Putting a chill on 'global warming' concerns

Just ask my husband. I'm not the recycling queen, but I try. We've had a vegetable garden for 40 years. We compost kitchen scraps and yard waste. What could be more basic recycling? We add no chemicals. I guess that makes it organic.

Decades before the city sponsored recycling, we saved our newspapers for a lady named Carol who lived on Harrison Street. She rescued vanfuls of papers from the neighborhood to recycle.

"Use the blank side of scrap paper for memos and grocery lists. Scrape that jelly jar clean. Add water to that last dribble of shampoo and shake for one more wash. Then put the containers in the recycle bin. Squeeze another dab of toothpaste out of the tube before tossing it away. Save those plastic lunch bags and wash them to reuse countless times."

Obsessive? My hubby says I am sometimes. Maybe he's right.

So you'd think I'd be on board with those who say we need to save the planet by reducing carbon dioxide. But how can reducing carbon dioxide by making biofuel save the world? Since a third of U.S. agricultural land has been used for biofuel, millions of people are going hungry. There's not enough corn now and what there is, is too expensive.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a climate change expert who served as Margaret Thatcher's policy adviser for four years, spoke at the Free Market Institute conference on climate change held Oct. 14 at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. His views of global warming are far removed from those of Al Gore and those who believe and advocate Gore's "Inconvenient Truth."

"The High Court in London ordered the Secretary of State for Education to issue 77 pages of corrective guidance to every school to which the movie was sent," reported Monckton. There were three dozen science errors in Gore's movie; the judge selected nine "as being so serious as to require judicial attention."

Wheaton College addressed the topic of global warming again recently. Though there are many in the Christian community who think that people are causing problems in the environment and have signed the "Evangelical Climate Initiative," there are as many, or more, who disagree.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation says, "Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards. Consequently, they ignore our potential, as bearers of God's image, to add to the Earth's abundance."

Monckton described the African energy cycle: People cut down trees, which deforests the continent. They carry the lumber home on their backs, then burn it in smoke-filled huts with no fireplaces or chimneys, resulting in widespread lung disease. The industrial scale of burning fossil fuels "liberates Africans from this energy cycle of despair."

Life expectancy in Hong Kong, where fossil fuels are burned on an industrial scale, is 81 years. In Chad, Africa, where fuel is burned in those closed huts, life expectancy is 44 years, Monckton showed in a graph. Are those activities causal or coincidental?

Monckton questions several of Al Gore's statements, such as that polar bears are dying because of "global warming." Monckton referenced a paper by Monnett and Gleason published in 2006 saying there were four dead polar bears "killed not by global warming, but by high seas and strong winds in a violent storm in Beaufort Sea." He said, "Sea-ice extent in the Beaufort Sea has, if anything, increased somewhat over the past 30 years."

Ann McElhinney, a journalist and documentary film director, said that "polar bears have doubled in number since the 1950s."

Concerning Gore's warnings of melting polar caps and rising sea levels, Monckton reported that "Professor Niklas Moerner, the world's ranking expert on sea level, who has written 520 peer-reviewed papers on the subject in a 35-year career, estimates that sea levels will rise not more than eight inches by 2100."

Monckton states that the "National Climatic Data Center's own data-set reveals that since 2002, there has been rapid global cooling."

He also reported that "the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has obtained signatures of some 31,000 scientists, across all disciplines, one third of them with doctorates, who do not believe that 'global warming' is manmade."

Professor Antonio Zichichi, the discoverer of antimatter, said in 2007, "It is not possible to exclude the possibility that the observed phenomena may have natural causes. It may be that man has little or nothing to do with it."

It is good stewardship of Wheaton, DuPage County and the planet to recycle, conserve resources and treat nature with care. But people are the reason for caring for the planet. It is people who discover, create and are the acme of God's creation. Grim alarmism doesn't help. Closing more factories will cause loss of jobs and increased hardship. Governmental regulations will make our fuel costs skyrocket as President Obama said they will. For a different perspective, go to www.cornwallalliance.com.

Terry Jean Day has lived in Wheaton since 1967. Contact her by e-mailing tjd2006@sbcglobal.net.