American Policy Center » 2006 » May
- Fanatics, Heretics and the Truth about Global Warming
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- “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
- “No study to date had positively attributed all or part of the climate change to …man-made causes.”
- Critical Thinking: or Making Me the Straw Man
- Landowner’s Coalition Demands Repeal of ESA
May 24, 2006
By Tom DeWeese
“Oceans lash our coasts. Deserts Burn. The sky provides no shelter. Turmoil of Biblical proportions threatens not just our weather but life itself. Global Warming is upon us.”
Those words aren’t from the preview trailer of the silly, overblown, over dramatic film, “Day After Tomorrow” that invaded movie theaters a few years ago. And they aren’t just carefully selected “scare” words developed from a sweep through a thesaurus. These are the opening words to yet another hysterical diatribe passing as news these days on the subject of Global Warming. This particularly silly one greeted readers of a recent issue of Playboy Magazine. The article was, of course, accompanied by the obligatory pictures of smokes stacks belching over a city and the melting of ice burgs.
You hear it everywhere. Global Warming is a fact. It is here. It is now unstoppable. The Polar Ice Cap is melting. Polar Bears are endangered. Greenland is actually turning green! Hurricanes are blowing with more force. Tornadoes are growing in numbers. Water levels are increasing, threatening to flood New York City. Human existence is threatened. And, of course, the deserts are starting to burn. We are assured that scientists are in near total agreement with the assessment.
The media is in a frenzy, rushing to report the latest news release from special interest groups with the latest report or prediction. Al Gore is rushing his hi tech docudrama to the theaters to whip up more frenzy. Corporations are being forced to turn “green” to show their “corporate social responsibility” in the wake of the coming disaster.
Global Warming has become a euphemism for a political agenda. There is Socialism, Capitalism and Global Warmingism. It has become a religion run by fanatics reminiscent of the leaders of the darkest days of the Inquisition that nearly destroyed civil society only a few hundred years ago. We are not to question the great god of Global Warming. Those who do are separated from civil society and labeled as heretics.
So how can anyone question the decrees handed down from the Ivory Towers to the unwashed masses? Answer: every religion has its heretics.
The simple truth is there is no scientific consensus on Global Warming. In fact, as the media frenzy screams global warming, there are a growing number of scientists who are expressing their doubts.
In 1992, just prior to the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders signed The Heidelberg Appeal, a quiet call for reason in dealing with the climate change issue. Neither a statement or corporate interests, nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world’s ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears. Today, the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by more than 4,000 scientists and leaders from 100 countries, including more than 70 Nobel Prize winners.
Also in 1992, another statement from some 47 atmospheric scientists was issued saying “such policies (greenhouse global warming theories) derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. The statement cited a survey of atmospheric scientists, conducted in the summer of 1991, “confirms that there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century.” The statement went on to say, “We are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science.”
In 1995, over 85 scientists and climate experts from research labs and universities worldwide, signed the Leipzig Declaration in answer to the International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy, held in Leipzig, Germany that year. In part, the Declaration says; “In a world in which poverty is the greatest social pollutant, any restriction on energy use that inhibits economic growth should be viewed with caution. For these reasons, we consider ‘carbon taxes’ and other drastic control policies – lacking credible support from the underlying science – to be ill-advised, premature, wrought with economic danger, and likely to be counterproductive.”
In 1997, a Gallop Poll of eminent North American climatologists shows that 83% did not support the claims of the green house theory of Global Warming.
In 1998, The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) issued a petition for signature by atmospheric scientists saying there is no scientific evidence indicating that greenhouse gases cause global warming. That petition was signed by more than 17,000 scientists and leaders involved in the issue.
Global Warming scaremongers have tried to discredit these statements from the opposition, saying either they are too old to be counted in today’s debate or that they weren’t signed by real scientists. Neither is true. One only has to look at the signers on the documents and statements to know who and what they are. The relevance of the documents can be answered in two ways. First, most of the signers of these documents from the 1990’s hold the same positions today. Second, as is the fallacy in the Global Warming debate, such drastic climate changes, as described in the scaremongers diatribes, would not come about overnight. Though the proponents would have you believe otherwise, 15 years is but a microsecond in the study of the earth’s activities.
However, there is great question about the validity of the documents promoted by the Global Warming crowd. There is strong, documented evidence to show they care little about sound science and facts and much more about their political agenda.
For example, in May of 1996, unannounced and possibly unauthorized changes to the United Nation’s report on climate change touched off a firestorm of controversy within the scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the science group that advises the United Nations on the global warming issue, presented a draft of its report in December 1995, and it was approved by the delegations. However, when the printed report appeared in May 1996, it was discovered that substantial changes and deletions had been made to the body of the report to make it conform to the Policymakers Summery. Specifically, two key paragraphs written by the scientists were deleted. They said:
That was not the last time data has been manipulated by the IPCC to fit its political agenda. In 2005, a federal hurricane research scientist named Chris Landsea resigned from the UN-sponsored IPCC climate assessment team because his group’s leader had politicized the process. Landsea said in his resignation letter, “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity had been due to global warming.” He went onto say, “I personally cannot in good faith contribute to a process that I view as being both motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”
In 2006, the voices of reason are speaking out louder than ever. Professor Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, says the global warming theory is neither environmental or scientific, but rather, “a self-created political fiasco.” Carter explains that “Climate changes occur naturally all the time, partly in predicable cycles and partly in unpredictable cycles.”
Meanwhile, more than 60 leading international climate change experts have gone on record to urge Canada’s new Prime Minster to carefully review global warming policies, warning that ‘”Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause.”
In April, 2006, using temperature readings from the past 100 years, 1,000 computer simulations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings, Duke University scientists announced that “the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions.” The study was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Gabriele Hegerl of Duke’s Nicholas Schools of the Environment and Earth Sciences said her study discounts dire predictions of skyrocketing temperatures.
In 2004 the Heartland Institute published a report by Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Lindzen reported that global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol. Lindzen, a member of the IPCC and one of the world’s leading climatologists, said that alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science.
Said Dr. Lindzen, “With respect to science, consensus is often simply a sop to scientific illiteracy. After all, if what you are told is alleged to be supported by all scientists, then why do you have to bother to understand it? You can simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief, and you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists except for a handful of corrupted heretics.”
So why, if scientists are researching the issue and if there is no consensus that global warming is a reality, is this voice not being heard? Why is a near panic building in the news media, on Capitol Hill and in research labs across the nation and in the international community?
Answer: fear and money.
Simply put, scientists know where the grants will come from to pay their salaries. Dr. Patrick Michaels, a leading opponent to the global warming scaremongers, calls it the federal/science paradigm. He describes it this way: Tax $ = Grants = Positive Feedback Loop to Get more Grants.
Says Dr. Michaels, “What worker bee scientist is going to write a proposal saying that global warming is exaggerated and he doesn’t need the money? Certainly no one wanting advancement in the agency! There is no alternative to this process when paradigms compete with each other for finite funding.” The only ones who can openly oppose the party line of the day are those who don’t need the grants or who have some other source of funding. There aren’t many.
The money is in global warming because it’s being pushed by a political agenda that wants power. Power in Washington. Power on the international stage. Power over economic development. Power over international monetary decisions. Power over energy. In short, power over the motor of the world. It’s driven by literally thousands of large and small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sanctioned by the United Nations, and implemented by a horde of bureaucrats, university academics and an ignorant but pliable news media.
Case in point. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) used to publish the journal Science. Since 2000, it has published roughly 75 commentaries which have supported the idea that global warming is a serious problem requiring massive solutions. Now, the AAAS acts as a massive lobbying operation pushing this agenda. Taxpayers have now provided $20 billion into the scientific community for global warming work.
Moreover, Science and its British counterpart Nature won’t publish articles to the contrary of the agenda. If a scientist wants the prestige of being published, then he must carry the global warming banner.
According to Dr. Michaels, this is how it works: “They take a little truth and distort it or study it into a lot of revenue for them. Them = Academia + Environmental non governmental organizations + private scientific fields + Government + all the associated public and private organizations supporting this shell.”
Concludes Dr. Michaels in his landmark book, Meltdown, “This junk science works for the fish movement, smart growth, sustaining development, rapid transit, wet lands, critical areas, water rights, property rights, fossil fuels, logging, justifying huge government and environmental land wildlife corridor buy ups with public money, changing regulatory laws, changing high court opinions, escalating enforcement codes, on and on.” It’s all thrown into the offering plate as the taxpayer sits in the pew of the Church of Global Warming.
Federal spending on climate research has ballooned since the early 1990’s from a few hundred million dollars to $1.7 billion today. As Dr. Michaels points out, scientists who don’t toe the party line don’t share in that bounty.
Blasphemy or not, here’s the truth about Global Warming.
As reported by Dr. Lindzen, “The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease – both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6 degrees C (or about 1 degree F) over the past century is likely. A relevant question is whether this is anything to worry about.”
Professor Bob Carter says the pubic has been brainwashed by politicians and bureaucrats into believing world industrialization has created “climate change” that will lead to widespread disaster. However, he shows that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940 before industrialization really began, followed by a cooling between 1940 and 1965, a period during which human-caused emissions were accelerating.
In fact, looking deeper into history reveals that global warming and cooling are simply a regular occurrence. According to Robert Essenhigh, Professor of energy conservation at Ohio State University, the ice sheets at the poles have been melting since the early 1900’s and the Earth’s warming had begun about the middle 1600s.
That warming trend followed a 300 – 400 year cooling period, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, which came after the much hotter Medieval Warm Period, running roughly A.D.900 to 1300. During that period, the Vikings had two settlements on the west coast of Greenland. The settlements vanished with the onset of the Little Ice Age. This is the same area global warming scare mongers are panicked over because some grass is now growing there. In fact, history shows such growth is nothing new.
We are told, however that man-made carbon dioxide is the source of the global warming problem. As Professor Essenhigh asks, “what has carbon dioxide to do with this”?
He explains, “the two principled thermal-absorbing and thermal-emitting compounds in the atmosphere are water and carbon dioxide. However – and this point is continually missed – the ratio of water to carbon dioxide is something like 30-to-1 as an average value. At the top it is something like 100-to-1. This means that the carbon dioxide is simply ‘noise’ in the water concentration, and anything carbon dioxide could do, water has already done.” “So,” he asks, “if the carbon dioxide is increasing, is it the carbon dioxide driving the temperature or is the rising temperature driving up the carbon dioxide“? In other words, the carbon dioxide issue is irrelevant to the debate over global warming.
But what about all of those storms? We can see the weather changing before our eyes, we’re told. We are experiencing death, destruction, plagues, extinction, biblical catastrophes at alarming rates. Any fool can see… Those reports simply show how effective the propaganda machine has been.
The truth about the hurricanes is that during the past 35 years, the average number of “significant” tropical cyclones in the southern regions, including the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Indian Ocean, is about 28.5 storms per year. The breakdown by decade is: 1970s – 32.9; 1980s- 27.8; 1990s – 29.1; and the 2000s, so far – 25.0 It is interesting to note that so far in the 2000s the numbers are actually below average. Even if one calculates just the last ten years it only amounts to 28.5 – well within the average.
The fact is, researchers are now looking into Hurricane Katrina to determine its true strength. It is currently listed as a category 4 storm. But will probably be downgraded to a category 3. It is important to remember that the disaster of New Orleans was a result of bad government not taking care of the levies. There was relatively little actual hurricane damage.
Ice is melting on the edge of the caps because it always melts in the summer. But research shows that the core of the ice is actually thicker than ever. And the burning deserts? Well, that’s what deserts do, isn’t it?
It’s easy to distort the facts when you start from the premise that global warming is a fact and then one must only gather details to support the premise. It’s easy to find film footage of natural occurrences like melting ice and beached whales and then put your own caption on it — especially when you are armed with millions of dollars in grant money and an impressive title to go with it. A published report in a prestigious magazine accompanied by a news story in a major news paper will lead to speeches in front of a gathering of ones peers and on to a book deal. It’s good to go along to get along.
So look out this summer. The Global Warming machine will be in full charge mode as Al Gore invades theaters with his new documentary entitled “An Inconvenient Truth.” The primal panic will reach a deafening scream, sure to drown out the voice of reason and truth. The one that says there is no global warming!
May 10, 2006
By Tom DeWeese
They are one of the biggest publishers of textbooks in the world, and they wanted to use some of my writings in one of their products. My first thought was, “Gee, I’m coming up in the world.” The second was, “How do they intend to use it?” So I asked for a sample. A good thing I did.
The textbook will be entitled “Invitation to Critical Thinking,” and apparently will be distributed to children’s classrooms in Canada. It will cost the schools $59 each. “Critical Thinking,” of course, is a major tool in the arsenal of today’s restructured government schools that are designed, not to educate, but to indoctrinate. Education expert Charlotte Iserbyt, in her landmark book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” describes Critical Thinking as “challenging students’ fixed beliefs.” It’s a tool to get them to question their values system.
Of course, when I saw the title, my alarm bells began to sound. How could anything I have ever written fit into the concept of such a book? Everything I have ever produced was designed to expose, attack and kill such an “educational system”
So I began to read the sample pages the publisher sent to me. It contained three excerpts, including mine. Here are two, exactly as they would be printed in the book:
Critical Thinking Tip 11.5 (these are instructions for the children at the top of the exercise)
Remember that issues are complex, so a diversion may on occasion be warranted and reasonable. A warranted and reasonable diversion should eventually return to the issue. Keep the issue(s) in mind. In other words, the teacher will decide what is to be a “warranted and reasonable diversion” and if you take a different path than the predetermined one, your argument will not be “warranted or reasonable.”
Exercise 11.16 Fallacies of Relevance II
In each of the following examples, check all fallacy categories that apply. More importantly, explain each fallacious instance you identify.
Example: And the Lord God commanded man, saying, “You may eat freely of every tree of the garden; but the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)
(Here are the choices given the children to describe that statement)
In what category does this example fit and why?
Appeal to anger Straw Person EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER
Appeal to fear Two wrongs
Appeal to pity Common practice
Are you starting to get the picture as to how this book is used to challenge a values system? Now here’s my text they wanted to use in the book.
Example: In a Group Workbook (educational tool for children) entitled: Sunday School Specials, a chapter tells students that “real conservation means remembering to turn off the light, hiking or biking instead of hitching a car ride, and cooling off in the shade instead of in air conditioning. Kids are often tempted to do things the easy way instead of the ‘green way’. They need lots of encouragement and affirmation to develop and stick to an environment-conscious lifestyle…” That one line demonstrates an important key to the purpose of Group’s Sunday School curriculum – to promote a political agenda based on pagan earth worship rather than Christian values.
(Here’s the choices given the children to describe my statement)
In what category does this example fit, and why?
Appeal to anger Straw person EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER
Appeal to fear Two wrongs
Appeal to pity Common practice
They were using as the exercise in Critical Thinking quotes from an article I wrote a few years ago entitled “Is your church teaching pagan earth worship in Sunday School?” I wrote that article to describe how a popular new Sunday School curriculum contained the same Outcome-base education behavior modification indoctrination process that was being employed in government classrooms. This curriculum taught the children to play a game of tree hugging and taught them that the Endangered Species Act was the new Noah’s Ark. This is clearly a political agenda, not education. And I said so.
The point of my article was to expose the very process this new textbook is employing. Now I found myself being used in an exercise, as an apparent example of someone promoting fear and creating straw “persons.”
My response to their request to grant them permission to use my article in this way was swift and to the point. “I’m sorry, but I will not grant permission to use my work in this way. Your ‘textbook’ is the root of the very curriculum I was talking about in the article you want to quote. Obviously the entire section of the book where my material was to appear is a critical discussion of Christianity. Your selections offered Appeal to anger; fear; pity; straw person; two wrongs; common practice – all are negatives. There is no room for a person to agree with the statements. I can only imagine the classroom discussion your teacher’s guide will offer. This is not education, it is propaganda. Sorry, but no, I will not help you in perpetrating it on innocent minds. Shame on you for trying to call it education. Now, is my message an appeal to anger, fear or do I just pity you?”
May 1, 2006
“Fed up” landowners have said “enough” to feeble efforts by Congress to “fix” the Endangered Species Act (ESA). That’s why a coalition of property rights groups, led by the American Land Foundation, Stewards of the Range, the American Policy Center, Liberty Matters, and the PFUSA Grange have now gathered more than 6,300 signatures to a letter calling for repeal of the ESA.
The letter is being delivered to Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. His committee will soon consider legislation to “update” and “improve” the ESA.
The House has already passed the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act (TESRA). The Senate is considering a bill sponsored by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) called the Collaboration and Recovery of Endangered Species Act (CRESA). While the House version makes at least a weak attempt to compensate landowners when the ESA is invoked, the Senate version offers nothing for them. Both bills confirm the worst fears of landowners about how serious Congress is to actually addressing the real problems of the ESA.
The coalition opposes those legislative efforts to “fix” the ESA and, instead is calling for outright repeal of the existing law, saying there can be no fix of the worst legislation ever produced by Congress.
Since its enactment in 1973, the ESA has penalized landowners unlucky enough to have an endangered species on their land. Farmers, ranchers, tree farmers, homeowners and others who harbor endangered species or habitat on their property are subjected to severe land-use restrictions that can lead to economic ruin.
“Rather than a solution to helping endangered species, the ESA has become a very powerful tool, used by radical environmentalists who want to stop literally any use of certain lands for any purpose,” said Dan Byfield, president of the American Land Foundation of Taylor, Texas. “The entire community of Klamath Falls, Oregon was literally chocked to death as its water supply was shut off to protect a sucker fish that isn’t endangered,” said Byfield.
Yet, as Coalition leaders point out, all of the pain caused by the ESA to landowners is really for nothing as far as endangered species are concerned. “In the 33 years since the ESA has been on the books, just 34 of the nearly 1,300 U.S. species listed have made their way off of the endangered list,” said Margaret Hage Byfield, executive Director of Stewards of the Range based in Idaho. “Of this number,” she continued, “9 species are now extinct, 14 appear to have been improperly listed in the first place, and just 9 (.6% of all species listed) have recovered.” Concluded Hage, “that’s a 99% failure rate that proves the ESA is nothing more than a powerful tool for special interests groups to promote their political agenda.”
These are the reasons why the coalition is calling for outright repeal of the ESA. “There is only one valid answer to this outrageous situation,” said Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, Warrenton, VA. “Repeal the ESA and, if necessary, start over.”
To that end, the coalition has generated more than 6,300 signatures for the letter to Senator Inhofe to demand repeal of the ESA . These signatures aren’t from members of rich and powerful lobbying groups. They are from the landowners, business owners, and community leaders who are suffering from the ESA.
In part, the letter says, “Congress needs to revisit the wisdom of the Founding Fathers who believed the ownership of property must be secured from government intervention for liberty to exist. Take that security away through environmental laws like the ESA, and not only is liberty not secure, it no longer exists. You have only to look at the past 30 years since the enactment of the ESA to see what it has produced – the dramatic destruction of property rights and the failure to recover species.” “Landowners need heroes to stand for us and protect our private property. It’s time to listen to us for a change,” said Byfield, appealing to the Congress to take a stand for property owners.
“In this day when Americans have come to understand the horrors of widespread government abuse of eminent domain, such as in the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, we should rightly fear the creation of a new ESA that could best be called Kelo 2,” concluded DeWeese.
The coalition maintains a website at www.repealesa.us where the full letter may be viewed and signed.
