Going to bat for God’s green earth

By REV. DON EMMEL

Wow! When I wrote my letter “Who to believe on climate change?” (March 28), I didn’t realize I would be honored with a vigorous reply from the “media specialist” of the Heartland Institute’s head office in Chicago (“Straight from the Heartland,” April 1).

I must have struck a very sensitive nerve. It seems their reply was meant to take me to the woodshed.

But I deeply appreciated Benjamin Franz’s “Bad Info from the Heartland” (March 29), indicating that “The Heartland Institute’s data and charts are all 10 years old or older, and still include data that has since been shown wrong.” I also appreciate his letting us know that “the Heartland Institute is part of the pro-tobacco propaganda machine.” I took a look on Heartland’s Web site and found a link to an item about a December 2006 press release from the president of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets announcing “a multi-year partnership project with Heartland Institute to influence public opinion on tobacco issues.” Hmmm. I wonder what that is about?

I also deeply appreciated Dr. Kelly Decker’s article “Time to take climate change seriously” (March 31). She wrote about the stringent peer review process published scientific articles go through. “No one pulls any punches. The evidence for global climate change comes from many peer-reviewed sources from many labs covering different geological and atmospheric angles who have been working for over five decades on the subject.” That from a senior research scientist herself who has gone through the peer review process.

But then I read a speech on the Heartland Institute’s Web site by Heartland President Joseph Bast, given to the Nebraska Farm Bureau on Feb. 7 and published in Environment News April 1. The preface to the published article said, “Bast demonstrated the current global warming scare is like prior environmental scares that were soundly debunked once sufficient scientific data were gathered on the issue. Although global warming is a scientifically controversial topic, Bast notes, scientists agree the warming to date has been modest and that natural variability may well explain some or all of it. Premature attempts to ‘do something now’ will cause more harm than good, particularly to American farmers, he notes.” This preface summarized well his total speech debunking the climate issues as being full of myths.

Now I await the second major report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be released in Belgium on April 6. According to the article in the April 2 San Francisco Chronicle, this report by a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists representing 120 governments will be pretty stark.

But I join the comment in that article by Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy, who was the top author of the 2001 version of this report, when he said, “The worst still is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid. Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.” I pray, too, that we will not be that stupid. I am not a scientist, but I want to go to bat for God’s wonderful earth for the generations yet to live upon it.

(Emmel is a retired Presbyterian pastor. He lives in Napa.)

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