[J.P.'s Moment of Common Sense. For a list of subscribing radio stations, click here.]

Venezuela is in the middle of a revolution, in case you haven’t heard.  Like communist leaders usually do, the president reacted to citizen complaints by throwing the leader of the opposition party into prison which, so far, is just making Venezuelans angrier.

Ukraine is having a revolution, too—Kiev is actually burning: protestors have occupied the city’s Independence Square, including government buildings, for months now.  (See picture above-right, a blended before-and-after photo of Independence Square.)  The protestors are so many and so entrenched, the government was forced into a truce with them like with an invading army.

Russia is fanning the flames, of course, by threatening to cut off Ukraine’s natural gas supply.

Meanwhile, Syria’s revolution is spiraling out of control with stomach-turning atrocities from everyone involved.  Sometimes the government does something horrible but more often, it seems, it’s the rebels, the people Obama wants to aid financially—these human sewer rats create more headlines by mass murdering Christians than by actually battling the government.

Speaking of mass murdering Christians, it’s happening in Iraq and Iran, too, and in Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan... we are seeing the genocidal elimination of Christians in dozens of countries around the world.

The whole planet is tense, angry, and preparing for war: China and Japan have warships jostling for position around a tiny island in the East China Sea because there’s oil in the vicinity.  North Korea announced it will restart its nuclear facilities (show of hands: who really thinks they were ever stopped?).  Iran, hoping to join North Korea in the Nuclear Club, is stringing Israel and the U.S. along while it continues to enrich uranium to weapons-grade level and build missiles capable of reaching Israel.  Japan and India are negotiating a military alliance against China.  The Obama administration has misplayed the cards it was dealt in Afghanistan to the point of embarrassment...

My God, we even have British and Spanish warships threatening each other off Gibraltar like we’ve gone back in time to the Napoleonic Wars!

While all this stuff is happening, world events so scary the nightly news is like a horror show, John Kerry, our bumbling buffoonish Secretary of State, visited Indonesia this week and gave a speech about Global Warming.  He announced that the most dangerous threat to the world is climate change.

(Climate change and Global Warming are synonymous, by the way, climate change being merely a new name for the same scam.  They stopped calling it Global Warming because temperatures inconveniently stopped rising seventeen years ago, calling into question the previous name’s aptness.)

That’s right.  Forget about revolutions, genocide of Christians, ancient enemies rattling sabers, and mad dictators with nuclear weapons: Kerry says the big danger is carbon dioxide.

Climate change is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” said Kerry, comparing it to “terrorism, epidemics, poverty, [and] the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”  He blasted people who question Global Warming, mocking them and comparing them to Flat Earthers.  The big lie from his speech, which Kerry used to back up his assertion that there is scientific consensus on the issue, is a lie used by President Obama also... regularly.  Here’s Kerry in Jakarta:

“When 97 percent of scientists agree on anything, we need to listen, and we need to respond.  Well, 97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible.”

It’s instructive to examine that number because, first of all, it’s completely untrue; and second, we can trace it to its very roots and eliminate all doubt about its source and falsehood.  It’s not often we can examine a lie so thoroughly and arrive at full comprehension of the depraved dishonesty of this president and his minions.

To wit:

At the turn of the millennium fourteen years ago, the scientific debate about Global Warming theory was already in full swing.  Proponents of the notion did not want a debate, did what they could to stifle any appearance of debate—even to the point of skullduggery and censorship—and constantly announced to the world that scientific opinion was “unanimous.”  Trouble is, every time they claimed unanimity some skeptical scientist would scream, “How can opinion be unanimous when I am right here in your face announcing that I disagree?”

The Warmists needed some kind of evidence of the consensus they claimed, even if they had to invent it.  That invention came in 2004, in the form of a peer-reviewed study of scientific abstracts by historian Naomi Oreskes (from the University of California–San Diego).  Oreskes concluded—surprise, surprise—that scientific opinion was “nearly unanimous.”  Left-wing politicians were delighted.  Al Gore trumpeted her “nearly unanimous” claim all the way to a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar.  What few people outside the scientific community knew was that Ms. Oreskes was later forced to retract her conclusion in the same magazine where it was originally published.

In other words, her study was nonsense.

Clearly, the Warmists needed a better phony study, or at least a new phony study—something ostensibly showing scientists in a state of consensus.  Please, don’t worry about accuracy, just bring us the result we need!

Along came a team in 2013 led by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli (ardent and committed Warmists out of New Zealand and California, respectively) which again surveyed abstracts and this time concluded there was a “97.1%” consensus among scientists.  This study is the source of John Kerry’s—and Barack Obama’s, and everyone else’s—“97% consensus” claim.

Interestingly (and revealingly), this study was published in a relatively new and relatively unknown science journal, Environmental Research Letters.  Why?  Well, because it was flat-out rejected by the more established science journal (Earth Systems Dynamics) to which it was first submitted.

Guess what: five months ago, not that long after its publication, the Cook, Nuccitelli et al. study was debunked and disproved by a peer-reviewed study in the esteemed Science and Education journal—because of math errors, faulty conclusions, and incorrect methodology.  The actual consensus among scientists about Global Warming theory according to the rebutters?  Not 97.1%, but rather 0.3%.

0.3% instead of 97%—quite a difference.  Our Secretary of State, speechifying in Jakarta about scientific consensus, was wrong by a factor of three hundred twenty three.

That’s... today’s dose of common sense.

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” — Joseph Campbell

“Fiction has subversive potential.  People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse.  They don’t know what’s inside.  You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness.  Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.” — Randy Alcorn

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA        Tweet