TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

An estimated billion people celebrated Earth Day around the world yesterday, but few seem to understand the true motivation for this day. It is not just another reminder to use recycled paper or drive energy-efficient cars … one day out of the year to make everyone feel like they have contributed to save the earth, which is very much alive, from dying. The greater, usually lower key, objective is a calculated attack on the sanctity of human life. Population control is, and has been, inextricably linked to the environmental and abortion movements.

For years, the Sierra Club and other “green” militants have said that the best way to consume fewer resources is to have fewer children. Their own website says, “Talk to your decision-makers and demand an increase of funding for voluntary family planning programs and access to comprehensive sex education for young people.” This is the plan to keep the abortuaries and Planned Parenthood busy.

Last year, Optimum Population Trust released a paper that was even less subtle. It claimed that children are “bad for the planet” and called on nations to reduce the global population by five billion – which would only be possible by forced abortion and sterilization. Something they are willing to do … something that is unnecessary.

And how could we forget Barry Walters? This is the Australian professor that published an article last year advocating a “baby tax” for every couple with more than two children. The interesting thing is that most of the people having more than two children could never pay such a tax.

The driven “so called crisis” of the day is global warming. Not only is it alarmist capitalism trying to find a new way to extract money from everybody possible, it is not even true. We have had weather and climate cycle changes for years and it will not change. But even this is just another excuse to fund “Planet” Parenthood and similar groups.

The bottom line is that the stewardship of God’s creation is the responsibility of every Christian. Yes, take care of the earth in a responsible manner but let’s use a balanced manner to do so – not an extremist.

We must realize that there is a greater threat to the environment than climate change or scarce resources – and that’s the threat of environmental extremism that elevates the planet above people. That is exactly what the global warming scare tactics do.

Maybe Christians should do this on another day to show good stewardship … not on the day where the focus is the worship of planet earth and the support of population control via abortion, sterilization and euthanasia?

Obama promises alliance with Al Gore

At a town-hall meeting in Wallingford, PA Sen. Barack Obama was asked if he would tap the former vice president for his Cabinet to handle global warming. “I would,” Obama said. “Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He’s somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I’m already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real.

This is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Gore stands to make billions through his companies as he scares more and more people into a panic like Chicken Little with his “sky is falling” rhetoric. I’m sure they will try to make it look like it is not a conflict of interest … but it is plain to see now and it will be then. Gore is so self-serving … and Obama wants to help his “friend.”

Obama also said he would use Gore to help forge a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions designed to lower pollution.

Of course this is the talking from both sides of the mouth deception that many politicians learn so quickly. You know, “I’m going to fight against taxes and high energy costs” right after we institute a system that would increase electricity bills from power companies.

Obama also called on individuals to do their part to lower energy consumption. “All of us are going to have to change our habits. We are a wasteful culture,” he said. Using compact fluorescent light bulbs, energy efficient appliances, and unplugging power chargers when they’re not in use are relatively simple solutions, he said. “Those kinds of simple steps, if everybody takes them, can drastically reduce our energy consumption.”

Hello, is anyone home? Everybody doesn’t have numerous millions of dollars to work with thanks to Oprah, the Hollywood elite, and the liberal special interest groups. If Obama changed his habits he wouldn’t even notice it. For those who live in the real world … it will cost. With prices going up and wages not who can afford new appliances. Those with tight incomes are already unplugging everything they can to save.

What a breath of fresh air it would be if the politicians were half as concerned with the people they are supposed to be serving as they are with their self-serving interests! They only pretend they care until they get your vote and then it is business as usual.

Don’t be fooled, you are being led slowly down the path to socialism by being taken in by rhetoric and not checking out the real facts!

Global Warming Deaths on the Rise! Surely they are not already claiming large scale death due to alleged warming climates. I thought they would at least wait until it “happened.” But then I read on….

“About 160,000 people die every year from side effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition, a group of WHO scientists said Tuesday. What’s more, they projected the “disease burden caused by climate change could almost double by 2020.”

160,000 deaths year, huh? Every year? Which year? Who was the first guy to die? And wow, how many years has THIS been occurring?!

This is exactly the kind of “study” that makes for big headlines. Death and destruction on the rise, backed by “credible” science. It’s enough to make me run for cover under the Kyote treaty. Or so they hope.

WHO (World Health Organization) is at it once again … just about as useless as the United Nations. They are spreading junk science in the form of a press release. How did WHO make this calculation? Patrick J. Michaels from the CATO Institute sheds some light on it: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5225. Michaels explains how many of these “global warming deaths” that had “occurred” in Europe in 2003 when France and neighboring countries shut down in August to vacation. Hospitals were understaffed and broken air conditioners went unfixed. In France alone, 15,000 senior citizens died from neglect, not global warming! These people might have lived if it hadn’t been for negligence … turn on the a/c and cool it down!

The people at WHO also included death by tornado, hurricane, flood, and climate related disease. But it makes you wonder how many weather-related deaths would occur annually even at temperatures in, for example, 1990? The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed 20,000 people in the Caribbean. Did that count? And aren’t there many other factors to consider? Surely lots of people died of heat stroke in pre-air conditioning days. It seems possible, even likely, that the advent of air conditioners have substantially reduced death due to weather.

Maybe WHO should converse with the folks at the American Journal of Epidemiology who recently documented that in “hot weather, the death rate for persons who had central air-conditioning was 42% lower than the rate for persons who did not have air-conditioning …” http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/136/1/106

More junk science!

Are the world’s ice caps melting because of climate change, or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global warming theory?

Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original levels.

Moreover, a February 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.

The Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore during his “Inconvenient Truth” lectures about mankind’s alleged impact on the global climate.

Gore fails to mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when melting is normal. Or that the polar bear population has soared in recent years.

As winter roars in across the Northern Hemisphere it seems to have joined the ranks of the skeptics.

As the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades, adding that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one exception – Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places, been basking in unseasonably warm weather.

Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and southern China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow.

Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in the memory of most residents.

AFP news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China, stranding 180,000 people and leading to widespread power cuts just as the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the government said Monday. The latest cold snap has taken a severe toll in usually temperate Yunnan province, which has been struck by heavy snowfalls since Thursday, a government official from the provincial disaster relief office told AFP.

Twelve people have died there, state Xinhua news agency reported, and four remained missing as of Saturday.

An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam’s northern region, which started on Jan. 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By February 17, the spell had killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper.

In Britain the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the Express, which reports that experts say that February could end up as one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at least the middle of the week. And the BBC reports that a bus company’s efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold weather.

Meanwhile Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend and continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken prefectures were also closed.

Scores of villages, mainly on the island of Crete, and in the prefectures of Evia, Argolida, Arcadia, Lakonia, Viotia, and the Cyclades islands were snowed in.

More than 100 villages were snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded in Kozani, Grevena, Kastoria and Florina, where they plunged to -12 C.

If global warming gets any worse we will all freeze to death.

A headline on the popular UK website, DailyMail.co.uk, screamed “Global Warming Sees Polar Bears Stranded On Melting Ice.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of two polar bears standing atop a small iceberg. They had a forlorned, defenseless look on their bear faces. It was so sad.

But then … I couldn’t help but wonder if the frightened look wasn’t from the helicopter hovering overhead as the Envirophotographer came in real close to snap his pictures. It couldn’t be because the polar bears were lost or homeless … this is what they do, this is where they live. Polar bears can swim! Check it out at Sea World. Can you lose a bear on a piece of melting ice? Can’t they just swim to the next piece of ice, then the next piece, and so on. Sometimes if you listen long and hard enough to Global Warming advocates, you’d think the entire ice cap was already gone. But indeed it still stretches for thousands of miles, even if it has melted at all. I doubt very much there are any stranded bears out there due to global warming.

But this picture sure tugs at our hearts. The poor little bears. They are all stranded out there. Thousands of them, hugging onto little ice cubes, nearly drowning. And it’s my fault. If we had just signed Kyoto … (That’s for another time.)

Frankly, as a Christian and human being, I am concerned about the environment. We are suppose to take care of the earth … the focus being on “take care of” not worship it. I’m not prone to believe this constant stream of emotional nothingness. How about some real science and evidence. Interestingly enough the real proof is not there – just conjecture. I think it’s ironic that the same atheistic liberals who demand I offer up some PROOF that my God exists now expect me to believe, without proof, that Planet Earth is on the brink of death.

I need more than a photograph!

Why so gloomy?
By Richard S. Lindzen

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators – and many scientists – seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth’s climate history, it’s apparent that there’s no such thing as an optimal temperature – a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week.

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year’s report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.

In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There’s even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth’s surface.

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down – not up – the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise – a dubious proposition – future increases wouldn’t be as steep as the climb in emissions.

Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world’s average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its “forcing” – its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn’t been uniform – warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don’t explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn’t account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record – an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.

Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle – Al Gore’s supposed mentor – is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn’t warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.