Integrating Missionally

I live in the Mid-Atlantic. Since December 19, 2009, we have received almost 6 feet of snow. We set records for snowfall this year. I am asking God to move me back South as a result.

I admit that I’m not a climatologist. But I am a scientist. I read scientific literature. My doctoral dissertation integrated emerging brain research and theology. I have a computer science degree and spent 6 years in the IT industry. All this intrigues me.

Climate change is a difficult subject, and a contentious one. It’s a charged debate with people on the left and right politically and socially at each other’s throat. With the winter storms that have roared through this year, and with the Cap and Trade bill before Congress and being pushed through by the White House, the debate has only grown louder and more angry, if that is possible.

This week, both sides of the debate politically have gone after each other in the media. Those on the right are considering putting out an amber alert for Al Gore because he has been silent with all this snow and with ClimateGate. They have made fun of the former Vice President and those on the Left because global warming couldn’t be happening with all this snow. The Left has now fired back saying that all this snow is actually evidence of global warming. Just this week, MSNBC anchors and Fox News anchors have lobbed shots at each other over this.

Here is a sampling of video clips of this week’s action. First, Rachael Maddow interviews the lovable Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Nye appeared on MSNBC’s Feb. 10 “Rachel Maddow Show” and aired his disapproval of manmade climate change skeptics and labeled them “unpatriotic.”

MSNBC Anchor Dylan Ratigan got into the act, stating: ‘Snowpocalypses’ that have been going through D.C. and other weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing, and anticipating because of global warming … In fact you could argue these storms are not evidence of a lack of global warming, but evidence of global warming.” That clip is here.

Glenn Beck responds to this clip on the radio and on his Fox News program. The transcript of what he said on the radio program can be found here.

Not to be out done, Ratigan responds to Beck with what appears to be scientific evidence. Note that clip here:

The IPCC report that Bill Nye notes received a Nobel Prize for their work has been exposed by ClimateGate. The IPCC has had to announce this week that errors were made. Britian has called for an inquiry. India has pulled out because of the manipulation of the data. And despite some claiming the science is settled, it certainly doesn’t appear to be.

I know two things. First, in 2002, I participated in a doctoral class where one of my colleague worked for an environmental group. She was, herself, an environmentalist. During part of her research, however, she came to the conclusion that the environmental movement had little to do with the environment and more to do with the money. In fact, it was primarily a money movement.

Second, the science that Ratigan & Nye use to validate their claim that global warming is the cause of the record snow falls, has recently been proven incorrect. A recent study by Susan Solomon,Karen Rosenlof,Robert Portmann,John Daniel,Sean Davis, Todd Sanford, and Gian-Kasper Plattner, published in the journal Science, states:

Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here, we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% compared to estimates neglecting this change.

This article was generated by scientists with the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado and the Physics Institute in Bern, Switzerland. These are hardly groups associated with any high level of climate change skepticism.

If the water vapor concentrations were increasing, with more water in the atmosphere there could be more rain and snow, depending on the temperature. However, water is decreasing; therefore there should be reduced rain and reduced snow falls. That is just not happening.

Another article was published in Geophysical Research Letters by two scientists with the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The article is entitled “Is the climate warming or cooling?” Easterling and Wehner basically show that with little-to-no external forcing of global climate, we will still get decades of warming and cooling. They note that no real cause is needed to produce a decade of cooling – it is all just part of the natural variability of climate.

Has there been a trend towards an increase in temperature? Since 1975, yes there has. It is, however, now trending downward.

As a Christian, I believe it is important to be good stewards of creation. I want to be off the grid (except for internet) in 10 years, using solar, wind, and geo-thermal energies and the grid as back-up power only. At the same time, I also believe in the sovereignty of God and in that I believe that God can take care of this planet without my help or my harm. So while I support environmentalism to a point, I also reject the rabid environmentalists trying to cap and tax (trade) and destroy economies and jobs.

Q4U:

1. Will extreme environmentalism hurt our economies? If so, how?
2. What are you doing to be more aware environmentally, and a better steward of the earth’s resources?

Popularity: 12% [?]

About this talk

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

About the speaker

With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce — the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.

His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is an evolutionary transformation of the familiar career guide. Replacing linear text with a manga-inspired comic, Pink outlines six career laws vastly differing from the ones you’ve been taught. Members of the Johnny Bunko online forum participated in an online contest to create the seventh law — “stay hungry.”

A contributing editor for Wired, Pink is working on a new book on the science and economics of motivation called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
for release in late 2009.

Popularity: 8% [?]

This is a re-post of thoughts published in a past post.

I have been thinking and processing two interesting articles. One is on gossip and the other is on information addiction. The science of gossip is quite interesting. Of course, we all gossip, science would say it is part of our socialization processes. Used negatively, however, it really is an attempt to tear down and/or exert power over someone who has more influence than us or who is on the rise in their influence but whom those in control want to normalize and bring conformity to their behavior.

The gossip study comes from the October 1, 2008 edition of Scientific American Magazine. The article is entitled, “The Science of Gossip: Why We Can’t Stop Ourselves“. The author of the article, Frank T. McAndrew states,

Only in the past decade or so have psychologists turned their attention toward the study of gossip, partially because it is difficult to define exactly what gossip is. Most researchers agree that the practice involves talk about people who are not present and that this talk is relaxed, informal and entertaining. Typically the topic of conversation also concerns information that we can make moral judgments about. Gossip appears to be pretty much the same wherever it takes place; gossip among co-workers is not qualitatively different from that among friends outside of work. Although everyone seems to detest a person who is known as a “gossip” and few people would use that label to describe themselves, it is an exceedingly unusual individual who can walk away from a juicy story about one of his or her acquaintances, and all of us have firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping spectacular news about someone else a secret.

Gossip functions as a socializing process. In his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool in England suggested that gossip is a mechanism for bonding social groups together, analogous to the grooming that is found in primate groups. Sarah R. Wert, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Peter Salovey of Yale University have proposed that “gossip is one of the best tools that we have for comparing ourselves socially with others.”

Gossip can be an effective means of uncovering such information about others and an especially useful way of controlling free thinkers who may be tempted to violate group norms. “Studies in real-life groups such as California cattle ranchers, Maine lobster fishers and college rowing teams confirm that gossip is used in these quite different settings to enforce group norms when an individual fails to live up to the group’s expectations”. In each of these groups, “individuals who violated expectations about sharing resources and meeting responsibilities became frequent targets of gossip and ostracism, which applied pressure on them to become better citizens. Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer groups have typically revealed a similar social control function for gossip in these societies.”

According anthropologist Jerome Barkow of Dalhousie University, we tend to be especially interested in information about people who matter most in our lives: rivals, mates, relatives, partners in social exchange, and high-ranking figures whose behavior can affect us. Given the idea that our interest in gossip “evolved as a way of acquiring fitness-enhancing information, Barkow also suggests that the type of knowledge that we seek should be information that can affect our social standing relative to others.” Therefore, we to find higher interest in negative news about high-status people and potential rivals because we can exploit it. Negative information about those lower than us in status is as useful. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Genuine or Generic?

When it comes to consumer buyer patterns, an interesting psychological process unfolds. According to author Jonah Lehrer, “In general, people rely on a simple heuristic, or mental short-cut, when trying to evaluate the quality of a product: we assume that more expensive things are of higher quality. In other words, you get what you pay for. As a result, we automatically suspect products on sale of being faulty, or inferior. And because our expectations profoundly influence our experience, an olive oil that we expect to be lower in quality will actually taste lower in quality.”

Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an “energy” drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine which, the bottle promised, would impart “superior functionality”. Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. Shiv found that people who paid discounted prices consistently solved about thirty percent fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks. The subjects were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical.

Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. “We have these general beliefs about the world?for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality?and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,” said Shiv. “Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.”

This is consumerism at its best. The mega and multi-site churches have tapped into this consumerism. Megachurches are the brand name product. They spend lots of money on branding and advertising and they look “expensive”. They look genuine. All you have to do is say their name: Willow Creek, Saddleback, Fellowship, Northpoint, Life Church. Everybody in the area knows what they are. That is also why everybody jumps on the popular “brand” names: Journey and Fellowship are names that come to mind. This is also why they go multi-site. The brand sells.

But what it also does is turn churches that have less resources into the generic version of the brand. They are not as flashy, not as “expensive” feeling or looking, and thus are not as genuine as the church that spends so much money on appearances and the show, the production that occurs each weekend. They can’t advertise their brand so they are practically unknown. They are not perceived as genuine, thus they are “church lite”, a copy, and not as effective in satisfying needs.

People associate with a brand of Christianity. But here is the bigger question: Do people associate the followers of the brand with the creator of Christianity or with the brand of Christianity the followers are pushing? The jury may still be out on that. As Matt Casper told Jim Henderson after visiting ten megachurches in the US, “Is this really what Jesus told you guys to do?”

Popularity: 1% [?]