TBC NewsWatch

IS THE CLIMATE CONSENSUS BEGINNING TO CHANGE?

Front Page Mag, 4/18/12: Is the Climate Consensus Beginning to Change? [Excerpts]—The current scientific consensus on Global Warming and Climate Change (or Global Weirding or Global Climactic Disruption, etc.) may be slowly shifting away from the catastrophism of the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.

More recently, a coalition of 49 former NASA scientists and seven Apollo astronauts has accused the bureaucracy of both NASA and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, with which it is affiliated, of diddling with the facts. They write: “We believe that [their] claims that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.” (“Watts Up With That,” April 10, 2012).

Further, the Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) of August 29, 2011 showed unambiguously that the UN suppressed or ignored much of the countervailing data that challenged its official position.

[I]n November 2009, the Hadley Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an Anthropogenic Global Warming myth. It had become undeniable that data was tampered with to paint the desired canvas, that counter-evidence was deliberately squelched, that character assassination against climate skeptics was an accepted tactic and that experimental results were falsely replicated. The notorious Wikileaks cable dump made it even clearer that the climate “consensus” was more of a political gambit than a scientific project (guardian.co.uk, December 3, 2010).

Even some of the specialists involved in the enterprise have begun to question or object to the findings as, to quote from the emails, “not statistically significant,” as “truly pathetic,” and as “defending something that increasingly cannot be defended.” Nevertheless, “The same science personalities at the top of the United Nations climate research machine,” writes Terence Corcoran, “are back, parading before readers in all their blundering glory” (National Post, November 23, 2011). The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU, Phil Jones, has gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others.

Myron Ebell, director of the nonprofit Competitive Enterprise Institute Center on Energy and the Environment (CEI), has said it definitively. “If there were any doubts remaining…the new batch of E-mails…make it clear” that the IPCC “is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response” (CEI online, November 22, 2011).

MERCHANTS OF DESPAIR

FrontPageMag, 5/7/12: [Excerpts from an interview with Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy. His latest book is Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism]—Al Gore is trying to turn antihumanism into a global cult. Just have a look at this quote from his book An Inconvenient Truth: “The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise.…When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.”

It is revealing that Gore chose the words “An Inconvenient Truth” as the title of his book. That phrase could be the virtual chorus line for all the antihuman movements for the past 200 years who used pseudoscientific arguments to demand that people harden their hearts to the human misery purported to be necessary, i.e.: It is an inconvenient truth that:

Thomas Malthus: “the Irish must be swept from the land.”

Charles Darwin: “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

Madison Grant (Author, The Passing of the Great Race, 1916): “indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury to the race…It is an inconvenient truth that “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, (authors Global Ecology, 1971): “when a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.”

The Club of Rome (authors Mankind at a Turning Point, 1974): “the world has cancer, and the cancer is Man.”

Alexander King (founder, The Club of Rome, 1990): “DDT…has greatly added to the population problem.”

LEGISLATURE IMPROVES HOMESCHOOL LAW

http://www.hslda.org/hs/state/ga/201205070.asp: Legislature Improves Homeschool Law—With the signature of Governor Nathan Deal on House Bill 39 on May 1, 2012, Georgia enacted significant improvements to its homeschool law. Effective with the 2012–2013 school year, parents will no longer have to submit monthly attendance records to their local public school superintendent. Instead, the records will be submitted only once a year to the Georgia Department of Education. Additionally, the initial and annual declaration of intent to conduct a home study program will be filed with the department of education instead of the local superintendent.

Submission of monthly attendance records has always been a thorn in the flesh of homeschoolers in Georgia. Problems with parents missing the end-of-month deadline by a few days or misplaced records by school officials often led to inappropriate action by the school district. School districts routinely reported families to social services for educational neglect or threatened truancy charges against family members. They also initiated action to bring about the revocation of the driver’s license of students by reporting excessive absences to the department of driver services. Annual reporting at the end of the school year should bring an end to these excessive and unwarranted enforcement actions.

Filing the declaration of intent with the department of education removes the local school district from the administrative process of beginning and continuing a home study program. HSLDA’s experience has been that the less involvement homeschoolers have with the local school district, the fewer legal problems they have.