The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.
His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.
You can take a look at the graph above, which shows the pause since 1998. And now we are starting another downturn. How could a scientific paper be published that tried to hide the pause? How could the NOAA do this? Answer: big government is desperate to show the need for higher taxes and more regulation of energy producers.
Let’s hope that the Republicans aren’t influenced by this, or we will all be paying more for electricity and gas.
For a long time now, conservative speakers have been being blocked by left-wing students and protestors. At UC Berkeley, a leftist seminary, things have spilled over into fascism and violence.
You can review some photos of the violence, vandalism and rioting in this post from the Daily Signal.
Here’s one:
Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker
A female Donald Trump supporter was pepper-sprayed on Wednesday night by an anti-Trump protester while she was giving an on-camera interview at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I’m looking to make a statement by just being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same,” Kiara Robles told KGO-TV. “Props to the ones who are doing it non-violently, but I think that’s a very rare thing indeed.”
Within seconds of that comment, someone wearing black gloves came over and pepper-sprayed Robles in the face and then quickly ran away. It is not completely clear why Robles was targeted, but she was wearing a red “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat that resembled Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hat as protests broke out to oppose a Trump supporter scheduled to speak on campus.
Here’s the video:
Watch that. And think carefully about what Democrats are really like. How different is the typical Democrat that you know from the one who attacked a defenseless woman who was merely speaking words that the attacker did not like? This is the result of leftist seminaries and the leftist mainstream media and leftist Hollywood teaching impressionable young people to hate others instead of understanding them.
The use of violence in the pursuit of political aims is the very definition of terrorism. And while it probably would be too much to treat these half-baked campus radicals with the seriousness applied to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, the crimes committed in this and related episodes are serious and demand to be treated seriously. Political violence has social implications far beyond those of ordinary crime — we are not talking here about local thugs knocking over a 7-Eleven in Oakland.
Domestic terrorism. That’s what the left perpetrated, and is now covering up, in California. The article notes that only one person was arrested, and that’s not surprising, since the Democrats in power are doing nothing whatsoever to fix the problems. This is what Democrats believe, from bottom right to the top. So why would they punish people they agree with?
The Daily Signal notes that no one has been arrested:
[…][T]he new violent nature of these protests prompts a discussion over whether or not the school should be a recipient of federal funds.
Videos have surfaced of a crowd of protestors beating a man unconscious and lighting a massive fire, which led to the cancellation of Yiannopoulos’ speaking engagement by the university.
Yet as of last night, campus police remained minimally involved in containing the riots, with the police chief saying she was not aware of any arrests made.
Fortunately, there may be a way to reverse the indoctrination in hate that young people are receiving – namely, cutting off the flow of taxpayer money to the leftist seminaries.
More:
The riots were violent enough to elicit a response from President Donald Trump, who tweeted out, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”
Indeed, American taxpayers should be well aware of where their money is going.
UC Berkeley is a public institution that receives federal dollars, yet it appears to allow violence, censorship, and holds contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.
The response to Trump’s tweet from Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a radical leftist, was to pretend to be shocked that anyone would punish the leftist leaders for manufacturing domestic terrorists with taxpayer money. They are so entitled, that they cannot imagine that they are committing fraud by taking taxpayer money, and turning out little brainwashed fascists.
Now the secular left will be very unhappy with the flow of funds they use for indoctrinating children being cut off. But if we want to stop future crimes and future acts of domestic terrorism, then we should serious about forcing the leftist seminaries to expose their little psychopaths-in-training to critical thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. Before it’s too late.
The term for a person who believes in fully naturalistic evolution but who also believes in God is “theistic evolutionist”.
Terrell Clemmons takes a look at one organization of theistic evolutionists “Biologos”, and makes a distinction between their public statements and the real implications of their public statements.
Here is the PR / spin definition of theistic evolution:
Evolutionary creation is “the view that all life on earth came about by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Evolution is a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes in creation.” This view, also called theistic evolution, has been around since the late nineteenth century, and BioLogos promotes it today in a variety of religious and educational settings.
And here is the no-spin definition of theistic evolution:
As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains it, the central issue dividing Bio-Logos writers from intelligent design theorists is BioLogos’s commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), which is not a scientific theory or empirical finding, but an arbitrary rule excluding non-material causation from the outset. “Unfortunately,” Meyer writes,
methodological naturalism is a demanding doctrine. The rule does not say “try finding a materialistic cause but keep intelligent design in the mix of live possibilities, in light of what the evidence might show.” Rather, MN tells you that you simply must posit a material or physical cause, whatever the evidence.
What this means, according to BioLogos’s own epistemology, is that God is objectively undiscoverable and unknowable—a tenet that sits squarely at odds with Christian orthodoxy, which has for centuries held that God is clearly discernible in the natural world (e.g., Romans 1:20). Obviously, this is theologically problematic, but Meyer also points out that theistic evolution faces problems from a scientific standpoint as well, as the technical literature among evolutionary biologists is moving away from the Darwinian mechanism.
Whenever I talk to theistic evolutionists, I try to stop them from talking about the Bible or their faith, because that’s not what is interesting to me. I don’t really care about their history as a religious person, or where they go to church, or who their pastor is. When I talk about origins and evolution, I only care about the science. What the ordinary process of scientific inquiry tells us about nature? Does nature have the capacity to create all of the varieties of life without any intelligent agency playing a role? Or, are there parts of nature that are similar to computer programs, blog posts, and term papers, where the best explanation of the effect is an intelligent agent choosing how to arrange the parts to achieve functionality?
I don’t accept molecules-to-man unguided evolution. This is not because I start with faith and let faith override the findings of science. It’s because I think that if you look at specific areas of natural history, there is clear evidence of intelligent agency, such as in the origin of life, or the Cambrian explosion. These effects in nature are well-studied and well-understood, and they look much more like the code that a computer scientist (like me) writes than the simplistic “order” created by wind erosion or crystalline patterns or anything the blind forces of nature could produce. Blind forces are observed to make small changes – short or long finch beaks, fruit flies with 4 wings and no balancers, bacterial resistances.
What’s also interesting is how often theistic evolutionists drop the theism but keep the evolution.
Consider this article about Stephen Matheson from Evolution News:
Biologist Stephen Matheson is a longtime critic of the theory of intelligent design. His extensive attacks on Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, for one, ranged from the substantive to the trivial and personal. The tone was frequently…abrasive, and we responded at the time. With Arthur Hunt, Dr. Matheson has debated Dr. Meyer in a forum at Biola University. Formerly a professor at an Evangelical Christian school, Calvin College, Matheson is still listed as a Blog Author at the theistic evolutionary website BioLogos, where it notes that he enjoys “explor[ing] issues of science and Christian faith.”
Well, his theistic evolutionary explorations have now terminated. As he reports on his personal blog page, where he took a hiatus of more than five years along with a break from his teaching, he is “happily” no longer a Christian.
OK. Now that’s just one case, but what about Howard Van Till, also of Calvin College?
Salvo magazine takes a look at what he wrote in a recent book:
In what follows I shall use the term “naturalism,” when unqualified, to represent neither more nor less than the rejection of supernaturalism. Stated positively, naturalism is committed to the belief that all events that occur within this Universe are consistent with and adequately explained by the system of natural causes. This commitment necessarily entails the additional belief that the system of natural causes is fully adequate to account for all events that transpire. Focusing on the issue of the Universe’s formational economy, we can say that naturalism—as here defined -entails the RFEP.
Now, for the big three Western monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. To deny supernaturalism IS to deny the robust theism present in the world’s big three monotheistic religions. Van Till denies theism as commonly understood now. And again, this isn’t because of the science. His heavy handed naturalistic assumption squashed out any kind of serious inquiry into areas like the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine tuning, the origin or life, the Cambrian explosion, biological convergence, so-called junk DNA, deleterious mutations, and so on. Places where you can see that naturalistic forces cannot do the creating that Van Till has faith that they can.
And for the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the standard Big Bang cosmology, and a 4.5 billion year Earth. My problem with evolution is not Bible-based, it’s science-based. If the science shows the need for intelligent causes, and I think it does, then I think that the naturalists need to adjust their assumptions and pre-suppositions to match the evidence. We have blog posts and computer science code, that’s evidence for a programmer. We have DNA and proteins and sudden origin of body plans, that’s evidence for a programmer, too.
