Thank you, Herb, for taking on a daunting topic, and doing a fine job of teasing out the salient features. Anyone who does not follow climate blogs like "wattsupwiththat", "climateaudit", or "realclimate" will certainly find himself data challenged, as new scandals are exposed on a daily basis. D' jour-gate seems to be all that is left to describe each new revelation in the blogosphere. 

Of course for the Left, if it doesn't appear in the front pages of The New York Times, it didn't happen. So Climategate may still be, for many of them, a distant, vast right wing conspiracy. A couple of years ago, after hearing a highly educated liberal friend defend catastrophic AGW by reference to An Inconvenient Truth I emailed him a good primer on the subject called A Skeptical Layman's Guide to Global Warming. His response: "I am not competent to argue the science, so I just have to choose whom to trust, and since the scientific consensus is in favor of catastrophic AGW, that's what I accept." He was what progressives would no doubt call a data driven person.

There is a line in the movie When Harry Met Sally spoken by Billy Crystal when, after opining to to Meg Ryan that there are two types of women - high maintenance and low maintenance - he is  asked by Meg Ryan which category she belongs in. "You're the worst," he replies, "You think you're low maintenance, but you're really high maintenance."  The intellectual Left is dangerous because they think they are data and reason driven, while in reality their opinions are as infused with religious belief as those of the yokels in the church pews. Hopefully, exposure of the IPCC fraud that intellectuals, including the Adventist Left, bought - hook, line, and sinker - can be a reality check for them.  

Nathan: Doesn't take many words to figure out that you think with your head and not with your glands. Whoever gave Billy Crystal those lines knew what we are writing about. Why is it so hard to lay out one's presuppositions now and then--would save a lot of time and key strokes. Cheers, Herb

Elaine Nelson

Since there may not be absolute evidence of possible climate change, what are the obstacles to our acting as if there were?  It is quite apparent from the temperature changes as well as the rapid thawing of glaciers that massive changes have been made, regardless of the cause.  

Is the hesitancy to behave as if there is global warming of such drastic expense that refusal to act is causing the opposition?  Or, are there other reasons, not given for ignoring such changes?

Herbert, only very low level people ever believed in anthropogenic global warming.  The elites of which you write were in on the joke from jump street.  It was never anything but a power grab; if you can convince people that carbon dioxide is destroying the world, you can control every single thing everyone does, right down to the smallest detail of all of our lives, right down to breathing (which emits CO2).  The global warming hoax was the ultimate rationale for the ultimate totalitarianism. 

It's no wonder freedom has been, and is, so very rare in this world.  The haters of freedom of are so numerous and various, and those who believe in freedom so few and far between.  Just in the last century, we've had to face down fascism, Nazism, communism (all of which are totalitarian forms of socialism), and now we're having to deal with Islamism (a totalitarian ideology that has far more in common with Nazism and communism than anything invoked in Western minds by the term "religion"), and totalitarian environmentalism (the global warming hoax).  Jesus said "the poor ye have always with ye" but he could as truthfully have said, "the enemies of freedom ye have always with ye."

Cheers to you as always, Herb.

Sorry for not quite grasping the entire theme of this blog post, but are you relating the fundraising efforts of the various world religions (perhaps, but perhaps not, excluding Adventism and its various stepchildren like 3ABN and Voice of Prophesy, etc.) with the grant proposals of universities and other climate change research facilities?

Is SDA escatology a convenient truth?  A fund-raising scheme?  Is our church fighting a battle for dollars in a duel of armageddons?  Give us/them more money because we/they need to spread the word about the end of the world due to the 1) the 2000 yrs running imminent return of Jesus Christ or 2) an overwhelming amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and sketchy temperature readings... 

Herb, you suggested we follow the money.  If we follow the bigger money trail, where will it lead?  To ministers or scientists?

As our own church predicts the unknown timing of the return of Jesus Christ, what is it doing?  Is reporting the return of Jesus as "imminent" a fact?  Is it a prediction of the unknown?  Or is it pressing an agenda?

Herb, with regard to the broad strokes with which you painted "Climategate" much to the delight of Nathan, David, and others, I'd suggest you read the actual documents in context (as best as can be done) and in their entirety - FactCheck.org has a review of Climategate if you care to google it.  It's a little troubling that you would parrot the Fox News take on Climategate, which if you took the time to read the volumes of material available from the breach at the CRU, wouldn't match up with what you wrote here.  I spent several hours reading the material (I must admit that I skipped over some of the data-thick pages) and didn't find the scandal that was reported on the Rupert Murdoch-controlled media outlets. 

It troubles me to see so many who are supposed to be God's stewards of His earth pooh-poohing something that is so obvious as global warming based on opinions of corporate entities, both sides of whom have possibly abused the issue.

One simply need look at the Canadian/US north to see global warming in action through climate change. The North is a microcosm of the rest of the earth. Scientists say that significant changes to our earth start there. Glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. Animals such as polar bears have a much longer summer where they are starving because they feed themselves in the winter to get them over the short summer. Frozen habitats are melting away and the North is experiencing the warmest temperatures we've ever seen.

 Just in the southern provinces of Canada we are getting unheard of warmer temperatures for this time of the year. Usually at this time the prairie provinces are experiencing temperatures between -30 and -40. They are hovering around the 0 mark! When it is snowing in California and Texas, it doesn't take a scientist to see that our climate is getting seriously messed up.

 The science is there. Only a fool chooses to ignore it simply because it may have been blown out of proportion.

Elaine: Appropriate questions. The issue is 1) not whether there are climate changes but 2) what is causing such.  3) In the range of many centuries are we experiencing something never seen before? 4) When we review what equally qualified scientists are saying against the AGW crowd, why are they not given the mike and the grants? 5) When we see/hear the perfidy at the bottom or center of IPCC's reports as they skew stats to impress government policy makers (self-confessed), what should common proles like you and me think? We are in this together, Elaine.  Cheers, Herb

David: I wrote God At Risk--The Cost of Freedom in the Great Controversy for the very reasons you outline so well. Freedom is the key word, even before love, in the Great Controversy. And many will see before time ends exactly how they stand on this one word. Cheers, Herb

Elaine: I have to admit that your questions are the first time I have seem them anywhere! I do think you have your tongue in your cheek, however. The analog is in our faces, in a way. The way truth works is way above how many sociologists, psychologists and historians and theologians often work. Noah was simply saying that his generation was destroying itself with their self-inflicted, self-caused troubles and God had the only way out. Truth was not coming to them because of Noah's words only  but also through the enlightened conscience. Their heart and head were being tested. Same today. What do you think? Cheers, Herb

Steve: Looks like you did more than casually think about all this. Several points: 1) Most Adventist fund-raising (and the Lord has helped me raise many millions of dollars for causes that I believed and convinced others that such assertions were true to fact) can point to much bang for the buck. And so can many science grants.generally.  But surely not all. as scientists are quick to point out--the zillions spent on projects that seem to favor someone's presupposed paradigm.under dispute before and after the grants is legendary.

2) I like your phrase:"duel of Armageddon." --I may use that some day! The paradigm or metanarrative  for the Advent was given to us by our Lord Himself--not something a bunch of SDAs thought up. I think we agree on that.

3) I think your tongue is in your cheek when you compare the Adventist minister to an Adventist scientist with the phrase, "Follow the money." Neither has much to follow.  If you mean TV clergy vs university grants--plenty of money. Just depends how it is used.

4) No, the Advent has never been "imminent" since Jesus left. But for Adventists since 1844, it has been "near." Big difference! When we throw conditions into the equation, near is always relative, don't you think?

5) Can't figure out why you refer to Murdoch and FOX NEWS in all this.  The accumulated material I have in the file on Climategate comes from various books, mags and newspapers in this country and foreign (which seem to be more forthright than many of our own). Are you comparing FOX with MSNBC?  Cheers, Herb

Gulbox; You ask the right questions! Stewardship of this planet is one of the Christian's chief concerns--or should be! But jollowing the latest headline or scarey film is not playing fair with this planet. The planet always suffers when good money is diverted to support activist propaganda, which is exactly what much of AGW is today.

 Of course recent "numbers" that can be proved (and not like the Himalayan glaciers or the "hockey-stick numbers--both examples of IPCC reports blurted out to the world until saner scientists were allowed the mike) will always be interesting--and they always have been interesting in the ebb and flow of time.

You are right--"science is there!" But what one believes may be good science following one's own paradigm isn't always happy when someone comes along with another paradigm and moves the world of science along--such as what happened to Joseph Priestley in 1775 who fathered the phlogiston theory.

 If his students believed that forever,this world would never have heard of the oxygen theory of combustion.thanks to Antoine Lavoisier. To the end of his life, Priestley never went beyond his well-received science, butl truth prevailed.  The oxygren theory of combustion (as any high school student today knows well) was the key for rethinking how to do chemistry--becoming what we today call "the chemical revolution." Cheers, Herb

It is a bit frustrating to see so many, who seem pretty uninformed about climate change, reacting to skeptics the same way that fundamentalists often react when facts challenge their presuppositions - ad hominem attacks and irrelevant personal experience.  The issue isn't whether there is climate change. The questions are: What is causing it? Is it bad? Can we control it? Who is going to decide what the right temperature is for various parts of the planet for all time? And just how are we going to achieve that? Can we at the same time cool the praries of Canada and warm villages high in the Andes where record cold is threatening the subsistence living conditions of indigenous people?

May I suggest that you go to "wattsupwith that.com" and take a look at an article posted on 1/27 by Willis Eschenbach on the subject of rising sea levels. I'm not suggesting it's the final word. In fact I'm eager to hear a refutation. Don't just look at the article though. Peruse the 200 plus comments, and you will see that there are some really brilliant physicists, mathematicians, engineers, marine biologists, and climatologists sharing their perspectives. It is incredibly fascinating and informative. Ditto for "climateaudit.org". Then go to "realclimate.org", a site sponsored by AGW believers who heavily censor input. The contrast in tone and substance is startling. These sites will put you on the road to becoming an informed participant in the discussions. Watch out though! It will stretch your mind, and it just might tempt you to see science as something other than a prop for moral-political agendas.

But Herb's blog isn't really about the merits of Global Warming per se. Climategate simply illustrates how today's scientific dogmas are just as vulnerable to becoming Truth claims as the dogmas of a flat earth and a geocentric universe were centuries ago. The fundamental problem, which I think Herb is driving at, is the blindness of the self-proclaimed enlightened class to the corruptibility of their truths and Truth claims. 

The conventional wisdom peddled by Warmists and the MSM tells us that our present climate situation is unprecedented, manmade, and of catastrophic import. It is incontrovertible that these assertions rest on data which has been collected by a very few scientists who have steadfastly refused to disclose their raw data, principle components, adjustments, or smoothing formulae which they use to come up with headline-grabbing findings. Other scientists have taken these findings and designed parameters and algorithms to come up with computer- models that have proven wildly inaccurate over the past 20 years. This is largely due to dependence on dubious data, as well as the fact that the 97% of greenhouse gases that are other than CO2 are very poorly understood. How can we trust the conclusions - why should we trust the conclusions - if the data upon which they are allegedly based are not available for review and analysis?

Yes, glaciers are receding; they are also advancing. Polar bear populations are overall at an all time high. Ocean levels were rising at greater than the current rate long before anthropogenic CO2 levels began to rise. Satellite data measuring tropospheric temperature (unadjusted and unsmoothed) do not yield the same conclusions about global warming as those reached by suspect GISS and NOAA surface station measurements. When temperatures go up, it's evidence of climate change; when they drop, we are told that temperature should not be confused with climate. I know it seems silly, but many scientists have found a striking correlation between sunspot activity and historic temperature trends. What foolishness would cause anyone to look at the sun as a possible cause of climate change is of course a mystery to most Warmists.  

A fundamental tenet of AGW (unprecedented warming caused by human activity) has been predicated on fraudulent constructs by a few paleoclimatologists that presently lie in shambles. Before we as Christians embrace feel-good moral imperatives flowing from elitist consensus, let's either stay out of the fray or become informed.

Nathan: Well said. You are merely suggesting common sense and academic integrity. Why should anyone be troubled with that--unless for various reasons they have never been forced to examine their presuppositions.

My chief concern is not AGW in particular but academic elitism in general. That includes all fields in the academic arena--and esp theological elitism that is most important because they handle material far more serious than climate data.

When any church gets into an administrative "group think"--something is dying even though the surface seems like much is going on and needs media coverage. All the while, books or articles, well-researched, are at times banned because the conclusions do not fit the "group think"! But history tells us that truth does emerge eventually--but think about the time lost while people are not benefited personally by truths that make the difference.

Or meetings are held by only the gilded "peer review" mentality that selects the speakers and continues the "group think" fog. That goes for any media production that attempts to emphasize their own group think--no one academic area or media center is immune.

 Everybody that breathes should examine the temptation to be in the "inner circle" (C.S. Lewis) and enjoy the breath of real freedom. Cheers, Herb

Thanks for the great article. I am glad that someone is openly writing about this.  It’s interesting how many Christians are ready to point out the problem with preaching Apocalypse and Revelation, and yet, they are falling for another doomsday scenario from the Religion of Environmentalism.  It looks like we are all facing a deeper issue.  I like how Michael Crichton has put it in his speech on Environmentalism as Religion back in 2003:

“I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.” 

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html

Brendap: You surely nailed it to the wall with a firm swat of the hammer.  I tried to access the Criichton email address but it didn't work. You noted well that most people who breathe, one way or another, come up with their own notion of how to duel with Armageddon. But most think with their glands and not with their heads. In other words, make sure of your facts first. That is why the Bible has stood the test of time as well as in one's personal experience--that is, those who really give it a chance. Cheers, Herb

In spite of the fact that the bulk of the responses to Herb's Blog post took a political bent, it is just as I thought -

My chief concern is not AGW in particular but academic elitism in general. That includes all fields in the academic arena--and esp theological elitism that is most important because they handle material far more serious than climate data. [Emphasis added.]

I'm going to test the limits of the limb I'm currently out on, with the full weight of my post-holiday corpulence, and guess that Herb's column was aimed much more toward not just theological elitists in general, but specifically self-directed at theological elitists within our own SDA family. 

As interesting as Climategate, polar bears, and himalayan temperatures may be, the true thrust of Herb's insightful examination is being parried by and buried in arguments that miss his point.

And in missing his point, we prove his point - that sometimes in our hubris we are so right about the wrong things, and somehow, at the same time, so wrong about the right things. 

Steve: How can I add anything to your keen, perceptive, insights? All I can say is, all the above.  "Group think" is one of the sub-level diseases of elitism wherever found. Cheers, Herb

To "Guibox":  Hi my Canadian friend.  On balance when I was traveling in Alaska last summer, several old friends mentioned how that it got down to -78F last winter in Tok, AK.  How's that for global warming?

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99162528