By James Wilson
Climate change skeptics are producing bundles of credible evidence mankind has not caused planetary warming and – pretty sure – we are actually in a cooling trend. There is a lot of money and power invested in the global warming-caused-by-people narrative but Attorney General Loretta Lynch has the answer. She threatens to prosecute people denying the narrative. It speaks poorly for freedom of inquiry.
Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March her department is considering civil actions against so-called climate change deniers; she has referred the matter to the FBI to determine whether the offense meets legal criteria for prosecution. She follows in the footsteps of California Attorney General Kamala Harris investigating Exxon Mobil Corporation for lying about climate change. Harris is that heroine of the left who proposed education and jobs programs for illegals in defiance of law as District Attorney for San Francisco. She is infamous for refusing to defend California law – Proposition 8 – and for raiding the home of pro-life activist David Daleiden when he is not even accused of a crime in California. Lynch, for her part, was answering a question about pursuing those who “pretend the science of carbon emissions” is unsettled.
This assault on the First Amendment is the latest in the secularist war on science; there is no reason to expect them to stop with corporate entities. There will then be nothing to protect parents, scientists, and even legislators from roasting on the politically correct spit. One wag suggested Lynch read up on the Inquisition’s persecution of Galileo for claiming the earth was not the center of the solar system.
The difficulty is the question really is unsettled, but the evidence does not favor warming alarmists. More data pours in showing the earth entering a cooling trend far more dangerous than global warming but less pinnable on people who can be taxed, regulated and prosecuted into submission.
The US Climate Reference Network was installed in the 1990s to provide ultra accurate temperature measurements with instruments more sensitive and more numerous. Exacting usage protocols cancel the need to extrapolate over information gaps and estimate trends, virtually eliminating opportunities to fudge data for a partisan agenda. Readings reveal a years-long cooling of the oceans that correlates with the growth of polar ice caps over two decades. They support a new theory – championed by physicist John Casey (president of Space and Science Corporation) and others – of what regulates global temperatures. The driver is not earthborne carbon dioxide but rather that pesky sun Galileo thought the center of the system.
Climatologists have known of sunspots for centuries. They tend to run in eleven year cycles and there is some correlation between high numbers of spots and terrestrial climate trends, but most scientists do not believe they pack the wallop-over-distance required to actually alter climate on this planet; Casey and his friends agree. They believe – and have tested – the notion that internal cycles of the sun, not the irradiance of sunspots, drive climate change on earth. What Casey calls the Bicentennial Cycle – it lasts a little more than two centuries – began anew in 2009. Using his model he successfully predicted a serious reduction in sunspots for several cycles to come and this correlates with the cooling trend recorded all over the planet today.
The data also correlates to what are known as the Little Ice Ages of the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries in terms of fewer sunspots recorded during those times. These cycles can also produce greater numbers of spots and then climate tends to warm. I am not enough scientist – by far – to personally analyze all this, but it is not rocket science to call it both fascinating and empty of human causation.
What to do. First remember the First Amendment is not intended to provoke so much as to produce truth through the free exchange of ideas – however provocative. Second, let us engage in the full exchange of ideas – without agenda. Third, celebrate the freedom to discover what really is in this process. Or we could just sit back while attorneys general prosecute those who disagree with them. I know which approach is favored by a God who is “the Way and the Truth and the Life,” and, “for freedom has set us free.”
In one pivotal scene of the classic film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, scientist Professor Barnhart tells alien Klaatu, “It is not faith that makes good science, but curiosity.” Any person of honest curiosity will bravely and persistently seek the truth. Only faith, however, which is curiosity submitted to Creator, will actually find the truth he seeks.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships, The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@charter.net
