Rick Warren is no Billy Graham

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

Last August I wrote a column critical of Rick Warren's decision to host a presidential candidate forum at his Saddleback Church.

My reasoning then was that America's crisis is moral ambiguity. I argued that Pastor Warren would only contribute to this ambiguity by hosting candidates with opposing views on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and presenting himself as a neutral moderator.

Only Barack Obama would gain, I felt, being showcased as an acceptable candidate by one of the nation's best known evangelical pastors. If John McCain had wanted to clarify his social conservative credentials, he didn't need to go to Rick Warren's church with Barack Obama to do it.

Evangelicals and other Christians listened as Rick Warren called Obama and McCain "friends" and "patriots" and watched as Warren winced no more than would have Larry King when Sen. Obama said it was above his "pay grade" to consider if and when an unborn child has human rights.

Evangelicals had already been hearing from Warren, and left-leaning pastors like Jim Wallis, that they should broaden their primary concerns beyond sex and abortion.

In retrospect, I cannot prove that I was right. But I think the evidence powerfully supports my claim.

Barack Obama picked up five percentage points of the evangelical vote over what John Kerry received in 2004. Those five percentage points amounted to about a third of Obama's winning vote margin over John McCain.

Sure, the Saddleback Forum alone does not explain this shift. But the legitimacy Obama gained that night certainly didn't hurt.

The largest shift was among 18-29 year old evangelicals. Obama got 32 percent of their vote -- double what John Kerry had gotten.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the forum, Warren was oblivious to the vulnerability of this group. The Journal reported, "... as for the notion that younger evangelicals are ready for rebellion against their parents' ideals, Mr. Warren cites polls showing that the younger evangelical generation is even more concerned about abortion than the older one." True. But this was only one part of the picture.

In 2007 the Pew Research Center reported that Republican identification among 18-29 year old white evangelicals had dropped from 55 percent in 2005 to 40 percent.

A survey done by Greenburg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that 26 percent of 18-29 year old evangelicals, compared to 9 percent of those over 30, support same-sex marriage.

Now President-elect Obama has invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. The NY Times calls this an "olive branch to conservative Christian evangelicals" and many now call Warren this era's Billy Graham.

An olive branch? Rick Warren helped get Obama elected and our President-Elect understands that there is still evangelical gold to be mined in the pastor from Saddleback Church.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright can explain how Barack Obama uses pastors. Obama sat in his church for 20 years and used his words for the title of his best-selling book, then discarded him when he became a political liability.

Regarding the Billy Graham comparison, it challenges even the most creative imagination to picture the Rev. Graham's ever hosting a forum for political candidates.

In an interview, Barack Obama recalled a previous invitation to Saddleback Church. "...I was invited to Rick Warren's church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion." I doubt that Billy Graham would see this in the spirit of his own calling to bring the gospel to all who would listen.

Nor would I see the Rev. Graham signing onto the Evangelical Climate Initiative, as has Rick Warren. This gives Christian cover to the left to raise our energy costs to address still-unsubstantiated environmental claims.

But on global warming, Rick Warren and Barack Obama are on the same page. Perhaps these will be the first post-inaugural chips that our new president will call in.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Take Global Warming Hysteria With a Grain of Salt

From our friends at Americans for Limited Government.

Global Warming Model Soon To Be Scrapped

Photo:USFWS

What follows are excerpts from a piece written by Christopher Booker of The Daily Telegraph, London. In 2009, as we face worsening economic conditions world wide, destabilization of the Israeli-Arab conflict and acceleration of Islamic terrorism, we must not exhaust resources chasing after hobgoblins that exist only is some people’s imaginations. Al Gore, et al, have had their say, now let’s get to work on things that matter.

The Daily Telegraph

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
[…]
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

Relax, Your SUV Didn't Do It

This article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says global warming started 5,000 years ago (when, incidentally, there were no SUVs or coal-fired power plants, and no evil American or Western civilization to make them).

Global warming didn't start with the industrial revolution, but began 5,000 to 8,000 years ago with large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe, according to new research by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists.

Using powerful supercomputers and advanced climate models, the researchers concluded that methane and carbon dioxide - the building blocks of global warming - began rising with the introduction of rice cultivation and large-scale tree removal.

So don't worry about it! Drive your Hummer or Expedition with pride!

That, or advocate we kill off 90% or more of the human race so we can allow our planet-goddess to go back to the au naturale. Maybe we can get the environmentalist wackos to jump to the head of the line to show their love for the goddess. Ya think?

There is a silver lining, though. The article says this warming probably averted another ice age. I'm sure Floridians would love the 4 degree weather I have outside my house right now.

On a semi-related topic, Daily Tech reports Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer called fears over global warming "mistaken".

"I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect", said Happer. "Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science."

Well, there goes that consensus thing! So much for "settled science."

Happer's latest remarks were made yesterday, as he asked to be included in a Senate Environment and Public Works report of scientists disputing global warming alarmism. Happer joins 650 other scientists on the list, many of whom have been interviewed previously by DailyTech.

"Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility," Happer concluded.

Anthropogenic global warming makes for thrilling science fiction and good fodder for socialist to peddle more government authoritarianism, but doesn't make for good science. It's based on a grain of science and a bucket of conjecture.

Even CNN Talking About the Joke of Man-Made Global Warming

Wow! The light is starting to come on, even on CNN!

Al Gore has to be on a serious crying-jag at this point, if even the Clinton News Network is talking about what a farce anthropogenic global warming is!

New Crisis: Northern Hemisphere in Total Darkness by July

I'm at home today and have been listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio when I heard about a brilliant illustration of the "global warming" lunacy.

Rush says there is a letter to the editor by Richard Strimple at the American Thinker which exposes a new and frightening problem we face here on earth:

I have detected a new crisis that I have named "the daylight change crisis". I first noticed it sometime around the end of June this year. I started paying attention and created computer models and sure enough I was right! We are losing daylight at an astonishing rate. Each day we are losing approximately 2 minutes of day light and my computer models predict total darkness by next July.

Since the best evidence for any warming of the earth points to a natural, cyclic event, you can imagine the parallel here.

Liberals, think real hard and you might figure it out. I know you've been operating almost entirely on emotions and emotionalism for a long, long time, but shake the dust off that gray matter and think about it.

What's the parallel? Can you get beyond your religious predispositions and grasp it? I know you can, if you're brave enough. Go ahead; give it a try!

Al Gore Not Responsible For Winter Blast

The following headlines were found on Drudge this morning and the stories high-light the record winter conditions that have gripped most of the US and Canada. Weather extremes and record conditions are the norm in meteorology. Every day there are new records for hottest, coldest, driest, wettest, windiest, etc. somewhere in the world. Climate truthers rush to report all of these as if they were something new and unexpected, always leaving the impression, explicitly or implicity, that all such occurrences are due to man-made “global warming.”

The cold spell that has swept across most of North America is remarkable for the fact that Al Gore is not here, but in Europe. It is a scientifically provable fact that wherever the Goracle speaks on Global Warming, the local weather fails to cooperate and attendees to these events usually have to brave severe cold or unseasonably cool weather.

Winter Weather Hits Las Vegas

New York May Get 6 Inches of Snow in Storm Tomorrow

Winter Storm Warning Issued For Chicago Area

FRIGID STORM CLOSES CALIFORNIA FREEWAYS, DROPS SNOW IN MALIBU

Spokane Shut Down By Snowstorm
Let's pray the Mr. Gore extends his visit to Europe until at least April; a return before this current spell passes could precipitate a mini-Ice Age.

Climbing Mt. Hoaximanjaro

It seems to be national Media Global Warming Scare Week, at least at NBC. They're making a mountain out of a molehill at Mt. Kilimanjaro, claiming the ice is melting there because of the mythical global warming. Just one problem: it isn't.

As the video below explains in part, there are a number of factors involved in the loss of ice at Kilimanjaro, including natural cycles, deforestation in the area, geography...and who knows, maybe the fact that it's a volcano could have something to do with it, too.

Reuters talked about this last year. But as Stuart Shepard says, we can always count on our "trusty" media to never let the facts get in the way of a good story...or a good scare.

In his Stoplight® video commentary, Stuart Shepard explains why NBC's Ann Curry didn't need to climb a mountain this week to discover what's happened to the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Glaciers Growing in Alaska

Some interesting news from the Anchorage Daily News:

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008.

Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.

"In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound," said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

"In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years."

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

So the glaciers in Alaska have been shrinking for 200 years? Shiver me timbers, but I don't think we had SUVs and coal-fired power plants 200 years ago.

The article also mentions other climate fluctuations in the past:

During the Little Ice Age -- roughly the 16th century to the 19th -- Muir Glacier filled Glacier Bay and the people of Europe struggled to survive because of difficult conditions for agriculture. Some of them fled for America in the first wave of white immigration.

The Pilgrims established the Plymouth Colony in December 1620. By spring, a bitterly cold winter had played a key role in helping kill half of them. Hindered by a chilly climate, the white colonization of North America through the 1600s and 1700s was slow.

Could it be that warming and cooling on planet earth is a cyclic phenomena?

Nah. Much more fun to blame SUVs and capitalism. Too much common sense, facts and truth could really cast an unpleasant pall over Obama's Socialism Train.

Note to "mainstream" media: be sure to ignore this.

HT to Newsbusters.

Al Gore Calls for Civil Disobedience to Promote Environmental Worship

You know, for civil disobedience to be warranted, there usually needs to be some compelling moral priority or injustice that's being ignored.

So Al Gore's mindless call for civil disobedience to "prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration" definitely seems over the top.

Maybe if you consider blasphemy against the religion of anthropogenic global warming a compelling moral priority, it would seem in order.

However, I'm pretty sure most rational and otherwise thinking people don't.

Gore's call is, however, worth a chuckle for those amused at seeing a grown man make an idiot of himself.

Archaological Find: Global Warming Thousands of Years Ago

Al Gore and his acolytes would have us believe that any warming of planet earth is due to the evil machinations of those of us in the West (primarily in the United States--the most evil of all nations) and that it is specifically the fault of SUVs, coal fired power plants and modern industry.

Interesting, then, that Yahoo News reports archaeologists have found several objects they say date back to about 4,000 BC about 9,000 feet above sea level in the Swiss Alps.

So far, 300 objects dating as far back as the Neolithic or New Stone Age -- about 4,000 BC in Europe -- to the later Bronze and Iron Ages and the Medieval era have been found in the site's former icefields.

But relative to the claims of Al Gore and his fellow anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts, consider this:

But it would never have emerged if climate change were not melting the nearby glacier.

Okay, so we have evil SUVs to thank for melting the ice and finding these treasures. So what?

They have allowed researchers not only to piece together snapshots of life way back when, but also to shed light on climate fluctuations in the past 6,500 years -- and hopefully shed light on what is happening now.

"For us, the site itself is the most important find because we have this correlation between climate change and archaeological objects," Hafner said.

"We know that people were only able to walk on this site when it was relatively warm," said Martin Grosjean, executive director of a national network called Swiss Climate Research. "When it was too cold, the glacier advanced and it was not a passable route."

Scientists have long known there were periods of warmer weather in the region but the artefacts allowed them to identify the exact years, when the site would have been passable on foot.

According to Grosjean, such data could help sharpen forecasts for the future by taking into account patterns of natural temperature fluctuation.

Hmmm. Natural temperature fluctuations. Not passable when it's cold, yet man-made tools were found there.

That must mean it was at least this warm several thousand years ago!

And according to the best archaeological data available to us, there were no SUVs or coal-fired power plants thousands of years ago.

This must mean that the climate was about this warm--if not warmer--several thousands of years ago. And that it was a natural phenomenon.

Wow! I can't wait to see what Al Gore thinks! He's going to be so surprised to find out he's been wrong all this time.

Incredible!

British Environmental Minister: Man-Made Global Warming is 'Hysterical Psuedo-Religion'

Even the British Environment Minister is figuring out that Al Gore's sci-fi thriller "Anthropogenic Global Warming" is just that: fiction.

The BBC and the News Letter report Environment Minister Sammy Wilson is also astute enough to call it what it has, like an L. Ron Hubbard book, become: a religion.

Speaking of the environmental wackos, Wilson says

Their ire has been particularly directed at me because I refuse to blindly accept the new pseudo-religion that we must dramatically change our economy in order to stop climate change. The tactic used by the "green gang" is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact.

Wilson also cites historic climate change...before we had SUVs:

The most modern history of the earth shows that these changes occur in regular cycles. From 200BC to 600AD we had what was known as the Roman warming when grapes grew in the open as far north as Scotland. The Dark Ages between 600 and 900AD was a cold period. Then came the Mediaeval warming period from 900 to 1300AD followed by the Little Ice Age between 1300 to 1850 AD when the Thames regularly froze over and fairs were held on the ice. From 1850 to 1940 we had another period of warming followed by a period of cooling from 1940 to 1975. When I was at school, scientists were confidently predicting that we were entering another ice age. From 1976 we have experienced gradual warming again. Significantly the most progressive and prosperous periods in world history were during the periods of global warming.

As he said, the apostles of global warming are outraged at his blasphemy and are labeling him a flat-earther-type.

Hang in there, Minister Wilson. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the claims of anthropogenic global warming are (pun intended) full of hot air.

It's only a matter of time before these anti-capitalist idiots slink off into obscurity.

Sun Cools Off, Earth Cools Off

Imagine that?

This is from the latest WeGetIt.org Biblically-based environmental group:

For the first time in nearly 100 years an entire month has gone by without the sighting of a single sunspot. That could turn out highly significant for Earth's temperature.

Why?

Because sunspots correlate with both solar energy emission and solar magnetism. Solar energy affects Earth temperature directly. Solar magnetism affects it indirectly by affecting how much cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, which affects low-level cloudiness. Decreasing solar magnetism leads to increasing cloudiness, which leads to decreasing surface temperatures.

During the Maunder Minimum (very low sunspot activity about 1645 to 1715), temperatures fell so much the period has come to be called the Little Ice Age.

Thus, as the graph above indicates, solar influence on global climate dwarfs human influence through the emission of carbon dioxide. What the downturn in sunspots portends is global cooling.

This also helps explain why temperatures on Mars and other planets, which lack human influence, have changed in ways similar to changes on Earth.

Some conclusions are so simple, they escape the elites who are always trying to be the smartest guy in the room.

Palin Not Drinking the Koolaid on Global Warming

Finally, someone on the national front who's not drinking the global warming Koolaid.

Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says she's not sold on Al Gore's sci-fi classic "Anthropogenic Global Warming."

From yesterday's Washington Post:

In an interview released by Newsmax magazine today, Palin said that while she recognized her state would be affected by climate change, that didn't mean humans are responsible.

"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location," she said. "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."

If only her running mate John McCain were such an independent thinker.

GOP to Incorporate Sci-Fi Classic Into Platform

The Hill says Republicans are expected to include Al Gore's sci-fi classic "The Invasion of Anthropogenic Global Warming" in the GOP platform.

According to the article, the draft says

“Increased atmospheric carbon has a warming effect on the earth,” the document said. “While the scope and long term consequences of this warming effect are the subject of ongoing research, we believe the United States should take measured and reasonable steps today.”

This, despite a recent report by one scientist that a "Little Ice Age" is on the way.

Or that David Evans, a global warming true believer, has changed his mind because (imagine that) the facts don't support the contention.

Or that evidence of melting glaciers is all wet.

Or that arctic volcanoes are belching not only heat but greenhouse gasses.

Or that the sun is a much more likely culprit for any temperature change.

Or that global warming true believers say it'll cost $45 trillion to stop half of what they think is man-made global warming.

Or that the American people believe increasing access to our energy supply is more important than indulging a fantasy.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, as disappointing as it is. McCain "reached out to Democrats" a few months ago with his global warming pap.

Let's just hope he leaves the pro-life plank of the GOP platform alone.

Given his past behavior, it isn't by any means beyond McCain to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, even as Democrats are showing us just how radical and out of touch they really are.

New Report Blames Solar Winds for Temperature Change

CNS News reports on new evidence from Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physicist, which points to solar activity as the cause of any warming on planet earth.

There is now little doubt that solar-wind variability [streams of ionized gases that radiate out from the sun] is the primary cause of climate change on a decadal time scale,” Singer said.

But what about statements from the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which claim anthropogenic global warming is real?

“Anything that falls beyond the purview of anthropogenic (human) caused global warming is not going to be seriously investigated by the IPCC,” Cohen told CNSNews.com. “That’s why the IPCC should never be viewed as a scientific manual. It was created for the sole purpose of supporting the notion of human-induced climate change.”

In other words, they're not interested in any evidence that doesn't fit their contention.

The likelihood of solar activity as a culprit for planetary warming is also evidenced in the fact that warming has been observed on Mars and Jupiter. The last I checked, there were no SUVs or coal-fired power plants on either of these planets.

There also weren't any SUVs 12 million years ago, when scientists believe global warming carved out canyons in Antarctica. I'm pretty sure there weren't any SUVs 300 million years ago when scientists say there was a global climate shift.

The most likely and logical conclusion, that the sun may be causing temperature changes on earth, isn't as exciting as the idea of a global catastrophe brought on my man's stupidity, nor does it excite those who despise the success of the United States and the West.

But it does make the most sense.

You are Getting Green...Veeery Green

If the American Psychological Association hadn't already tipped their hand that they care more about promoting a liberal agenda than examining the facts, they've definitely done so now.

As you may have heard, last week the APA came out with the outrageous statement that abortion isn't hazardous to women's mental health. This was soon refuted by a statement from 100 scientist, medical and mental health professionals, as well as a statement from APA member Dr. Rachel M. MacNair who called the report a "politically-motivated exercise" which ignored evidence that didn't fit their pro-abortion agenda.

Now the newsletter from WeGetIt.org, a group that takes a Bible-based approach to environmental stewardship, draws attention to a USA Today article last week which says the APA wants to put the head-shrink on you to make you be more "green":

Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.

"We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do," says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. "We know what messages will work and what will not."

According to the piece, they're pretty worried about this silly "truth" and "fact" and "contrary evidence" stuff slipping into news coverage and getting people off the approved mantra of greenness:

By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.

American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort.

Imagine that: just 45 seconds' coverage of a different explanation is enough to lead 11% of believers to doubt Al Gore's faerie tale.

They seem to believe all this contrary stuff such as solar activity, natural cycles, flawed global warming data, etc. is too confusing for people. How shameful that some skeptics (like a list of 31,000 scientists, among others) want to disturb people's peaceful dreams of global catastrophe with something as icky as reality.

So pushing a liberal pro-abortion agenda wasn't enough for the APA; they had to find another liberal cause to promote: radical environmentalism.

As for the APA's credibility, if they have any left, it seems to be headed for the door.

Scientist: Little Ice Age on the Way

From Milenio, a Mexican scientist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico says we will soon enter another "Little Ice Age" like the earth has previously seen.

Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera says it will last 60-80 years and will likely be a result of decreased solar activity.

The link above is to a Google-translated Spanish website and the translation doesn't hold during cutting/pasting, so here is a screen print of some other relevant things Herrera said:



Imagine that: volcanoes and solar activity affecting global temperature. Whoda thunk?

It's Not Easy Bein' Green

Living "green" and thinking green and building green and doing green and being green are supposed to save the planet, right?

The National Center for Policy Analysis has a piece by Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center, which looks at the results from schools in Washington state that were built "green."

Supporters of green schools claimed the schools would save 30-50% in energy costs, reduce absenteeism by 10%, and even bring better test scores (perhaps they were too modest to predict Middle East peace as another result).

So is "building green" the wave of the future and the way to save our fragile, human-pillaged planet? Not really.

The results:

- In no case was the green school the most energy-efficient in the district.

- In some cases the green schools were more efficient than the most recently built nongreen school, but the difference between them was often very small.

- In no case were the energy costs for a green school 30 percent less than at comparable schools as supporters had projected.

Apparently the student body was equally unimpressed, since it also didn't do much for absenteeism, either. In three green schools, absenteeism was actually higher than the overall district rate.

The moral of the story: before you spend money for a ticket and jump on the "green" bandwagon, make sure the vehicle is actually going to go somewhere.

Global Warming Proponent Admits: The Facts Don't Support the Contention

Brit Hume at Fox News features a piece on a former apostle of global warming, David Evans, is now a heretic to the religion of anthropogenic global warming.

How sad. High Priest Al Gore is losing converts left and right, these days. Blind faith just ain't what it used to be.

Here's what the Fox News piece says:

Evans writes in The Australian newspaper that if global warming was caused by C02, scientists would have found hot spots about six miles up in the earth's atmosphere over the Tropics. Evans describes those hot spots as the signature of the greenhouse effect. He says scientists have been trying to locate them for years using thermometers attached to weather balloons.

But he says years of research "show no hot spot — whatsoever" adding that "an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming."

One might consider Evans a part of the priesthood himself, having built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office to measure Australia's compliance with Kyoto.

He says in the piece he wrote at The Australian that in 1999 the evidence "seemed pretty good," but...

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

If you're Al Gore, you keep riding the same dead horse until he's ground beef, or ground horse at least. Or a stinking carcass, which is where the theory of anthropogenic global warming is headed fast.

Evans points out several of "the most basic salient facts":

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

Evans goes into some detail on each of these facts, so I'd encourage you to read the entire article.

Evans obviously hasn't sold out his liberal credentials, since he makes it clear here that he doesn't want the Labor government to shooting itself into the foot and getting booted out of office for a long time:

The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time.

If Democrats in the United States were smart, they'd pay attention to this (but hopefully the won't.) If some of the Republicans weren't such dumb sheep, they'd have already figured this out; hopefully it's not too late.

I suppose Gore will throw Evans out of the Church of Global Warming now. But Evans is certainly welcome at places where thinkers are present.