News

U.S. CO2 emissions declining, but China and Asia CO2 emissions are rising

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Investors Business Daily reports.

Excerpt:

America is a global warming success story, for those who believe in such things. CO2 emissions are on the downtrend in this country. In fact, they are lower today than they were two decades ago. When you account for all the economic and population growth over those 20 years, that decline is even sharper.

What’s more, the U.S. — along with several other industrialized nations — is below the CO2 emission targets set by the Kyoto protocol. You know, the treaty that Al Gore & Co. said would save the planet, but that America never ratified.

China is a completely different story. It’s tripled the amount of CO2 it pumps into the air each year over those same two decades, to the point where it now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the U.S.

Other developing countries are spewing CO2 at record levels as well. And all are increasing at rates much faster than industrialized nations could ever hope to cut theirs back.

So where are the protestors? Are they in Beijing demanding that the communist leaders there “change course”? Are they in India — where CO2 levels have doubled in the past two decades — demanding more solar panels and electric cars?

Nope. Instead they flock together in New York, in London, even Australia (which emits as much CO2 in an entire year as China does in 16 days).

I guess I don’t really care about CO2 levels with respect to climate change, because like all other sane people, I have watched almost all of the projections made by global warming alarmists be falsified in my lifetime by actual data.

The Wall Street Journal explains how this was done.

Excerpt:

The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).

Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.

First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after all invalidate their theories.

When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”

We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. Areport from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30 years of slight cooling after 1940.

I love science. But I love experimental science. When you have government, which is intent on growing larger, paying scientists to find evidence that government needs to grow larger, you have a conflict of interest. We shouldn’t be so anxious to appear on the side of the “smart” people, because “smart” people have a tendency to say stupid things when there is money being pressed into their hands. We need to be skeptical.

The cosmic background radiation is fact. The fine-tuning of the force of gravity is fact. Protein folding is fact. Predicting the weather hundreds of years into the future is something else entirely. Especially when you have to edit out the Medieval Warming Period and “hide the decline using Mike’s Nature trick”. That certainly isn’t science. It’s prostitution.

Podcasts

Is common ancestry confirmed by molecular and morphological evidence?

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Casey Luskin did a good podcast explaining a problem with two kinds of evidence commonly used to argue for common ancestry.

Details:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin takes a keen-eyed look at Darwin’s tree of life and finds that common descent, far from being confirmed by the data, is actually contradicted by it, as New Scientist pointed out in their cover story, “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.”

Listen in to learn how the data is challenging Darwinist assumptions, and check out “A Primer on the Tree of Life” for more information.

The MP3 file is here.

The paper linked above seems to be exactly what he read out loud in the podcast.

Here is one section from the paper that summarizes everything:

One authoritative review paper by Darwinian leaders in this field stated, “As morphologists with high hopes of molecular systematics, we end this survey with our hopes dampened. Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as it is in morphology and as it is between molecules and morphology.”

Another set of pro-evolution experts wrote, “That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.“

The two methods of determining ancestry are “often incongruent”. What I am looking for in order to be convinced of common ancestry is substantial agreement between morphological phylogenies and molecular phylogenies. I don’t see that, so I am still skeptical of common ancestry. Especially with all the examples of convergence that I keep finding out about.

Commentary

This woman’s husband left her for his business partner and took her kids

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A striking story from the Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

In the fall of 2007, my husband of almost ten years told me that he was gay and that he wanted a divorce. In an instant, the world that I had known and loved—the life we had built together—was shattered.

I tried to convince him to stay, to stick it out and fight to save our marriage. But my voice, my desires, my needs—and those of our two young children—no longer mattered to him. We had become disposable, because he had embraced one tiny word that had become his entire identity. Being gay trumped commitment, vows, responsibility, faith, fatherhood, marriage, friendships, and community. All of this was thrown away for the sake of his new identity.

Try as I might to save our marriage, there was no stopping my husband. Our divorce was not settled in mediation or with lawyers. No, it went all the way to trial. My husband wanted primary custody of our children. His entire case can be summed up in one sentence: “I am gay, and I deserve my rights.” It worked: the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”

I truly believe that judge was legislating from the bench, disregarding the facts of our particular case and simply using us—using our children— to help influence future cases. In our society, LGBT citizens are seen as marginalized victims who must be protected at all costs, even if it means stripping rights from others. By ignoring the injustice committed against me and my children, the judge seemed to think that he was correcting a larger injustice.

[…]At the time of the first ceremony, the marriage was not recognized by our state, our nation, or our church. And my ex-husband’s new marriage, like the majority of male-male relationships, is an “open,” non-exclusive relationship. This sends a clear message to our children: what you feel trumps all laws, promises, and higher authorities. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want—and it doesn’t matter who you hurt along the way.

[…]Our two young children were willfully and intentionally thrust into a world of strife and combative beliefs, lifestyles, and values, all in the name of “gay rights.” Their father moved into his new partner’s condo, which is in a complex inhabited by sixteen gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old male prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late sixties and has a boyfriend in his twenties. My children are brought to gay parties where they are the only children and where only alcoholic beverages are served. They are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers, and LGBT film festivals.

Both of my children face identity issues, just like other children. Yet there are certain deep and unique problems that they will face as a direct result of my former husband’s actions. My son is now a maturing teen, and he is very interested in girls. But how will he learn how to deal with that interest when he is surrounded by men who seek sexual gratification from other men? How will he learn to treat girls with care and respect when his father has rejected them and devalues them? How will he embrace his developing masculinity without seeing his father live out authentic manhood by treating his wife and family with love, honoring his marriage vows even when it’s hard?

My daughter suffers too. She needs a dad who will encourage her to embrace her femininity and beauty, but these qualities are parodied and distorted in her father’s world. Her dad wears make-up and sex bondage straps for Halloween. She is often exposed to men dressing as women. The walls in his condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative positions. What is my little girl to believe about her own femininity and beauty? Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead, he is warping it.

Without the guidance of both their mother and their father, how can my children navigate their developing identities and sexuality? I ache to see my children struggle, desperately trying to make sense of their world.

When I was younger and considering marriage, I thought a lot about no-fault divorce and how I would feel about my wife leaving me because she wanted to find herself in Europe, or something. I thought about the feminist judge who would give her custody of our children, and force me to pay alimony and child support. Marriage did not seem like a good risk to me then. I guess part of me always thought that feminists would be the only bad guys in this sexual revolution, and men and children were the victims of feminist selfishness. But this woman’s story really makes me realize how women can be just as much the victims of judicial activism as any man was under no-fault divorce laws. That story she told about the activist judge just made my blood run cold. What must that have been like for her, to lose custody of her kids and have them put into the “gay lifestyle” Grindr-style environment? My heart goes out to her.

Previously, I blogged about Dawn Stefanowicz‘s story of growing up with a gay father.