Bad news for Holland

Not only did they lose the World Cup but their country is going to sink. In about a hundred years. Maybe.

Global warming and Sola panels

I can't believe it! The subject of Global Warming has invaded even one of my favourite blogs, the Sola Panel!


In the comments, one reader wanted to link up the Christian attitude to global warming with the Christian attitude to apartheid:

I hope this following comparison isn’t too emotive. I do think we need to heed the warning of the experience of CESA - our evangelical friends in South Africa. They chose a path of political quietism during the apartheid years.

Read the rest somewhere here.

Left a comment as well, which I'll try to rescue from blog comment oblivion, with typos removed, by posting here:

...[T]he comparison with apartheid may or may not be emotive, but it's hard to see how it's relevant.

Discrimination on the basis of skin colour is a sin, the only exception being the positive discrimination associated with the attractive and slightly olive coloured skin of me and my daughters.

By contrast, refusal to be persuaded about whether we've heated the world, and are continuing to do so, is not a 'sin' under almost any meaning of that word. Sure, it may well be silly to fail to be so persuaded. But being silly remains allowable even in these enlightened times, and not being at the top of the class is never singled out as being problematic—not by the Bible, and not even by the Roman Catholic church.

So average people like me still haven't been completely convinced that the world is being heated to perdition, not unlike the biro I stuck on the bunsen burner back in Year 9, and remains fused (AFAIK) to the tripod Mr Boddy took away from me and into the Science staffroom for closer inspection.

And if the right wingers are to be believed, (and even the left wingers, according to this right winger), the climate-change consensus is collapsing anyway.

Whatever the case, those who kept on with their rather foolish and simplistic gospel message will keep doing so whatever the barometer outside the building is telling them.

But those who wanted Christians to switch to the gospel of global warming are in trouble, if the promised warming fails to materialize. They will need to find another clever thing to scare us with.

And let's not even begin to ask how many lives could have been saved if the 'let's stop global warming' money had actually been spent on something that is currently killing people, like malnutrition.

In the meantime, I'm not worried about any of this temperature nonsense. I'm worried about gospel preaching. And what's more, I'm worried about Peak Lithium, really I am. When the supplies of this important metal run out, where am I going to buy my rechargeable batteries?

And so on.

Global warming farce

You can feel the tide turning on this, or the wall crashing down, or the 'what' entering the 'whatever' (whichever metaphor grabs your fancy).

It's not so much that Paul Sheehan has written a somewhat sceptical article, it's the fact that it appeared in the SMH, until quite recently an unashamed promoter of the ideology that not only is global warming happening, we must all pay lots of money to stop it.

Here are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.

Sheehan then goes on to provide a random grab-bag of things that are most likely true and most certainly underreported—the polar bear population is increasing, Barack Obama wants nuclear power stations to multiply, the scientific consensus on global warming is a myth, etc etc.

The two from Sheehan's article that, if true, ought to make Christian bandwagoners on global warming ashamed:

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.

After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

Those who have used the global warming momentum to push Christians (and others) to take costly action now (though the exact actions are frequently vague in nature, imprecise in application and uncertain in effect) have by and large remained silent on the real, current impact of a Western world largely sold on the reality of the still uncertain phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming.

The greater and possibly less visible sin of Christian apologists for global warming is not about how money and effort has been mis-spent, however, but how it's worked to distract some from the true end-time scenario; that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.

Global warming conspiracy

People are rightly suspicious of conspiracy theories, but having followed the debate for a little while now, I wouldn't be surprised if something is about to come crashing down.

Andrew Bolt explains in one of several articles; this one is called The global warming conspiracy: its silencing of the sceptics.

If true, the headline is not overstated.

In other surprising news, Andrew Barry agrees with the Pope. ;-)

Warming causes cooling

This is nuts.

Belief in global warming really has become a quasi-religious phenomenon that transcends the need for evidence.

An Inconvenient Untruth

Should you use fake photos to make the case that global warming is happening? Al Gore doesn't seem to mind.

I am thinking we might sell more Matthias Media products if we used this principle and mocked up some before-and-after Bible study shots. From Brian to Broughton!

Light up for Earth hour

Plug in those 100 watt light bulbs and let 'em burn, baby, burn.

If you're worried about CO2 emissions, it's better for the earth than the alternative.

Locking up skeptics.

If you are not convinced by the notion of global warming, David Suzuki would like you locked up.

Scientific consensus and Einstein

Einstein wasn't much one for consensus, scientific or otherwise. In 1931 a tract appeared entitled "100 Authors against Einstein". His response was "If I were wrong, one would be enough."

People concerned about global warming like to point to the question of consensus. I tend to think that in the area of forecasting 100 year trends, in climate or otherwise, it is not something of more than marginal significance.

I for one am pleased that Einstein didn't let himself be guided by the scientific consensus on the speed of light.