Religious leaders dump coal, declare “no faith”

There goes my world. Who knew they had faith in coal?

So forget science, climate change is a moral problem. Is climate sensitivity 1 degree or 3? Ask a priest.

A group called Australians Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) has badgered 150 soft targets in the religious world to sign a grandiose letter making coal into the new Lucifer.

The Guardian

In an open letter headed “no faith in coal”, the leaders say the climate crisis is a profoundly moral problem and Australia’s response will be crucial in addressing it.

Signatories to the letter include bishops, rabbis, theologians, the grand mufti of Australia and the heads of the Uniting Church, the Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils, Muslims Australia and the National Council of Churches.

Remember the alarmist maxim: ask a plumber to do the plumbing, a heart expert to do the surgery and when you want to predict the climate, ask an Imam.

Or failing that — ask a school student — which is what the religious leaders have done. Let’s quote their letter:

As you know, thousands of school students have been protesting in our streets about this emergency. They have three demands. We are writing to urge you to agree to them:

1. Stopping the proposed Adani coal mine
2. Committing to no new coal or gas projects in Australia
3. Moving to 100% renewable energy by the year 2030.

Let’s ask innumerate teenage girls to set national energy policy. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s not like they are easily fooled slaves to fashion who make great cheerleaders.

The sound of breaking commandments:

I count five:

1. Thou shalt have no other Gods (since when was the IPCC sacred?)
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain (don’t use God for Renewable industry advertising)
3. Honour thy father and mother (not the teenage false saints)
4. Thou shalt not bear false witness  (praise not the scientists who hide declines)
5. Thou shalt not steal.  (see the Australian Renewable Energy Target — solar panels.)

The BishopRabbi economist says automation is bad for jobs

Solar power apparently makes more jobs:

The Adani mine in Central and North Queensland is an excellent example. People there need new, reliable jobs. Yet serious investment in solar would yield far more jobs than the Adani mine would, as it is less automated. And rejecting new coal will also help to protect jobs that depend on the Great Barrier Reef. There are currently 60,000 people whose livelihood depends on the Reef.

Let’s get rid of washing machines too and then women can be full time housewives again. That’ll create lots of jobs.

Solar power makes jobs in the same way that freight by horse and buggy does: a small high-maintenance unit can’t be used in an efficient way with economies of scales. Those economies being what makes trucks cheaper.

So the nice but weak religious leaders have handed their moral power to children and activists. There’s no reason they shouldn’t speak up on climate change, but if they care about their flock, they might want to research the positions they advocate. That means reading the arguments for and against. Instead they blindly follow a group that treats the IPCC as a God — the ARRCC describes its policy as pretty much everything the IPCC ever said.

Thou shalt not question foreign committees

After donating their brains to the IPCC the ARRCC rationalizes why any outcome at all proves they are right:

How the climate is changing

While the numbers above may seem small, their impact is much greater than just a global warming of temperatures by 1-2 degrees. This is firstly because this amount is just an average – the changes in temperature is unevenly distributed across the globe Some places around the world will experience much greater increases than this and some places will actually experience a DECREASE in temperatures.

This phenomenon of cooling and warming at the same time is partly explained by the effect that warming has on ocean temperatures and currents. As the air and land temperatures warm, so too does the average ocean temperature. The increased air and ocean temperatures causes accelerated melting of the ice in the arctic and Antarctic, resulting in an increase of cold water flowing into the oceans. The colder waters interact with the warmer waters to change the patterns of ocean currents, which sees some of this colder water flowing to places that in past have experienced warm ocean currents. As ocean temperatures mediate coastal land temperatures, the colder waters will cause colder temperatures.

So, religious geniuses, tell us what outcome would prove the theory wrong? If temperatures stayed exactly the same?

Changing air and water temperatures also affects the weather. As ocean currents change this affects the air currents that flow above the oceans, changing cloud formation and wind patterns. The overall effect of these changing air currents is that most places around the world will actually experience much less frequent rain fall. However when rain does occur, it will happen with much greater intensity. This leads to a pattern of both droughts and floods. It also means that sometimes actual rainfall seasons will change, with dry weather during traditional wet seasons, and very wet weather during traditional dry seasons. The main effect though is to make the rainfall very unpredictable based on past experiences. Changing rainfall patterns also have an effect on traditional water catchment areas and existing river systems, which can affect previously reliable sources of fresh water.

Let’s all pay homage to the pagan rites of climate superstition: Droughts, heatwaves, random noise is “proof” of anything you like. They’re not worse than ones we had 1,000 years ago. Floods are not worse either.

A third effect of changing water temperatures and currents is an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as tropical storms.

Except tropical storms are not occurring more frequently, and the worst storms were hundreds of years ago.

ManbearMonkPriest says skeptics are wrong because of a flawed keyword study of pal reviewed abstracts in a biased-funding safe space for b-grade thinkers. That and because name-calling “denier” sounds so scientific.

Sceptical arguments

The above impacts are not just predictions but things that are being observed right now around the world. However there is still a significant and often vocal body of people who are either sceptical of climate change science or outright deniers.

The prominent people amongst this group are rarely climatologists or even scientists at all – they are generally social scientists such as economists, politicians, people connected with big business or social commentators.

Prominent? Tell that to Professor Richard Lindzen.

While there are a few scientists among this group of people, research by Cook et al in 2013 (“Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”) found that 97% of published climatologists believe in the existence of human-induced climate change. That is, 97% of all scientists whose field of expertise is climate, and who have gone through the process of having their research peer-reviewed by other qualified scientists and published in a scholarly journal believe that climate change is happening and that it is directly linked to human activity. There have now been several pieces of research showing that sceptical scientists and think tanks indirectly receive substantial funding from fossil fuel industries.

Yes, and some unnamed research about unnamed people and unlisted sums claims they are paid hacks. These 150 gullible patsies will believe anything. They give religion a bad name.

Unfortunately the science of climate change is most often misrepresented in the media as a ‘debate’ between roughly even numbers of believers and sceptics, giving the impression that the scientific jury is still out. If the portrayal were more accurate, the picture would reflect an almost total consensus on the science, with only the tiniest minority of dissenters.

The media IS misleading. Skeptics outnumber and outrank believers. They won real Nobel Prizes, NASA awards, they walked on the moon they are MIT Professors of Meteorology. Half of meteorologists — fergoodnesssake — are skeptics, and survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics.

There is no consensus among scientists, there never was, and it wouldn’t prove anything even if there was.