Christians Proving Resilient To Climate Change Alarmism
In this newsletter:
1) Global Temperatures Drop Back To Pre-El Nino Levels
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 2 February 2018
2) Heaviest Snowfall On Record Blankets Moscow
BBC News, 4 February 2018
3) Christians Proving Resilient To Climate Change Alarmism
Indiana University, 23 January 2018
4) A Climate Of Crisis: America In The Age Of Environmentalism
History News Network, 4 February 2018
5) More Climate Hysteria As Five Polar Bears Lose Weight
Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 1 February 2018
6) Amazing: Supporters Raise $100.000 For Peter Ridd Legal Action Fund in 48 Hours
Peter Ridd Legal Action Fund
Full details:
1) Global Temperatures Drop Back To Pre-El Nino Levels
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 2 February 2018
The onset of La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean has caused temperatures drop to levels not seen in six years, according to satellite temperature data.
“Note that La Niña cooling in the tropics has finally penetrated the troposphere, with a -0.12 deg. C departure from average,” wrote atmospheric scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who compile satellite data at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
Satellite data, which measures Earth’s bulk atmosphere, show temperature anomalies dropped from 0.41 degrees Celsius in December to 0.26 degrees in January. The temperature drop was brought about by a La Niña cooling event in the tropics.
La Niña is in full swing in 2018, plunging temperatures in the tropics to -0.12 degrees Celsius in January, down from 0.26 degrees the previous month. It’s the third-largest tropical temperature drop on record.
“The last time the tropics were cooler than this was June, 2012 (-0.15 deg. C),” the scientists wrote.
“Out of the 470 month satellite record, the 0.38 deg. C one-month drop in January tropical temperatures was tied for the 3rd largest, beaten only by October 1991 (0.51 deg. C drop) and August, 2014 (0.41 deg. C drop),” they wrote.
La Niña settled in late 2017, with cooler waters reaching from South America, across to eastern Pacific islands. It’s the opposite of El Niño warming events.
“The last time the Southern Hemisphere was this cool (+0.06 deg. C) was July, 2015 (+0.04 deg. C),” Christy and Spencer wrote.
“The linear temperature trend of the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomalies from January 1979 through January 2018 remains at +0.13 C/decade,” they wrote.
Full story
2) Heaviest Snowfall On Record Blankets Moscow
BBC News, 4 February 2018
Moscow has seen its heaviest snowfall in a day since records began, with more than 2,000 trees brought down and air travel disrupted, officials say.
More than half the monthly average snow - 38cm (15 inches) - fell on Saturday, beating the previous record from 1957.
A falling tree and collapsing power line killed one person and five others were injured.
Snowfall is expected to ease off on Sunday night but the temperature is expected to drop.
Dozens of flights have been delayed at the Russian capital's airports.
Despite the disruption, many people on social media just seem happy to see a "real Russian winter" again after the unseasonal thaws of previous years, and have been sharing snowscape pictures.
Full story
3) Christians Proving Resilient To Climate Change Alarmism
Indiana University, 23 January 2018
There has been no “greening of Christianity” among people in the pews, despite efforts by some religious leaders to emphasize environmental stewardship, according to new Indiana University research.
David Konisky of IU’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs analyzed 20 years of survey results from Gallup public opinion polls in one of the first major studies of how attitudes about the environment by self-identified U.S. Christians have shifted over time.
He found that environmentalism is not increasing, and there are signs it is actually in decline. For example, Konisky’s analysis of the survey responses from 1990 through 2015 indicates that Christians, compared to atheists, agnostics and individuals who do not affiliate with a religion, are less likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, and they are more likely than others to believe global warming is exaggerated.
For example, the likelihood that a Christian survey respondent expressed a great deal of concern about climate change dropped by about a third between 1990 and 2015.
The pattern generally holds across Catholic, Protestant and other Christian denominations and does not vary depending on levels of religiosity.
“This relationship between religion and the environment is significant because of the increasing importance of climate change,” Konisky said. “There may come a time when religious leaders and faith-based organizations generate more interest in protecting the environment and more willingness to demand action, but we haven’t seen it yet.”
The current lack of enthusiasm comes despite high-profile calls for action such as the encyclical letter on the environment released by Pope Francis in 2015 and despite initiatives led by Evangelical Protestant groups, such as the formation of the Evangelical Environmental Network.
Full story
Paper: The Greening of Christianity? A Study of Environmental Attitudes Over Time
4) A Climate Of Crisis: America In The Age Of Environmentalism
History News Network, 4 February 2018
“Denier!” It has become the epithet of choice among climate change activists to malign those who dissent from the prevailing consensus [says] Patrick Allitt, author of A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism. The term, inherently political, is almost exclusively limited to two groups of people: Holocaust deniers and climate change skeptics. When used against the latter group, the implication is that questioning the accuracy of a scientific study is like questioning the historical reality that Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. Is the position of a climate change skeptic as meritless as someone who denies a well-documented genocide?
Patrick Allitt, a professor of environmental history at Emory University, is of the position that the response to climate change has been disproportionate to the scope of the problem. Is he a denier, as his detractors would suggest? No, Allitt insists. He says he believes in the overwhelming array of evidence that shows that the climate is changing and that this has serious implications. Where Allitt departs from the herd is that he does not believe climate change is catastrophic; rather, he believes that the benefits of industrialization outweigh the perceived harms of climate change.
In A Climate of Crisis Professor Allitt explores the history of American environmentalism since World War II and highlights the progress that the United States has made in solving its environmental issues. As Allitt explains, the “United States is far less severely polluted than it used to be, it uses energy more effectively, and it is actively responding to the new environmental challenges as they arise.” However, according to Allitt, this progress has been attached to a culture of alarmism within in the environmental movement where the problems are amplified and the solutions are simplified.
Allitt argues that the history of American environmentalism is filled with repeated alarms that later turned out to be false. In the 1960s there was a great alarm that overpopulation would lead to mass famine and death for millions in the developed world, a false alarm according to Allitt. In the 1970s warnings about the exhaustion of oil and other raw materials were echoed by scores of environmentalists, with the claim that by 2000 we would run out of vital resources, which Allitt cites as yet another false alarm. Allitt argues that both of these cases, much like climate change today, were described in catastrophic rhetoric, which was disproportionate to the severity of the issue.
What could be behind this phenomenon? Allitt believes it is all about votes, noting that “in a democracy it’s important to motivate voters, and using crisis rhetoric is a good way of doing it.” As a historian, Allitt believes it is important to look beyond the rhetoric and to recover a sense of balance and perspective. Unlike the environmental causes of the past, Allitt contends that the hysteria and overreaction characterize our response to climate change and that this can have unintended consequences which may end up burdening the potential victims of climate change, future generations.
Climate change, as Allitt explains, is unique in that it has no immediate constituency and the beneficiaries of climate change abatement are not easily identified. As such, Allitt is reluctant to commit large resources to the solution of long-term problems, which may or may not benefit a generation that does not yet exist. At a time when hundreds of thousands of people still die prematurely because of remediable problems like contaminated drinking water and smoke inhalation, Allitt argues that governments’ commitment of vast resources to the issue of climate change is misplaced.
With all that said, Allitt is adamant that he believes climate change is a serious, yet manageable issue that should be addressed. According to Allitt, we are less vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because “we are so much more knowledgeable than we were before and have so many more ways to respond.”
How should we respond to climate change? Allitt suggests that we should carry on with research connected with reducing greenhouse gas emissions without sacrificing economic growth in the process. Why is economic growth such a central concern? Allitt argues, “the creation of wealth enables societies to respond to severe environmental challenges and that only wealthy societies have active environmental movements.”
Industrialization is, as Allitt puts it, “the source of salvation to populations throughout the world” and the benefits of it needed to be weighed against its adverse impacts on the environment.
In Allitt’s view, one of the biggest misconceptions regarding climate change is that it is a recent phenomenon when, as he explains, “climate change has been a fact of life throughout earth’s history, and not just since the Industrial Revolution.” Again, Allitt acknowledges that industrialization contributes to climate change, but emphasizes, “Industrialization is only one of the causes.”
Are the other causes of climate change a matter of settled science? Allitt does not see climate change through the lens of “settled science” which he suggests is a misnomer.
Our understanding of climate change has been shaped, in large part, within the last half of the century with studies and experiments from a range of scientific disciplines including meteorology, astronomy, oceanography, and paleo-climatology. As such, Allitt believes that looking at climate change as matter of settled science is actually ahistorical. Allitt explains that science is “constantly developing and changing, with each new generation of scientists contesting the findings of their predecessors, and occasionally starting over by subjecting familiar data to new interpretive paradigms.”
Back in 1500, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe was also “settled science.” Additionally, Allitt points to the early 1900s when the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons was settled science,but later generations of scientists challenged that orthodoxy and, eventually rejected it outright. The history of every science shows the same kind of process. Given the dynamism of science, Allitt argues that it would be “extraordinarily anomalous if climate scientists said to one another: All these issues are now settled, and there’s nothing more to be done.”
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A Climate Of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism
By Patrick Allitt
A provocative history of the environmental movement in America, showing how this rise to political and social prominence produced a culture of alarmism that has often distorted the facts
Few issues today excite more passion or alarm than the specter of climate change. InA Climate of Crisis, historian Patrick Allitt shows that our present climate of crisis is far from exceptional. Indeed, the environmental debates of the last half century are defined by exaggeration and fearmongering from all sides, often at the expense of the facts.
In a real sense, Allitt shows us, collective anxiety about widespread environmental danger began with the atomic bomb. As postwar suburbanization transformed the American landscape, more research and better tools for measurement began to reveal the consequences of economic success. A climate of anxiety became a climate of alarm, often at odds with reality. The sixties generation transformed environmentalism from a set of special interests into a mass movement. By the first Earth Day in 1970, journalists and politicians alike were urging major initiatives to remedy environmental harm. In fact, the work of the new Environmental Protection Agency and a series of clean air and water acts from a responsive Congress inaugurated a largely successful cleanup.
Political polarization around environmental questions after 1980 had consequences that we still feel today. Since then, the general polarization of American politics has mirrored that of environmental politics, as pro-environmentalists and their critics attribute to one another the worst possible motives. Environmentalists see their critics as greedy special interest groups that show no conscience as they plunder the earth while skeptics see their adversaries as enemies of economic growth whose plans stifle initiative under an avalanche of bureaucratic regulation.
There may be a germ of truth in both views, but more than a germ of falsehood too. America’s worst environmental problems have proven to be manageable; the regulations and cleanups of the last sixty years have often worked, and science and technology have continued to improve industrial efficiency. Our present situation is serious, argues Allitt, but it is far from hopeless. Sweeping and provocative,A Climate of Crisis challenges our basic assumptions about the environment, no matter where we fall along the spectrum reminding us that the answers to our most pressing questions are sometimes found in understanding the past.
5) More Climate Hysteria As Five Polar Bears Lose Weight
Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 1 February 2018
Thick sea ice rather than climate change may be the reason why five (out of nine) polar bears lost weight
The really significant content of a new paper being heavily-hyped by the media1 is what wasn’t said rather than what the authors discovered about metabolic rates and weight maintenance of a small sample of nine Southern Beaufort Sea bears in 2014 to 2016 (Pagano et al. 2018; Whiteman 2018).
This paper does not document starving or dying bears but merely found some (5/9) that lost weight when they should have been gaining, given that early April is the start of the ringed seal pupping season (Smith 1987) and the intensive spring feeding period for polar bears (Stirling et al. 1981).
The question is, why were Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears off Prudhoe Bay (see map of the study area below), still hunting and capturing only adult and subadult ringed seals from sea ice leads when newborn ringed seal pups and their mothers should have been plentiful and relatively easily available in their birth lairs on the sea ice (see below)?
“Using video collar data, we documented bears’ hunting behavior and foraging success. Bears used sit-and-wait tactics to hunt seals 90% of the time, and stalking comprised the remaining 10% of hunts (movies S1 to S4) (19). Bears that successfully killed and ate adult or subadult ringed seals either gained or maintained body mass, whereas bears that only scavenged or showed no evidence of eating lost mass.”
There was no discussion in the paper of ringed seal birth lairs, or sea ice conditions at the time of the study, but several mentions about what might happen in the future to sea ice and potential consequences for polar bears. The press release did the same.
However, as you’ll see by the sea ice thickness maps below, there may be good reason for the lack of ringed seal lairs, and a general lack of seals except at the nearshore lead that forms because of tidal action: the ice just a bit further offshore ice looks too thick for a good crop of ringed seals in all three years of the study. This is reminiscent of conditions that occurred with devastating results in the mid-1970s and mid-2000s (Burns et al. 1975; Cherry et al. 2009; Harwood et al. 2012, 2015; Pilfold et al. 2012; Stirling 2002, Stirling et al. 1987). Those events affected primarily bears in the eastern half of the Southern Beaufort and were almost certainly responsible for the recorded decline in SB bear numbers in the 2001-2010 survey (Bromaghin et al. 2015; Crockford 2017; Crockford and Geist 2018).
It seems very odd to me that Pagano and colleagues suggested no reasons for the unexpectedly poor showing of polar bear hunting success during their study except a bit of hand-waving about higher-than-we-thought metabolic rates in the bears. For years, I’ve worried that the inevitable next episodes of thick Southern Beaufort spring ice would cause problems for polar bears and seals but we wouldn’t know it because whatever effects were documented would be blamed on reduced summer ice: I suspect that time may have come.
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6) Amazing! Supporters Raise $100.000 For Peter Ridd Legal Action Fund in 48 Hours
Peter Ridd Legal Action Fund
Thanks everybody, you did it and in just 49 hours. I have had a lot of emails from friends who were going to donate but were too late and were a little embarrased. Don't be - even my mum was caught out by the speed of it all. We never know if we will have to make the call ago, I hope not.
Thanks to lots of people including Anthony Watts, Jennifer Marohasy, Jo Nova, Benny Peiser (GWPF), Willie Soon for spreading the word. Also a huge thanks to the IPA for helping with the organisation.
In an era of dangerous group think in science, academic freedom and scientific integrity is increasingly under attack.
My name is Peter Ridd and I am a Professor of Physics at James Cook University, and I am facing serious repercussions for supporting scientific integrity.
This is not the first time my honesty and pursuit of truth has offended powerful people. This time, however, it has become very serious.
I have now been issued a 'Final Censure' by James Cook University for talking about quality assurance in science and told to remain silent. In response, my lawyers have filed in the federal court. This case is set against the background of the issue of academic freedom, and I need your help to support my mounting legal costs.
for more details https://platogbr.wordpress.com/serious-misconduct/
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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