Articles: American Geophysical Union Scraps Science, Now Faith Based

Articles: American Geophysical Union Scraps Science, Now Faith Based

American Geophysical Union Scraps Science, Now Faith Based

By Norman Rogers

June 29, 2013

 

I recently attended a 3-day science policy conference sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).  The AGU is an association of 62,000 scientists who study the Earth.  Although the conference was allegedly about science policy, it resembled a cross between a Scientology rally and a workshop for lobbyists from the Mohair Council of America.

The euphemisms for lobbying by people who aren't supposed to be lobbying are "communication" and "outreach."  The AGU believes, in a secular way, that God is on their side and the reason why they are being ignored, and not being given enough money, is that they haven't done enough communicating.  They think that if only the government understood the importance of their work, things would change for the better.  It absolutely never crosses their mind that if the government and the people understood what they are really doing, their money might be cut off.



What they are doing is howling at the moon that the sky is falling.  The president of the AGU, Carol Finn, who, incidentally, is employed by the federal government, opened the lobbying/communications workshop on the first day of the conference with this:

AGU's mission is to promote discovery ... for the benefit of humanity[.] ... I live in Colorado[.] ... [L]ast week's Black Forest fire ... was the worst wildfire in Colorado's history[.] ... I live in Boulder County[.] ... [T]he county and the city of Longmont have just outlawed fracking[.] ... [A]ll these communities need to be able to try to figure out how to balance energy development and putting drill rigs next to schools[.]

The subtext here, repeated over and over at the conference, is that global warming causes forest fires and that hydrocarbon development is undesirable, if not dangerous.  But perhaps forest fires are started by matches.  Maybe hydrocarbon development is preferable to riding around on horses.

How trustworthy is an organization that claims to be organized for the "benefit of humanity," anyway?

The illogical thinking and ever-changing stories about global warming doom are puzzling.  What motivates the global warming proselytizers?  Is there a root belief that explains their behavior?  My suggestion is that their behavior is religious in nature and can be explained if we postulate that they believe in the following commandment:

Thou shalt not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

If you realize that the story is not really about global warming, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, it becomes easy to understand why the believers are not disturbed by the fact that global warming, as measured by surface temperature, stopped 16 years ago.  They easily find other scientific theories to buttress their faith.  They ignore or discredit any science that challenges their faith.  They tell us that if we don't stop adding carbon dioxide to the air, we will have extreme weather and the oceans will become acidified.  The polar bears will die.  The wine will lose its flavor.  We will catch exotic diseases.  If one theory of doom is refuted, or becomes boring, there are plenty of others to take its place.  Embarrassing information, such as the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes plants grow faster, with less water, is dismissed.  They say plants grow faster, but they are less nutritious, or they grow faster, but they deplete the soil of its nutrients.

What we have is an obsession with the evil of carbon dioxide -- a carbon cult.

The great majority of people who are members of the AGU are interested in science, not in a new religion centered on carbon.  They have not woken up to the fact that their organization has been infiltrated by a carbon cult.

The carbon cult formulation does explain a lot.  Chesterton's insight -- "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything" -- seems relevant in this discussion.  Compared to traditional religion, the carbon cult is naive and emotionally thin.

Missionaries for a well-organized religion are intensely practical and often extremely diligent.  Much of the science of linguistics has been created not by professors, but by Christian missionaries who want to learn the languages of illiterate peoples so that they can spread the gospel and translate the Bible.  Of course, they also have to devise an alphabet and teach the people to read the newly translated Bible.  Thus you have an example of the civilizing influence of Christianity. 

What is the civilizing influence of missionaries who want to take practical sources of energy away from poor peoples?

The missionaries of the carbon cult are gradually becoming better-organized.  In the United States, religions are financed by their followers.  The government is not supposed to support religions financially, at least not if one religion is favored over another.  But the carbon cult masquerades as a scientific discipline, enabling it to receive government funding.  The carbon cult is financed partly by government support of science, and partly by the contributors to the big-budget environmental organizations.  The ability to influence government policy is as good as cash in the bank, and the ways in which influence over government policy can be turned into cash are endless.  For example, a few years ago, the natural gas industry gave $25 million to the Sierra Club for their "beyond coal" campaign that is trying to destroy the coal industry.  The natural gas people thought that the Sierra Club through its influence over the government would kill the coal industry, thereby helping the alternative fuel, natural gas.  The natural gas industry did not understand that you can't buy off ideological fanatics.  The Sierra Club later turned on its benefactor and launched an attack on fracking.  The Sierra Club is an important church in the carbon cult. 


The AGU has received large contributions from, of all people, oil companies.  Global warming orator Bill McKibben, the leader of an organization whose purpose is to lower the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, said that the business plan of the oil companies is to wreck the Earth.  Carbon cultists consider fossil fuel companies to be extremely evil, but apparently they are willing to suspend that judgment when cash is available.  In this case the dictum attributed to Lenin seems relevant: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  Oil company executives are casting themselves in the role of the people to be hanged.


The first day of the AGU Science Policy Conference was devoted to an excellent tutorial on how to lobby the government and on how to present the doctrines of the carbon cult in an effective way.  The organizational structure of a typical congressional office was explained.  The attendees were treated to skits showing an effective and ineffective way to approach a congressional staffer.  The attendees were cautioned about the use of scientific jargon.  Susan Hassol, a prominent writer for the global warming establishment, made the point that the word aerosol should be banned.  To scientists, aerosols are small particles floating in the atmosphere, but to the public, they are aerosol spray cans and always will be.

The attendees were told to explain why the weather would be more extreme by comparing carbon dioxide to steroids.  If an athlete takes steroids, he will still play the game, but his performance will be more extreme.

One difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is that the cults usually hide their true nature.  The more bizarre the cult, the greater the imperative to hide its doctrines.  The general public must not be allowed to realize that the advocates of global warming alarmism are in reality making up the story to propagate a fanatical faith that carbon dioxide is bad.

The science behind global warming is very shoddy.  Yes, there is a nugget of real science buried in all the alarmist, made-up stuff.  Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation, and increased carbon dioxide probably will warm the Earth by a small amount.  The mechanism is quite complicated, involving the atmospheric lapse rate and a slight relocation of the tropopause.

The complicated and jargon-laden science is reduced, by the missionaries of the carbon cult, for public consumption, to "carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas."  The formal predictions of global warming from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the product of an opinion poll of computer models that disagree with each other and that have been manipulated to make them look better than they really are.  The carbon cultists accept those predications as serious and profound scientific truth, because the predictions provide support for their faith.

Norman Rogers is a physicist, a member of the American Geophysical Union, and a senior policy advisor at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank.  He maintains a personal website.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/american_geophysical_union_scraps_science_now_faith_based.html#ixzz2XdIkhhVY
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Articles: Anatomy of a Controversy

Articles: Anatomy of a Controversy

 A good history of the 25 year old "Global Warming: scam.

Anatomy of a Controversy

 June 27, 2013
 By Tom Sheahen

The subject of climate change has returned to news headlines lately because of the president's speech at Georgetown U. However, the response by the broader population was not enthusiastic endorsement, but rather, intensification of the controversy. It's helpful to inquire how the transition came about.
It was 25 years ago this July that a Congressional hearing was staged to promote the idea that CO2 emitted by mankind burning fossil fuels is causing the globe to heat up excessively. Then-senator Al Gore was a major booster of the idea, which was subsequently emphasized in his book Earth in the Balance.
About 8 years ago, the belief was near-universal that global warming was real and dangerous. Since then, new scientific data has emerged showing it isn't so. Moreover, people have learned that the cost of complying with proposals to eliminate CO2 will be very high.
The foremost scientific observation is that there has been no warming for 15 years. Meanwhile, CO2 in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing, and recently crossed the "milestone" of 400 parts-per-million (ppm) in the atmosphere. The computer models, which have built-in the assumption that CO2 will cause temperature to rise, have predicted temperature-rise numbers that are totally and obviously in disagreement with observations. As a result, the models have lost credibility.
A series of satellites has been monitoring temperatures over the entire globe for 1/3 of a century by now, and no net global warming has been observed. When Al Gore began his promotion, that satellite data had accumulated for only about 7 years, too short a period to detect a trend.
Starting around 2006, investigators found that a high percentage of official temperature measurement stations were not reading accurately, due to problems of positioning or maintenance, along with the "urban heat island" effect. Therefore the land-based temperatures reported became suspect.
Somewhere in the 1990s, a small community of scientists began to affiliate (mostly via the internet) who didn't accept the "common wisdom" that CO2 causes global warming. They were at first ignored, but when their numbers grew to significant size, they were denounced as "climate deniers" -- an epithet meant to sound like "Holocaust deniers." Their preferred name is "climate skeptics."
Meanwhile, the large majority of scientists, and certainly the nonscientific public, went along with the prevailing belief that CO2 causes global warming. The scientific leaders fostering that position became known as the "climate establishment." They controlled the funding, the conferences, the journal editorial policies, etc. Until quite recently, there was a very solid wall known as "the consensus" defending that establishment policy.
But that has all crumbled now. The major "ClimateGate" scandal of 2009 revealed the deceit that the leading theorists had been practicing, and showed that scientists can be just as conniving and disingenuous as ordinary mortals. Thereafter, increasing numbers of competent scientists looked more closely at the data, and switched to the "climate skeptic" position.
The appeal to "consensus" dissolved when people remembered that Galileo and Einstein were certainly opposed to the establishment view. Actually, consensus has no place at all in science. Facts -- measurements and observations -- drive the progress of science, and data trumps theory.
Plus, people recalled from third-grade science class that animals and plants exchange CO2 and O2, and both are necessary for life.
Today, the assertion that CO2 is about to cause catastrophic change is categorized as "global warming alarmism." For several decades, the media have been uniformly aligned with the position of the global warming alarmists, and anyone who spoke against the theory was ridiculed. But because of the pre-eminence of data, among scientists there has been a gradual erosion of support for the global warming hypothesis.
Meanwhile, the public lost interest in the entire topic. The media were far behind the public. Only in late 2012 and 2013 have most of the major media players acknowledged that there is disagreement on the subject. Here's a typical snippet from the New York Times:

This January, as President Obama began his second term, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to list their policy priorities for 2013. Huge majorities cited jobs and the economy; sizable majorities cited health care costs and entitlement reform; more modest majorities cited fighting poverty and reforming the tax code. Down at the bottom of the list, with less than 40 percent support in each case, were gun control, immigration and climate change.

                                                                                                    Ross Douthat, "The Great Disconnect"
Lately, over in Europe, a new type of alarm is occurring as people in Germany and England look at their electric bills. The policies put in place by their governments to limit CO2 output have turned out to be terribly expensive, and the people want to stop funding "green energy" projects.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the administration (especially the EPA) is planning a new offensive against CO2, introducing various new taxes and regulations. Colloquially, that's termed the "War on Coal." The incumbent government is so ideologically committed to opposing CO2, and so inattentive to scientific data, that it is oblivious to the costs that will be incurred. Learning anything from the Europeans is out of fashion in Washington these days.
Summarizing where the scientific situation stands today:

1. There is NO consensus about the effect of CO2 on temperature.

2. There is agreement that natural causes of climate change have always played a role.

3. There is disagreement about the relative importance of natural vs man-made influences on climate. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT stated the "climate skeptics" position succinctly: "That mankind has an effect on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant." Others (Al Gore, etc.) invoke the computer models and predict catastrophic sea-level rise.

4. Our response to changing climate should be adaptation; efforts at mitigation are futile (and expensive!).

5. The debate is whether we have centuries or only decades to prepare for changes in climate.

Despite the full support of the scientific, political, and meda establishments, global warming/climate change was unable to gain traction as an exploitable, ongoing crisis for one simple reason: it contradicted the real world. What other current agendas are due to be trumped by the data?

NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian

NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian..

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

 

 A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.
Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.
In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."
Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.
An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.
The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.
The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.
Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.
The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.
Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.
It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies.
Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US".
The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the Fisa Amendments Act in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable, and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces.
When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.
A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy.
The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.
With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.
The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.
"Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all."
The new measures introduced in the FAA redefines "electronic surveillance" to exclude anyone "reasonably believed" to be outside the USA – a technical change which reduces the bar to initiating surveillance.
The act also gives the director of national intelligence and the attorney general power to permit obtaining intelligence information, and indemnifies internet companies against any actions arising as a result of co-operating with authorities' requests.
In short, where previously the NSA needed individual authorisations, and confirmation that all parties were outside the USA, they now need only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA.
The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming "access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning".
In the document, the NSA hails the PRISM program as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA".
It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.
The NSA document indicates that it is planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider. The agency also seeks, in its words, to "expand collection services from existing providers".
The revelations echo fears raised on the Senate floor last year during the expedited debate on the renewal of the FAA powers which underpin the PRISM program, which occurred just days before the act expired.
Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware specifically warned that the secrecy surrounding the various surveillance programs meant there was no way to know if safeguards within the act were working.
"The problem is: we here in the Senate and the citizens we represent don't know how well any of these safeguards actually work," he said.
"The law doesn't forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one Fisa court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can't say and average Americans can't know."
Other senators also raised concerns. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon attempted, without success, to find out any information on how many phone calls or emails had been intercepted under the program.
When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.
When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a "report". According to the NSA, "over 2,000 PRISM-based reports" are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year.
In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data.
"It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.
"This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."
A senior administration official said in a statement: "The Guardian and Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law does not allow the targeting of any US citizen or of any person located within the United States.
"The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.
"This program was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate.
"Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.
"The Government may only use Section 702 to acquire foreign intelligence information, which is specifically, and narrowly, defined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This requirement applies across the board, regardless of the nationality of the target."
Additional reporting by James Ball and Dominic Rushe

Prophetic Horizons: "Maybe Its Time To Get Weird” by Garris Elkins

Prophetic Horizons: "Maybe Its Time To Get Weird” by Garris Elkins

"Maybe Its Time To Get Weird” by Garris Elkins

I love to read people who understand history and the development of language.  A couple of years ago I was struck by a paragraph within an article written by my Fulbright Scholar and Master of Fine Arts educated daughter:

         “When I taught literature to high school students on the Micronesian island of Saipan, I began the year with the Anglo-Saxon text of Beowulf. (That juxtaposition was a bit weird all by itself.) I explained to my seniors that the word “weird” stems from an Anglo-Saxon verb meaning “to become.”  As a noun: wyrd. Unlike our contemporary version, which is slightly negative, wyrd was positive. It was linked to one’s destiny and meant “supernatural.” Wyrd is an ongoing, continual happening—“that which happens.”

                 (Anna Elkins – from her article, “Toward”, at wordbody.blogspot.com)

My ministry affiliation is within a traditionally Pentecostal denomination. God put me in this family and He has blessed me in so many ways because of that relationship.  I listen to conversations within my own church family and outside in similar groups that have journeyed through a hundred-plus years of history since the great Azusa Street Revival.  Some groups that started off in that Azusa Street experience have, over the years, defined themselves out of that stream because it seemed too weird and unwieldy.

Like most pastors, I have read through the Bible on numerous occasions.  It is filled with lots of very “weird” and unwieldy experiences.  Bushes talked. Rocks spouted water.  People walked across dry ocean bottoms through standing walls of water. People ate bread that fell from heaven. Ax heads floated on water. Prophets were taken up. The sun stood still. Donkeys spoke. Prayer hankies and shadows brought healing. Spit in the eyes released the miracle of sight. Poisonous snakes were shaken off.  Today, similar things are taking place around the world where the Church is actually growing.

In the last few years I have noticed some in the traditional Pentecostal camp are now beginning to repeat a phrase – “We don’t want to get weird.”  I understand why that phrase is being used. None of us want man-made or man-produced anything.  We want the legitimate and real.

As I look across the traditional Pentecost landscape in the American Church, I am actually seeing very little of the good God-weird stuff taking place.  We have become a very manageable crowd.  What we actually need to take place in our midst has a hard time getting past our disclaimers and demands about our concern for becoming weird.

What can happen, and may have already taken place, is that we actually begin to shut out the good God-weird experiences when they show up on our doorstep.  Maybe, like the Anglo-Saxon definition of the word wyrd, we actually become the Spirit-infused people we were intended to be by experiencing things for which we have no logical explanation.  Maybe “weird” is not a destination like many have come to believe, but a process that gets us to where we need to go. Without some element of the wonderfully weird works of God in our midst we will end up living with our own self-crafted image of life and ministry looking back us in the mirror.

The weird and unexplainable things God does are part of the supernatural journey that actually leads us to our destiny. Like its earlier Anglo-Saxon usage, “wyrd” was something that was supposed to continue to happen and not stop.  When it stops happening in our midst is when we actually become weird in a negative sense.

When we construct a verbal fence with statements like, “We don’t want to get weird”, we are actually stumbling ourselves as we walk forward into the fulfillment of our destiny.  From my reading of the Bible, I find it filled with wonderfully weird experiences. God used these experiences to jump-start the hope of His people that He was still in the house.