change. We must focus the national discussion on lack of credible scientific evidence of man-made causality.

It is precisely the lack of observed warming, (which undermines the alarmists in their pursuit of research funds) which led first to the sudden name change from “global warming” to “climate change” and now to “global climate disruption”. Climate alarmists must now attempt to blame every snow storm and hurricane and drought that occurs on global warming/climate cha...

On May 29, 2016, a 3 or 4 year-old boy (sources differ on his age) was visiting the Cincinnati Zoo with his mother. As boys sometimes do, he got into trouble. In this case big trouble, life threatening trouble. He fell into the enclosure that housed a 450 pound male silverback gorilla named Harambe (for the meaning of Harambe click here).

It’s amazing the child survived the 10-foot fall into the enclosure. The water in the enclosure’s moat must have broken his fall. The danger was not over though. The gorilla approached the child, grabbed him, and dragged him around the moat like a toy. Bystanders and zoo officials were horrified. Zoo officials decided that the best course of action was to shoot the gorilla, which they did.

Harambe died.

The boy survived with only minor injuries.

In a normal culture, there would be a big sigh of relief followed by an appropriate investigation about the enclosure’s ability to keep people out. But as I have been writing for some time, we are not living in a normal culture. We are living in a time where animals have been elevated in status as humans have declined in status. Just look at the Honoring Harambe Facebook page. The URL says “Justice for Harambe” which suggests to this writer that some people think that Harambe’s rights were violated. Whatever the actual reasons were behind the choice of the URL, it is somewhat disturbing that 168,189 people liked the page (as of June 19, 2016).

Really folks?

Meanwhile people are being shot in Chicago, and now more recently in an Orlando mass shooting, and we are spending our time thinking about a gorilla?

Consider PETA’s blog which was titled, “Gorilla Pays with His Life for Others’ Negligence.”  While the blog was actually pretty tame, the title shows contempt for others, who the “others” are isn’t stated.

Change.org has a petition for what is being called “Harambe’s Law. The law would punish zoo visitors whose negligence resulted in the injury or death of an endangered species. It has 215,473 supporters as of June 19, 2016.

Interestingly, in both of these sites, the gorilla’s behavior is not blamed.

You may wonder why should the gorilla be blamed, the gorilla is just acting like a gorilla. Certainly, that is one way to look at it. The problem is the animal rights protest industry argues that humans shouldn’t treat animals like animals because we are just animals too.

So the question is, if humans are just animals then why are we held to moral account and other animals aren’t?

Couldn’t people say that we, as animals, are just acting like animals, and making mistakes? Why don’t people argue that the gorilla was complicit in his own killing because he should have known to leave the boy alone or at least to be able to follow the orders of his keepers?

If you are shaking your head, thinking “but Stephen, that is not how it works.” I would simply ask, then why is it that the animal rights position is heads the animal wins and tails the human loses?

I think I know the answer. But do you?

This article was originally published on The Stewards Blog.

Featured image courtesy of Brian Ford/FlickrCC 

Greenpeace, and quite a few of their allies, are being sued by Resolute Forest Products Inc. on charges of racketeering. The lawsuit comes in response to Greenpeace’s crusade accusing Resolute falsely of:

(a) ‘destroying endangered forests,’ and ‘operating and sourcing wood . . . in violation of law’; (b) causing the ‘destruction of endangered species’ and ‘critical caribou habitat’ and risking a ‘Caribou Herd Death Spiral,’ ‘extirpation’ and ‘extinction;’ (c) ‘abandoning’ and ‘impoverishing’ the Boreal’s indigenous communities; and (d) impairing the Boreal’s ability to mitigate climate change.

For a company that is recognized in North America and around the globe for leading the way in “social responsibility and sustainable development,” Resolute has received more than its share of radical environmental bullying. However, they aren’t sitting back, wringing their hands and trying to pacify the greenies. No way!

In a strong act of defiance, Resolute turned the tables on their accusers and brought a lawsuit against Greenpeace, and their associates, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia.

The extremely detailed complaint covers the gross falsities of the Greenpeace allegations.

Instead of destroying Boreal forests irresponsibly, in the areas that Resolute harvests trees, they immediately start the regeneration process naturally or with seeding or planting. Although Resolute plays a minor part in the less than 0.5% of the Canadian Boreal forest harvested annually, it has reduced its impact by planting over a billion trees in Ontario alone.

As for destroying the habitat of the caribou, in 2010 Resolute agreed with Greenpeace to operate outside the habitat of the threatened woodland caribou. Greenpeace conveniently overlooks the fact that the affected populations are extremely small in comparison with the rest of Quebec’s caribou, over 98% of which continue stable and self-sustained.

Another equally ignored fact is that Resolute brings employment and economic opportunities to the indigenous peoples while hindered by the difficult economic times and by Greenpeace itself.

Ironically the radical environmental agenda towards Resolute has had the direct effect of closing some businesses that were investing in the region, turning the whole “protect the indigenous peoples” line on its head.

The claims by Greenpeace that Resolute is destroying the ability of the forests to mitigate climate change goes against the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says that younger forest growth benefits the climate more than old growth. And Resolute has contributed far more than Greenpeace to the Boreal’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases.

Resolute’s legal counsel is conducting a thorough investigation of Greenpeace and has established a website to catalog information regarding the green group’s campaign and practices.

It’s refreshing to see an environmentally conscious and economically responsible business fight back against Greenpeace’s malicious attempt to beat it into submission.

Korea offers a tale of two cities, one that should give pause to anyone enamored of socialism.

At a recent UN Climate Summit, Bolivian Presidente Evo Morales said, “The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model.” Morales is just one of many in the Green movement who assume it is always bad to have growing business.

To be fair, many other people assume that economic growth must always be good. Surely there is a middle ground; everything humans do has a ripple effect to the rest of creation. That is why Jesus said that before a man begins to build he should carefully count the cost. We dare not act without careful consideration and accounting of the cost of our actions. One way to count the cost is to look at examples, to learn from the decisions of others and the consequences of those decisions.

Take North and South Korea. The two nations were created after World War II, separated at the 38th parallel by the demilitarized zone where Soviet and American troops met after liberating the unified Korea from 36 years’ occupation by the Japanese. North of the 38th parallel is Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Just 120 miles southwards is Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea.

The North embraced socialism and the South capitalism, offering us a kind of laboratory to compare the results.

Other laboratories exist — U.S. capitalism and Soviet socialism, and examples could be multiplied. However, no laboratory offers conditions as ideal for comparison as North and South Korea. Here we have a decades-long experiment beginning with almost identical social conditions, geography, race, climate and other factors that might influence the outcomes. The dominant dependent variable over more than seven decades is economic system.

The socialist government of North Korea bans private ownership and favors government ownership and control over the means of production. Socialists believe that removing individual freedom of economic and political action reduces inequality and thereby brings about a just society where everyone is equal. By contrast the South has an economic system much closer to capitalism, where legal conditions safeguard free and uncoerced exchange of goods and services.

One might object that neither is an ideal socialist or capitalist model. I agree completely. Utopia is impossible. But put side by side no one could mistake the system in Pyongyang as capitalism or in Seoul as socialism.

What, then, are some consequences of the differing choices?

North Korea is third world, and South Korea is now first world. North Koreans are the world’s most brutalized people. They endure severe restrictions on political and economic freedoms. They survive left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Tens of thousands have escaped to tell their stories.

Socialism: Poor and Environmentally Grubby

Evo Morales and other speakers at UN Climate Summits decry capitalist development models, but their socialist alternatives give no comfort. The twentieth century demonstrated that coercion is invariably necessary on a large scale to enforce scientific socialism. Socialist governments sought economic development, but their utopian policies resulted in most of the famine deaths of the twentieth century, in peacetime. Even apologists for socialism admit grim 

Is your Bible good enough to eat? This strange question occurred to me when I heard an interesting conversation between a student and her teacher.

The young girl questioned the teacher about the famous clock in London.

“You must mean, ‘Big Ben’,” said the teacher.

“Oh no,” said the student. “I mean, ‘Old Ben.’ And after that, can we please learn about the famine Bible in the British Museum, you know, the ‘Gluten Free Bible’?”

The Bible has been subjected to numerous gimmicks through the ages. One of the most recent is the “Green Bible” introduced for the first time in 2008.

The Green Bible, naturally printed with soy ink on recycled paper, was unveiled with support from the National Council of Churches and various environmentalist groups. Together with the actual Bible, the binding contains a series of essays on radical environmentalism.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote: “The Green Bible is a unique treasure for people who want to more fully live out the scriptural values of stewardship, love for their neighbors, and care for the underprivileged. It provides inspiration and valuable resources for contemplation, community building, and action on behalf of the planet.”

The famous Bible the little girl struggled to remember had, of course, nothing to do with gluten. She was thinking of the Gutenburg Bible. The ethos of the Green Bible is different from that of Johannes Gutenberg who, in Mainz, in the 1450s, took the invention of movable type and leveraged it to make the Bible available to the masses for the first time.

This iconic Gutenberg Bible is the gluten free version the little girl, in her mispronunciation, was thinking of. His Bible revolutionized the world and ushered in the age of the printed book. Forty-nine copies, or substantial portions of copies, survive, and they are considered to be among the most valuable books in the world.

The Green Bible is, by contrast, not designed to illuminate but to obfuscate. It is a marketing gimmick aimed to pander to a culture obsessed with green living and rising environmentalist sensibilities.

Richard Cizik, while still vice president for Governmental Affairs of the 30-million member National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), found the green letter Bible “exactly what the Church needs at this critical time,” because it will become a tool to highlight what mankind needs, namely, “urgent changes in values, lifestyles and public policies to avert disastrous changes in climate.”

Gutenburg’s Bible was designed to bring the Word of God to men, but the Green Bible uses the Word of God as a tool, a Trojan horse, to slip in politically correct values, lifestyles and public policies that may have little or nothing to do with the Bible.

Before Gutenberg, book production required laborious copying by hand. Gutenburg had a dream of placing Bibles in the hands of the people who had, until that time, been forbidden by the church to possess Bibles. It was the explosion of access to the Word of God that liberated Western culture from shackles of superstition and brought multitudes immediate access to the light of the gospel. Without Gutenberg’s invention, the Protestant Reformation would not have been possible.

Rather than seeing the Bible as the living Word of God, more powerful than any double-edged sword, the producers of the Green Bible see the Word of God as a marketing gimmick for the more important message of being green.

This emphasis is clear when Cizik notes that the green letter Bible is what the church needs at this critical time. Notice that he does not say the Bible is what the unbelieving world going to h...

“Recently I was foolish enough to try to reason with an environmentalist,” wrote Stanford economist Thomas Sowell. “But it became obvious that he had his mind made up and didn’t want to hear any evidence to the contrary. The pope is more likely to have read Karl Marx than an environmentalist is to have read even a single book that criticized environmentalism.”

One might say a lot about the Pope and Marx, but I want to focus on Sowell’s juxtaposition of the ideologies of socialism and environmentalism. Socialism is an economic and political ideology, but surely environmentalism is just a concern for the environment?

Sowell conflated these ideas because socialism and environmentalism have become opposite sides of the same coin. Socialists want to ban private ownership and favor government ownership and control over the means of production. Socialists believe that removing individual freedom of economic and political action results in a reduction of inequity and thereby brings about a just society in which everyone is equal.

But that seems a million light years away from the idea of cleaning up a roadside, protecting rare birds, or concern about polluted water. In such context the word ‘ideology’ seems inappropriate to apply to concern for a healthy environment. Most people, like myself, believe that it is proper and good to seek a fruitful and beautiful environment. If that is environmentalism then count me in.

Patrick Moore, a founder and past president of Greenpeace who has since left the group, prefers to call himself a ‘sensible environmentalist’ because he appreciates that the environmentalist movement has changed. It is, he says, no longer science based but “a political activist movement.” It has taken on the form of a total ideology erasing boundaries between radical activism and sensible environmentalism.

Moore identifies the point where the ideology of socialism co-opted ‘sensible’ environmentalism. In an interview with the Vancouver Sun he said, “The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology.”

Dany Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the group European Greens–European Free Alliance, exemplifies the all-too-common Marxist-Green connection. When he transformed himself from Dany the Red into Dany the Green he surfed the fashionable green political wave onto a deeper Red tide.

Cohn-Bendit said, “We have a project for Europe, an idea—the ecological transformation of our way of production and our way of life.” Says Dany the Green: “It’s for the survival of mankind.”

Self-described socialist activist Tom Athanasiou, director of U.S.-based EcoEquity, wrote “[E]nvironmentalism is only now reaching its political ...

George Orwell’s Animal Farm tells of the visionary pig Old Major, who had a dream that soon proved disastrous: “And now, comrades, I will tell you about my dream of last night. I cannot describe that dream to you. It was a dream of the earth as it will be when Man is forgotten.”

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is one example of organizations that hope to play an important role in furthering these goals. Its manifesto states: “Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.” Dense indeed. These folks may be the alleged sharp edge of environmentalism, but the same ethos is also expressed by Green celebrities who represent the dull and fuzzy parts.

In its 2014 report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed how the reduction through efficiency of CO2 emissions from hydrocarbon fuels was wiped out by population increase. In other words, all the interminable blather at climate summits, all the regulation to increase the cost of energy and thereby reduce CO2 emissions, all the trillions of tax dollars diverted to ‘renewables,’ the threats to persecute and imprison climate ‘criminals’ — all of it is just smoke and mirrors. None of it will stop the alleged manmade global warming unless, according to the United Nations, something is done to reduce human population.

It’s fairly likely that population will peak around mid-century and then begin declining at an accelerating rate that could leave the entire world’s population at under half a billion within a few centuries, with some demographers speaking of a coming population crunch. Yes, leading environmentalists predict global population to grow 50 to 100 percent this century and per capita consumption of energy and materials to increase with wealth, but they rarely explain that population growth is expected only in non-white races. Europe and the United States are growing only because of immigration. Their native-born populations fail to breed — perhaps because they are too busy saving the planet.

At a recent World Economic Forum in Davos, former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft’s Bill Gates discussed how population is the fulcrum of global warming, and that contraceptives are therefore key to fighting climate change. The African population, said Gore, is anticipated to exceed India’s and China’s by 2050 and be more than both combined by the end of the century.

If you understand population demographics you will see that Gates and Gore are tiptoeing. As an African, I find entertaining efforts by wealthy white environmentalists to explain in euphemism and allusion their belief that the real problem of climate change is the growth of brown and black populations in Asia and Africa.

Gates and Gore would never say it except in veiled language.

Instead they try to brainwash everyone with nonstop global warming campaigning. They explain that richer nations must be fleeced for global warming reparations, and that people in those nations should smile with ecological self-satisfaction as they are robbed of their hard-won liberties and prosperity. A recent report estimates that, based on the failed computer models, serious efforts to limit the worst effects of global warming

Mere Environmentalism, by Steven F. Hayward, is packed with a surprising amount of information about the broad subject of environmentalism, and includes information on the best way for Bible believing Christians to interact with it. There is more to be learned from a casual reading of this little book than from the majority of textbooks on the same subject.

This book is more than just a collection of facts and figures. Hayward presents each point in a short essay that clearly explains the idea, and gives the reader something to mentally chew on.

Hayward issues an encouraging, albeit blunt, charge to believers when he states that “Christians who confront environmental issues can make a significant contribution to progress in solving ecological problems.”

What are the origins of the modern environmental movement?

In what ways does that movement deviate from a worldview based on the word of God?

And how does it conform to the word of God?

How does economics, helping the poor, and caring for our natural world fit together?

These are just some of the pertinent questions that Hayward asks—focusing our attention on the foundational problems of a proper environmental ethic.

Hayward concludes by observing that “being more thoughtful through the perspective of faith is an important action step in our age—maybe the most important action of all.” Christians have a moral responsibility to be thoughtful stewards of the environment and not heedlessly acquiesce to current environmental fads.

For those interested in knowing what to believe about the true nature of the modern environmental movement, and how to respond to it, this book will prove invaluable.

In March a group of Democratic attorneys general formed “AG’s United for Clean Power.”

It sounds nice enough, doesn’t it? New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, standing beside a grinning Al Gore, announced that the gang was going after any energy providers and distributors who may have committed thought crimes such as questioning the human cause of the 0.8oC global warming since 1880.

MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen said the appropriate response to this tiny warming is to shrug and say, “So what?” It is a tiny fraction of the daily temperature change in most places, and a smaller fraction of the seasonal temperature change. But at the AGs’ meeting Al Gore called it a “climate crisis.”

The state AGs are in lockstep with federal Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who recently said she is considering legal actions against “climate change deniers” (a nonexistent species, since no one denies that climate changes).

You may wonder how this could be possible in the United States, where freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Constitution.

Imagine a society in which one is under near-ubiquitous surveillance. Such a vision is remarkably close to the reality of 21st century America, if the words of Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer are to be believed. In statements regarding a recent case he said, “If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.”

We’re already under a voluntary microscope with tools like Facebook. Small wonder that politicians desire a similar bonanza. With total data coverage, attorneys general will find it easy to harm those who are not in total support of correct political priorities. Justice Breyer thought such a possibility resembled, too closely for comfort, the dystopian society George Orwell wrote of in his novel 1984.

In more than this we resemble Orwell’s Oceania, which had its own form of twisted English called Newspeak. Newspeak was carefully devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. It made it difficult, nearly impossible, for the common prole to have incorrect ideas. Newspeak, as a mode of expression, acted to develop correct mental habits and make all other thoughts inconceivable.

“It was intended,” wrote Orwell, “that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought, that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc, should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

This brings me to global warming. The term occurs frequently in Al Gore’s 1992 book, Earth in the Balance (I stopped counting at 81 times). But when Mr. Gore stood beside the attorneys general there was not even a nostalgic reference to global warming. It has passed out of the memory tubes governed by Newspeak.

The problem with global warming is its precision. The words global and warming have precise and well-understood meanings. Global refers to an all-encompassing entity, in this case geographically specified—the planet Earth. Earth is a medium-sized planet located in space approximately 1.5×1011 m from its closest star. And Earth is warmer, on average, now than it was in the past—well, the late 14th through early 19th centuries, anyway. (It’s also cooler now, on average, than it was in the Holocene Climate Optimum, and probably also the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period, but polite conversation doesn’t encompass such inc...

Justice is a hot topic in today’s culture. People are very interested in determining whether justice is being properly and faithfully carried out. It is a common interest across cultures, and generates a huge amount of discussion about who receives it, how it is applied, when it is subverted, and what exactly “justice” means.

Why is it so important that people want justice and can it really be effectively applied across a broad landscape such as America?

Is it possible to have impartial justice?

What part does Christianity play in the softening or stiffening of justice?

Questions like these are needing to be answered in a time when the public is bombarded with pleas for action to help the ‘poor.’

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner carefully explains in Social Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel how justice is a multifaceted concept that unites “impartiality, rendering what is due, proportionality, and conformity with the standard of God’s law.” And although social justice may seem to fit the Christian idea of grace, it is not “justice” and soon takes on a tyranny all its own if not balanced by Biblical thinking.

In a clear, succinct way Dr. Beisner helps the reader answer tough questions and think critically through the booklet, showing that justice is first of all a Biblical idea and that it has repercussions for all of society, not just the areas that garner public attention. For a short but thought provoking explanation of justice and its implications Social Justice is an excellent resource.