Potential Democratic VP nominee
misrepresents Cornwall Alliance on Senate floor
Megan
Toombs
Senator Tim Kaine
(D-VA) is a potential running-mate choice for presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Yet he recently joined other Democratic
Senators on the Senate floor to attack the Cornwall Alliance for the
Stewardship of Creation and other Virginia-based organizations, in an attempt
to defend climate alarmism against its critics.
As has been the case
with other attempts to vilify, intimidate and silence experts who disagree with
alarmist views on global warming and climate change, Kaine presented an
argument rife with logical fallacies – appeals to emotion, straw men, ridicule,
oversimplification and misrepresentation.
The one thing the good
Senator forgot to include in his speech was any sound science and ethics!
According to Kaine,
the Cornwall Alliance is part of a “web of denial,” a “shadow organization,”
“bizzaro,” and “greedy.”
Senator Kaine read
just a tiny piece of our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,
in which we quoted Psalm 19. He then said, “So somebody is really using
Scripture to argue that making our energy production cleaner, safer, cheaper,
violates the Christian tenet of caring for the poor?”
No, Senator Kaine, if you read the full Open
Letter, you would discover that it addresses both science and
economics. More important, it explains that pushing wind, solar, biofuel and
other technologies that are not currently cheaper or better
for the environment also hurts those in poverty. You would also have seen that
it was signed by hundreds of scientists, including over 20 climate scientists.
But you didn’t mention any of that.
Senators Kaine, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and
others have banded together to attack the alleged “web of denial” that appears
to be made up only of conservative organizations that they claim are funded by
ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations that they consider immoral – even
though the energy they provide has been indispensable to lifting and keeping
billions of people out of poverty, and even though ExxonMobil has not given any
of these groups a dime for a decade or more.
Moreover, there is another “web of denial,”
the one created by climate alarmist organizations that are funded by renewable
energy corporations, wealthy liberal foundations and government agencies that
stand to gain money, prestige and power from promoting scares about climate
change. As Kathleen Hartnett White brilliantly demonstrates in her booklet Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case, they have been caught exaggerating, fabricating and falsifying data to support
their views, suppressing contrary data, intimidating scientists who disagree,
and corrupting the scientific peer-review process.
Senator Kaine claims that 70% of Virginians
agree with the “scientific consensus” that catastrophic anthropogenic global
warming is real and that “it is urgent that we do something about it.”
There is no evidence that 70% of Virginians
(or Americans) agree with this. They may agree that global warming and climate
change are “real” and that humans today are contributing somewhat to these
cycles and fluctuations, which have been ongoing for millennia. But to convert
that into saying a huge majority believe humans are causing catastrophic
changes is disingenuous. To say they want to spend trillions of dollars to try
controlling Earth’s climate has no basis in fact.
And what “scientific consensus” is he talking
about? The “97% of scientists” that is the go-to statistic for alarmists has
been debunked so thoroughly that it takes serious chutzpah to use it.
Then there is the fact (observable fact, mind
you, not computer models) that shows there has been no statistically significant long-term global warming
for nearly all of the last 19 years.
Yet they deny this too.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased quite
significantly during this time, as developing countries built coal-fired power
plants, created jobs, lifted people out of abject poverty, dramatically
improved the living standards for billions, built roads and highways, and put
millions of cars and trucks on them. So where is the correlation between
increased temperature and rising CO2 levels?
There is none.
No one argues that humans have absolutely no
effect on the environment or on potential warming.
What is in question is
whether human CO2 emissions will create temperature increases and other
planetary changes so dramatic that they will cause catastrophes that justify
spending trillions of dollars in vain efforts to stabilize climates and
temperatures that have never been stable. What is also in question is whether
we can ethically do so by restricting or eliminating the fuels that countries
all over the world depend on for 80% of the energy that makes economic growth,
jobs, poverty reduction, health and welfare possible.
Those trillions of dollars should instead be
spent to lift billions more people out of poverty, and reduce the high rates of
disease, malnutrition and premature death that invariably accompany that
poverty.
Right now, the only “proof” alarmists have is
computer model projections that are wildly inaccurate, and a “hockey stick”
graph that is utterly worthless and has been derided by the scientific
community for the ability of that computer model to create suddenly rising
global temperatures when it is fed random numbers from a phone book.
That’s some serious denial – of the
uselessness of climate models, of what is actually happening in the real world,
and of the fundamental human right of people everywhere to use fossil fuels to
improve their living standards, health and well-being.
__________
Megan Toombs is the Director of Communications
for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. You can follow her
on Twitter @MeganToombs.
This article has been published here at the request of Paul Driessen.
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