Bible Bending Propaganda

It's almost too bad that Jesus Christ has been historically depicted as a long-haired, bearded, and sandal-clad -- because the enviro-hippies behind something called the "Evangelical Climate Initiative" have now claimed Him for their own alarmist agenda. While those physical representations of Christ may be accurate, the Biblical claims that these Birkenstocked believers make for global warming reductions are hermeneutically deficient. Most of their flawed interpretations emphasize the social gospel (surprise!) rather than genuine Divine intent -- a common liberal tendency.

They include the utterances of Sir John Houghton, a climate scientist, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an "evangelical Christian," according to the ECI. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals almost a year ago, he made a scientific case for the existence of global warming, and its benefits and drawbacks (with the second far outweighing the first). I will leave technical refutation and doubt to others, and address the Biblical support he attempted to use to buttress his position:

"[God] demonstrated this most eloquently by sending his son Jesus to be part of creation and by giving to us the responsibility of being good stewards of creation. What is more I believe that we do not do this on our own but in partnership with Him -- a partnership that is presented so beautifully in the early chapters of Genesis where we read that God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the day."

There you have it! God intended for man to live in temperate climes. But then again, He also intended for man to live naked: so much for that. And not surprisingly, Houghton butchered Genesis 3:8, which actually says that Adam and Eve (after the Fall) "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day," after which they tried to hide from Him -- hardly a harmonious stroll.

But seriously, Sir John's pining for the early days of the Bible is admirable. Who doesn't wish we were in the days of sinless perfection, in absolute accord with God? Alas, that is not the condition of the present globe on which we live. Rather than actually making us "good stewards of creation" as Houghton claims, God instead cursed the world and essentially said, "Here -- deal with this!" We've been toiling over the corrupted soil ever since, and the unspoiled creation that Jesus was allegedly sent "to be part of" disappeared long ago.

Still the 86 ministry leaders behind the ECI bought into it, maintaining that they "are articulating a biblical, Christ-centered, business-friendly evangelical approach to climate change and providing a different way of understanding the problem":

Once we understand the profound impacts climate change will have on people, especially the most vulnerable, then we find plenty in the Bible calling us to take prompt action. Jesus' commands to love our neighbors (Mk. 12:30-31), do unto others as we would have them do unto us (Lk. 6:31), care for "the least of these" (Mt. 25:40, 45), and be proper stewards of His creation (Lk. 12:42-48; Col. 1:16) all require immediate and sustained action to solve global warming.

These "social Gospel" passages can hardly be construed as a legitimate case for the fight to reduce global warming. The first misinterpretation is the proper role of man in relation to the creation. Calls to "stewardship" in the Bible never have to do with caring for some pristine earth -- for its own sake or for God's. Instead God gave man "dominion" over the world and its creatures, for human consumption and use.

Of course, that doesn't mean you pollute willy-nilly. Dumping oil or chemicals where they can seep in someone's water supply certainly is unneighborly. But that has nothing to do with Biblical "earth" stewardship, and linking disputed negative global warming effects to proper social practices is misleading at best. If environmentally conscious Christians want to do something that will clearly and measurably help their poor neighbors, why don't they invest in waste removal in places like Port-au-Prince and Bangladesh instead?

The answer is, because ECI signees have been duped by environmentalist liberals and have failed to discern their Biblical illiteracy:

This is God's world, and any damage that we do to God's world is an offense against God Himself (Gen. 1; Ps. 24; Col. 1:16).

I hope the ECI endorsers didn't overstrain their eyes searching those Scripture references for evidence of God's anger at human abuse of the earth. Instead, they would do well to recall some other Biblical citations that emphasize what the real goals of Christian ministry should be in relation to the planet. They should remember that the Apostle Paul disdained those "who set their mind on earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Philippians 3:19-20).

As for Jesus, contrary to Sir Houghton's assertions, He does not dwell on the earth but instead will return to the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:22-23), after God also establishes a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1).

And don't forget, God has some serious global warming of His own planned (2 Peter 3:10). Christian leaders ought to be warning people about that rather than looking for ways to mitigate the questionable effects of the current heat wave.

Source





Genetically engineered crops: Only the news that fits a Luddite agenda in the NYT

Newspapers are often criticized for bias in their "news" articles. A prime example was Andrew Pollack's Feb. 14 New York Times piece on biotechnology applied to agriculture: "At the dawn of the era of genetically engineered crops, scientists were envisioning all sorts of healthier and tastier foods, including cancer-fighting tomatoes, rot-resistant fruits, potatoes that would produce healthier French fries and even beans that would not cause flatulence. ... Resistance to genetically modified foods, technical difficulties, legal and business obstacles and the ability to develop improved foods without genetic engineering have winnowed the pipeline."

While Mr. Pollack misses many of the nuances about biotechnology applied to agriculture and food production, he devotes ample ink to the anti-biotech crowd, including the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology (which he describes as a "nonprofit group," though "anti-biotechnology lobbyists" would be more accurate) and the radical Friends of the Earth.

Memo to Mr. Pollack: All points of view on scientific and technological issues are not created equal. Good journalism is not served by creating a kind of moral equivalence between those who hold ideological, anti-biotech views and those with supportable, legitimate viewpoints -not unlike equating creation theory with Darwinian theory. How ironic the same activists who opposed agbiotech relentlessly for 20 years now decry the "hype" and "overselling" of its benefits-rather like the teenager convicted of murdering his parents who pleads for mercy from the courts because he's an orphan.

Reflecting the views of biotech's antagonists, Mr. Pollack approaches the subject as though genetic engineering of plants were fundamentally new. But virtually all the 200 major crops in North America have been genetically improved, or modified, in some way. Plant breeders, not nature, gave us seedless grapes and watermelons, the tangelo (a tangerine-grapefruit hybrid), the canola variety of rapeseed and fungus-resistant strawberries. In North American and European diets, only fish and wild game, berries and mushrooms may be said not to have been genetically engineered in some fashion.

North Americans have consumed more than a trillion servings of foods containing gene-spliced ingredients, without a single untoward reaction. Gene-splicing is essentially an extension, or refinement, of earlier, less precise, less predictable techniques. In fact, when conventional and gene-spliced seed materials are mixed, arguably the former should be thought of as contaminating the latter.

What makes false alarms about a new technology hard to expose is the virtual impossibility of demonstrating the absolute safety of any activity or product: It's always possible we haven't yet gotten to the nth hypothetical risk or to the nth dose or the nth year of exposure, when the risk will finally be demonstrated. It is logically impossible to prove a negative, and all activities pose some nonzero risk of adverse effects.

The use of gene-splicing to craft small, precise genetic changes that enhance or introduce desirable traits into plants has been a stunning technological success. But excessive and unscientific regulation and the intractable opposition of activists have slowed its translation into consumer-friendly foods. Contrary to Mr. Pollack's implication, gene-spliced "potatoes that would produce healthier french fries" (with higher-than-usual starch content) were available-until anti-biotech activists bullied fast-food chains into rejecting them.

Mr. Pollack's statement, "Developing nonallergenic products and other healthful crops has also proved to be difficult technically" is simply untrue. A vast spectrum of such plants has been crafted by laboratory scientists, but they cannot afford the gratuitously inflated regulatory costs to test the plants in the field. Excessive and unwise regulation is a major reason products in the development pipeline "do not include many of the products once envisioned," to quote Mr. Pollack.

Unscientific and discriminatory Environmental Protection Agency and Agriculture Department regulatory policies make field trials with gene-spliced plants 10 to 20 times more expensive than a similar plant engineered with less precise, less predictable conventional genetic techniques. Unlike pharmaceutical development, agricultural R&D is a low-budget enterprise. Such counterintuitive regulation and gratuitous costs make it uneconomical to develop many promising and even important food products.

Then there is Mr. Pollack's puzzling disparaging claim "industry ... has been peddling the same two advantages-herbicide tolerance and insect resistance-for 10 years." These traits have been of monumental importance, not only to farmers' bottom line but to occupational health and the natural environment. Enhanced pest resistance in plants has obviated the need for hundreds of millions of pounds of chemical pesticides (and thereby reduced environmental and occupational exposures). Herbicide tolerance has made possible a shift to more benign herbicides and environment-friendly no-till farming.

As British historian Paul Johnson has written, "Left to themselves, the creative forces in society will always deliver, but keeping them reasonably free to do so is a perpetual, grinding battle. It is one that must never be lost." Once again, the New York Times is fighting on the wrong side.

Source






SPOTTED OWL UPDATE

The owl having been placed on the endangered list in 1990, the Clinton administration (in the mid 90's), banned all logging on 24 million acres in the Pacific North West. This shut down the logging industry, costing around 130,000 jobs



Last month the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a call for proposals to develop a recovery plan for the northern spotted owl. It's about time: The owl was added to the nation's burgeoning list of threatened and endangered species nearly 16 years ago. That it took so long helps explain why only 10 of the 1,264 species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) have ever recovered.

If my gut reading is correct, the owl won't be No. 11. It is already doomed across much of its range, and the reason is well known among field biologists who have been observing the bird for some 20 years. More aggressive barred owls are pushing them out of their 21-million-acre home range, or killing them, or both. In any case, spotted owls are fighting a losing battle, a fact that has me wondering if the Fish and Wildlife Service isn't whistling past the graveyard.

Barred owls, not to be confused with common barn owls, migrated from their native East Coast environs a century or more ago. No one knows why, and until they started killing already-threatened spotted owls, no one cared. Now they do. Just how long it will take the barreds to finish off their brethren isn't known, but the situation has become so precarious that a federal biologist recently opined that shooting barred owls might be the only way to save spotted owls.

How and why the government failed so miserably in its costly attempt to protect spotted owls is a sordid tale that illustrates what happens when science is politicized. Begin with the fact that protecting owls was never the objective: Saving old-growth forests from chainsaws was. The owl was simply a surrogate -- a stand-in for forests that do not themselves qualify for ESA protection. But if a link could be established between harvesting in old-growth forests and declining spotted owl numbers, the bird might well qualify for listing -- a line of thinking that in 1988 led Andy Stahl, then a resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, to famously declare, "Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn't, we'd have to genetically engineer it. It's the perfect species for use as a surrogate."

Indeed it was. But to back their play, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and their friends in the Clinton administration needed a good story for the judge. They found it in three obscure reports: a 1976 master's thesis written by wildlife biology major Eric Forsman at Oregon State University; Mr. Forsman's 1980 doctoral dissertation; and a 1984 report written by him and two other biologists. All three reports suggested a strong link between declining owl populations and harvesting in old-growth forests. Unfortunately, the hypothesis has never been tested, so despite 16 years of research, no link between old-growth harvesting and declining owl populations has ever been established.

Moreover, we know little about the relationship between harvesting and owl populations. One such study -- privately funded -- infers an inverse relationship between harvesting and owls. In other words, in areas where some harvesting has occurred, owl numbers are increasing a bit, or at least holding their own, while numbers are declining in areas where no harvesting has occurred.

More here




NEW DOUBTS ABOUT DINOSAUR GREENHOUSE THEORY, PALEO-CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Fossil wood gives vital clues to ancient climates

New research into a missing link in climatology shows that the Earth was not overcome by a greenhouse period when dinosaurs dominated, but experienced rapid fluctuations in temperature and sea level change that resulted in a balance of the global carbon cycle. The study is being published in the March issue of Geology.

"Most people think the mid-Cretaceous period was a super-greenhouse," says Darren Groecke, assistant professor and Director of the Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry Laboratory at McMaster University. "But in fact it was not to dissimilar to the climates over the past 5 million years."

By using high-resolution stable-isotope analysis from 95-million-year-old fossilized wood collected from Nebraska, Groecke and his team were able to precisely correlate the terrestrial carbon cycle with that from deep-sea records. However, when they compared the carbon curves from both records, it was evident that a chunk of about 500,000 years was missing from the terrestrial record. Other records already indicated a drop in sea level, a 2-4§C drop in oceanic temperature and a breakdown in oceanic stratification coincident with a marine extinction event.

"Rapid, large falls in sea-level in the ancient record are typically only produced by a glaciation, and so the combination of all the data during the mid-Cretaceous period suggests a short-lived glaciation during a period generally considered to be a super-greenhouse," says Groecke.

"Whatever hits the water causes a ripple effect on land," says Groecke. "Earth often undergoes rapid temperature fluctuations, and this new information may help us to understand how the biosphere will respond to human-generated alterations of CO2 concentration."

He said the research not only challenges conventional wisdom surrounding ancient climates, it makes a case for the use of high-resolution sampling in order to reconstruct a more accurate picture of the ancient climate and its affect on the Earth.

Eurekalert, 23 February 2006

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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