Evangelicals and other religiously-inclined are now uniting their voices against ruinous policies on climate change. The “We Get It!” campaign seeks one million signers to their declaration and will probably get it with such illustrious partners as Dr. James Dobson, Family Research Council, WallBuilders, Concerned Women for America, Janet Parshall, senators and congressmen, and nearly a hundred pastors, Christian leaders, policymakers, theologians, and state organizations.
Their press conference yesterday included choice comments. Cal Beisner, the leader of the campaign and the national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance, believes there have been attempts to portray a major shift of evangelicals towards embracing catastrophic global warming, which is simply not true. Representing the Southern Baptist Convention, Barrett Duke asked, “How can you create policy on unsettled science?” He also pointed out that, more than on any other issue, polls show evangelicals aren’t following the US mainstream on global warming—they are rejecting the alarmists’ predictions.
Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), a white Republican, and Bishop Harry Jackson (High Impact Leadership Coalition), a black Democrat, were promoting their new book “Personal Faith, Public Policy” and suggesting that one can be green without being gullible. Jackson called global warming a civil rights issue because the poor have “no microphone and their interests are considered last.”
The declaration can be signed at www.We-Get-It.org, and may also be forwarded to interested friends.
Hurricanes and tropical storms will become less frequent by the end of the century as a result of climate change, US researchers have suggested.
Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne on Wednesday announced that he had decided to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. He also announced that the regulatory reach of the listing would be limited by invoking exemptions under section 4(d) so that it could not be used to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The Pacific Legal Foundation immediately announced that they would file suit to block the listing. Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council immediately sent out action alerts and fundraising appeals announcing that the listing was just the first step. Now they would have to sue to overturn the 4(d) limits, so that the listing could be used to stop oil and gas exploration and production in the Arctic and to challenge the construction of new emitting sources, such as coal or gas-fired power plants.
My view, and also that of Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.), is that the decision is based on junk science—specifically, computer models that predict increased summer melting of the Arctic Ocean ice sheet. It has been shown empirically that these models lack predictive capability. The Department of the Interior should have applied the minimal standards required by the Federal Data Quality Act to disregard the model predictions.
Although the tide is turning against energy-rationing policies in the U. S. Senate (and in the European Union, especially in Britain), Senator John McCain (R-Az.) is staying true to the old religion in his presidential campaign. He laid out his global warming policies in a speech at a Danish company’s wind turbine factory in Portland, Oregon on Monday. McCain used the venue to say that, “When we debate energy bills in Washington, it should be more than a competition among industries for special favors, subsidies, and tax breaks. In the Congress, we need to send the special interests on their way….” The Energy Information Administration reported that wind power receives federal subsidies of $23.37 per megawatt hour of electricity produced. Coal gets 44 cents and natural gas 25 cents. However, the subsidies provided to wind and solar power are not enough to make them competitive without state and renewable mandates.
This morning, at the National Press Club in Washington D. C., Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) will announce that more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition rejecting claims of global warming alarmism. The complete list will be available at www.petitionproject.org at 10:00 AM.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
The topic of rising food (and feed for livestock) prices, partly as a result of ethanol subsidies (an incentive to burn our food), has been discussed much in this space. Well, now the effect has trickled down to our beloved pets.
Keep an eye on Fido.
During his 1999 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, the New York Times reported that John McCain told a group of college students that there was still a lot he didn't know about global warming. "I don't claim to be an expert on the issue," he said.
On May Day, Noah Keenlyside of Germany's Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, published a paper in Nature forecasting no additional global warming "over the next decade."
In an effort to win over those "moderates" who believe that global warming is about to destroy the planet, Republican presidential candidate John McCain spoke Monday at a Portland, Ore., training facility for Vestas Wind Technology. He claimed, "The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington."
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