Tag Archives: Climate Change

News

Did global warming / climate change cause hurricanes Harvey and Irma?

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NOAA graph showing frequency of major hurricanes (1897-2017)
NOAA graph showing frequency of major hurricanes (1897-2017)

The graph above (tweeted by famous climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg) includes Harvey and Irma.

The Daily Signal takes a look at the historical record of major hurricanes that made landfall.

Excerpt:

Flooding in homes and businesses across Houston was still on the rise when Politico ran a provocative article, titled “Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like.”

Politico was not alone, as another news outlet called the one-two punch of Harvey and Irma the potential “new normal.” Brad Johnson, executive director of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote, says Harvey and Irma are reason to finally jail officials who “reject science.”

[…]Except they’re not telling the full story.

Consider this data from a 2012 article in the Journal of Climate, authored by climatologists Roger Pielke Jr. and Jessica Weinkle. Pielke tweeted a graph from the paper that shows no trends in global tropical cyclone landfalls over the past 46 years.

Here is the graph:

Historical graph of tropical cyclone landfalls (1970-2016)
Historical graph of tropical cyclone landfalls (1970-2016)

If global warming were a thing, then you should be able to see much lower numbers on the left, and much higher on the right. But it’s basically flat.

More from the far-left United Nations IPCC:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent scientific assessment that “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

Further, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [such as ‘Superstorm’ Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

If even the socialist United Nations admits there’s no problem, then I’m not sure why the far-left mainstream media is trying to link global warming with hurricanes.

What about floods?

Reason.com reported on a report from the National Academies of Science on the link between global warming and floods:

The 2017 Special Report further finds that trends with respect to floods in the U.S. are a mixed: They have increased in some regions and declined in others. The draft also observes that “attribution studies have not established a robust connection between increased riverine flooding and human-induced climate change.”

A new study in the Journal of Hydrology analyzing long term flooding trends in North America and Western Europe finds no discernible increase in floods in those areas during the past 80 years. A team led U.S. Geological Survey researcher Glenn Hodgkins reported, “There was no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time in major-flood occurrence during the 80 years through 2010, using a very large dataset (>1200 gauges) of diverse but minimally altered catchments in North America and Europe.” The researchers added, “For North America and Europe, the results provide a firmer foundation for the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] finding that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”

Floods are still happening, but at the same rate as before – it’s flat.

But these observations of flat numbers of hurricanes and floods isn’t stopping the mainstream media from being hysterical.

News

Temperature measurements plunge after Australia removes “adjustments”

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Satellite global temperature measurements 1979 - July 2017
Satellite global temperature measurements 1979 – July 2017

(Image source: Data from University of Alabama, Huntsville)

Of course the temperature measurements went down after the measuring process was adjusted to report the raw data.

The Australian reports.

Excerpt:

Recorded temperatures at the Bureau­ of Meteorology’s Thredbo Top automatic weather station have dropped below -10C in the past week, after action was taken to make the facility “fit for ­purpose”.

A record of the Thredbo Top station for 3am on Wednesday shows a temperature reading of -10.6C. This compares with the BoM’s monthly highlights for June and July, both showing a low of -9.6C.

The BoM said it had taken immed­iate action to replace the Thredbo station after concerns were raised that very low temperatures were not making it onto the official record. Controversy has dogged the bureau’s automatic weather station network since Goulburn man Lance Pigeon saw a -10.4C reading on the BoM’s website on July 2 automatically adjust to -10C, then disappear.

Later independent monitoring of the Thredbo Top station by scientist Jennifer Marohasy showed a recording of -10.6C ­vanish from the record.

BoM initially claimed the adjustments were part of its quality control procedures. But bureau chief executive Andrew Johnson later told Environment Minister Josh­ Frydenberg that investigations had found a number of cold-weather stations were not “fit for purpose” and would be replaced.

Several other temperature measurement stations are also receiving the fix to stop adjusting the raw data:

An in-house investigation that includes two independent experts has been called. The bureau said it rejected allegations aired in some media outlets that it had sought to tamper with temperature data.

It has been reported online that electronic smart cards were allegedly fitted to the BoM’s automatic weather stations, which put a limit on how low temperatures could be recorded in official weather data. The BoM declined to comment ahead of the internal review.

[…]On her website yesterday, Dr Marohasy said it was not the recording­ devices that were at fault. “To be clear, the problem is not with the equipment; all that needs to be done is for the smart-card readers to be removed,” Dr Marohasy said.

And this was not a situation where the government, which had been lying, corrected itself. Oh no! Challenges to the faked government data came from outside the government, as Bureau of Meteorology minister explained:

“The first we heard of the ­problem was in early July after (The Australian) approached the Bureau­ of Meteorology,” the ­minister said.

You might remember a recent scandal where it was discovered that scientists in the UK had been adjusting the temperatures to “hide the decline” of temperatures in their simulation code.

Here was the data before hiding the decline:

Raw temperature measurements before hiding the decline
Raw temperature measurements before hiding the decline

And here was the data after:

Raw temperature measurements after hiding the decline
Raw temperature measurements after hiding the decline

That second graph, with “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” was sent then to the IPCC to influence climate policy. I have no doubt that socialist governments were very grateful for this “evidence”. Just what they needed to get a mandate from the masses to control businesses and consumer spending were grateful for this hiding of the decline, and rewarded the scientists with many research grants. This is why we call global warming alarmists “watermelons”: green on the outside, and red on the inside.

If you’ve never heard of that Climategate story from 2009 before, you should definitely read about it.  Here is a good single post that explains what happened.

Podcasts

Can a person be postmodern and a Christian at the same time?

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Can a person be postmodern and a Christian? Not for long
Can a person be postmodern and a Christian? Let’s look at their leader

Wow. Postmodern “Christian” Brian McLaren has completely abandoned traditional Christianity. McLaren, you may already know, spear-headed the “emergent church” movement – an attempt to fuse postmodern relativism with liberal Christianity.

Greg Koukl and Kevin DeYoung analyze his latest book “A New Kind of Christianity”.

The MP3 file is here.

Details:

Kevin DeYoung – Brian McLaren’s New Kind of Christianity
Host: Greg Koukl

Guest: Kevin DeYoung – Brian McLaren’s “New Kind of Christianity” (00:00:00)
Commentary: Reality vs. Religion? The Modern Upper Story Leap (00:56:39)
Guest: Dennis Prager – Reality vs. Religion (01:52:25)

We’re interested in the first hour of the three-hour show.

Topics of hour one:

  • What is Brian’s view of Creation?
  • What is Brian’s view of the Fall?
  • What is Brian’s view of Scripture?
  • What is Brian’s view of Truth?
  • What is Brian’s view of sin and Hell?
  • What is Brian’s view of the Fall?
  • What is Brian’s view of atonement?
  • How did Brian’s leftist political views infect his theology?
  • How did postmodernism affect Brian’s epistemology?
  • How faithful is Brian in interpreting the text?

There’s also a nice blog post about Brian McLaren by Melinda from Stand to Reason, too.

Excerpt:

McLaren doesn’t think the Bible is to be taken literally. For instance, the Garden of Eden story isn’t about sin and the Fall, rather it’s a “compassionate coming of age story.”  Consequently, the whole idea of sin and Hell is a horrible overreaction and has caused the church to offer a violent message and image all these years.  It follows from this interpretation then, that there is no need for the cross and Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Those are violent ideas resulting from a bad reading of the Bible.

And a couple of longer reviews are linked.

Tim Challies and Kevin DeYoung have written excellent and more in-depth reviews of McLaren’s new book and I highly recommend them.

I highly recommend you listen to this podcast and if you know anyone who is being influenced by the (non) religious left, take a look at the articles, especially the DeYoung article, which is quite good.

A generous “orthodoxy”?

And finally, here is a review of another much earlier Brian McLaren book by Biola University professor of philosophy Doug Geivett – one of my absolute favorite people. This is back when McLaren was just starting to leave orthodox Christianity behind.

Excerpt:

Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004) has been called a manifesto of the “emerging church” — a movement that is rethinking Christianity against the backdrop of postmodernism. McLaren is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md.

[…]In using the term “orthodoxy” for his position, McLaren is making a political move to subvert traditional evangelical theology. “Orthodoxy,” as he uses it, is whatever happens to be in vogue and culturally dominant. Also, an important theme among postmodernists has to do with the nature of belief — they doubt that people have, or need, good reasons to believe as they do, so they emphasize behavior over belief. (This probably explains why McLaren’s book relies less on evidence and argumentation and more on rhetoric.) However, in de-emphasizing the importance of belief, McLaren and other postmodernists overlook three things.

First, belief is the engine that drives behavior. The best way to cure wrong action is to identify false beliefs. Second, all people — even postmodernists — have definite beliefs about the things that matter most. They can’t help it. While McLaren resists the invitation to state clearly what he believes — for example, about the eternal destiny of nonbelievers — surely he has some view of the matter and that view influences his approach to the proclamation of the gospel. (As a pastor, he should have good ideas about this and a host of other issues of theological significance.) Third — though postmodernists sneer at the idea of evidence — evidence matters because it’s how we determine what’s true and is crucial to ordering our lives according to truth. In this respect, the postmodernist is out of step with the culture because human beings are by nature evidence-gatherers.

Very important to understand where these postmodern “Christians” are coming from, and where they end up when they’ve worked their mystical anti-realism through to its conclusions.