Cornwall Alliance – December 14, 2009
Copenhagen Update: Talking with an Alaskan Geologist
By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Before coming to Copenhagen, I Googled to find an English-speaking church to attend on Sunday and found the International Christian Church of Copenhagen.
Though I’m Reformed and its pastor and service are Lutheran, I was glad to be able to go and worship with fellow Christians. The Scripture readings, as usual in a Lutheran service, were excellent, and the liturgy was orthodox – the sermon, though, left me very grateful to be in a church in which the pastor makes the gospel clear every week and offers some substantive explanation of Scripture.
At the end of the service, as is their habit, the congregation had visitors rise and identify themselves. Most of the half-dozen or so visitors were here for COP-15, and I took particular interest in a fellow from Alaska who identified himself as a member of the American Geophysical Union, which a while back experienced a major protest by a large number of its members because its leadership had, without polling members, issued a position statement calling for urgent action to stop manmade global warming. Ah!
Perhaps here would be one of those independent-minded members of the AGU who protested! He’d be interesting to talk with.
Well, he was interesting, but not quite as I hoped. He was a study in – How does one put it politely? Well, let me just describe first. John (not his real name) said he was pleased to see that the United States government had a much larger and more active representation this time around than at the last climate summit, because, he said, his work in Alaska was where the greatest impacts of “climate change” were happening. Indeed, he insisted, the effects were accelerating – Arctic sea ice melt greater every year and all sorts of bad things happening from it. Now, the fact is that the greatest sea ice melt was in 2007, and 2008 and 2009 saw much less melt, and the 2007 maximum was caused not by warmer temperatures but by unusual ocean currents that brought warmer water in and carried ice away, but rather than getting into a set of claims and counterclaims about such data, I decided to focus on logic.
“Assuming that these effects of warming are accelerating, what persuades you that the underlying cause is anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions?” I asked.
“Because of the positive feedback loops.” He said. “As the ice melts, the ice-free water absorbs more heat from the sun,” which causes more melt, more absorption of heat, more melt, etc.
“But why is that evidence that the initial cause is anthropogenic? Wouldn’t the ice melt and the albedo” (the reflecting effect) “diminish whether the initial warming were anthropogenic or natural?”
John completely ignored the question, which had pointedly shown his post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy and rambled on about the IPCC’s being so sure of things (despite our having already discussed climategate – with which he demonstrated only the most superficial acquaintance, about what one might have expected from someone who had seen nothing but mainstream media coverage and had never taken the time, like a good scientist, to look at the evidence for himself by, say, reading the emails and computer code).
It’s not fun being a former logic professor talking with global warming true believers.
And it’s sad knowing that sincere fellow believers – and I assume John was one – have been hoodwinked into AGW alarmism, apparently without ever thinking about how the Biblical worldview or Biblical theology might help them interpret the world around them and suggest different conclusions.
Public date: December 15th, 2009Categories: News
Tags: climate change, Copenhagen, Cornwall Alliance, E. Calvin Beisner, environmentalism, global warming
