Inconvenient Climatic Facts Chronically Neglected part 3

Secondly, CC alarmists heap untenable burdens onto ecologically sound nations while poorer nations (including, ironically, rising super-power, China) are exempted from addressing their sorely deficient practices.  Yet if CCAs sincerely believe we have but a decade before reaching our ecological “point of no-return,” then common sense would urge redirecting our focus to cleaning up the practices of the latter now!  While it makes sense then for richer nations to financially assist poorer ones, it is absurd to post-pone redressing the latter’s ecological inadequacies by waiting fully a decade later.

   

Thirdly, global warming alarmists are purchasing beach front homes for themselves even as they persist in warning that such property will soon be buried under water.[1]

Fourthly, in the absence of outcry by either academics (who generally prefer left-leaning causes) or the media who encourage the same, my hometown of Seattle recently re-placed its viaduct with an underwater tunnel along its harbor that has an entrance at close to tidal level.  How does that make sense at all in the face of rising sea-levels?

These points indicate that the driving force of their agenda isn’t neglect, but outright hypocrisy.

I fully understand that no one (myself included) lives in a manner completely consistent with one’s convictions.  Yet this paper highlights a disconnect within the CC front that is far deeper than commonplace human fallibility.  It instead entails a willful neglect of vital evidence such as is in glaring violation of the scientific method. The true impetus of the charge CCAs herald rests on suppressing counter-evidence of a kind that is game-changing.[2]   This tactic is so intellectually dishonest; it should compel any competent judge to throw it out.  For despite posing to be scientific, their case is framed not by a scientific spirit, but on an ideology porten-ding to be science, so as to advance an unnamed agenda which cannot be justified by science.  For example, it is a matter of demonstrable fact that financial rewards are showered onto CCAs and “green” industrialists, but withheld from CC “deniers” who are instead censored and belittled.  It is on this pseudo-scientific basis that uninformed people are thereby needlessly alarmed.[3]  A far better motivation for properly caring for our ecological world has already been mandated in the Holy Bible (Genesis 1:28; 2:15), which is grounded not in fear, but in the context of reverent stewardship built upon an enthusiastic trust in our Maker and Redeemer. 

For this reason, it is imperative for principled scientists to rise up in protest over this deception in order that the integrity which ought to guide all scientific research be restored!  Furthermore, it is urgent for the rest of us to discipline ourselves to discern between truth and falsehood to the end that we govern ourselves in accordance with truth as opposed to hysteria.

---

[1] https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/08/27/rush-limbaugh-why-would-the-obamas-buy-a-climate-doomed-beach-house/

[2] The scientific method insists that every hypothesis be submitted to the scrutiny of all relevant evidence in a welcoming spirit.

[3] Lay people groundlessly fear not only ultimate planetary death, but the depletion of forests, water, and other species. Op.cit (7).

Inconvenient Climatic Facts Chronically Neglected part 2

It is vital to note that these details are based NOT on “conservative” or “Trumpian” opinions, but on scientific facts brought to light through scientifically-disciplined investigation.  In regard to Seattle for example, the scientific evidence for the glacier that buried that region consists of parallel north/south ridges (drumlins) along the direction of the glacier that are separated by rounded valleys, and vast layers of moraine (glacial gravel) and “erratics”[1] (boulders) carried there by glaciers, but later left behind when the glacial tongue melted.

  It is also crucial to note that these ice masses began retreating 16,000 years PRIOR to the 2^nd Industrial Revolution (dated in the mid-1870s) with its introduction of mass-production and use of fossil fuels to power industry and transportation.  This neglected fact, in and of itself, refutes the alarmists’ assertion that people are a necessary cause of “runaway” global warming.  Indeed alarmists can only maintain their agenda by both ignoring such evidence and limiting their analytical timeline (AT) to about the last 150 years.[2]  For example, in my “google” search on the topic, “scholarly articles for shrinking glaciers and global warming,” of the first 65 web-sites (where I arbitrarily stopped), virtually all of them worked within the above AT, and neither of the two exceptions referencing older dates (4,000 y.a.) sought to reconcile them with con-temporary charges of human-caused CC.[3]  By way of illustration, retreating Athabaska Glacier (AG)[4] lying just north of the border between Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada, has heightened the allegation of our complicity in global warming.[5]  Yet that glacier is merely a tongue to what once was an immensely larger glacier, which is now (again, conveniently) never referenced in this context.  The rounded aspect of the huge valley trough which routes the famous “Icefields Parkway” proves that it was carved by 250 miles of glacier,[6] flowing two directions from a common beginning point, that vanished at the end of the last ice age.[7]  It is fully reasonable to assume that if these references to geological history didn’t challenge the CC agenda, the alarmists would eagerly refute the challenge that I am posing.  So, their silence is palpable and their chronic failure to concede the above data is very telling.

If we are to really believe that it is the purpose of the CC agenda to save our planet, then questions demand to be asked which confront the following incoherent circumstances:

Firstly, at the same time that CC alarmists (CCA) insist on overhauling both our society’s economic philosophy and our industrial means of production and transportation, they themselves exhibit no signs of self-reform in their own personal, private lives.

---

[1] https://www.dnr.wa.gov/programs-and-services/geology/explore-popular-geology/puget-sound-and-coastal-geolog#puget-sound-geology

[2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-glacier-mass-balance

[3] Boldface mine.  Search dated September 24, 2019, beginning 9:20 am.

[4] Pictures from differing time periods can easily be accessed on a search engine under the words, “Athabaska Glacier.”

[5] https://skepticalscience.com/athabasca.html

[6] Pictures from differing time periods can easily be accessed on a search engine under the words, “Icefields Parkway.”

[7] Provincial Museum of Alberta Publication. A Nature Guide to Alberta. (No. 5, 1980), p. 326.

                                                                                             To be continued...

Inconvenient Climatic Facts Chronically Neglected part 1

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…?”[1]

An article on climate change in a recent paper was not news that is useful in resolving debated matters, but merely propaganda.   Titled “Poll: 64% disapprove of Trump’s climate change views,” it lacked a single, solitary, scientific fact in support of global warming (GW) which might indicate the relative merits (or demerits) of either party in this contention.  Instead the writers merely assume the correctness of the GW position and, on the basis of assumptions, commit the begging the question fallacy by berating deniers for their so-called “anti-scientific” worldviews.[1]  In reality, nothing in this article pushing the “climate-change” agenda indicates a commitment to scientific methodology at a level which sharply distinguishes scientific findings from popular opinions, a matter I will address in my closing paragraphs.  To give but one hint here, the mere appeal to scientific “authority” just because many “scientists say so” does not qualify as a scientific fact when no vetted supporting evidence is provided.    

One does not need to be an expert in climatology or even a scientist in another field in order to evaluate the trustworthiness of “climate change” (CC) pronouncements.  The relevant data behind this aspect of CC rest not on obscurities that are confusing to non-specialists,[2] but on substantial climatic events whose evidence, by their public nature, cannot be swept away as if they didn’t happen.  Scientific credibility is indeed wholly compromised when unequivocal evidence is admitted only when it advances a desired agenda.[3]

CCs’ first red flag entails the shifting of their banner term from “global warming” to “climate change.”  Notice that this alteration disables the criteria by which evidence (was it by drought, or blizzard?) is sought to confirm a cause to an ambiguous event.  It also contradicts a core aspect of scientific hypotheses[4] which requires that they all be specific and falsifiable.  Every scientist, irrespective of their perspective on CC, should be expected to already know this.

The second flag concerns their illegitimate omission of relevant data.  The driving force behind CC alarmists isn’t specifically the level of CO² in the atmosphere, but their allegation of human culpability behind retreating or dead[5] glaciers, melting Arctic ice flows, rising sea levels, and the alleged elevated extinction of animals[6] because of human contribution to the eleva-tion of green-house gasses.  In light of this charge, it is imperative to grasp that around 18,000 years ago a vast portion of Canada lay under 2 vertical miles of the Laurentian Continental Ice Sheet,[7] while southward-extending “tongues” of that same mass, up to 3,000 feet thick, once rested on top of what includes both today’s city of Seattle[8] in the west and the Great Plains and Great Lakes regions to the east.[9]  For the same reason, and correspondingly at the same time, the land “bridge” extending between America and Asia (due to such a massive accumulation of snows lowering the sea levels) permitted human travel between these continents; that is, until the ice-age temperatures reversed upward and caused the sea to re-flood that “bridge.”[10]  Both the (unknown) cause of that upturn in temperature, and its result, were catastrophic.[11]  Yet the authors draw no implications at all as to its bearing on the assertion that CC is human-caused.

---

[1] By A.P. writers Seth Borenstein, Nicholas Riccardi and Hannah Fingerhut appearing in The Daily American. Somerset, PA, 9/14/2019, p. A 10.

[2] Of course details that are scientifically established can have a vital bearing on climatology with respect to the question of our contribution to climate change.  On this matter, however, it is reasonable for the general public to ask why we aren’t hearing either hard facts or hard statistics.  In addition, the very fact of the “neglect” that I reference in my title serves to heighten the question of the credibility of the evidence that CC proponents do claim to have.  After all, neglectful research in one arena which we can perceive is a sure indication of bias in another.  

[3] Indeed the scientific spirit is so determined to follow evidence where it leads that it seeks to disconfirm the hypothesis under consideration.

[4] A hypothesis is a research plan for determining whether or not the available evidence confirms or excludes one’s theory.

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/19/iceland-holds-funeral-for-first-glacier-lost-to-climate-change

[6] www.climate-change-guide.com/extinction-of-species.html.  ** On the other hand see American Museum of Natural History. www.amnh.org/ dinosaurs-ancient-fossils/extinction. “The largest mass extinction event happened around 250 million years ago when perhaps 95 percent of all species went extinct [while an] … extinction that occurred 65 million years ago wiped out some 50 percent of plants and animals.”

[7] https://serc.carlton.edu/vignettes/collection/58451.html

[8] Nick Zentner video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSSxdogrv1s

[9] “The Retreat Chronology of the Laurentide Ice Sheet During the Last 10,000 Years and Implications for Deglacial Sea-Level Rise.” serc.carlton.edu/vignettes/collection/58451.html

[10] https://www.livescience.com/64786-beringia-map-during-ice-age.html

[11] https://humanoriginproject.com/evidence-global-warming-end-of-last-ice-age/

The Absurd Ploy to Disarm the Only Obstacle to Armed Attackers

The apparent rise in frequency of mass-shootings does NOT indicate a need for more gun laws, but rather a heightened presence of conceal carry (CC) citizens for the following reasons:

Unless the gun laws already on the books are actually enforced, it is ludicrous to expect that adding laws will reverse rising crime rates.  Instances of such neglect instead proves that defending citizens from violent crime has, for such administrations, yet to be a priority at all.

Jesus’ disciples carried a weapon (Matt. 26:52, Mark 14:47, Luke 22:50, John 18:10-11) indicating that He upheld the concept of self-protections in non-religious (secular) contexts.[1]

Since it is obvious that law breakers by definition don’t respect gun laws, it is utterly futile to seek to minimize mass-shootings by fixating on the access of firearms for law-keepers.  Insofar as the latter are restricted from either reasonable access to a firearm, or the freedom to use it for self-defense without fear of lawsuit, whenever unarmed people are assaulted by a law-breaker with a gun, they will be helpless to stop his determination to do whatever he wishes.  

Even under the best of conditions, police officers cannot arrive in time to stop a murderer from carrying out his crime.  Indeed, there is little reason to call police unless a crime is already underway.  For this reason, competent armed people need to be present at the scene in order to stop the murderer the moment the carnage starts.  There is simply no other possible way to protect innocent bystanders during the precious minutes before the police can arrive.

Gun control proponents who have financial means to purchase security with armed bodyguards, are imposing a double standard by exempting themselves from the very strictures they force onto vulnerable citizens who, with the vast majority, can’t afford the same protection.

Since it is obvious that guns are inanimate objects, they have NO capacity to wantonly kill people.  The cause of murderous rampages is instead persons who pull triggers, thrust a knife, or wield a hammer or rock (notice the broad range of potentially fatal objects) by determining in their hearts to murder others (James 4:1f).  In the event that purchasing private firearms becomes increasingly restricted to the point of being illegal, criminals will not be deterred from obtaining them, and even if they are hindered, they will find other ways to kill (Gen. 4:8). The heart of our human problem really is the problem of morally corrupt human hearts.

This reality highlights an often-neglected aspect of what is needed in order to encourage moral uprightness and discourage lawlessness; which is wholesale Christian revival.  Public safety requires more than a sufficiently armed population.  It demands a godly people.[2]  The kind of morality which issues in healthy societies is grounded on the worldview that the God of the Holy Bible is the author of right and wrong, and additionally that all people will ultimately stand before His judgment seat at the end of time (Acts 17:31).  Doubtless, some readers will scorn this assertion.  Nevertheless, it is self-evidently true that unless this view is broadly embraced by our culture, public expressions of morality will continue declining toward chaos.

 Research indicates both that gun homicides have been “10% higher” in states which do not support CC laws, and that CC permit holders are far less likely to commit crimes.[3]

---

[1] “Difficult Bible Passages: Matthew 5:39.” www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/04/20/dificult-bible-passages-matthew-539

[2] John Adams stated, “Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102

[3] http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/concealed-carry/