July 25, 2016 Show with E. Calvin Beisner on “More Debunking Global Warming Hysteria”

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October 4, 2016

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:57: Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon
01:04: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.
01:12: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on the 25th day of July 2016.
01:21: And today before we introduce our guest and our topic, I just wanted to offer my condolences to the family of Tim LaHaye, the world -renowned dispensationalist author who went home to glory this morning at the age of 90 after suffering a stroke.
01:39: So obviously, although I am a theologically reformed
01:44: Christian and a Calvinist, I had a lot of differences on theology and eschatology with Dr.
01:51: Tim LaHaye. But he was indeed a brother in Christ who fought on the same side as those of us in the reform camp on many other issues.
02:02: And I hope that his family is comforted knowing that he will be with eternity in Christ.
02:09: And today we have as our guest, returning as our guest, Dr. Calvin Beisner.
02:16: He is the founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the
02:22: Stewardship of Creation. And we are continuing our discussion that we left off with a number of weeks ago on debunking global warming hysteria.
02:31: And we've got a whole bunch of issues under that heading to be discussed very shortly.
02:37: But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner.
02:45: Hi, Chris. Thanks very much. Glad to be back on the program with you. Yeah, it's always a pleasure to have you on.
02:50: And judging from the reaction I've been getting from a lot of my listeners after I started publicizing this, there's a lot of other people who are enthusiastic about your return to the program as well.
03:03: And as I always do, even though we've already had you explain the Cornwall Alliance, there are always people listening for the very first time, it seems, on Iron Sharpens Iron, especially since our ad in World Magazine came out.
03:20: And so if you could let our listeners know about the Cornwall Alliance. Thanks, Chris.
03:26: The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is a network of about 60 scholars sprinkled around mostly
03:32: North America, a couple in India, one in Great Britain, elsewhere. But we're about 60 of us.
03:40: There are about a third of us who are natural scientists, including climate scientists, geologists, solar physicists, chemists, and so on, all various different specialties.
03:53: And about a third are economists, most of them focusing on either developmental or environmental economics, that is how societies rise out of poverty and how we are best able to take good care of the natural environment around us.
04:12: And then the other third are theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and pastors. And all of us are working together to promote three different things simultaneously.
04:24: The first is biblical earth stewardship, or what we also call godly dominion. Men and women creating
04:30: God's image, working together lovingly to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and to the benefit of our neighbors.
04:38: We take up the idea from Genesis 1, 28, where God, having created Adam and Eve in his own image, blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and everything that moves on the face of the earth.
04:55: The second major thing that we want to try to promote through our educational activities is economic development for the very poor.
05:03: I think primarily in terms of places like Sub -Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, where literally billions of people still live in extreme poverty without such basic amenities as electricity and running water and sewage sanitation and things like that, and therefore suffer high rates of disease and premature death.
05:26: We see two things as really crucial to whole societies rising out of poverty.
05:32: One is a set of institutional arrangements, including private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law, and the other is access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, without which work cannot be done.
05:49: You and I remember probably in about sixth grade when we learned the definition of energy as the capacity to work.
05:56: Well, the more energy you have, the more work you can do. The more work you can do, the more you can produce, and that means more food, clothing, shelter, and all other things that make people's lives healthier and longer.
06:10: So, biblical earth stewardship first, economic development for the poor second, and then most important, the proclamation and defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which results in the conversion of sinners to Christ and to their minds being transformed to agree with God's revelation in scripture about how he made this world and how it so that we begin to live in a way that's consistent with God's design that results in better earth stewardship and also in better economic development.
06:50: We do all this in a world that is permeated by an environmental movement, the vast majority of whose worldview, theology, and ethics are anti -Christian with their own doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation, and whose science and economics are often very poorly done, resulting in policies that are not particularly helpful to the natural environment but are often very harmful to the world's poor, and so we want to hope to bring good correction to all of that, especially to introduce people to Jesus Christ, who on the cross died, was buried, and rose again from the dead in victory over sin, and all who trust in him alone for their salvation are forgiven of sin, justified, made righteous in the sight of God, and reconciled to him.
07:45: So that's our work. Amen, and I just want to let our listeners know, and I'll probably be repeating it throughout the program, but the website for the
07:55: Cornwall Alliance is CornwallAlliance .org. Cornwall, that's C -O -R -N -W -A -L -L -Alliance .org.
08:04: That's Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Let me announce also our email address, if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.
08:15: E. Calvin Beisner on global warming or climate change hysteria, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
08:25: chrisarnson at gmail .com, that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com,
08:32: and please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of of the
08:37: USA. Dr. Beisner, you are not a climate scientist yourself, so what gives you confidence to speak about climate change at all?
08:49: That is correct. I'm an interdisciplinary scholar who's done extensive studies in philosophy, religion, history, theology, apologetics, logic, and the like, and I do try to read very, very widely.
09:06: I've read about 50 -some books on the scientific aspects of the climate change controversy, how the climate responds to various different stimuli, including human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thousands of articles on the subject, including hundreds of free journal articles, so I think
09:28: I do actually know the scientific case for and against the idea of dangerous man -made global warming very well.
09:35: In fact, one of the world's leading climate scientists, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, who is a senior fellow of the
09:42: Cornwall Alliance and is a principal research scientist in climatology at the
09:50: University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is the U .S. science team leader on the
09:57: NASA satellite program called Aqua Satellite, that is the source of global data on atmospheric temperature, the most comprehensive and the most reliable source of such data.
10:12: Dr. Spencer actually told me about five years ago, four years ago perhaps, he said,
10:18: Cal, you probably know all the scientific arguments on global warming better than any climatologist
10:25: I know. You read all the different perspectives on it, you read all the different avenues of research on it, and most of us just focus on narrow little paths.
10:38: I think probably Roy exaggerated a little bit there, but I do know a good deal.
10:43: But frankly, I don't depend on my own understanding of this. We do have, as I mentioned, a network of about 60 scholars, about half a dozen of them are climate scientists, including really top ones like Roy, like Dr.
10:57: David LeGate at the University of Delaware, and Dr. Anthony, shoot, his last name escapes me, but he's at the
11:07: University of Missouri, and others as well, and I know also quite a lot of other climate scientists around the world, who, though not part of Cornwall Alliance's network, are glad to consult with me when
11:20: I have questions. So I try to keep up that way. Yeah, and it might be good right off the bat to bring up something that we brought up last time, just so our listeners who may be skeptical about things that you're saying, especially since you've admitted that you're not a climate scientist yourself and that kind of a thing, did not the founder of Greenpeace resign from Greenpeace because he thinks or believes without question that the hype of global warming alarmists is all based on lies?
11:56: Well, that wasn't the actual reason for his resignation from Greenpeace. He resigned from Greenpeace back in the,
12:03: I believe it was the late 1980s when he resigned, and that was because even at that point, he recognized that Greenpeace had transformed itself from the highly scientific ecological organization that he had co -founded, and of which he had been the president for some time, into a far more politicized organization that frankly was embracing, as he put it, a very left -wing
12:33: Marxist kind of thinking. But he also recognized that it was on all sorts of different issues, embracing ideas that just simply didn't have solid scientific support.
12:46: He was the only Ph .D.-ed environmental scientist involved in the founding and leadership of Greenpeace, and it had simply been taken over by political activists instead.
12:59: So that's why he left. But in ensuing years, as he studied the climate change issue, he became thoroughly convinced that although human emissions of carbon dioxide do indeed contribute some warming to the atmosphere, they don't do so at a level that is dangerous either now or in the foreseeable future, and that it would be frankly very counterproductive for us to try to reduce those emissions in order to reduce global warming, because the reason for those emissions is that they come from our using the best sources we have for the abundant, affordable, reliable energy that is indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty.
13:48: You know, in the June issue of World Commerce Report, you have an article,
13:54: Climate Science, Energy Policy, Poverty, and Christian Faith. How do they connect?
14:00: In that article, you sought to make the point that what we think about human -induced climate change and how we respond to it have important ethical implications, especially regarding the poor.
14:13: Can you briefly explain how you tie all those things together? Well, I kind of hinted at it in what
14:19: I just now said about Patrick Moore and his understanding of why we should not be trying to minimize global warming.
14:27: The gist of it is this. The only way to reduce human contribution to global warming is to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but those are, aside from nuclear, far away the best source of the abundant, affordable, reliable energy that's absolutely necessary to lift and keep any society out of poverty.
14:52: Nuclear has its own problems, and essentially they are two. One is not particularly the danger of spent fuel, that is something of which we are thoroughly capable of taking care of, but rather there's one, the danger of weaponization of spent fuel, and the other is simply that nuclear reactor technology is beyond the technical abilities of most developing nations and beyond the ability of those nations to afford the basic capital to build those things in the first place.
15:28: They're very expensive up front, though over the long haul they're a very inexpensive source for energy.
15:34: So fossil fuels, especially coal and natural gas for generating electricity and petroleum for transport, are far away the best source we have of that energy that's absolutely necessary to help the poor.
15:49: Get rid of those and essentially you trap the roughly three to three and a half billion people at the bottom of the world's economic spectrum in their poverty for generations to come.
16:02: And since the scriptures tell us that we are indeed supposed to be concerned about the poor, we're supposed to want to protect them from harm, to protect them from oppression, and that sort of thing, we're supposed to want to make sure that they are able to rise out of poverty, well that brings a pretty strong ethical component into this,
16:24: I think. Yeah, isn't it ironic that here you are, the conservative Christian on my show, and you are the one that seems to have a more intelligent and logical and realistic solution to poverty than all the liberals who claim that they are the champions for the rights and well -being of the poor, and we in the conservative wing of everything, including
16:47: Christianity, we are just totally neglectful or uncaring about the poor. Yeah, it's one of those things where good intentions don't always link with sound understanding.
17:01: I mean, it's been the case for a long time that people on the left claim to care far more about the poor, and that's part of why they embrace the idea of wealth redistribution, socialism, things of that sort.
17:16: But what economic history tells us is that socialism and wealth redistribution do not in fact significantly reduce poverty, they're more likely to prolong poverty, and it's been free markets, it's been capitalism that has done far more to lift people out of poverty, to keep them out of poverty, and even to minimize the inequality of incomes and wealth within societies.
17:43: What we see is that inequalities of income and wealth are exaggerated not in very, very free market societies, but in much more heavily regulated societies, and particularly in those societies that make a big emphasis on redistributing wealth, because the very, very wealthy can always afford the various different tactics to shield themselves from taxation, whereas the middle class cannot.
18:13: So the middle class tends to get shrunk while the recipient class grows, and meanwhile the top 1 % or the top 5 % continue to thrive.
18:28: Yeah, the global warming alarmists are in their own way, in their desire to ban fossil fuel, they are in their own way, just like the
18:41: Pharisees were, they're taping out the gnats and swallowing the camels, if you will, they're straining out the gnats and swallowing the camels.
18:50: Yeah, that is so, and particularly when you recognize that, frankly, the donor base for most large environmental organizations is a base of pretty wealthy people, they tend to be financial elites, and so they're asking for us to turn away from fossil fuels, which are the least expensive source we have for abundant, affordable, reliable electricity, and go instead to wind and solar.
19:20: The problem with that is that that's much more expensive. Well, if you're rich, you can handle that, no great problem, but if you are middle class, and particularly if you are lower class in income, that can be quite a problem.
19:34: In many states, for instance, in Florida, where I live, households earning less than $45 ,000,
19:45: I believe it is, per year in after -tax income spend as much as 19 % of their income just on energy for home heating and cooling and lights, that sort of thing.
19:58: And households with under $10 ,000 of a year of after -tax income spend as much as 70 % of their income just on that energy.
20:09: So if you force, say, a 10 % rise in electricity prices by forcing a switch from fossil fuels to wind or solar, well, you make things a little bit uncomfortable for the wealthy, you make things a lot more uncomfortable for the middle class, but you devastate the poor.
20:32: Wow. In the article that I mentioned just a few minutes ago, Climate, Science, Energy, Policy, Poverty, and Christian Faith, How Do They Connect, that was in the
20:44: June issue of World Commerce Report, you discussed how some people use dramatically colored graphs to convey information about temperature trends.
20:54: How do those sometimes distort reality? Well, this is one of the many different ways in which, as the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, right?
21:07: Someone actually wrote a book called How to Lie with Statistics. You can have statistics, and they can actually be truthful, accurate numbers, and yet the way you present them can be very misleading.
21:22: So I happened to point out in this article, just simply in order to help people to see the various different ways in which their minds can be manipulated through what is essentially a psychological technique,
21:36: I pointed out that in many instances, alarmists will graph anomalies in temperature, anomalies from a long -term mean, a long -term average, and they will use a color code for doing so.
21:55: And so, for instance, in the graph that I featured in this article, one was a graph of the
22:04: United States, another was a graph of the whole world, and in both instances you had these very, very colorful representations of areas that were average in temperature and areas that were above the longer -term average in temperature and areas that were below.
22:22: And the areas that were above were all graphed in a very shocking red. Red is a color of alarm for all of us, and light, and things of that nature, right?
22:35: So red tends to be an alarming color for us.
22:41: So I just simply pointed out that if you represented exactly the same numbers, not in color, but in grayscale, all of the alarming appearance disappeared, and so I reproduced the graph that way.
22:56: Well, I'm not quibbling there with the numbers. I'm quibbling there with the psychological impact of how they are presented, because it's really that psychological impact that makes more difference in this debate than the real numbers themselves.
23:14: What most people don't realize is that when the global warming alarmists are talking about how much we've seen the world warm over the last, whether it's 10 years, 20 years, 40 years, 150 years, whatever, right?
23:28: What they're talking about is a change in global average temperature of less than one degree
23:37: Celsius. And frankly, most places in the world experience a change in temperature 10 to 20 times that much every single day, from morning to night.
23:52: That change is not going to make a significant difference for any habitat in the world.
23:58: But if you graph the numbers with alarming colors, you can create the psychological effect.
24:08: We have a listener in Kinnelon, New Jersey, who says, oh, his name is
24:15: Steve from Kinnelon, New Jersey. He says, the shrinkage of the rainforest that has been observed by those who have flown in space over the past 40 years is interesting.
24:30: It's the trees and other plants that produce the oxygen we breathe, and a significant portion of the rainforests are gone.
24:39: This has to have some effect. By the way, much of the climate change science is a lot of bunk.
24:47: I do not advocate or agree with Al Gore's or other crazies out there.
24:53: So if you want to comment on Steve and Kinnelon, New Jersey's... Yeah, yes, I'll be happy to comment on that.
25:00: Rainforest depletion was occurring at its highest rates in the 1960s and 1970s.
25:08: By the early 80s, it had slowed significantly. And even at its highest rate, it was at less than one half of 1 % per year.
25:21: That would take quite a long time to deplete the rainforests very significantly.
25:27: The reason why people have been alarmed about this is that this information tends to be presented in, again, frightening terms.
25:41: For instance, there was a period during which the Brazilian rainforest, or the Amazon rainforest, was losing the equivalent of about the area of Indiana every year.
25:57: Well, that sounds awful. That sounds just horrific. Well, that was not quite honest.
26:06: Here's the deal. That area was being consumed every year, but other area was growing every year as well, and the net loss consequently was much smaller.
26:20: But furthermore, that area of Indiana, compared with the entire area of the
26:26: Amazon rainforest, was a very small part of a percent. And so, if you don't know your geography, if you don't actually look up the figures, you can be frightened by this kind of thing.
26:40: Now, the fact is that deforestation reached its peak worldwide back in the 1950s, 1940s, and has been declining since then.
26:51: Rainforest deforestation has been declining since the late 1970s. And the actual measure of the number of acres of wood growing around the world shows that it's well above what it was at the turn of the 20th century, the beginning of the 1900s.
27:10: Furthermore, the carbon dioxide that we're adding to the atmosphere is causing all plants to grow better than they once did.
27:19: And satellite photography shows us that, in fact, the world is greening because of this.
27:27: Deserts are shrinking as plants are able to grow better in hotter and drier conditions and with less water because of more
27:36: CO2 in the atmosphere. So, actually, we're actually in pretty good shape there. Well, thank you,
27:42: Steve, and we look forward to hearing from you. And keep spreading the word about the show in Kinnelon, New Jersey and everywhere else the
27:50: Lord leads you. And when we return from the break, we are going to have your reaction to theoretical astrophysicist and global warming alarmist,
28:01: Dr. Ethan Siegel, who you bring up in your article that we mentioned. And we would look forward to hearing you rebut what he had to say.
28:12: And if anybody else would like to join us on the air, we do have a few of you still waiting to have your questions asked and answered.
28:19: But if anybody else would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
28:28: And as always, please give us your first name, your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside the
28:33: USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. Hi, I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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32:25: Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, this is Chris Arns, and before we return to our discussion, one of our sponsors has an event they want you to know about that's being held
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34:08: fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, and before we go to the issue that I was mentioning before the break, which involves your response to Dr.
34:21: Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist and global warming alarmist, we have a listener in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, CJ, who wants to know,
34:33: I've heard that you may be a libertarian politically, and I was just curious if that was true, and I'd like to follow that up with which one of the current major candidates running for president more closely reflect your understanding of global warming?
34:54: Fascinating question. Number one, I'm not libertarian politically. My economic understanding, that is, of whether capitalism or socialism or some sort of third way is the ethically and practically preferable economic system, my economic understanding would be closer to libertarianism than to, say, the typical understanding of mainstream
35:24: American economists in the shape of, say,
35:29: Robert Samuelson, whose introductory textbook on economics is one of the most widely used in American universities and the like.
35:37: I'm certainly not Keynesian. I'm much more what's called Austrian in my understanding of economics, and that aligns me with a lot of libertarians on economic issues, but on moral and social issues, such as abortion, marriage, homosexuality, things of that sort.
35:54: I'm most certainly not libertarian. I'm a very conservative Christian, more in line with what tends to be thought of as traditional conservative thought.
36:07: The follow -up part of that question was which of the major candidates would be closer to my position on global warming.
36:20: Frankly, I don't think either one of them would be significantly close to my position on global warming.
36:27: Obviously, Hillary Clinton has said that global warming is one of the greatest threats facing mankind.
36:33: I would be far from her. Donald Trump has tended to belittle the fears of global warming, and one might think that that would put him and me fairly close together, but frankly,
36:46: I think that Donald Trump has probably never put two brain cells together to think through the science or the economics of global warming or climate policy or energy policy, and so I think his is just not a very well -informed position.
37:07: So there you go, and I'm going to have a very, very difficult time voting in November.
37:15: Well, I don't think that you're alone on that, and by the way, just to follow up, I do know more conservative
37:22: Christian libertarians who are certainly pro -life who would not be in favor of a woman's right to choose even though they believe in a very small government.
37:35: Right, right. Libertarianism as an economic theory is,
37:40: I think, very fine, but when it comes to questions of abortion, of marriage, of, say, prostitution, things of that nature,
37:55: I would be quite in disagreement with many other libertarians.
38:01: Well, let me repeat our email address if you'd like to join us at chrisarnson at gmail .com,
38:10: chrisarnson at gmail .com, and we would love to have your questions as well for Dr.
38:16: Beisner, and before we even go into the article where you respond to Dr.
38:22: Ethan Siegel, if you could tell our listeners who exactly he is. Well, as you mentioned, he's an astrophysicist and he wrote a major article in Forbes magazine that came out a few months ago in which he purported to refute global warming skeptics like myself.
38:45: The article was titled, The Next Great Global Warming Hiatus Is Coming, with hiatus in scare quotes, and the gist of his argument was that climate skeptics, as he described us, and climate realists, as he describes himself and others whom
39:06: I would describe as global warming alarmists, look at the same data in two different ways.
39:12: Climate skeptics will graph the data and point out that there are periods of rising global average temperature and then there are periods of plateau, and then there's more rise and then there's more plateau, and there's more rise and there's more plateau, and he says the skeptics will just point at the plateaus and say, see, no warming, and then he says, but the climate realists look at the same data and they point out that with every plateau leading to another rise, the long -term trend is for greater warming, and that's what's really going on.
39:51: And I point out that, in a sense, he's correct there to do that, but that doesn't really properly address how the skeptics are handling these data.
40:07: Our point is not that there is no global warming. Our point is not that human emissions of carbon dioxide do not contribute to a long -term warming trend.
40:19: Our point is that the amount that human emissions of CO2 contribute is much smaller than what he and others think that it is, and we have a variety of different reasons for that.
40:32: One of those reasons is that there is not a strong statistical correlation between the long, steady rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the intermittent rise in global average temperature.
40:50: If indeed CO2 is the primary driver, then there should be a very strong correlation, but there is not.
40:57: And in fact, by the way, the real correlation between CO2 and global warming is one in which the
41:07: CO2 changes follow the temperature changes, if we're talking very short term, tend to follow them by a matter of months, or on a slightly longer term, by a matter of about 40 years.
41:23: On much longer terms, CO2 concentration tends to follow changes in atmospheric temperature by about 800 to 1000 years.
41:33: Now, CO2 is driving the temperature. You need those sequences to be exactly the opposite.
41:40: That's part of why we argue that CO2 is not the primary driver. But the other part of why we argue it is simply that if it were, then the warming ought to be pretty much unintermittent, just as is the rise in CO2 concentration.
42:01: What do climate scientists mean by the pause or the hiatus in global warming?
42:07: How long has it been going on? Why is it important? Climate skeptics like myself have long pointed out that since there was no statistically significant increase in global average temperature from basically early 1997 to late 2015, that's a period at the longest, it was 18 years and nine months.
42:36: That contradicted the claims of the computer modelers, whose model output is the primary basis for the
42:46: United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes assessment reports that have claimed that, say, a doubling of CO2 would result in anywhere from about 2 to 4 .5
43:00: degrees increase in global average temperature. That's in Celsius, by the way. Those models did not predict this 18 years and nine months lack of warming.
43:16: Now, Siegel attempts to respond to that by pointing out that, okay, sure, we have this pause, but it has now been superseded by new warming that had started up, that was driven by El Nino, a very strong El Nino in the southern
43:38: Pacific, an upwelling of warm water to the surface that warms the atmosphere. This results in a resumption of the long -term warming trend.
43:49: Well, that may be the case, but El Nino is a cyclical event, and it's followed typically by La Nina, the opposite, a cooling event.
43:59: In fact, that's what's happening now. We had January through May were exceptionally warm months, or January through April, rather.
44:09: May and June recorded the two fastest months of global average temperature decline in the period of the satellite record, and we are going to continue to see that as La Nina gets stronger and really takes hold.
44:26: This is one of these things where, frankly, the argument's going to keep going back and forth, and it's going to take time for scientists to converge further and further on particular ideas.
44:38: What I can say is this. The scientists who specialize in the empirical estimate, not the modeled estimate, but the empirical estimate of the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere have been reducing their estimates very significantly over about the last 15 years as that pause lengthened.
45:04: The reason for that is you just can't reconcile the absence of warming with the computer model's assumption that the
45:12: CO2 is the primary driver. According to you, there is a very important, perhaps the most important, paragraph in Dr.
45:21: Ethan Siegel's article that discusses the temperatures appearing to be rising at a rate of 0 .40
45:30: to 0 .80 degrees Celsius or 0 .72 to 1 .44
45:36: degrees Fahrenheit per century, and if you could explain why this is such an important part of the article.
45:43: Yeah. Well, Siegel acknowledges that the plateaus in global warming have indeed happened, but what he says is that what should be far more concerning to anyone who wants to know the truth about climate change is this, quote, the long -term rise in temperatures is continuing at a steady rate.
46:07: The fact that temperatures appear to be rising at a rate of between 0 .4 and 0 .8 degrees Celsius per century unabated is the real cause for concern.
46:18: Now, why I say that this is the most important paragraph in his entire article is twofold.
46:26: First of all, he says that the rise is unabated, that it is steady, right?
46:35: But even in the graphs that he himself presents, it is clearly not steady.
46:41: It is clearly not unabated. But the second, more important reason why this is such a crucial paragraph is that the rate of warming that he says is going on, 0 .4
46:55: to 0 .8 degrees Celsius per century, is actually considerably less than the rate of warming that global warming skeptics like myself say is to be expected.
47:11: He's actually given away the store here. The rate that is projected by the climate models on which the
47:19: UNIPCC and various national governments and various national academies of science rely, that says that the actual warming rate ought to be at least two and probably three times that high.
47:34: Well, what that means is that - Hello, Dr. Beisler?
47:40: He's conceding that the models are wrong. Hello? Yes, yes. You dropped off there for about two seconds.
47:46: Okay. He's conceding in his own words that the models are wrong, you're saying. That's right.
47:52: He's conceding implicitly that the models exaggerate the warming effect of CO2 by two to three times.
47:59: Now, does he realize this? Well, one can hardly think that he wouldn't have realized it if he didn't come right out and say it explicitly, but this is the case.
48:11: And frankly, that's exactly what global warming skeptics have been saying.
48:16: Yes, CO2 warms the atmosphere, but we think it probably warms it only about a half to a third as much as what the
48:24: IPCC says. That's exactly what he's just said. Hmm. Now, when it comes to people like Dr.
48:32: Ethan Siegel and other scientists who apparently have poured a lot of their time and effort into studying this issue who disagree with you, perhaps even on the 180 degree opposite end of the spectrum, what do you make of these people?
48:48: Are they just being bought off to do this? How can they be coming up with such different answers to this issue?
48:59: Yeah, the answer really has to vary a great deal from person to person.
49:06: I think that there are people involved in this who frankly are dishonest. I would count
49:12: Al Gore as that sort of person. I would count Michael Mann of Penn State University in that category.
49:20: I think there's been plenty of empirical evidence that they have been dishonest with the facts about this.
49:29: But I think there are also an awful lot of people who have other motivations, not a matter of dishonesty, not a matter of being bought off or anything like that, and for whom there are other explanations.
49:43: Some, I think, just really are convinced that the models are the best way to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
49:50: Well, frankly, it's probably true. Modeling is the only way we know the future until the future becomes the past.
49:58: But the problem is that models are credible only insofar as they are validated, only insofar as they're able to predict and then what actually happens matches up with what they predicted, or insofar as if you run them backwards, they match the past observational record without your having to parameterize the models.
50:26: That is, you're not allowed to run the model, notice that it doesn't fit the past observations, and then do a bunch of ad hoc adjustments to the model until finally you get it to match the past record.
50:39: That's called curve fitting. And frankly, you do not truly understand the way a natural system works until you can model it into the future and have the future observations actually match what you modeled.
50:57: That we've not been able to do with these models. So what
51:02: I see is a lot of people involved in this are very much invested in the computer models.
51:10: And partly this stems from the fact that so many of them were educated after computer time became very inexpensive and computers became very powerful.
51:18: And so more and more people were educated in science, not out in the real world, but sitting at their computer screens.
51:24: And literally, they have lost the capacity to distinguish between the real world and their models.
51:33: And I don't just have that as a hunch. That was the conclusion of the research by Myanna Lawson, a sociologist of science, who spent several years at the
51:47: National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which is where some of the top climate modelers do their work.
51:56: And she was studying not climate itself, but rather the modelers as scientists doing their work.
52:03: And what she discovered in talking with them and interviewing them and asking them many questions was that most of them had reached the point where they no longer distinguished in their own minds between their models and the real world.
52:22: They'd say, when you do such and such, the ocean warms so and so. And she'd say, no, you say the ocean.
52:31: Do you mean your model? Oh, yeah, that's right, my model. And sometimes she'd say, do you actually have a hard time remembering that the model is not the real world out there?
52:42: And they would laugh nervously and admit that yes, indeed, they do. So what we've got is a situation where people have become so accustomed to using computers for a virtual reality that they don't anymore distinguish between that virtual reality and the real reality out there in the real world.
53:06: And so they tend to be very proprietary about their models. These are their babies, and they're very proud of them.
53:14: And they are very, very sophisticated mathematically. And so they don't want to know, they don't want to admit that the real world observations are refuting them.
53:25: But that's really the key to science. As Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist put it back in the 1960s, the key to science is this.
53:37: You try to come to an understanding of how the world works, to a new theory, a new hypothesis, whatever, you start by making a guess.
53:45: And then you make predictions based on that guess for what you would find if your guess is right.
53:51: And then you compare what you observe, whether in the laboratory or out in nature, you compare that with your predictions.
54:00: If the observations contradict your predictions, then your theory is wrong, period.
54:06: It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn't matter how many people agree with you.
54:13: It's wrong. That's the key to science. And unfortunately, an awful lot of scientists seem to have forgotten that.
54:20: In your article, you present some very interesting graphs by Dr.
54:27: John Christie of global temperature compared with computer climate model situations.
54:33: Who is Dr. Christie? And what do those graphs reveal? Dr. John Christie is partner to Dr.
54:40: Roy Spencer, whom I mentioned earlier in the program. He and Roy run the
54:45: NASA aqua satellite program that gives us our 24 -7, 365, all latitudes, all longitudes, all altitudes, temperature readings for the atmosphere.
55:00: It is the most comprehensive and the most reliable source of global temperature data that we have.
55:09: Dr. Christie is also a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
55:16: He and Dr. Spencer have actually won awards from NASA for their work in this.
55:22: Dr. Christie simply presented in testimony before a committee of the
55:27: U .S. House of Representatives back in February a graph in which he compared the predictions of 102 of the computer models that the
55:39: UNIPCC uses, and that's practically all of them. He compares their predictions running from 1979, the start of the satellite monitoring of global temperatures.
55:54: He compares their predictions with the actual observed temperatures given by satellites and by weather balloons.
56:03: That's the next most comprehensive and reliable set of climate data or temperature data around the world.
56:12: What he shows in this is quite simply that from about 1995 onward, you rarely get an overlap between the predictions and the observations.
56:25: From about 2003 onward, you never get an overlap, and the average of the models runs two to four times as high as the average of the actual real -world observations.
56:43: So in other words, in Feynman's terms, the observations contradict the theory, therefore the theory is wrong.
56:52: We're going to go to a break right now, and before I go to the break, I'm going to read a listener question that you can mull over in your mind and answer to the best of your ability when we come back, and I can repeat the question as well when we come back.
57:09: But Michael, a very first -time questioner in our audience, perhaps a first -time listener as well,
57:16: Michael from Statesboro, Georgia, he says, to establish global warming, wouldn't you have to show there is a statistically significant increase in average global temperature, that this warming is not part of a global cyclical pattern that naturally occurs, and that this warming is the result of anthropogenic causes?
57:45: And we will come back after the break to get your response to that.
57:51: And by the way, Michael, in Statesboro, Georgia, since you're a first -time questioner, you are getting a free
57:58: New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the New American Standard Bible, but I need your full mailing address.
58:05: Right now I just have Statesboro, Georgia, so if you give me your full mailing address, we'll get out that free
58:11: Bible to you as soon as possible. So if anybody else would like to join us on the air, and we do still have a few waiting, and we will get to you,
58:19: God willing, as soon as possible, but if anybody else would like to join them with questions, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.
58:27: chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr. Calvin Beisner. Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio is sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year -round
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01:01:55: This is Chris Arnsin. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with an hour to go is
01:02:01: Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance. We are discussing debunking global warming hysteria.
01:02:10: This is a follow -up to another program we did on the same topic but there's obviously a lot to cover under the umbrella of that heading that we didn't get to last time.
01:02:21: If you'd like to join us on the air with your own questions, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
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01:02:35: USA. Going back to Michael from Statesboro, Georgia and his question, he says, to establish global warming, wouldn't you have to show there is a statistically significant increase in average global temperature that this warming is not a part of global cyclical pattern that naturally occurs and that this warming is the result of anthropogenic causes?
01:03:01: Has any of this been done? And that's Michael's question from Statesboro, Georgia. Yeah, the question makes perfect sense and indeed that's been one of the major areas of debate in the entire conversation about global warming or climate change or man -made global warming, however you want to refer to it.
01:03:24: The first thing is simply that we do have to recognize that climate has changed all through Earth's history.
01:03:31: In fact, the only thing constant about climate is that it changes, always changing. And we are able to track changes in global average temperature, which by the way is only one small part of climate.
01:03:44: There's also humidity, there's rainfall, there's wind and so on. But we've been able to track that there have been significant rises and declines in global average temperature in the past, long before human beings began emitting any significant amounts of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels.
01:04:09: We know, for instance, that the medieval warm period running from about 900 to 1200
01:04:14: AD was at least as warm as and probably significantly warmer than the late 20th and early 21st century is right now.
01:04:25: The Roman warm period around the 1st century AD was probably warmer than that.
01:04:31: The Minoan warm period several centuries before that was warmer as well.
01:04:38: And the Holocene climate optimum period, roughly 6 ,000 to 8 ,000 years ago, was much warmer than any of those periods.
01:04:52: And then in between those, we've had cooler periods, one of the coolest having been what we refer to as the
01:04:58: Little Ice Age, running from about 1350 to about 1850, with the coolest temperatures in the late 17th century.
01:05:10: That was the period during which even the River Thames would often freeze. There would be ice fairs on the
01:05:17: Thames in London during Christmas time and January.
01:05:24: Much colder than the present. We also know that cold times are much more challenging, not just for humans, but for all the rest of life on Earth, than are warm times.
01:05:37: Plants grow better in warmer climates. There's more food produced.
01:05:43: People therefore don't go hungry so much. There's not so much disease and so on.
01:05:49: Obviously, there are natural cycles that drive these things. The most important ones are probably cycles in solar energy output and solar magnetic wind output.
01:06:01: The energy is easy for us to understand. We experience that as the warmth you feel when you stand in the sun, right?
01:06:07: Magnetic wind is a little more complicated. Solar magnetic wind modulates the amount of galactic cosmic rays that enter the
01:06:19: Earth's atmosphere. Those galactic cosmic rays, in turn, seem increasingly clear now.
01:06:28: It's been a controversial idea for about 25 years. They seem pretty clearly now to be involved in the formation of cloud nuclei in the atmosphere.
01:06:40: The more cosmic rays come into the atmosphere, the more clouds there are. The fewer cosmic rays come in, the fewer clouds there are.
01:06:48: Solar magnetic wind filters out cosmic rays, so when the solar magnetic wind is stronger, there are fewer rays coming in and therefore fewer clouds.
01:06:58: With fewer clouds, you have warmer temperatures and vice versa. Those cycles are important.
01:07:05: Also important are cycles in ocean currents, the most important ones probably being the
01:07:11: Pacific decadal oscillation and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation.
01:07:23: There are others as well. Solar cycles run on a pattern of about 11 to 15 years.
01:07:32: Ocean cycles can run on patterns anywhere from about 8 to 30 years.
01:07:39: Those also affect temperature. Then there are some longer cycles as well. The crucial thing in terms of Michael's question is this.
01:07:48: We clearly distinguish the recent warming, say running from about 1980 to about 1998 or thereabouts.
01:08:01: We clearly distinguish that as driven by human activity, whereas these earlier warming periods were driven by natural cycles.
01:08:11: The answer is some people think so and some people don't think so.
01:08:17: Some people think, well, a little bit, but not much. I think I would be in that last category.
01:08:24: I'd say there's probably pretty good reason to think that our addition of CO2 to the atmosphere resulted in this more recent warming cycle being a little bit more accelerated than some of the other ones.
01:08:39: That's basically because of our understanding of physics, not because of anything that we're able to actually observe.
01:08:47: In fact, there have been, since 1850, three roughly the same lengths and of roughly the same rate of warming over that period.
01:09:04: The two earlier ones most certainly were not driven by human emissions of CO2 because our emissions were not big enough to have an effect yet.
01:09:14: So we really just simply don't know. Michael has a follow -up question.
01:09:20: Are you familiar with the position on global warming held by Daryl Castle, who is the presidential candidate of the
01:09:30: Constitution Party? No, I'm not. Okay, well, I'm not either,
01:09:36: Michael. I don't have the best answer ever. Well, Michael, perhaps you could send that information to us and we'll show it to Calvin after the program.
01:09:46: Thank you very much for writing, and don't forget to give me your full address for the free Bible that you're getting today.
01:09:54: I know that I am probably losing my mind regardless of how you answer this question, but I am almost certain that in the 1970s, when
01:10:06: I was a kid, I was hearing about some kind of an alarmist rhetoric about an ice age coming.
01:10:14: Am I misremembering history here? No, you're not. And by the way, the data are pretty clear that from the 1940s to the early 1970s, there was a significant cooling average temperature, at least, anyway, in the
01:10:36: Northern Hemisphere, probably globally as well. And because of that, a number of scientists were predicting that we would be entering a period of what they were referring to as perhaps a repetition of the
01:10:53: Little Ice Age. Nobody, by the way, was predicting that we were close to getting into a new glacial period where the
01:11:03: Northern Hemisphere down to about the latitude of San Francisco and St.
01:11:09: Louis was all covered by a mile or more of ice. Nobody's thinking that, but some scientists were thinking that we were headed back into something similar to the
01:11:19: Local Ice Age from 1350 to 1850, and they were blaming it on our emission of particulate matter, soot and that sort of thing, from our industrial activity, which was reflecting some sunlight back out into space so that it didn't warm the surface of the
01:11:38: Earth. That was a reasonable hypothesis, a very plausible hypothesis. I think it never was clearly proved to be the case, never was thoroughly disproved either.
01:11:52: But some of the media did take it and hype it a good deal.
01:11:59: Time magazine, Newsweek, others ran major cover stories on the coming cooling or the great cooling, whatever they called it.
01:12:10: Nowadays, a lot of people who are global warming alarmists deny that that ever happened, but the stories are there.
01:12:20: Yeah, well, I was certain I remembered it, and I remember being called an idiot for saying it, but then again,
01:12:26: I'm called an idiot for a lot of things, and perhaps sometimes correctly. But I'm glad that you vindicated me, because I did remember that.
01:12:37: Going back to your article, global warming alarmists like Dr. Ethan Siegel, who you were discussing earlier, assert that carbon dioxide that we emit when we use fossil fuels to produce energy is the main cause of recent global warming, and it's clear that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising, and so has temperature.
01:13:00: I mean, today even is a really horrible day outside. You can barely walk 10 feet in here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, without collapsing.
01:13:08: But why do you reject the claim that carbon dioxide is the primary cause for the rising of temperatures?
01:13:16: Yeah, the reason I reject that is that the sequence of changes in CO2 in the atmosphere and changes in temperature in the atmosphere is the exact opposite of what is necessary for the hypothesis that the
01:13:30: CO2 is driving the temperature. Over very long timescales, measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of years, if you are accepting sort of conventional geological theory, over those very long timescales, a study of Antarctic ice cores dating back 270 ,000 years, published in Science in 1999, found that CO2 concentrations lagged temperature, that is, followed temperature by from 200 to 1 ,000 years.
01:14:06: And so if CO2 was driving temperature, then the temperature should have changed after the
01:14:13: CO2 instead. Now, on shorter timescales, timescales comparable with the period from the late 1970s to the present, over which the fears of dangerous man -made warming have arisen.
01:14:30: On those shorter timescales, a study by Hunlam et al., published in Global and Planetary Change in 2013, examining the lags and leads between a number of annually averaged variables, concluded that changes in the amount of atmospheric
01:14:47: CO2 always lag behind corresponding changes in temperature, with the maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature found for CO2 lagging 11 to 12 months in relation to global surface temperature, 9 .5
01:15:03: to 10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature.
01:15:12: So in short, the alarmists have the cart dragging the horse.
01:15:21: They say that CO2 is driving temperature, but CO2 changes follow temperature rather than lead it.
01:15:28: And we do have a listener in Perry County, Pennsylvania, Arnie, who wants to know, why is it that those who are believers in the global warming alarmist rhetoric get so extremely hostile to those who disagree with their theory?
01:15:55: It's kind of interesting that in a day and age when one of the main battle cries of liberalism is tolerance, and yet they seem to be very intolerant of those who oppose their views on climate change.
01:16:10: Do you have any explanations for this? Yeah, well, I'd start off much the way
01:16:15: I did to an earlier question, and that is that we really have to be careful to distinguish from one person to another.
01:16:22: Different people are motivated, persuaded, et cetera, by different things. And I think different people respond to this controversy in different ways as well.
01:16:31: I try always to keep very cool about this. I try to just speak as objectively as I can.
01:16:38: Sometimes I can get a bit emotional when people seem to be just ignoring the impact of the policies that they promote on the world's poor.
01:16:47: But I try to be objective. And there are people on the other side who do the same. But there are also people on both sides of this who get very angry at those who disagree with them.
01:16:57: And whichever side they're on, I think that's not a very constructive, very productive thing to do.
01:17:03: Still, there is the interesting question, why do those people do that? And particularly in terms of those who are on the alarmist side,
01:17:15: I think it probably has much more to do with their political vision than with their scientific thinking or their economic thinking.
01:17:25: And it helps to remember, in this regard, something of the history of the environmental movement from the 1960s to now.
01:17:34: By the late 1960s, early 1970s, it was increasingly clear that capitalism or free markets was outperforming socialism or communism in terms of the basic question, which produces more wealth and gets it into the hands of more people.
01:17:53: And so a large number of socialists, especially in Europe, were deciding, you know, we're not able to further our vision of government, which is a government that has very extensive control over people's lives, that plans the economy in great detail.
01:18:15: We're not able to defend our vision of government by saying that it actually makes people wealthier or that it even reduces inequalities of income.
01:18:26: But there's this growing environmental movement, and our vision of government fits really well with that, because now we can rationalize big government on the idea that we need to control people's actions in order to protect the environment.
01:18:42: So you had the founding of the Green Parties in various European countries first, then in Canada, in New Zealand, in Australia, and eventually a
01:18:51: Green Party here in the United States, which never really got very far. It still exists, but doesn't get very far.
01:18:58: And so that prompted some people to describe these folks as watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
01:19:07: Now, if your fundamental vision of government is being challenged, and your rationale for that vision is being challenged, it becomes much easier to get emotionally upset about the debate.
01:19:25: But I think the appropriate answer for us as Christians, as people who want to think rationally about these things, is simply to try to stay as cool, calm, and objective as we can, and to deal with facts as much as possible, and stay away from attacking persons, stay away from attacking motivations.
01:19:47: Let's just deal with facts as best we can. Can you tell our listeners about this video showing
01:19:56: Nobel Prize -winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining what he calls the key to science?
01:20:04: Yeah, anybody can find this quickly and easily on YouTube. Just look up Richard Feynman, the key to science, and there are a number of different places on YouTube where you can watch this.
01:20:15: But it's a classic clip of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize -winning physicist, saying to a university class of students, he says, in general, we look for a new law by the following process.
01:20:32: First we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right.
01:20:40: Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience. Compare it directly with observation to see if it works.
01:20:49: If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
01:20:58: It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't matter. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is.
01:21:06: If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That is all there is to it. The reason
01:21:12: I often quote this is simply that the sole basis for fears of dangerous global warming is the output of computer climate models.
01:21:25: These models are tremendously sophisticated. They are among the most complex computer models run anywhere in the world.
01:21:35: They have to run on great supercomputers at extremely high speeds. They are genius mathematical products, but they are still models.
01:21:47: That means they are hypotheses. They are theories. They are not facts.
01:21:52: They are not observations of the real world. We have to test models. We have to test hypotheses, theories, and predictions by comparing them with the real world.
01:22:02: As we said earlier in the program, when you do that, you find that on average, the models predict twice to three times as much warming as actually observed over the relevant period from added
01:22:16: CO2 in the atmosphere. We also find that 95 % of the models predict more warming than actually observed.
01:22:25: If their errors were random, then we would expect them as often as not to predict less warming than actually observed.
01:22:34: It ought to be about 50 -50 above and below. The fact that they predict 95 % of the time more warming than actually observed indicates that the errors are not random.
01:22:45: They are driven by some kind of bias. By bias, I don't necessarily mean dishonesty, although sometimes it might be that.
01:22:55: Instead, it is simply a mistake that is not yet identified, but that is duplicated and replicated in model after model after model.
01:23:05: A mistake that results in our thinking that the climate system responds to added
01:23:12: CO2 in a way that it actually turns out that it doesn't. Finally, none of those models predicted the complete absence of statistically significant warming from February 1997 to about November of 2015, a period of 18 years and 9 months.
01:23:31: In fact, the modelers have been saying that the models can accommodate a period without warming of about 8 years because of internal variability.
01:23:43: But if we get beyond 8 years without any warming, then we've got a real hard time justifying the models.
01:23:50: When we got beyond 8 years, which was about 10 years ago, actually at this point almost 11 years ago now, when we got beyond that, they revised their thinking and they started saying, ìWell, if we get past 12 years, then it'll be time for us to really reconsider the models .î
01:24:07: Well, we got past 12 years about 6 .5 years ago. ìWell, if we get past 15 years...î
01:24:16: Well, now, Ethan Segal, whose article I was responding to in my article here in World Commerce Report, Ethan Segal has now said, ìNo, it should be 17 years .î
01:24:31: Well, we went beyond 17 years as well. In short, the models have been invalidated and they therefore provide no rational basis for any prediction about global average temperature off into the future.
01:24:45: And if there's no rational basis for any prediction, then also no rational basis for any policy. Well, it's interesting if you would apply
01:24:53: Dr. Feynman's, this Nobel Prize -winning physicist, if you would apply his reasoning to Darwinian evolution, you'd come up with the same kind of, you know, scratching your head how on earth these serious scientists could even think that this is true, let alone a factual thing with certainty.
01:25:17: And you know, Chris, I think ultimately you and I understand the real root cause of all of this, and that is the naturalism, the atheism driving so much of the scientific community right now.
01:25:31: For instance, the American Association for the... Dr. Beisner, are you there?
01:25:42: Well, Dr. Beisner... Yes, our atheist. Hello, Dr. Beisner, could you repeat what you just said, because you dropped off for about at least five seconds.
01:25:52: Ah, okay. Can't figure why that's happening, but yeah, the naturalistic worldview, the atheism underlying so many scientists contributes to this.
01:26:03: The American Association for the Advancement of Science is over 95 % atheists, even though scientists as a whole, including many outside the
01:26:13: AAAS, tend to be way under 20 % atheists.
01:26:19: But the AAAS tends to dominate discourse, public discourse on this. Well, the
01:26:24: Bible tells us that when people exchange the truth of God for the lie, and begin to worship and serve the creature rather than the creator,
01:26:34: God gives them over to a reprobate mind. And thinking themselves to become wise, to be wise, they become fools.
01:26:45: Naturalism is basically irrational. In fact, as C .S. Lewis pointed out in his chapter,
01:26:51: The Trouble with Naturalism, in his book, Miracles, naturalism is, in essence, the argument that there is no such thing as argument, which means it's self -refuting.
01:27:04: Naturalism says that matter and energy and motion is all that exists. Well, if that's so, then the thoughts in our brains are nothing but matter and energy and motion.
01:27:17: They're nothing but the electrochemical events in our brains. But you know what?
01:27:22: When matter and energy interact with each other, unless there's something beyond them that we call spirit, when matter and energy interact with each other, there's no reasoning.
01:27:35: When two billion balls meet on a table, they don't sit down and have a nice cup of tea and have a discussion about, all right, now let's see, which way do you want to go after this, and at what speed?
01:27:46: And which way would you like me to go after this, and at what speed? No. There's an exchange of energy, and they ricochet off of each other in directions that are absolutely predetermined by the physics of the whole thing.
01:28:00: Well, if that's all that's happening in our brains, then there is no reasoning behind any of our ideas.
01:28:09: There's no reasoning behind any of our beliefs, our decisions. Well, that in turn means that there's no reason to believe in naturalism.
01:28:21: And so, consequently, I reject naturalism. But what we see, really, is the increasing irrationalism of a whole lot of modern science.
01:28:33: By the way, Michael, who had the question earlier from Statesboro, Georgia, I forgot to mention to you that I am actually interviewing
01:28:44: Daryl Castle, the Constitution Party's candidate for President of the
01:28:51: United States. I'm interviewing him, God willing, on Tuesday, August 2nd, from 4 to 6 p .m.
01:28:58: So make sure you tune in to Iron Sharpens Iron to hear
01:29:03: Daryl Castle interviewed. And we're going to our final break right now.
01:29:09: If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisorensen at gmail .com,
01:29:15: chrisorensen at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city, and state, and country of residence.
01:29:23: If you live outside of the USA, and we do have a few people waiting to have their questions answered, so we'll get to you as quickly as possible when we return from the break.
01:29:33: So don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and more debunking of climate -raising hysteria.
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01:34:03: Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzin. If you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes and the half hour to come, we have as our guest today
01:34:12: Dr. E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the
01:34:18: Stewardship of Creation and their website is cornwallalliance .org.
01:34:29: We are discussing debunking global warming hysteria and we are continuing a subject, that subject, which we began a number of weeks ago here on Iron Sharpens Iron and there's a lot to cover in this very complicated matter and we probably are still only scratching the surface on it today.
01:34:52: But if you'd like to join us with a question you better do so quickly because we only have 25 minutes left and we have already a couple of people waiting to have their questions asked.
01:35:03: But before I go to them Dr. Beisner, you have argued that the computer climate models are invalidated and so provide no rational basis for predictions about future global temperature.
01:35:19: Why? Well that's because when compared with real world observation the predictions of the models are contradicted.
01:35:29: The models on average predict twice to three times as much warming as actually observed over the relevant period.
01:35:36: 95 percent predict more warming than actually observed which indicates that the errors are not random but driven by some sort of bias written right into the models themselves and none of them predicted the complete absence of statistically significant global warming from February 1997 to November 2015 a period of 18 years and nine months and the slight warming that we've had since then running from basically late
01:36:05: December to late April of this past period was driven not by a long -term trend of global warming but instead by an extraordinarily strong El Nino Southern Oscillation in the
01:36:19: South Pacific, Pacific Ocean Current and that has already been ended and we are now into a strong La Nina that resulted in May and June being the second most rapid two -month decline in global average temperature in the satellite record.
01:36:36: So in other words the models simply do not match reality as observed and reality as observed is the litmus test it's the the standard against which we have to judge the models.
01:36:51: We actually have an overseas listener we have Christopher from Norway asking
01:36:57: I don't know if I missed this but is there anything that really proves even if global warming at the rate that the alarmists are saying is truly happening is it really a bad for the world?
01:37:15: That's a wonderful question and I'll answer it by referring to my friend
01:37:22: Dr. Richard Lindzen who is Emeritus Professor of Meteorology and Climatology at the
01:37:27: Massachusetts Institute of Technology at MIT, one of the world's leading climatologists.
01:37:35: Dick puts it this way he says let's assume that the IPCC is right and that global average temperature is going to rise about three degrees in response to a doubling of CO2 content in the atmosphere.
01:37:51: What's the appropriate response? He says so what? Well that's that's his highly scientific answer and the reason that he gives that answer is that pretty much all locations on the earth experience a much greater change in temperature every day from the low to the high for the day and they also can experience a much greater change in average daily temperature from the middle of summer to the middle of winter every year and so that kind of a change in global average temperature is just simply not something that is going to cause havoc for any ecosystems and certainly not for humanity.
01:38:43: You know one of the questions that a lot of the people on the alarmist side of this neglect is this question.
01:38:51: How do we know what is the ideal temperature for the earth's ideal global average temperature?
01:38:59: Is there an optimal global average temperature? That question has not been adequately answered.
01:39:06: I think we can be very very sure that the optimal temperature was not what it was at the at the low point of the little ice age during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
01:39:21: During that period there was massive suffering because the winters were so much colder because the growing seasons were so much shorter.
01:39:32: That was the period of at the start of the little ice age that was the period of the black plague.
01:39:39: That was the period when crop failures all over the world resulted in mass famines.
01:39:46: That certainly was not a good thing. If we pay attention to people's choices about where they live, well people tend to be migrating to warmer climates not to colder climates.
01:40:02: Not just as they get old and want to retire but even in earlier periods of life as well.
01:40:08: Ever since we managed to make those warm climates comfortable through air conditioning people tend to migrate to warmer places rather than colder places.
01:40:19: That indicates that they prefer that. That they find that better. Indeed epidemiological studies indicate that disease and premature death are less common in warmer places than in colder places.
01:40:37: Cold snaps, for instance, kill 10 times as many people per day as heat waves do.
01:40:46: So as global average temperature rises the number and duration and severity of cold snaps should decline.
01:40:56: Even if the number and duration and severity of heat waves were to rise just as much as the cold snaps were to decline we would see a reduction in temperature related premature deaths to the of eliminating about 90 % of them.
01:41:16: So yeah we should actually be welcoming some global warming rather than frightened by it.
01:41:25: Yeah I would imagine that somebody from Norway would especially want that. Thank you
01:41:31: Christopher from Oslo, Norway. And by the way Christopher I want to let you know that I don't know if you are familiar with Bjorn Storm Johansen in Norway.
01:41:42: He's a Reformed Baptist involved in many conferences and activities apparently in Scandinavia.
01:41:48: If you'd like me to send him or send you I should say his email address so you could get in contact with him if you don't already know who he is let me know.
01:41:59: Anyway as you report Dr. Beisner the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that future generations in countries that are poor now will be wealthier in a warmer world than in a cooler world.
01:42:15: In other words that trying to reduce global warming is actually making people of the future poor that they otherwise would be.
01:42:23: Why does the IPCC predict that? Why is it significant and how is it how does it happen? Which is really a follow -up on what
01:42:30: Christopher in Oslo was talking about. Right well the reason the
01:42:35: IPCC makes that prediction is that IPCC's predictions of future global average temperature are driven by its predictions of future economic development or economic growth.
01:42:48: And its predictions of future economic growth are driven in turn by its predictions about how much fossil fuel we use to provide the energy that drives economic growth.
01:43:01: Now that in itself is a revealing fact because that concedes implicitly that the substitutes for fossil fuels cannot provide as much energy at as low a price as can the fossil fuels.
01:43:18: Therefore when we substitute wind and solar we're going to be reducing the amount of energy that people can use.
01:43:25: Well if you reduce the amount of energy you reduce the amount of work performed. And if you reduce the amount of work performed you reduce the amount of goods and services produced i .e.
01:43:38: you slow stop or reverse economic growth. You make people less well off than they otherwise would be.
01:43:46: Now the IPCC's predictions show that almost scenarios that is the scenarios in which there is the most economic growth between now and say 2100 or 2200 the places that are now the poorest are better off in those warmest scenarios in the future than they are in the coolest scenarios.
01:44:12: Well that's actually pretty sensible. It's pretty obvious why that should be so. If the warmth is driven by the growth and there's less warmth then there must have been less growth.
01:44:24: Now what the IPCC's working group three predictions also say is that in those wealthier futures people live longer and are healthier because their wealth shields them from a variety of different risks that are far greater risks than anything associated with climate.
01:44:48: Risks for instance from lack of pure drinking water, lack of sewage sanitation, lack of adequate nutrition in their food, lack of adequate calories per day, lack of safe transportation or lack of health care.
01:45:04: All of those things rise as economic growth rises and they rise more with more economic growth.
01:45:16: And all of those are far more important to human health and long life than are climate related things such as global average temperature or the frequency or severity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, heat waves, cold snaps and so on.
01:45:42: In fact if you have income equivalent to say the bottom fifth of Americans you can thrive in any climate from the arctic circle to the
01:45:55: Sahara desert to the Brazilian rainforest. If you are very poor like the roughly half of the world's population that still lives without electricity and therefore also without running water and so on, if you're very poor like that you can't thrive in any climate not even in the best south pacific paradise.
01:46:19: Health just simply requires significant wealth and it grows as wealth grows.
01:46:26: So the IPCC actually in my mind gives away the ethical debate when it recognizes by its own modeling that fighting global warming will slow economic development and therefore leave people at greater risk than would allowing global warming to happen unimpeded.
01:46:50: So would I be right to say that according to you the IPCC by asking us to restrict fossil fuel use now to reduce global warming is actually asking for poorer generations today to sacrifice for the sake of other richer generations tomorrow?
01:47:06: How can that be done? That is exactly right. People will talk about how what we're doing today is going to affect generations in the future.
01:47:16: Well yes of course that's so. I mean as long as time continues that will be so. But the case is this.
01:47:25: As the world continues to develop economically generation after generation will be wealthier than its previous generation.
01:47:35: And so when we're asking people today to restrict their use of fuels which means that they have to consume more expensive energy or less energy both of which impoverish them.
01:47:51: We're asking them to sacrifice for the sake of generations in the future who are actually richer than they are.
01:47:59: And what that basically means is we're doing a wealth redistribution program from the poorer of today to the richer of tomorrow.
01:48:12: That I think is not a good way to put it. Yeah could you repeat the very last part of your sentence because for some reason you became very low in your volume.
01:48:21: Well what we're asking is for the poorer generations today to sacrifice in order to protect the richer generations of the future.
01:48:33: That basically means we're redistributing wealth from the poorer to the richer.
01:48:38: I don't think that's ethically defensible and it's pretty ironic because those who want us to do that tends to be on the political left who usually argue that we need to redistribute wealth from the wealthier to the poorer.
01:48:51: They're wanting here to do exactly the opposite. We have another Christopher this one in Suffolk County Long Island New York who wants to know if growth in warmth is a good thing.
01:49:07: Why is it that on the globe the areas that are the warmest in their climates are those that are most impoverished?
01:49:17: Is that just a coincidence? No it's not a coincidence. Instead it is a result of a very interesting historical phenomenon.
01:49:31: Extreme heat and high humidity make long physical exertion very difficult.
01:49:40: Anybody who's gone out and tried to jog in South Florida where I live in the middle of the day in July knows that you just can't do that as well as you can in January.
01:49:52: I mean that's just simply the case. Now where the industrial revolution started, driven primarily by the ethical and cultural effects of the reformation, was in Scotland and England and the
01:50:15: Netherlands. And that industrial revolution started there and then spread bit by bit around the world.
01:50:24: It's coming bit by bit into the areas closer to the equator, but it started out mainly in the
01:50:30: English speaking world. Now air conditioning wasn't developed in any major way until the early 20th century.
01:50:43: And it was air conditioning that's fine in very warm areas of the world to sustain long hours of hard work.
01:50:53: Not even necessarily physically demanding work. If you've ever just tried working for many hours in a room where the temperature is say 80 or 85 degrees, you know that that's difficult even if you're just sitting at a desk.
01:51:10: You get tired more rapidly. So areas of the world that are very warm were not very conducive to high economic productivity until we were able to air condition offices and factories and other workspaces.
01:51:31: That means that they didn't begin to grow economically until later than the areas that were already cool enough that you could work comfortably year round without air conditioning.
01:51:45: So now we're seeing those areas beginning to catch up. And frankly, if you go to Dubai, where all the buildings are well air conditioned, despite the fact that it may be 115 degrees outside, it's very comfortable in the offices and you can work well.
01:52:02: It's comfortable in the factories and you can work well. You go to Singapore similarly, Japan similarly, and so on.
01:52:09: So it's a matter of the historic progress of industrialization and particularly of air conditioning around the world, rather than saying heat necessarily causes poverty.
01:52:23: Heat delayed economic development until air conditioning made it more possible.
01:52:30: Well, this may be the final question we have time for. But in the latter part of your article that we have been focusing on during this entire broadcast, you set forth what you consider to be a moral case for using fossil fuels for energy.
01:52:45: Can you summarize that case for our listeners in about five minutes? Yeah, I can summarize it, in fact, even faster than that.
01:52:55: Fossil fuels are our best source of the abundant, affordable, reliable energy that is absolutely indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty.
01:53:08: The alternatives to them in terms of wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, and so on, are much more expensive.
01:53:17: They tend to be intermittent, especially wind and solar. You don't have energy the instant you need it.
01:53:25: They are fluctuating and that makes the expense of them much higher.
01:53:33: The cost per kilowatt hour that you have to pay on your electric bill is higher for wind and solar -generated electricity than for coal or natural gas -generated electricity over the long haul.
01:53:47: What we saw as the result of this in countries that have already taken drastic measures to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar, such as in Northern Europe and especially in Great Britain, is the development of what's been called fuel poverty or energy poverty.
01:54:07: That's the situation in Britain. They define energy poverty as the situation where a household has to spend more than 10 % of its income simply to heat the house during the cold months of the year.
01:54:23: That doesn't mean any of the other energy that you use, such as cooking, lights, television, hot water heater, driving, anything of that sort, transport, just to keep the home.
01:54:36: Fuel poverty has become so much more common in Britain because of the drastic policies to reduce fossil fuel generation of electricity and replace it with wind and solar that there's been a great increase in the number of what are called excess premature winter deaths.
01:55:01: Because severe cold is tough on people, especially the elderly and those who are physically ill in various ways, you always have a higher death rate in the coldest times of winter than in the warmest times of summer.
01:55:22: Epidemiologists speak regularly of premature winter or excess premature winter death.
01:55:29: That's the excess of the death rate in winter versus the death rate in summer.
01:55:35: But from 2010 onward, the 2010 -11 winter onward, the number of excess premature winter deaths in the
01:55:45: United Kingdom rose from having been typically an average of about 8 -10 ,000 to being typically an average of 25 -35 ,000.
01:55:58: In other words, driven by fuel poverty, we were seeing an extra 15 -25 ,000 excess premature winter deaths.
01:56:10: In the UK each winter. Now, that I think is a serious ethical problem.
01:56:17: We are forcing people to die because they can't keep their homes adequately and still afford the food, the clothing, the transportation, and everything else they need.
01:56:31: To get an idea how serious a problem that is, if that same thing were to happen here in the
01:56:37: United States, the result wouldn't be 15 -25 ,000 extra deaths per year.
01:56:45: It would probably be at least five times that many, because the
01:56:50: United States population is about five times that of Britain. And it would even be higher than that because a great deal of America's population lives in places that have much colder winters than anything in the
01:57:03: United Kingdom. So that, I think, is a serious ethical problem with the notion that we ought to abandon fossil fuels.
01:57:11: Fossil fuels have lifted people out of poverty for well over 200 years.
01:57:16: And by the way, there's another aspect to this. And that is that because through fossil fuels making electricity available, every individual can consume a great deal more energy than he could simply from what he eats, from the calories that he consumes every day.
01:57:38: The average American now consumes about 190 ,000 calories per day, including not most of it from food, just about 2 ,500 a day from that, but most of it from electricity and gasoline.
01:57:57: And that's the amount of energy that you would get from about 60 consuming food.
01:58:07: Well, in order to benefit from that much energy 300 years ago, you didn't use electricity.
01:58:16: You used slaves. Well now, because fossil fuels have made electricity so widespread and affordable, they actually contributed to the reduction of slavery around the world.
01:58:28: Wow. It seems that your position on this issue is proving the leftists and the liberals to be hypocrites in nearly every area on how their position on global warming alarmism is somehow better for humanity and especially the poor that they pretend to be the champions for.
01:58:52: So it's kind of interesting how one after another issue seems to prove them to be very hypocritical.
01:59:00: Of course, they're very often unconscious of this, I'm sure, but I'm not so clear that many of those in leadership are.
01:59:10: But we have to go now. And I know that your website, again, is CornwallAlliance .org.
01:59:21: I look forward to having you back very soon, Dr. Bisoner. In fact, if you could stay on the phone,
01:59:28: I will open up my calendar if you have the time and we'll schedule you for another interview. Well, thank you,
01:59:34: Chris. And the Lord bless you. The Lord bless all of those in your audience, CornwallAlliance .org,
01:59:39: and also WhereTheGrassIsGreenerTheMovie .org. That's WhereTheGrassIsGreenerTheMovie .org
01:59:46: for a video documentary that we have on this subject. And I hope you always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater