Jay Richards and Stephen C. Meyer discuss scientific consensus on the Michael Medved show

The Michael Medved show is a national radio show broadcast out of Seattle, Washington. According to Talkers magazine, he has the fifth largest radio audience. He has a regular weekly segment on science and culture featuring  scholars from the Discovery Institute.

Here is the fifth segment from this past week, courtesy of the Intelligent Design: The Future podcast.

The MP3 file is available for download. (35 minutes)

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards and Stephen Meyer join Michael Medved for a discussion of the phrase “scientific consensus” and how it is used in debates over controversial issues such as Darwinian evolution and climate change.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery Institute will join Michael Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture. Listen in live online or on your local Medved station, or stay tuned at ID the Future for the weekly podcast.

Topics:

• Does global warming cause more tornadoes?
• Are we having more tornadoes now?
• Is science decoded NY consensus?
• Why would someone appeal to consensus
• If a person defends their view by using sweeping rhetoric and insults is that am indicator of strength
• Is there more extreme weather than before now?
• When did the last warming begin?
• Are we in a waking or cooling cycle now?
• How are scientists who dissent from the consensus treated?
• How much CO2 is needed in the atmosphere in order to create warming?

I subscribe to the ID the Future podcast, and I really recommend that you do as well!

Previous entries

• Episode one: Stephen C. Meyer on Thomas Nagel and intelligent design
• Episode two: Stephen C. Meyer on Richard Dawkins and the Cambrian explosion
• Episode three: John G. West discusses Darwinism and the value of human life
• Episode four: Stephen C. Meyer and John Lennox discuss human exceptionalism

Filed under: Podcasts, Big Science, Carbon Dioxide, Climate, Climate Change, CO2, Consensus, Darwinism, Evidence, Evolution, Global Warming, Jay Richards, Science, Scientific Consensus, Stephen C. Meyer, Tornado, Weather

Jay Richards: what should Christians think about global warming?

Here’s a lecture Jay Richards did for the Acton Institue.

And here is a related article from Boundless.

Excerpt:

The big environmental issue nowadays is global warming. Anyone who watches or reads the news even occasionally has been told that humans are causing global warming through all the fossil fuels we’re burning. They’ve also been told that this warming process eventually will prove catastrophic if we don’t reverse course as soon as possible.

As thinking Christians and good stewards, how should we respond?

The short answer is, we should respond thoughtfully. Thoughtless stewards are rarely good stewards.

Notice that my brief summary of the global warming controversy bundled together several distinct claims. To think clearly about this issue, we have to tease apart this bundle of claims and consider each one. For each claim, there is a corresponding question we need to answer. And it’s only after answering these questions that we can be in a position to determine what, if anything, we ought to do about global warming.

Here are the four central questions:

1. Is the earth warming?
2. If the earth is warming, is human activity (like carbon dioxide emissions) causing it?
3. If the earth is warming, and we’re causing it, is that bad overall?
4. If the earth is warming, we’re causing it, and that’s bad, would any of the proposed “solutions” (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol, legislative restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions) make any difference?

It’s important for us to think carefully about how best to achieve the goals set out by the Bible. And that means undertaking a close study of how the world works and how best to affect change for the good.

Filed under: Videos, Bible, Bible Study, Cap and Trade, Carbon, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Tax, Christian, Conservation, Earth, Economics, Emissions, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Green, Jay Richards, Jay Wesley Richards, Kyoto Protocol, Steward, Stewardship, Warming

New study shows that the medieval warming extended far and wide

From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times the whole of the planet heated up.

It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.

In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.

At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe – therefore that the warming we’re experiencing now is a man-made phenomenon.

However, Professor Lu has shown that this isn’t true – and the evidence lies with a rare mineral called ikaite, which forms in cold waters.

‘Ikaite is an icy version of limestone,’ said Lu. ‘The crystals are only stable under cold conditions and actually melt at room temperature.’

It turns out the water that holds the crystal structure together – called the hydration water – traps information about temperatures present when the crystals formed.

This finding by Lu’s research team establishes, for the first time, ikaite as a reliable way to study past climate conditions.

The scientists studied ikaite crystals from sediment cores drilled off the coast of Antarctica. The sediment layers were deposited over 2,000 years.

The scientists were particularly interested in crystals found in layers deposited during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ approximately 300 to 500 years ago, and during the Medieval Warm Period before it.

Both climate events have been documented in Northern Europe, but studies have been inconclusive as to whether the conditions in Northern Europe extended to Antarctica.

Lu’s team found that in fact, they did.

What that means is that the Medieval Warming Period was not local to Northern Europe, but extended all the way to Antarctica, as well. Now you might be asking yourself “how could medieval knights riding around on horseback cause global warming? Wouldn’t they have to be driving SUVs and drilling for oil and generally do nasty capitalist things like that?” Yes, they would. But they weren’t. And so this clearly shows that the warming and cooling of the Earth has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2 emissions. Whatever will the socialists do now to trick people into voting for higher gas prices?

Filed under: News, Antarctica, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Emissions, Climate Change, CO2, Emissions, Equality, Europe, Global Warming, Green, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Man-Made Global Warming, Medieval Warm Period, Mythology, Socialism, Watermelon, Zunli Lu

16 scientists explain why global warming is not a threat

From the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Levin)

Excerpt:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

And:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Read the whole thing! This is a must-read.

UPDATE: My friend Neil Simpson has found another recent study showing that there has been no significant global warming for 15 years – and the numbers come from the British Met Office, and the University of East Anglia (home of Climategate).

Related stories

• New study : Earth’s climate is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as IPCC claims
• Climategate 2.0: Leaked e-mails show scientists intended to deceive public
• NASA admits that their data is worse than CRU Climate-gate data
• 19 points that undermine the claims of global warming alarmists
• UN IPCC global warming alarmism based on student essay and magazine article
• How the UN’s IPCC cites non-scientific claims from the World Wildlife Fund
• Chairman of UN’s IPCC used bogus claims to grab global warming cash
• Britain to be hit by coldest winter in 100 years
• Does global warming increase the frequency of hurricanes?
• Canadian government finds polar bear population up 163% since mid-1980s
• Polar bear populations are not decreasing now
• Russian economists accuse CRU of cherry-picking Russian temperature data
• UK Daily Mail summarizes the Climategate scandal
• Armed guard prevents questions on Climategate at UN conference
• Australian climate data also adjusted to hide the decline
• What does Climategate really prove about global warming?
• Comparison of hockey stick graph data to a larger data set in the same area
• Oceans are not warming now
• Polar ice caps are not melting now

Filed under: News, ACGW, Adjusted Data, AGW, Al Gore, Alarmism, An Inconenient Truth, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropogenic Global Warming, CAGW, Cap and Trade, Carbon, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Emission, Carbon Emissions, Cause, Cherry-Picking, Climate Change, Climate Change Skepticism, Climate-gate, Climategate, CO2, Consensus, Corruption, Crisis, Energy Policy, Energy Tax, Environmentalism, Fear, Fraud, Global Cooling, Global Warming, Global Warming Skepticism, Green, Greenhouse, Hide the Decline, Hoax, Hockey Stick Graph, Inconvenient Truth, Indoctrination, Initiative, James Hansen, Keith Briffa, Melting, Michael Mann, Obstruction, Ocean, Official Data, Phil Jones, Polar Bears, Politicization of Science, Population, Propaganda, Raw Data, Regulation, Steve McIntyre, Weather Station

New study : Earth’s climate is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as IPCC claims

ECM sent me this article from the Economist concerning some recent research that was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science.

Excerpt:

Climate science is famously complicated, but one useful number to keep in mind is “climate sensitivity”. This measures the amount of warming that can eventually be expected to follow a doubling in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its most recent summary of the science behind its predictions, published in 2007, estimated that, in present conditions, a doubling of CO2 would cause warming of about 3°C, with uncertainty of about a degree and a half in either direction.

[...]But a paper published in this week’s Science, by Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University, suggests it is not. In Dr Schmittner’s analysis, the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than was feared.

Existing studies of climate sensitivity mostly rely on data gathered from weather stations, which go back to roughly 1850. Dr Schmittner takes a different approach. His data come from the peak of the most recent ice age, between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. His group is not the first to use such data (ice cores, fossils, marine sediments and the like) to probe the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. But their paper is the most thorough. Previous attempts had considered only small regions of the globe. He has compiled enough information to make a credible stab at recreating the climate of the entire planet.

[...]The group’s most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C. More importantly, these results suggest an upper limit for climate sensitivity of around 3.2°C.

I think that it is a good thing for the reputation of scientists that articles like this can be published at all. I have lost a lot of confidence in government-funded science lately, especially when the conclusion of the government-funded research supports the need for more government and high taxes.

In case you missed my recent post on the newly-release Climategate e-mails, then you should read that to see how biased climate scientists can be.

Here are the latest surface temperature measurements.

Filed under: News, ACGW, Adjusted Data, AGW, Al Gore, Alarmism, An Inconenient Truth, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropogenic Global Warming, CAGW, Cap and Trade, Carbon, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Emission, Carbon Emissions, Cause, Cherry-Picking, Climate Change, Climate Change Skepticism, Climate-gate, Climategate, CO2, Consensus, Corruption, Crisis, Energy Policy, Energy Tax, Environmentalism, Fear, Fraud, Global Cooling, Global Warming, Global Warming Skepticism, Green, Greenhouse, Hide the Decline, Hoax, Hockey Stick Graph, Inconvenient Truth, Indoctrination, Initiative, James Hansen, Keith Briffa, Melting, Michael Mann, Obstruction, Ocean, Official Data, Phil Jones, Polar Bears, Politicization of Science, Population, Propaganda, Raw Data, Regulation, Steve McIntyre, Weather Station