Dana at SkepticalScience.com reports on the Cornwall Alliance

Ironically, today SkepticalScience.com posted a most interesting article written by Dana Nuccitelli regarding the Cornwall Alliance and thanks to their generous Reposting policy I'm proud to add it to this little collection I'm putting together for those curious about this public relations effort called the Cornwall Alliance.

Global warming: a battle for evangelical Christian hearts and minds

Posted on 2 October 2014 by dana1981

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-battle-for-evangelical-hearts-and-minds.html

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is a conservative evangelical Christian public policy group that promotes a free-market approach to protecting the environment. The organization recently published a list of ten reasons it opposes policies to reduce carbon pollution and slow global warming, purportedly to protect the poor. As the first point on the list illustrates, the group essentially believes that the Earth’s climatewill be able to correct any damage done by humans.

1. As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting.

The group includes climate scientist Roy Spencer and professor of geography David Legates. Spencer’s research is among the 2–3% of peer-reviewed climate papersdisputing that humans are the main cause of global warming. He has often argued that climate policies will harm the poor, and has not been shy in making political and free market statements, having gone as far as to make comments about “global warming Nazis.” Legates is known for disputing the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

The Cornwall Alliance has tried to use scientific arguments to support its religious beliefs about the resiliency of the global climate, claiming,

Beisner: Subduing and Ruling the Earth to the Glory of God - say what?

The Cornwall Alliance tells us they speak for the God Almighty of time, creation and life - then they use their God as justification for rejecting hundreds of years worth of Earth observations and increasing climate knowledge.   Curiously their God does happen to totally embrace the neo-Republican/libertarian "free" market ideal.

This Cornwall Alliance document reminded me of the beautiful babes and tough cowboys used to sell cigarettes, only Beisner is using God to sell his attack and denial of solid scientific knowledge.  Tragically such superficial media campaigns seem to be quite successful at wooing an all too apathetic public.

Even though rational communication with such people seems next to impossible it's important to take the time to point out their base misconceptions, misrepresentations and out'n out lies, even if only to let other's know that the truth is out there.  

{Still working on getting this introduction right, edited Thursday evening, 10/2/14}

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The Biblical Perspective of Environmental Stewardship: Subduing and Ruling the Earth to the Glory of God and the Benefit of Our Neighbors

http://www.cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/the-biblical-perspective-of-environmental-stewardship-subduing-and-ruling-the-earth-to-the-glory-of-god-and-the-benefit-of-our-neighbors/

1. We affirm that the Earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof (Psalm 24:1).  We deny that the Earth or anything else is the result of impersonal, blind chance over time.

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This is a misrepresentation.  Evolution isn't about "blind chance" it's about dynamic processes of selection that can be observed, studied and increasingly understood.  Trying to portray it as "pure chance" is pure dishonest!

Of course, as we experience in our own lives, seeming "blind chance" does indeed play a part that can profoundly alter the flow of events, but it still occurred within a framework that is no chance.

I imagine Dominionist would probably claim that there is no chance and instead God directs everything, but that makes no sense thinking of God spending eternity watching his clock work ticking away.

Beisner's Cornwall Alliance's God

This post is at a new location:
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2014/09/beisner-subduing-earth-glory-god.html

Oily operators behind The Cornwall Alliance

One thing leads to another and after reading this article and looking at some of it's links, it seems to me I'd be remiss if I didn't share it as background to an upcoming series of posts that will be dedicated to a skeptical examination of The Cornwall Alliance's various claims.

With many thanks to ThinkProgress.org for all their efforts to keep us informed.

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The oily operators behind the religious climate change disinformation front group, Cornwall Alliance

BY CLIMATE GUEST CONTRIBUTOR POSTED ON JUNE 19, 2010 AT 7:27 AM

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/19/206237/the-oily-operators-behind-the-religious-climate-change-disinformation-front-group-cornwall-alliance/

The Cornwall Alliance appears to be a creation of a group called the James Partnership, a nonprofit run by Chris Rogers and Peter Stein, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Rogers, who heads a media and public relations firm called CDR Communications, collaborates with longtime oil front group operative David Rothbard, the founder and President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Jacques Villarreal, a lower level staffer at CFACT, for his James Partnership group. In the past, Rogers’ firm has worked for the Bush administration and for the secretive conservative planning group, the Council for National Policy.

According to public records, the following entities are all registered to the same address, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Road Burke, VA 22015, an office park in suburban Virginia:
- Rogers’ consulting firm, CDR Communications
- Rogers’ nonprofit hub, the James Partnership

- The Cornwall Alliance

- The new “Resisting the Green Dragon” website

In late 2005,

Hotwhopper's peek at the Cornwall Alliance

{Sou,  I've been working, on and off, on a detailed review of the way too long Cornwall Alliance's A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.  You've given me renewed incentive to get back to it and finish it.  Thanks for posting this look at the Cornwall Alliance and their assault on rational learning. CC  }

Until I finish my next project I want to share this article that was posted at Sou's Hotwhopper.com, the blog that does the best job of tracking Anthony's Watts' nonstop flood of increasingly disconnected claims and insinuations.
(I've shared three more links to other interesting articles about the Cornwall Alliance at the end of this.) 

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Sou - September 27, 2014 @wattsupwiththat 
Evangelical Deniers: The poorest and most vulnerable and the lowest of the low

http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/09/evangelical-deniers-poorest-and-most.html

You know how Anthony Watts on occasion has criticised other people for using photoshopped images or "fake" photos to illustrate a point, while at the same time faking images of his own. Well, he's done it again. This time pinching a photo from a company bringing cleaner energy to Africa (and South America), to argue that his readers should instead pollute "poor people" out of existence.
{on a related note also see:  June 27, 2013 Dr. Nils-Axel Morner's Maldives Tree - what's up with that?}

Compare and contrast - WUWT touting dirty energy (and religion), while using a photo about how a company helped a family in Rwanda move to cleaner cooking! (Scroll to the bottom.) 

Today WUWT and CFACT (archived here) are touting support for the pseudo-religious cult, the Cornwall Alliance. (I've written about that organisation before.) The WUWT article has the headline: 

Protect the poor – from climate change policies 

The Cornwall Alliance - Evangelical Science Denier and the Alarmist Fundamentalist Religious Cult

Here is an article written by Sou from HotWhopper.com - idea's worth sharing.  Food for thought.

What can be said of people who believe they actually understand God's mind?  It's one thing to personally believe and hold such meta-physical faith within one's heart - but expecting the rest of the world to fall in-line and to reject rational knowledge and observation based learning and trusting qualified experts who have spent entire lives committed to understanding their specialities.  No thanks.

Sad thing is, these sorts of faith-based dogmatists are one of the core reasons climate science, Earth observations and attempts at Earth stewardship have been so successfully rejected these past decades.  

How does one learn or change when disbelieve in observation based science is an article of Faith?

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The Evangelical Science Denier and the Alarmist Fundamentalist Religious Cult: The Cornwall Alliance

Sou | SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2013
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/10/the-evangelical-science-denier-and.html