OPINION/COMMENTARY

Environmental Disinformation 101

By every conceivable measure, the environment is getting better, not worse, with time but most college professors are reluctant to acknowledge the improvement, particularly on their own campuses. “There is no evidence of global warming, no evidence of species extinction and we have more forests than in Columbus’ time,” says Alston Chase, the author of Playing God in Yellowstone. “These are all true statements that are taboo in academia.” Chase spoke at a conference here sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. A senior fellow with the Pope Center, Chase has researched the environmental movement—national and international—for at least two decades. The veteran author and educator has seen just about every trend in Academia over the past half-century but even he finds himself continually surprised by the manner in which traditional academic principles get turned on their head in today’s Ivory Tower. At an academic conference in Montana, where he resides, Chase discovered to his dismay that his colleagues did not view truth the way he did, namely as something objectively verifiable. Rather, they saw truth as something that could be used to achieve an end....

Wilma Is Not Global Warming

It’s shaping up as an “extreme” week for global warming junk science. On Monday, the media reported about a new global warming study with headlines like UPI’s “More Extreme Weather Predicted.” By Wednesday, Hurricane Wilma was labeled as the “strongest Atlantic hurricane ever reported,” which no doubt will fuel claims that global warming is causing more intense hurricanes. We can, however, weather such global warming alarmism with the pertinent facts. Monday’s news was generated by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Purdue scientists who used a combination of mathematical models, historical weather data and local climate systems to supposedly predict that the interaction of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and local geographic features will increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as floods and heat waves. The first red flag, here, is the Purdue researchers’ reliance on a mathematical model of global climate — essentially the Purdue scientists’ crude guess as to how our exceedingly complex climate system works....

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