Patrick Michaels, Professor of Environmental Studies at the U. of Virginia, provides some background data about the problems with the typical presentation of Greenland ice sheet melting, and the way temperate data is collected and calibrated.
I'm all for stewardship of the Lord's creation. There is little doubt that human impact changes the planet. (See the excellent book 1491 for an amazing account of how much native American people's changed the landscape in North America through burning, and even transformed the soil of the Amazon and created large orchards of fruit trees.)
The reason I highlight climate change stories on this blog are because we are expected to be good stewards, and it is a complex subject. There are plenty of scare stories available today, but relatively few people promoting data analysis. The political and economic consequences of legislation around climate change are ENORMOUS. And the reality of our relatively poor ability to connect cause and effect (as a species, I mean, we're just bad interpreters) should keep us humble. Therefore, let us proceed rationally, with careful thought and balancing many points of data.
By the way, if any read can point me to some reasonable model or data that suggests lowering carbon emissions ("greenhouse gas") will cause climate cooling, or even slow temperature increases, I'd be genuinely interested to see it. So far all I have found is correlation arguments about temperate and "greenhouse gas" emissions.
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