Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a potential running-mate choice for presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, joined other Democratic Senators yesterday on the Senate floor to attack the Cornwall Alliance, and a few other Virginia-based organizations, in a poor attempt to defend climate alarmism against its critics.

As usual, Kaine’s was an argument rife with logical fallacies - appeals to emotion, straw men, ridicule, oversimplification, and misrepresentation.

The one thing the good Senator forgot to include in his speech was any sound science!

According to Kaine, The Cornwall Alliance is part of a “web of denial,” a “shadow organization,” “bizzaro” and “greedy.”

Senator Kaine quoted a tiny piece of our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change (which he didn’t mention was signed by hundreds of scientists, including over 20 climate scientists), in which we had quoted Psalm 19, and then said,

“So somebody is really using Scripture to argue that making our energy production cleaner, safer, cheaper, violates the Christian tenet of caring for the poor?”

No, Senator Kaine, if you read the full Open Letter you will discover that the argument, which includes both science and economics, shows that pushing technologies that are not currently better for the environment or cheaper (such as wind, solar, and biofuels) hurts those in poverty.

Since Senators Kaine, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and others are banding together to reveal the “web of denial” that appears to be made up only of conservative organizations they claim are funded by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations that they consider immoral (despite the fact that the energy they provide has been indispensable to lifting and keeping billions of people out of poverty, as Kathleen Hartnett White brilliantly demonstrates in her booklet Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case), what about the “web of denial” created by alarmist organizations - which are funded by renewable energy corporations and governments that stand to gain from climate alarm, and which have been caught exaggerating, fabricating, and falsifying data to support their views, suppressing contrary data, intimidating scientists who disagree, and corrupting the scientific peer-review process?

Senator Kaine claims that 70% of Virginians agree with the “scientific consensus” that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is real and that “it is urgent that we do something about it.”

What “scientific consensus”?

The “97% of scientists” that is the go-to statistic for alarmists has been debunked so thoroughly that it takes serious chutzpah to use it.

That’s denial.

Then there is the fact (observable fact mind you, not computer model) that shows there has been no statistically significant long-term global warming for about the last 19 years.

Yet they deny this too.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has increased drastically during that time, so where is the correlation between increased temperature and CO2?

There is none.

No one argues that humans have absolutely no effect on the environment or on potential warming.

What is in question is whether human emissions of CO2 will create temperature increases so drastic as to cause a catastrophe so great as to justify spending trillions of dollars to mitigate it that could be spent instead to lift billions of people out of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it. And right now the only proof alarmists have is computer model projections that are wildly inaccurate, and a hockey stick graph so derided by the scientific community for its inaccuracies as to be utterly worthless.

That’s some serious denial.

To watch the full speech click here. The Cornwall Alliance is mentioned in the second part of the video.

For more information on the dangers of environmental alarmism to people in poverty, go to here. The Cornwall Alliance is mentioned in the second part of the video.

For more information on the dangers of environmental alarmism to people in poverty, go to our website, www.cornwallalliance.org” title="our website">our website.

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“Social Cost of Carbon” - Going, Going, Gone?
June 13, 2016 By E. Calvin Beisner

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency forecasts the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) in the year 2020 to run anywhere from $13 to $137 per metric ton. That’s EPA’s measure of the harm each ton of “carbon” (really carbon dioxide, but who cares with our ill-educated public that doesn’t know the difference between an element and a compound -especially when the shorthand serves the purpose of scaring people needlessly?) emitted into the atmosphere.

Its estimates are based on a combination of computer climate models (that fail accurately to depict past global average temperature) and computer models of how ecosystems and economies will respond to rising temperatures.

But now three scholars have published a paper challenging those (and many other) estimates of the SCC based on empirically driven estimates of climate sensitivity (warming to ensue from doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration after all climate feedbacks have had their effect, i.e., in around two centuries). Kevin Dayaratna, David Kreutzer, and Ross McKitrick’s ”Empirically-Constrained Climate Sensitivity and the Social Cost of Carbon” finds, on the basis of empirical studies, that he computer climate models exaggerate CO2-induced warming, and consequently all the models about any harms attributable to the CO2 also exaggerate.

How badly? Enough that after correction, one widely used estimate falls by 30% to 50%, and another by 80%.

And, indeed, it could even turn out that the SCC is negative - that is, that CO2 added to the atmosphere brings more benefits than harms.

Which means that we wicked Americans, who have higher CO2 emissions per capita than most people, may well by doing so be doing more good for the world than most, too.

The study’s worth careful reading.