“It’s not my Constitution to play around with.”
Getting back to first Principles
By Edwin Feulner
Heritage Foundation Founder
Americans still enjoy freedom of religion. But these days, they’re expected to leave their faith in the pew or at home — not allow it to influence their behavior in the public square.
The Big Squeeze for Texas Education
By Matthew Wells, President
Science Teachers Association of Texas
Science Department Chair, Cypress Lakes High School
I am reminded of the old West Texas adage, “Please, Lord, one more oil boom and this time I promise not to throw it all away.”
Reforming our End-of-Life Healthcare System
By Barbara Coombs Lee and Kim Callinan
During a CNN presidential town hall on Feb. 3, an 81-year-old man from Concord, NH, with phase IV colon cancer, Jim Kinhan, asked Hillary Clinton what she could do to “help advance the respectful conversation that is needed around this personal choice that people may make, as we age and deal with health issues or be the caregivers of those people, to help enhance and — their end of life with dignity.”
Jim Kinhan is not alone.
Daughters of the Republic of Texas Are Still Carrying the Banner for Texas
By Dr. Betty J. Edwards
President General of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas
On April 21, 180 years ago, General Sidney Sherman’s men led the left wing of Sam Houston’s Army into battle against Mexican Dictator Santa Anna’s troops at San Jacinto. These men carried the only banner the Texans had that day as they rushed to meet their fate in a life-or-death struggle for liberty.
Rule by Unelected Bureaucrat
By Edwin Feulner
Heritage Foundation Founder
President Obama opened the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House this year by saying it was a bittersweet moment: it would be his last time hosting it.
Arbitrary caps deny local governments flexibility
By Tim Brown, Bell County Commissioner, Precinct Two
Anti-government, anti-tax sentiment is all the rage these days. It has come to dominate political dialogue and, to an increasing extent, policy.
Nothing is easy
To the Editor:
Claire Hartman, at the BOA meeting 3/3/16, said it’s easy to stand up before the board and criticize.
Some cold facts on Global Warming
By Edwin Feulner
Founder of Heritage Foundation
On the last day of February, the high temperature hit 64 degrees here in Washington. Yet the snow drifts from January’s massive East Coast blizzard were still melting. So what are we to make of the weather and the climate-change controversy? Is it getting warmer or colder?
It’s not even a question worth asking, as far as the analysts at NASA are concerned. Before the blizzard hit, they had already announced that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Not that this is anything new for most Americans. We hear dire global-warming proclamations on a near-daily basis, and it’s always just been the hottest day, week, month or year — no matter what the weather’s like outside.
Yet, as climate expert David Kreutzer recently pointed out, NASA is fairly selective about which information you’re supposed to believe. The agency’s own satellite data shows that while last year was indeed warm, it wasn’t as warm as 2010 or 1998.
But wait, some may say. You can chalk up this discrepancy to the difference between what the satellite data says and what the surface temperatures are (which NASA gathers from thousands of sites worldwide, with a few “adjustments” thrown in). But it doesn’t matter. Neither data set supports the wild predictions being bandied about by global-warming alarmists.
Search all the data for evidence of the accelerated warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and you come up empty-handed. Sometimes temps go up, but not always. There’s no constant warming. Indeed, the data show a significant moderation of the warming trend. At times it appears to have leveled off or even cooled a bit.
Should we be surprised? Not really. When you throw in variables such as measurement errors, as well as El Niño and La Niña, it makes sense that the average temperature for some years will be higher even if the overall trend is flat.
“Will the trend stay flat? Probably not,” Kreutzer writes. “The Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age for a couple of centuries and recovering from a real ice age for thousands of years. So there is a reasonable chance that we will revert to an overall warming trend, but there is no guarantee. Who knows? We might even be headed into another ice age (as was predicted in the 1970s).”
None of this is to say that human-caused CO2 emissions haven’t contributed to some warming. They likely have. But the bottom line is that, one way or the other, there’s no reason to believe that the sky is falling. Or, to be more exact, that the earth beneath it is warming up to levels that should frighten us.
No data points to catastrophic warming, hysterical predications aside. And, it should be noted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that there have been no upward trends in hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts.
Small wonder then, that liberal groups who are vested in global-warming alarmism often ignore data that contradict their agenda. They tell us repeatedly that the debate is over, as if there is an expiration date on free speech. Unfortunately, too many in the media comply. Some outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times, won’t even accept letters to the editor that question the gospel of man-made climate change.
Hence we get very selective reporting. “For example, the national media hyped NASA’s finding that 2014 was the hottest year on record,” writes Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. “Ignored was the footnote that revealed that NASA was only 38 percent certain this was accurate. Less than fifty-fifty. Americans would have been better served by a coin toss.”
There’s a lot of hot air circulating, all right. Fortunately, it’s more political than scientific. Leonardo DeCaprio may have been taken in, but the rest of us can ignore the overheated rhetoric.
Ed Feulner is founder of The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org).
Not just Flint where kids’ health is in danger
By Ronald White and Molly Rauch
Brown, foul-smelling water spewing out of faucets. Children poisoned by lead and other toxic metals. Families with aching joints, brittle bones, and shocking hair loss. These troubling images and more have been flowing out of Flint, Michigan since late last year as the scope and impact of the city’s austerity-driven water contamination crisis has become increasingly clear.