 May 13, 2009
Dear Friend, As you read this week's WeGetIt.org Wednesday Bulletin, please be thinking of friends who would benefit from it, and then forward it to them. Thanks for your support! Job-killing proposals, warming fears, and unreliable data
As the country reels from the economic down-turn and officials cautiously hope for a recovery to begin by the end of this year, some Congressional leaders are calling for a “green recovery.” But Spain, which leads the world in creating green jobs, has found that for every green job created, 2.2 jobs are lost. Now comes a memo from the Office of Management and Budget to Environmental Protection Agency saying, "Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the [Clean Air Act] for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities." You'd probably think the fears weren't well grounded--and neither was the tax. That's precisely the case with American temperature monitoring stations. They're supposed to constitute the world's most reliable set of stations, but 89% fail to meet the National Weather Service's siting requirements . They're exposed to all sorts of nearby point sources of heat that have increased over time, making their long-term records show a false upward trend.
As this map and its key show, the result is near-universal higher-than-proper temperature readings at stations around the country. (You can see stations in particular states here.)
A study of the significance of these and similar findings for stations around the world led two experts to conclude that estimates of warming from 1980 to 2002 were double what they should have been. Satellite records confirm this study's results and show significant global cooling for the last seven years. Are these good grounds to adopt expensive cap-and-trade?Thriving polar bears a sign of...global warming If you listened carefully to a National Public Radio report on polar bears yesterday, you might have noticed a little inconsistency. A report said that polar bears are threatened because global warming is causing declining Arctic sea ice (from which bears hunt for seals). But it also said that the bears are "in good shape now" and mentioned one, a healthy bear of record weight, that a researcher described as "a very fat bear for this time of the year . . . his belly almost scraped the ground, so he was a really fat good-looking bear."
If you're wondering how thriving bears and declining Arctic sea ice threatening their extinction could go hand-in-hand, you're thinking straight. Shrinking sea ice and fattening bears aren't supposed to go together. Part of the explanation is that Arctic sea ice, which hit its lowest summer extent in 2007, has recovered greatly since then, now nearing the 1979-2000 mean. Its smallest March extent since 1979 e.g., in 2006, was 8.4% below the mean, but this year's March extent was only 3.75% below. The notion that Arctic sea ice shrinkage has been caused by global warming is also suspect, for during the years of most rapid shrinkage, Earth was actually cooling rapidly. No wonder "a paper by NASA in 2008 attributed this ice-melt" not to global or even regional warming but "to unusual northbound currents and winds bringing warmth up from the tropics to the Arctic, and a more recent paper says that the summertime Polar winds in 2007/8 had blown much of the sea ice southward into warmer waters, where it melted."
Finally, Arctic temperatures were warmer in the 1930s and 1940s than since 1979, and ice extent shrank as much or more then (with the Northwest Passage opening several times to shipping), but the polar bears survived. They also survived when there was much less ice 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. And their number seems to have been growing , not shrinking, in recent years. A very sensible thinker on climate and energy Danish economist and statistician Bjorn Lomborg, whose books The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming make him the nemesis of global warming alarmists, just keeps on saying sensible things. In an interview with San Francisco Examiner environmental policy writer Thomas Fuller, Lomborg pointed out that, "with every dollar you invest in very quick CO2 cuts" like cap-and-trade, "you probably do less than a dollar’s worth of good." Despite his belief that manmade warming is real, Lomborg concludes that harm to humanity from unwise policies to cut CO2 emissions will exceed that from warming itself. His position gets considerable support from studies by the Copenhagen Consensus, under which Nobel Prize-winning economists and others study and rank various risks to humanity and alternative solutions to them. Copenhagen Consensus ranks R&D in low-carbon energy technologies 14th out of 30, but a combination of R&D and mitigation 29th and mitigation alone 30th. Now, please forward this message to your pastor, other Christian leaders, and friends and urge them to sign the WeGetIt.org Declaration, too! The more people sign, the stronger the message our leaders will hear that Biblical principles and factual evidence, not media hype about speculative fears like global warming, should guide our care for the environment and the poor.Gratefully, We value your privacy. If you received this from a friend, you can join the campaign at www.WeGetIt.org. This message was originally sent to [email address suppressed] because someone signed the WeGetIt.org Declaration as "fullname." Edit your name | Bulletin Archives | Unsubscribe | Inquiries |
