Modeling 2010 and Beyond

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for sticking around.

I’ve taken a hiatus the last week not only because of the glut of family activities one might expect this time of year (all good; in fact very good), but also in an effort to take seriously the clear admonition to wait on the Lord. I hope you have also.

It seems a good discipline not only because we’re told it is true (which should be enough) but because experience — my own, as well as that of friends and numerous Biblical figures — suggests that not waiting can lead down a slippery slope into the frenetic, no-time-to-think, must-react-now, fear-inducing and isolating it’s-all-up-to-me, no-time-for-prayer and consulting Godly brothers and sisters game of panic that Satan likes to play with us if we let him.

If you’ve ever visited a securities trading floor, been pressured by a salesman into signing now, or felt the adrenaline rush and temptation of a “flame” war you’ve caught a glimpse of that dark game. It’s the precise opposite of the eternal peace that is of God and His merciful rest. Anyone who’s been there knows that this state of waiting is hardly passive. It’s active, just in a different way. The Zen folks may have been onto some piece of it in their applications of quietude to sport (e.g., archery), but that’s a whole ‘nother post. No, I haven’t gone Eastern-pagan on y’all.  

And while I can’t say I have some magnificent new insight to share as a result of time in the non-blogging wilderness, some priorities have become clearer, some bad habits have risen to the level of conscious conviction, and a couple of new lines of inquiry, supported by insights from others who could not have known what I’d been led to write about have begun to form themselves into future posts. It promises to be an important time, these next few months.

I was also grateful to be handed a pair of vivid dreams this morning that have validated important aspects of my very small role in being alive and who I am at this time (including but not limited to this venue). (Please don’t hear that as grandiose. In conventional terms it would be called a midlife “crisis” — the kind of search for meaning and purpose that’s universal).

Thus here we go again with this strange little game of my moving my fingers here in my bloggy “kitchen” in snowy Boston, preparing black lines of type for your consumption out there in the dining room of the world. It is my aim to make it all as nutritious as possible. (If the ‘dishes’ are not to your liking, I urge you to at least taste them. Comments, as always, are welcome, but will be regarded as e-mails to the “chef”, shared on the blog to the degree that they are edifying, tasty, and complimentary to the main dish.)

This may seem a strange segue, but the rest of this post is about the great grand lie of climate change …the super-urgent, must-act-now, never mind thought or debate or difficult facts, God-denying hubris that drove the Copenhagen Climate “Summit” — the most recent pinnacle of the man-made, man-curable “crisis” of catastrophic global warming. Whew! So many words to say, simply: it’s a delusion, perhaps the delusion that the world has been given (and to a great degree has also swallowed) because they refused to love the truth (2nd Thessalonians 2:9-12).

Item one: an impossible-to-summarize, must-read piece on climate appearing in an admittedly unusual venue but with hyper-linked hard-science sources to back it up: a few basic, observable facts, plus a dose of common sense. An all-too-rare mix these days. Highlights: record cold and snow across North America  plus a 30-year record low amount of melting over the last (2008-2009) Antarctic summer. (The picture of the poor deer in head-deep snow in Wyoming is priceless; I wonder what climate-change believers who also support PETA will do with that one…)

Item two: an article linked from the previous one that expounds on the socialist-capitalist-fascist switcheroo behind Copenhagen (likely to surprise the idealists among the former group who haven’t realized that someone has to be in charge and it sure ain’t the lumpen proletariat). It also makes explicit a ripe-for-the-making comparison between carbon taxes and the indulgences of the church in the Middle Ages, observing that the latter ended badly and so must this. The following bit is also worth the trip to the article:

“What about ‘Green’ jobs?” you ask. For every “green” job created – at least – five productive jobs will be eliminated. Those who gain employment with government “green” jobs will produce nothing we can consume; their jobs will be to prohibit the creation of worthwhile jobs in what is left of our private, free enterprise sector.

The five-to-one ratio is hardly an academic exercise when one considers the human suffering, dislocation and social chaos already fomenting as a result of fifty percent unemployment with no end in sight in Detroit, a city that seems like it may offer parabolic, prophetic insights for the future of rest of the country. (Oh dear… did I just agree with Michael Moore?)

Item three: In the context of fluctuations in the sun being the overwhelming driver of climate (the ask-your-favorite five-year-old test of common sense), and water vapor being about an order of magnitude (10X) more important than carbon dioxide for the earth’s climate, I still find it remarkable that a scientific paper, “Received 18 August 2009; accepted 23 September 2009; published 7 November 2009″, (i.e., well before Copenhagen) didn’t derail that freight train, exposing its cargo as a steaming wreck of jumbled falsehoods. Wolfgang Knorr, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, UK in the abstract to his paper published in Geophysical Research Letters two months ago writes ever-so-dryly:

Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.

In other words, while the alarmists speak of CO2 emissions increasing (true) it seems not to be true that CO2 levels are increasing also. Note the subtle word shift. Emissions. Levels. Not the same. (Analogy: drip water into a dry sponge; much may go in while little or nothing comes out).

The historical record implies (in fact demands) that a set of compensating mechanisms must exist that makes a rise in man-made CO2 anything but cause for alarm. I find it remarkable that people who mock Yahweh, the Father/Creator and instead think in terms of some wise Gaia earth-mother goddess would think “her” so incompetent — so incapable, beyond some threshold, of re-adjusting to mankind’s presence and activity. If that is so: that we are harming “her” and she is unable to adjust, is “she” then worthy of worship as against the eternal, omnipotent Yahweh?

I’m reminded of the almost comical face-off between the prophet Elijah and the Baal-worshiping priests under King Ahab and Jezebel in 1st Kings 18, the modern version of which might involve taunts to the pagan worshipers of the Gaia earth-mother not having designed the earth properly and not being up to the task of producing a climate miracle. As with virtually all pagan ‘deities’, her worshipers would rather kill ‘her’ kids than embrace their abundance as our real Father does.

Speaking of miracles, it’s almost not worth blogging about the tremendous irony of an incapacitating, once-in-a-century blizzard just happening to slam the nation’s capital right as key dignitaries, including the president, returned from the almost-as-cold-and-snowy Copenhagen global warming cabal. Almost not worth blogging except that I got to see the aftermath firsthand and, well… it was quite something, even for this Boston boy. God is not mocked but, pushed far enough, He is not without a sense of pointed, illusion-deflating parable-theatre.

File the December, 2009 East Coast blizzard in the same, “don’t say later that I didn’t warn you” bucket with the many sober, insightful and Biblically-grounded analyses Joseph Herrin has written regarding a variety of recent natural disasters (see his ‘Calamity and Judgment’ section) or in a much smaller way, which I nibbled away at in this post last August (‘Camelot vs. Leviticus’).

[UPDATE 1/4/10: Contrast that with where the secularists are seeking to place the blame ('How about we sue you for breathing?). The chasm widens.]

U. of Bristol press release on the Knorr paper here; Science Daily take here.

Item four: Tangentially related, because it stems from the president’s visit to Copenhagen for the climate summit… Who has not yet read the noxious and by-definition blasphemous editorial in the Danish paper Politiken: “Obama greater than Jesus; The U.S. president – the practical saviour of our times”?

Hey, it’s a free society. This isn’t Islam. The piece pretty much speaks for itself and it will do little good for me to add my voice of outrage. God is up to that task.

Yet if the writers are under the illusion that they exist in a Godless universe, and that blaspheming all religions equally (both false and true; both man-made ‘gods’ and the Real One who made us all) brings the same eternal consequences, then they have a big surprise coming. With literacy, the church, the testimony of history, and the vast resources available nowadays (not to mention the heavens and the Holy Spirit), they have no excuse for not figuring out which One is indeed, above all. If their final answer is the Gaia earth-mother populist goddess of modern paganism, they’d be well served by reading to the end of the 1st Kings 18 chapter I linked above, e.g., v37-40:

“Answer me, O LORD [said Elijah], answer me, that this people may know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The LORD, he is God; the LORD, he is God.” And Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” And they seized them. And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.

After that, God changes the weather.

Item five: There is no item five. Carry on.  

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