You are the sunshine of my life ….

Just what does cause so-called "global warming" (recently hastily relabeled "climate change"), if, indeed, there is such a thing? The answer is blindingly obvious:

Larry Vardiman’s recent article ("Will Solar Inactivity Lead to Global Cooling?") points the finger of blame at a culprit that is also blindingly obvious: the sun.

What he says about the unwillingness of some climatologists even to consider the sun-causing-climate change scenario speaks volumes about the politics and sociology of this issue and implies that good old empirical observations can be ignored or not pursued at all — after all, we’re trying to save the planet, people!

As you can see from the pictures, solar activity — as evidenced by sunspots — is presently at a low ebb, and that could mean global cooling, not warming:

But the sun has behaved this way in the distant past, resulting in, for example, frozen rivers in northern Europe which permitted military invasions that would never have been attempted at that time of year and North American Indians confederating to deal with food shortages. (As you can see, climate change can have an up side and a down side.)

People with political agendas (e.g., the CEO of Chicken Little, Inc.) are unfazed by empirical science and prefer to rely on unverifiable computer models that support their programs (which might be a commission of the formal logical error of affirming the consequent, since alternative hypotheses are discarded in such models); in any event, as Vardiman indicates, it’s really too soon to make definitive — and hideously expensive — judgments on this issue:

It is true that the observed increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere likely contributes to global warming, but it is not at all evident that it is the primary cause. Unfortunately, the actions by advocates of carbon dioxide-caused global warming to mediate the effect may prematurely incur a massive debt load on our nation before we know the answer ….

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Charlie, we hardly knew ye ….

"Darwin suits my purpose." — Karl Marx

Two thousand and nine marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus, The Origin of Species, an event which even some apostate "Christian" churches are willing to celebrate — and never mind how unbiblical, inhuman, and fallacious Darwin’s book and so-called "theory" are: Charlie’s notion doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis, much less a full-blown theory, but that doesn’t dissuade many in or outside of mainline denominations from attempts at apotheosizing this English "agnostic" (which I define as an atheist without the courage of his convictions).

In his glancing book review ("Making a Monkey out of Darwin"), paleocon Patrick Buchanan takes Darwin to task for not merely being wrong but also for lying about his own views in print:

Darwin … lied in The Origin of Species about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

As with the controversy of "global warming," it’s clear that a scientist with an agenda just might not always tell the truth. In fact, he might also engage in a little intellectual property theft:

Darwin, [author Eugene Windchy] demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a "completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection." …. "All my originality … will be smashed," wailed Darwin when he got Wallace’s manuscript.

Think you know everything about the "Monkey Trial" because of a film you might have once seen? Think again:

The most delicious chapter is Windchy’s exposure of the Scopes Monkey Trial and Hollywood’s Bible-mocking movie Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow …. The trial was a hoked-up scam to garner publicity for Dayton, Tenn. Scopes never taught evolution and never took the stand. His students were tutored to commit perjury. And William Jennings Bryan held his own against the atheist Darrow in the transcript of the trial.

In Darwin’s world it’s not hard for knighthoods to be conferred on hoaxers, so strong is the will to attack Scripture:

Discovered in England in 1912, Piltdown Man was a sensation until exposed by a 1950s investigator as the skull of a Medieval Englishman attached to the jaw of an Asian ape whose teeth had been filed down to look human and whose bones had been stained to look old.

Buchanan doesn’t ask the obvious questions, however, so I will:

If Darwinian "theory" has indeed been discredited, then why is tax money being diverted to support programs that assume Darwinism has credibility? And if it’s all just yarn spinning, then why is this "theory" being taught in public school science classes as fact rather than in literature classes as mythology?

Christians know the answers to these questions; everybody else, however, without spiritual discernment simply won’t be able to connect the dots.

—Mike Gray