Cornwall Alliance :: Stewardship Notes :: Does Caring for “the Least of These” Demand Fighting Global Warming?

Cornwall Alliance :: Stewardship Notes :: Does Caring for “the Least of These” Demand Fighting Global Warming?

Does Caring for “the Least of These” Demand Fighting Global Warming?

David R. Legates, Ph.D.
July 12, 2013

Recently, my fellow evangelical scientists and academics sent a letter to the United States Congress urging immediate legislation on climate change. In an effort to care for the planet—God’s second greatest gift to humanity—they argue that our uncontrolled use of fossil fuels will disproportionately affect the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

I applaud their concern for the environment and for those in defense of whom Jesus commanded us to be especially diligent. But their call to reduce carbon emissions would do more harm than good, especially to the “least of these” as referenced by Christ.

Average global temperatures have not risen over at least the past fifteen years. Dr. John Christy, a fellow evangelical Christian and a highly respected climatologist, testified to Congress that in the United States, we have seen virtually no change in daily maximum temperature, while most of the warming is confined to increases in daily minimum temperatures. (Nighttime temperatures are driven by turbulence [or lack of it] near the surface, not CO2 warming. By contrast, daytime maximum temperature is a much better measure of warming from greenhouse gases. The lack of a signal in daily maximum temperature suggests that the rate of warming due to CO2 is relatively small.) That and the lack of warming for at least a decade and a half implies the effect of CO2 warming is much smaller than climate models suggest.

Contrary to claims in the recent letter, a report issued last summer by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on extreme events indicated that droughts “have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in Central North America.” The percentage of the United States classified in moderate-to-extreme dryness and wetness as presented by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows high variability but no significant trend. NOAA also concludes that snowfall records show no long-term trend and that recent record snowfalls are the result of natural variability, not global warming. Hurricane activity globally is at a thirty-year low, and the frequency of moderate to severe tornadoes (EF3-EF5) has not increased. Sea levels have been rising at about the same pace since well before greenhouse gases began to rise from fossil fuel emissions.

Draconian legislation to curtail energy use by restricting fossil fuel emissions will have little, if any, impact on Earth’s climate. A 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 would only reduce global average temperature in 2100 by an inconsequential 0.07°C. Even an elimination of all CO2 emissions by the United States would prevent only 0.17°C of warming.

Instead of fighting global warming, the most important environmental task facing Christians today is economic development, because poverty is the greatest threat to both human well-being and the environment.

We need to find more efficient ways to use energy and more sources for energy to keep the cost low. Why? If we make energy so expensive that only the rich can afford it, then the poor and the vulnerable will be denied access. That will condemn them to a life of poverty, sickness, and low life expectancy.

Moreover, the environment itself suffers because when a people are in dire need of food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities, they cannot be concerned with environmental issues. The Ganges River, for example, is both the source of ‘clean’ drinking water and the reservoir for untreated sewage. Why? Because the people are so poor. Technological development would enable them to afford water and sewage treatment. High-tech, high-yield farming methods would increase food supplies. Natural gas and electricity would heat homes and cook food without cutting forests and burning wood and dung, which degrade indoor air quality and cause lethal lung infections. Refrigeration would mean the poor do not have to choose between eating spoiled food and going hungry.

Furthermore, oppression thrives when energy is restricted. Totalitarian regimes remain in power by keeping their subjects poor and deprived of technological amenities. Freedom spreads when people have time and ability to travel and communicate, to develop ideas and concepts, and to organize against a common enemy and for a better way of life. Energy, therefore, is the life blood to ending poverty and oppression.

In the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–28), Jesus told of a master who entrusted his money to three servants. The first two put the talents to use and presented the master with more than they had been given. The third, whom Christ called ‘worthless’, hid his talent in the ground.

Often we think of the talents as money or ability, but they really stand for every resource. If we needlessly leave resources ‘hidden’ in the ground, will we be met with the same rebuke from the “Master of All Creation”?

In America and around the world, people are hurting now. I pray that my Brothers and Sisters in Christ see their need and respond accordingly, rather than limiting energy affordability and making life today more difficult for the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

Dr. David R. Legates, a Christian and a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware, is a Senior Fellow of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation—a coalition of clergy, theologians, scientists, economists, and policy experts committed to bringing a balanced Biblical view of stewardship to environmental and developmental issues.

Cornwall Alliance :: Stewardship Notes :: Science Class? Or Religious Humanist Recruiting Ground?

Cornwall Alliance :: Stewardship Notes :: Science Class? Or Religious Humanist Recruiting Ground?

Science Class? Or Religious Humanist Recruiting Ground?

by E. Calvin Beisner
July 10, 2013

Where is Dr. Mauerbry when we need her?

Thirty-seven years ago, in a freshman college course on physical anthropology, the professor required every student to write a term paper on a topic of his choice. I said I’d like to write on scientific evidences against Darwinian, naturalistic evolution.

“This is a science course, not a religion course,” she replied. “You can’t do that.”

“Who said anything about religion?” I replied. “I want to write about scientific evidences.”

She insisted that all opposition to evolutionism was religious. There were no scientific evidences against it.

“Well, then,” I replied, “I guess I’ll get an ‘F’. But I still want to do it.”

She forbade me.

Thinking she had infringed my academic freedom, I went to the faculty ombudsman to complain. He agreed and advised me to go back to her, point out her infringement, and insist on the right to write on that topic.

I did, and when I pointed out that the faculty ombudsman had said she’d infringed my academic freedom, she angrily replied, “All right, do your [expletive deleted] paper!”

I labored at it all semester, spending every available hour reading scientific journal articles in biology, genetics, paleontology, geology, and related fields. The result? A term paper over 100 pages, filled with evidences against naturalistic evolution, mostly drawn from evolutionists’ papers. It earned an ‘A’.

For all her prior blindness to scientific evidences that challenged her firm belief in Darwinism, Dr. Thais Mauerbry (not her real name) at least insisted that science not masquerade as religion, or vice versa.

We could use people like her in our educational establishment today—people who would recognize the religious nature of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) being pushed on state education departments as part of the new Common Core Curriculum.

The NGSS address religion in two ways, and in both ways they fail Constitutional tests.

First, the NGSS address religion, but not objectively.

Judicial decisions have set forth three ways the state can meet its First Amendment obligations:

• It can exclude religion entirely from public school curriculum.
• It can include it if it treats it objectively and neutrally with respect to students’, parents’, and taxpayers’ Constitutional rights.
• It can objectively consider the strengths and weaknesses of explanations that support various religious viewpoints.

The NGSS, however, address religious questions but fail to do so objectively.

Many people wouldn’t recognize this, because they think of secularism as non-religious. But the Supreme Court in McGowan v Maryland (1961) defined religion as any “activity that profoundly relates the life of man to the world in which he lives”—and that is an explicit goal of the science standards.

The specific religion promoted by the science standards is Secular Humanism. The Humanist Manifestoes define “Religious Humanism” as “an organized set of atheistic beliefs that (1) deny the supernatural, (2) claim that life arises via unguided evolutionary processes rather than as a creation made for a purpose, and (3) claim that life should be guided by naturalistic/materialistic science and reason rather than traditional theistic religious beliefs.”

The NGSS affirm each of these positions—not surprisingly, granted their authors, most of whom are members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom, according to a survey, deny or question the existence of God. (That’s far different from scientists at large, 33 percent of whom believe in God, and another 18 percent of whom believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Perhaps you’ll think twice, then, before you consider the NAS an objective source.)

Key to every aspect of the NGSS is insisting that all scientific questions be addressed and resolved solely in terms of Methodological Naturalism (MN), “the idea that science is not permitted to explain the cause of events within the natural world with anything other than a materialistic explanation through the use of ‘material’ or ‘natural’ causes (that is a cause resulting from the unguided interactions of matter, energy and the forces).”

Such a methodological principle excludes appeal to God or any other intelligence as the explanation for anything found in nature. Yet the standards assert it as if it were religiously neutral, exploiting children’s lack of mental preparation to recognize and question such bias.

As Citizens for Objective Public Education, an organization working to prevent adoption of NGSS, puts it, “The assumption of materialism (MN) is incompatible with science education that must respect the religious rights of children, parents and taxpayers.”

Second, the NGSS effectively rule out God not just in the laboratory but in the external world as well, again violating the standard of religious neutrality.

While Methodological Naturalism might be appropriate for experimental science, the assumption of no intelligent agency as a cause of historical events is unwarranted, and many of the world’s finest scientists, past and present, reject it. Nonetheless, the NGSS present unguided macroevolution as the sole explanation of all past cosmic, geologic, and biological events, never offering students an alternative, thus again foisting an atheistic religious worldview on them.

While they require presenting to students, through the 12 years of science curriculum, many purported evidences for naturalistic macroevolution, the standards—in contravention of the Constitutional requirement of objectivity in handling alternative religious views—fail to mention any of the evidences of purposive design in the universe, such as:

• that the discrete values of the material and energetic forces of the universe appear to be “fine tuned” to permit life—even slight alterations to many of them entailing the impossibility of life;
• the information content of the genetic code;
• the incapacity of natural causes to explain the sequencing of the four bases in DNA, which provides the intangible information content without which life would be impossible—this recognition caused renowned scientist Jacques Monod to describe this as “the ultimate mystery of life”;
• the absence of materialistic explanations for the origin of life;
• the incapacity of materialistic processes to explain “major increases in biocomplexity,” which, as COPE puts it, “require numerous additions to the information content of DNA before selectable function can arise, thereby casting doubt on the plausibility of stochastic [non-deterministic] processes to explain all of those increases”;

… and more.

In short, the NGSS are religion—atheistic religion—disguised as science. Their backers intend to use the public schools as recruitment centers for atheism.

That’s why Christian parents, educators, pastors, and political office holders need to be well informed about the NGSS and join the effort to prevent their adoption by state boards of education.

My lecture Science Standards: Political or Pure? How the Educational Establishment Threatens Americans’ Faith, Freedom, and Well Being—And How YOU Can Fight Back will equip you with the information you need to make the case against the NGSS in your state’s public schools.

For the month of July, as our expression of thanks, we’ll send a free DVD of this electrifying lecture to anyone who makes a donation of any size to the Cornwall Alliance. You can donate at our secure online website, or by phoning our office at 703-569-4653, or by mailing your check to Cornwall Alliance, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Rd., Burke, VA 22015. Whichever way you donate, be sure to ask for the free DVD “Science Standards: Political or Pure?”

Articles: Political Correctness Is Cultural Marxism

Political Correctness Is Cultural Marxism

 July 6, 2013
 By W.A. Beatty


The excellent AT article "Conservatives Pushing Back" by Bruce Walker explored what we conservative thinkers (We are, after all, American Thinkers) have known for quite some time: political correctness (PC) is to culture what Marxism is to economics.  To recognize that fact arms us with what we need in order to push back.  As Walker says (emphasis added), "[t]hese marketplace ballots are the key not only to the survival of a non-totalitarian America, but also to the final defeat of those whose minds and wills are chained with hard, cold manacles of leftism."

Walker's article is (pardon the pun) right on the money.  So, in an effort to further understand PC, exploration of its similarities to Marxism is in order.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German socialist.  Marx's social, economic, and political theories proclaimed that societies progress through class struggle.  His focus was upon economics, so Marx concentrated on the conflict between an ownership class that controlled production and a proletariat that provided the labor for production.  He referred to capitalism as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."  The proletariat, the oppressed workers, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure.

Marx's key concept was "class struggle."  That's where PC comes in.  PC seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior, just like Marxism, on all Americans and is, therefore, quite totalitarian in nature.  PC is, in concept, similar to Marxism, but its focus is upon culture, rather than economics, as the class struggle environment.

PC, just like Marxism, forces people to live a lie by denying reality.  PC takes a political philosophy and says that on the basis of the chosen philosophy, certain things must be true, and reality that contradicts its "truth" must be forbidden -- eradicated since it disputes PC, exposes as untrue what PC says is true.  People are reluctant to live a lie, so they use their eyes and ears to see reality, to say, "Wait a minute.  This isn't true.  I can see it isn't true; the power of the state [PC] must be put behind the demand to live a lie."  Marxism, by denying economic reality, did exactly the same thing.

PC, just like Marxism, has a method of analysis that always provides the answer it wants.  For PC, the "answer" is found through deconstruction, which takes any situation, removes all meaning from it, and replaces it with PC's desired meaning.  Walker references this point when he says, "[T]hat her [Paula Deen's] devout Christian faith is more the real target than past use of an unhappy word which did not keep Robert Byrd from remaining, by election of his fellow Senate Democrats, the most powerful Democrat politician in America."

PC, just like Marxism, depends upon defining what it considers good and bad groups.  It defines good groups as "victims" of bad groups.  The victims can never be anything but good, regardless of what their actions may be.  Witness what the Black Panthers did in Philadelphia, PA in 2008 and 2012.  Any group identified as good by PC (homosexuals, blacks, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, feminist women, mentally and/or physically challenged people, the poor, environmentalists, the list goes on and on) must be shown deference, both physically and linguistically.  They must not be offended, must not be insulted. 

Any group identified as bad by PC, such as white males or any Christian group, can be offended.  This offense, PC practitioners say, "makes up" for past offenses certain to have been committed in the past by bad groups.  And what's worse is that the PC practitioners get to define the offenses committed by the bad groups.  This situation, by definition, is a "self-fulfilling prophesy." 

Rush Limbaugh, in 2010, said, "Our politically correct society is acting like some giant insult has taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards."  The PC crowd labeled Limbaugh's statement offensive and insulting.  Imagine that.  Limbaugh was just "calling a spade a spade."  Like it or not, PC cannot prevent mental retardation, cannot alter reality.  But that doesn't stop them from trying.

PC, just like Marxism, depends upon expropriation.  PC is literally taking over our language, and woe be unto him/her that dares speak the truth.  When Marxists took over Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie by confiscating their property.  Similarly, when PC takes over our culture, quotas are set.  The so-called bourgeoisie are told whom they can and can't hire, and in what quantities they can hire.  As an example, see what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is currently up to.  And let's not forget affirmative action, a system of expropriation if there ever was one, another PC favorite.  When a black or Hispanic student (or some other "victim"), who isn't as well-qualified as a white student, gains university admittance through affirmative action, the white student's admittance is expropriated.

PC, just like Marxism, has a single factor explanation of all of history.  PC says that all history is determined by power, by which groups have power over which other groups.  Nothing else matters.  Period.  PC is all about gaining power for the good groups that it defines.  To further that goal, PC literally rewrites history.  And PC says that the Bible is actually about race and gender.  Nothing is beyond the PC crowd.

As an example of what PC has done and is currently doing, examine the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case/trial.  First, always PC, Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama said, "You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."  Then, ever PC NBC doctored the 911 recording; thus, "NBC created this false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism: manipulating Zimmerman's own words, splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create the illusion of statements that Zimmerman never actually made."  Here is what PC tried to do before the trial.  "Many viewed the early lack of charges against Zimmerman as unequal justice for a black victim.  More than 2 million people signed an online Change.org petition demanding 'Justice for Trayvon Martin.'"  Now, the prosecution is trying to say that Zimmerman is a liar, that his injuries were not life-threatening.  I'm quite certain that AT readers can cite numerous other examples.

The U.S. has become an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology and history that has been defined by PC.  People convicted of "hate crimes" as defined by PC are currently serving jail sentences for political thoughts contrary to PC.  And it's only getting worse -- PC continues to spread.

Marx believed his ideology, his economic system to be true.  But, reality contradicted his system.  His ideology did not adjust to reality.  Hopefully the PC ideology will soon suffer a similar fate.  It is, as Walker points out, a corrupt ideology.  The only problem is that we will have no country, will have an economic disaster once people are confronted with reality, when enough people say, "Wait a minute.  This isn't true."  Meanwhile, the Democrats/Progressives/Liberals who will not adjust to reality continue the PC ideology.  And they have convinced the MSM and enough low-information voters to continue to empower them as all three groups continue to ignore reality.

Charlton Heston once said, "Political correctness is tyranny with manners."  Tyranny, yes, but practitioners seem to have forgotten the manners part.

Dr. Warren Beatty (not the liberal actor) earned a Ph.D. in quantitative management and statistics from Florida State University.  He was a (very conservative) professor of quantitative management specializing in using statistics to assist/support decision-making.  He has been a consultant to many small businesses and is now retired.  Dr. Beatty is a veteran who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years.  He blogs at rwno.limewebs.com.

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.