The New Orthodoxy Strikes

The new scientific orthodoxy, intolerant as it is of heretics, has claimed another victim, according to the Christian Post:

The Iowa Board of Regents rejected on Thursday an appeal by a professor who said he was wrongfully denied tenure by Iowa State University because of his views supporting intelligent design.

While ISU officials have maintained that their decision last spring on Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez ’s bid for tenure had nothing to do with intelligent design, e-mails exchanged by ISU faculty – who voted against his tenure and statements in Gonzalez’s tenure file – suggest otherwise.

Gonzalez, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, has written papers on intelligent design and has asserted his views in a book which was published in 2004. He is also a senior fellow at Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading think tank on intelligent design.

The e-mails and documents obtained last summer by Discovery Institute through an open records request were not allowed as evidence by the Regents during their consideration of the case. The board also denied Gonzalez’s request to give an oral argument at the closed session but did allow him to be present when the votes were cast. Regents rejected his appeal in a 7-1 vote.

Looks like a classic case of, “don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”

Dr. Gonzalez is the author of The Privileged Planet, one of the numerous books that have contributed to the intelligent design movement of recent years. You can find lots of background information, including a lengthy list of his publications, at the Discovery Institute. The fact is that the professor had done everything necessary to receive tenure at Iowa State except the one thing needful: adhere to the ruling orthodoxy.

That’s American academic freedom at work, folks. Here’s praying that a Christian university or college–say, Wheaton or Calvin–will give Dr. Gonzalez the opportunity he richly deserves to continue his scholarly career.

Stock Up on Blankets

Those who are genuinely knowledgeable about the Earth’s climate (that doesn’t include a certain Nobel Peace Prize winner, by the way) seem to be falling into two camps. On the one hand, there are those who believe that human actions are the primary engine behind changing temperatures. On the other, there are those who see the sun as the primary cause of temperature change. As this piece from Investor’s Business Daily indicates, there’s a reasonable argument to be heard from the latter, regardless of the quasi-religious hysteria that sometimes comes from the other:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Thirty years ago, there was a lot of hysteria about the coming of a new ice age. I don’t remember if solar activity was supposed to be the villain, but apparently is has in the past.

As we have noted many times [in IBD editorials], perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”

Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”

“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”

This makes sense to me, if not as a decisive answer to the global warming people, then at least as an alternative hypothesis. But there are some for whom no dissent from today’s orthodoxy is to be tolerated (from the National Post of Canada):

David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.

At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month….

“What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

That last line is what you call irony.

Here’s the point: on one side, you have reasonable people trying to figure out what is going on with the Earth’s climate, what effects it is likely to have on human beings and the ecosystem as a whole, and what if anything can and should be done about it. You’ve got lots of those kinds of people on the other side, the side that favors an anthropogenic explanation  to climate change, too. But also on that side are a collection of religious fanatics, people for whom no amount of contrary information will suffice to change their minds, and who believe that others who don’t read the data the way they do should be silenced or worse. Then there are the Christian true believers such as Richard Cizik, who don’t hesitate to impugn the motives, intelligence, and even faith of those who disagree. It’s time for the reasonable people in both sides of this debate to take it back from the fanatics, and make clear that humanity isn’t going to be stampeded into actions that will potentially harm hundreds of millions if not billions of people.