How Corrupted Science Produces False Eschatology: A Look at the So-Called Climate Crisis

How Corrupted Science Produces False Eschatology: A Look at the So-Called Climate Crisis

Sin, Deception, and the Corruption of Science:
A Look at the So-Called Climate Crisis

by Charles Clough

Summary

The climate crisis agenda provides an excellent training opportunity for Christians to “test all things, hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) because it involves a revival of ancient pagan themes in science, the educational establishment, business, and politics. Sadly, it demonstrates how those themes are corrupting the scientific method that has contributed so much to the prosperity of Western civilization, founded as it was on several basic Biblical principles. Christians need to look critically at the climate crisis agenda being put forward by the educational, media, and political elite, and this paper is designed to help them do that.

Faced with a culture empowered by over a hundred years of secular education that has systematically excluded the Bible from any serious consideration, Christians educated within this system must make a conscious effort to view reality, not through the eyes of classical paganism or the collapsing Enlightenment, but through the Word of God.

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Introduction

Various centuries-old strands of a romantic notion of the primacy of nature over man coalesced in twentieth-century Nazi Germany, as Mark Musser has thoroughly demonstrated in Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust. He comments on the large-scale ideas that continue into our time.

For the past 200 years in both North America and Europe, the Judeo-Christian worldview has been specifically targeted by modern environmental thinkers for being anti-natural. … Much like the ancient Canaanite nature religion eventually suffocated Israel and Judah … modern environmentalism is well on its way to completely smothering the contemporary western world as well. Author Steve Milloy of Junk Science rightfully points out, ‘There is hardly any area of your life that the greens consider off limits to intrusion. There is almost no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or too sacrosanct to regulate.’ The worship of nature and strict asceticism, with occasional bouts of human sacrifice, often went hand in hand in the ancient world. Similarly today, with all of the land use regulation on the books, ecological asceticism is increasingly becoming the moral ethic for both Europe and America. … Environmental asceticism is well on its way to becoming a total replacement for the Judeo-Christian ethic in the western world. Even the publication of Green Bibles … is potentially just another nail driven into a sacrificial coffin built for Judeo-Christian values.[1]

As I will show below, the capstone of this spreading nature religion is its fear of climate change and its global drive to impose an anti-carbon asceticism upon rich and poor alike. It therefore invites us to critically examine its claims in light of the scientific method, which uniquely developed in the West from the Biblical worldview.

That science indeed sprang from the primary source material of the Judeo-Christian faith, i.e., a sixty-six book library providentially written over two millennia by divinely chosen prophets, strikes those of us educated in public schools as incredibly strange. Were there not scientific thinkers in ancient Egypt, Babylon, India, and China? Weren’t Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Ptolemy the founders of science in the West? Am I not trying to bring “religion” out of its peripheral ghetto to “impose” it upon “neutral” science? After all, hasn’t the public school curriculum taught us every subject from arithmetic to science to literature as though God doesn’t exist or, if He does, He is irrelevant to these subjects?

Those who have made the effort to understand the origin of modern science have had to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, its Christian foundation. As science writer Loren Eiseley noted a decade ago:

Science … is an invented cultural institution, an institution not present in all societies, and not one that may be counted upon to arise from human instinct. … [It] demands some kind of unique soil in which to flourish … and [without that soil] is as capable of decay and death as any other human activity, such as a religion or a system of government.[2] [emphasis original]

Scholars such as Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) have demonstrated that the scientific method of relying upon the rationality of nature and man’s mind in analyzing observations of nature began to appear in rudimentary form during the Middle Ages.[3] In their book The Soul of Science, Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton provide much documentation of how especially the Protestant Reformation with its return to Biblical source material and emphasis upon man’s calling to take dominion gave life to what we know today as the scientific method. The notion that there is a war between science and religion is a fiction created by nineteenth-century secular thinkers seeking to overthrow Biblical influence on culture.[4] Secular public education and its graduates in the media continue to deceive the public with this fiction.

Science requires at least three specific truths. First, nature must be de-divinized and rational. A scientific approach to nature cannot begin until nature is no longer regarded as the domain of various spirits behaving in a chaotic manner. Second, man must be assured that he has the intellectual capacity to recognize and understand such apparent rationality and that the laws of logic apply everywhere and always. Third, man must have the incentive to investigate nature, discover its structure and processes, and be motivated to learn how to utilize its resources for his betterment. Science is not for arm-chair thinkers; it requires getting one’s hands dirty—something the Greek philosophers despised. As Proverbs puts it, science is really a game of hide-and-seek: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter. But the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2 NKJV).

In fact, the wisdom literature of the Bible may well have triggered the dawn of belief in the rationality of the universe amidst the dark mysticism of ancient pagan culture. In his last book before he died, archaeologist W.F. Albright wrote:

In a forthcoming book … I will deal with the origins of the new ways of thinking which seem suddenly to appear among the Greeks in the early sixth century B.C. … The roots of this movement can be traced in the earlier literature of Israel. … It must be emphasized that not one of the supposed influences from Greek philosophy [upon Ecclesiastes’ wisdom] can be sustained. On the contrary, we have in Qoheleth [Ecclesiastes] some of the raw material on which the earliest Greek philosophers built their metaphysical structures.[5]

There was an observable, distinct sequence of developments that led to what Eiseley called the “invented cultural institution” of science: (1) Biblical revelation firmly established the knowableness of nature by man (because God has explained His contractual control over both man and nature) and spread outside of Israel at least by the exile period; (2) the Greeks began in the same period to work out the logical consequences of looking at existence rationally; (3) Church scholars in the medieval Church began to harness reason with empirical observations; and finally (4) the Reformation emphasis upon the Bible’s picture of dominion by man led the first scientists to investigate and manage nature. This development was the unique soil Eiseley wrote about that birthed the modern scientific engine of Western culture. However, as he also warned, without maintaining that soil this “invented cultural institution” can decay and die, as can any other human activity.

When we critically examine contemporary climate alarmism from the Biblical viewpoint, we will discover that it shares with the rest of modern environmentalism an intense longing to return to the ancient pagan view of nature. That regressive trend is now eating away at the very foundation of the scientific enterprise that historically arose only by rejecting this pagan worldview.

How Climate Change Became a Crisis

Climate has always changed throughout history. The notion that recent global warming is somehow unique in human history is a deception promoted by those campaigning for worldwide political action. It seems credible only because of our culture’s general ignorance of history. I know of only one historian who has made an effort to incorporate what is known about past climate change in his writing. Rodney Stark of Baylor University in his book How the West Won: the Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity writes:

If historians have been rather inattentive to matters of geography, they have been even less attuned to the implications of climate.… Of course, the obvious effects of climate—that Eskimos use sleds and Bedouins do not—have always been noted. What has been given little attention are significant climatic changes. … For example, in his well-received Civilization: A New History of the Western World (2006), Roger Osborne … gave two sentences to the Ice Age and made no mention of more recent climate changes. In his huge and cele­brated Europe: A History (1996), Norman Davies … gave one page to climate, but mostly to discredit it as being of historical significance.

The most basic fact about earth’s climate has been nearly forgotten: that warming and cooling trends are quite common. … Beginning sometime in the eighth century, the earth began to heat up, producing what now is known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 800 to about 1250. As temperatures rose, the growing season lengthened all across northern Europe; the Arctic ice pack receded, making it much safer to sail in the North Atlantic; and it became possible to farm successfully as far north as Greenland. Then temperatures began to drop until early in the fourteenth century, when the Little Ice Age dawned; this era of very cold winters and short summers lasted until about 1850. During the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, in the seventeenth century, the Baltic Sea froze over, making possible sleigh rides from Poland to Sweden; the Thames River froze in London, as did all the Atlantic harbors in Europe.[6] [Emphasis original]

Although past climate changes can be inferred today from various “proxy” data, e.g., isotope ratios in ice cores, sedimentation patterns in the deep ocean floor, varying tree-ring widths, etc., there are clear evidences in human historical records. [Remember that there were no thermometers on any geographical scale until the mid-nineteenth century and no widespread upper-air measurements of temperature until World War II.] Egyptian records, for example, report that dams had to be built because of the decline in Nile flooding due to a cooling period between 750 and 450 B.C.[7] Roman records speak of grapes and olives growing farther north and at higher elevations due to a warming period in the second and third centuries. These kinds of temperature observations were documented by Hubert Lamb, the founder of the climate center at East Anglia, UK.^[8] Figure 1 is a graph of temperature changes over the past 2000 years.

Figure 1. Craig Loehle, “A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Tree-Ring Proxies,” Energy & Environment, Vol 18, No 7+8 (2007), p. 1052.

The Green movement’s assault on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The very significant worldwide warming in the medieval period vastly weakens the credibility of the algorithm built into all present-day computer climate models, which makes human CO₂ emissions the primary driver of recent warming. Why? If we infer that because atmospheric CO₂ levels correlate with global warming for the past century and thus CO₂ must be the primary cause, then what was the primary cause of global warming prior to modern CO₂ emissions? Certainly CO₂ levels do not correlate with MWP warming some eight centuries before the Industrial Revolution. From this multi-century lack of correlation one must conclude that there exists at least one other presently unknown variable besides atmospheric CO₂ causing global warming and cooling. And if that is the case, how do we know that this “natural” cause (or causes) is not still operative today? And if so, how can the relative contributions of natural and human causation be set into the model algorithms with any quantitative verity?

Green movement leaders and their media lackeys have tried hard to keep this disturbing MWP fact from public view. Dr. David Deming of the University of Oklahoma Geosciences Department recounts his experience.

In 1995, I had a short paper published in the prestigious journal Science (Deming, 1995). I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America of the last 100 to 150 years. I closed the manuscript with what seemed to me to be a remarkably innocuous and uncontroversial statement: ‘A cause and effect relationship between anthropogenic activities and climatic warming cannot be demonstrated unambiguously at the present time.’

The week the article appeared, I came into my office one morning to find an email message from a reporter for National Public Radio. He wanted to interview me concerning my article in Science. … The reporter focused in on the last sentence in the paper. He asked me if I really meant to say that … the warming in North America might have been due to natural variability? … I said yes.

He replied, ‘Well, then, I guess we have no story. That’s not what people are interested in. People are interested if the warming is due to human activities. Goodbye.’ … It was my first realization that the media intentionally filter the information the public receives.[9]

Notice here how media management of public information determines what the public finally receives. What management thinks will bring the highest ratings and thus public and/or commercial funding for their organizations takes precedence over the truthfulness of information.

Deming tells what happened next after he had gained credibility within the climate change community.

They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said, ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’[10]

The Green movement’s campaign to hide the MWP led to another scientific debacle. The 1990 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the global publication that is used for policy decisions by nations’ leaders—repeated the standard view of global temperature history that included the MWP (Figure 2A). However, a climate scientist by the name of Michael Mann working in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts gathered various temperature datasets and did a detailed re-examination of global temperature history from the medieval period to the present. He applied controversial methodology to proxy (tree-ring) data from the medieval period and then, when those data appeared to show declining temperatures toward the end, replaced them with thermometer readings, which were significantly increased by “urban heat island” effect and geographically non-representative placement. Lo and behold, the MWP disappeared, and a sharp spike in recent temperature appeared. The result (Figure 2B) looks like a hockey stick on its side and promptly assumed the name “Mann’s Hockey Stick.”

Figures 2A (top) & 2B (bottom). Global temperature history as depicted in the 1990 UN IPCC Report (2A) and in the 2001 UN IPCC Report (2B) after Michael Mann “revised” the data to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) as well as the Little Ice Age.

The radical change in the last thousand years of global temperature history from traditional views to Mann’s “Hockey Stick” prompted in-depth reviews of his work, primarily by those who focused on his statistical analysis of data. First, Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economics professor, waged a prolonged campaign to obtain Mann’s data and the computer code that he had used to analyze it. They discovered errors in his data and code the correction of which made the hockey stick disappear, but they were unsuccessful at getting Nature, the journal in which Mann had published his modified temperature record, to publish their critique. 

A second front opened against Mann when the chairmen of two Congressional committees jointly requested an outside review of both Mann and the critique by McIntyre and McKitrick. The chairmen convened an ad-hoc committee made up of three statisticians: Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University, and Yasmin Said of The Johns Hopkins University. Wegman at the time was a board member of the American Statistical Association. Their thorough investigation, all of which was done pro bono to avoid any conflicts of interest, was published as the “Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction.”[11] Their conclusions and recommendations are given in the Appendix of this paper and make for an illuminating look into how scientific research and peer reviews work in the contemporary world.

Recent attempt to “correct” the hiatus in global warming from 1997 to 2015. Besides the conundrum of the MWP, there is the mysterious “pause” in global warming over about the last seventeen to eighteen years, shown graphically in Figure 3. Like the problem with the MWP, this pause creates a problem for the notion that increasing global temperature is so closely correlated with increasing atmospheric CO₂ that CO₂ must be the only cause to be accounted for in climate models. Over the last seventeen years, atmospheric CO₂ has continued its steady increase as more nations enter their industrial revolutions, yet global temperatures have not followed suit. These measurements show that the CO₂/global temperature correlation is not as convincing as the climate modelers assume.

Figure 3. Data from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT3-gl.dat show warming in tenths of degree Celsius from 1979 to 1998 with lack of warming since 1998, the warmest year.

In 2015 the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that it had found a flaw in the surface temperature data the correction of which erased this pause in warming and thus re-strengthened flagging confidence in the CO₂/global temperature correlation. Citing a paper reporting the finding, NOAA hastily announced to the media that it “refutes the notion that there has been a slowdown or ‘hiatus’ in the rate of global warming in recent years.”[12] A “revised” surface temperature dataset was then released. Some prominent scientists became suspicious. They pointed out two things.

First, the issue wasn’t whether recent years were among the warmest “on record” (in this case stretching back only to 1979, the start of satellite data, or to 1880). The issue was whether the warming trend from about 1979 through about 1997 (excluding 1998 because it was made anomalously warm by a super-El Niño) continued after 1997, or leveled off (albeit on a plateau higher than in the previous “record”). If the previous 18 years of warming had been driven primarily by rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration, then since that concentration continued to rise, the warming should have continued unabated.

Second, various scientists pointed out serious flaws in the NOAA study, which among other things relied more on tendentious adjustments to initially problematic data than on more credible data.[13] One of the world’s most respected physicists, Dr. William Happer, Professor of Physics (Emeritus), Princeton University, and former Director of Research, U.S. Department of Energy, is now pressing NOAA for transparency when it makes these kinds of revisions. NOAA, like other federal agencies, including the EPA, has internal published guidelines governing peer review requirements for “highly influential” scientific assessments. However, in its haste to publicize the denial of the global warming hiatus, NOAA did not follow its own protocol! So far NOAA management has argued that it did not have to follow its protocol because the research paper that had led to this widely publicized announcement didn’t meet the requirement of a “highly influential” paper. Happer and others respond that if a paper that is used by the Administration to establish wide-ranging public policy costing hundreds of billions of dollars is not “highly influential,” then it’s difficult to imagine what that designation means.[14]

So we see from the Deming event how the media can put ratings above truth and then spread deceptive information among the public at large. And we see from the Mann event as well as the more recent NOAA episode how the scientific academy and the federal government both share in the dissemination of distorted information. We next want to examine in more detail the forces that incentivize this distortion of scientific truth. Why, in spite of the many good, honest, and hard-working people involved in climate research and in formulating environmental policies, is the end product so deceptive, and why are the policies created to deal with climate change by vastly increasing energy costs so destructive of human welfare?

Turning a few tenths of a degree of global warming into a crisis. When reading a graph it helps to notice the scale of the vertical and horizontal axes. Notice that the vertical scale of temperature change in Figures 1, 2, and 3 is in tenths of a degree, not in whole degrees. Indeed, the entire warming since 1850 is under 1˚C, which is a small fraction of the normal temperature variation on any given day at any given location, and a smaller fraction of the normal seasonal temperature variation at any given location. So how did this small amount of recent warming turn into a crisis that somehow threatens all of civilization? The story is a sad combination of the consequences of: (1) the pagan philosophy behind so much of modern environmental thought; (2) the funding structure of modern science research; and (3) the ambitions of globalist politicians.

Let’s look first at the widespread revival of the old pagan view of nature. Old Testament students know that the prophets of Israel continually battled the deception of nature-worshipping pagan cults, chief of which was Baalism. For an agrarian economy weather and climate were a crucial concern. As the culminating event on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal makes clear, the entire nation of Israel (northern kingdom) was focused on the cause of the three-year, economically disastrous drought (1 Kings 18). Who was behind the weather? Unlike Yahweh, Creator and Lord over all nature and revealer of His contract with Israel (which included weather stipulations—Lev 26; Deut 28), Baal and his divine companions were seen as part of nature: Baal “died” after the spring rains; his counterpart Mot, the god of death, arose “victorious” and had to be defeated by human religious works to bring about the fall rains and cooler weather of autumn and winter. Man was supposed to cower under Nature and avoid offending it (or her).

We go from Mt. Carmel to Cancun, Mexico, nearly three millennia later. There the Executive Secretary to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change opened the seventeenth annual Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in 2010 in front of government officials from almost every nation with a prayer to the ancient jaguar and moon goddess Ixchel, seen in paganism as goddess of weaving:

Because you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change … Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skillful interlacing of many threads. … Twenty years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together … and think back to the inspiration of Ixchel.[15]

We observe this reversion to paganism in Al Gore as well. In 2002 he told Newsweek he was a Christian, a Protestant, and a Baptist. Yet he had already abandoned Biblical truth ten years earlier when he wrote Earth in the Balance. Seeking for a nature-centered faith that would unite all mankind, he wrote: “The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends upon the emergence of a new faith in the future. Armed with such a faith, we might find it possible to resanctify the earth”[16] [emphasis added]. Such a statement directly opposes Biblical truths that historically de-sanctified the earth, placing it under its Creator, who alone is to be worshipped.

Floating on this global sea of a revived pagan view of nature lies a second impetus toward manufacturing a climate crisis: the funding structure of scientific research. Modern scientific research is costly. Individual researchers and some universities struggle to maintain some degree of economic independence. However, inevitably most, if not all, funding comes from government bureaucracies with associated political budget negotiations. In America, World War II saw the rise of a vast, federally funded research program to create the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project). Large laboratories were created that were almost exclusively supported by the federal budget. President Eisenhower lived through that era and warned the nation in his famous “military-industrial complex” farewell speech in 1961 that an incestuous relationship could grow between the federal government and scientific research:

A steadily increasing share [of research] is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories. … In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. … The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.[17]

One scientist who has experienced the effects of federal funding upon research in climate science is Dr. Richard Lindzen, who in recent years retired from his position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his retirement he described the situation:

All such organizations, whether professional societies, research laboratories, advisory bodies (such as the national academies), government departments and agencies (including NASA, NOAA, EPA, NSF, etc.), and even universities are hierarchical structures where positions and policies are determined by small executive councils or even single individuals. This greatly facilitates any conscious effort to politicize science via influence in such bodies where a handful of individuals (often not even scientists) speak on behalf of organizations that include thousands of scientists, and even enforce specific scientific positions and agendas. The temptation to politicize science is overwhelming and longstanding. Public trust in science has always been high, and political organizations have long sought to improve their own credibility by associating their goals with ‘science’—even if this involves misrepresenting the science.[18] [Emphasis supplied.]

Lindzen provides a typical example using the case of the American Meteorological Society, which professes to speak to all areas of meteorology including the media (by its certification program for TV meteorologists) and climate science and to do so in the name of all its members (of which I am one).

Originally [professional societies were] created to provide a means for communication within professions—organizing meetings and publishing journals—they also provided, in some instances, professional certification, and public outreach. The central offices of such societies were scattered throughout the US, and rarely located in Washington. Increasingly, however, such societies require impressive presences in Washington where they engage in interactions with the federal government. Of course, the nominal interaction involves lobbying for special advantage, but increasingly, the interaction consists in issuing policy and scientific statements on behalf of the society. Such statements, however, hardly represent independent representation of membership positions. For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore.[19] [Emphasis supplied.]

The situations that Lindzen describes initially start because of the need to compete for federal funding, as Eisenhower foresaw in 1961. What better tactic to use in the competition than to put forward a scary scenario that will occur if you don’t fund our program X? And we must understand that the competition for funding climate research with other items in the federal budget has all taken place in the context of the revived pagan elevation of nature above man described above. Thus there is a sort of religious zeal among some of the key players—one particularly apparent in former Vice President Al Gore, whose Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992) reveals a man wholly converted to pagan mystical, pantheistic spirituality, despite his Christian profession.

Apparently to assure a steady flow of federal funds into their programs, the climate science community has recently begun serious attempts to link extreme weather events to global warming. The tax-paying public, of course, can see extreme weather far better than very gradual warming. Whereas earlier this claim was superficially made by media commentary and environmental propagandists outside the community, climate scientists themselves have recently devised a new methodology called “event attribution” that is producing more and more papers largely financed by more and more federal grants. The goal is to detect “the effects of long-term change on extreme events” such as heat waves, droughts, heavy rains, and flooding. The aim of the methodology is not merely to find a relationship between such extreme weather and global warming, but to find “human fingerprints” to place blame upon fossil fuel emissions.

The methodology, however, faces the same challenge of distinguishing human from natural causes that I discussed above.[20] To find “human fingerprints” all one has to do is use the lower, steady atmospheric CO₂ values of the pre-industrial period, assume a tight constant CO₂/temperature correlation, and then infer a similar lower, steady temperature and an associated lower “climate variability.” Compare that result with the steadily rising CO₂ values of the post-industrial period with its increasing temperature and associated higher “variability.” Lo and behold, we have supposedly proved that higher variability exists with more extreme weather events due to man’s fossil-fuel emissions. The CO₂ temperature correlation, however, has been neither tight nor constant if one looks at the pre-industrial age when CO₂ levels were relatively constant but not the temperature values, as Figure 1 showed, and even recently temperature leads rather than follows CO₂.[21] These new efforts to blame extreme events upon man involve a methodology that assumes a pre-industrial low variability like that shown in Figure 2B—the erroneous hockey stick. If so, it is a case of circular reasoning. And it is another example of starting with good intentions to help insurance risk estimation and mitigation strategies against extreme weather events, only to produce frenetic federally funded research activity furthering the public perception of a man-made climate crisis.

This brings us to the third force that has turned a relatively slow, small change in global temperature into a full-scale crisis of fear. Enter certain ambitious politically oriented individuals who see climate change as an excellent vehicle for pushing world leaders into a culture of global socialism. European intellectuals appear to be more straightforward about their ambitions than U.S. players. For example, Mike Hulme, leading climate scientist and successor to Hubert Lamb (cited in footnote 7 on page 3 above) in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, site of the “Climategate” scandal, writes in his book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change:

Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs. The function of climate change … really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change … to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come ….”[22]

German economist Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III, said in November 14, 2010: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. … One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore. …”[23] Long-time European political observers like former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who fought against communism, see through the gambit. Addressing the Australian Institute of Public Affairs, Klaus said, “Twenty years ago we still felt threatened by the remnants of communism. This is really over. … I feel threatened now, not by global warming—I don’t see any—(but) by the global warming doctrine, which I consider a new dangerous attempt to control and mastermind my life and our lives, in the name of controlling the climate or temperature.”[24]

Of course, the best example of the role of an ambitious politically oriented individual is the journey of Al Gore throughout the recent decades of climate change discussions. For many years Gore has claimed that his inspiration for warning the world about the climate crisis came from a course he had while a student at Harvard under the oceanographer Roger Revelle. Revelle, he implies, mentored him on the extreme dangers of increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. Gore thus pictured himself as a scientifically informed political leader reflecting what he had learned at Harvard. Unfortunately for Gore’s story, which made highly regarded Revelle appear as a climate change alarmist, Revelle co-authored a paper, published just before his death in the April 1991 Cosmos journal, entitled “What to Do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap,” which obviously depicted Revelle as anything but a climate alarmist. Since that paper had been published the year previous to Gore’s Earth in the Balance, reviewers were quick to question Gore’s story.

The environmental lobby couldn’t let that happen, so they attacked Revelle’s co-author, insisting that he had dishonestly added Revelle’s name to the Cosmos paper to make it appear that Revelle was not the alarmist Gore made him out to be. That co-author happened to be a Ph.D. physicist from Princeton, Dr. Fred Singer. Singer had published over 400 technical papers, was a director of the National Weather Satellite Service, served five years as vice-chairman of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmospheres, and, most importantly, had been close friends with Revelle since 1957. Fed up with the smears on his character, Singer filed a lawsuit against his Gore-supporting attackers and won it.

This pattern of harassment against anyone questioning the climate alarmist position is a common procedure by those zealous to use climate change as a tool to implement global socialism. Unable to muster coherent arguments against the truth of natural climate change uncorrelated with atmospheric CO₂ levels prior to the industrial age, they increasingly turn to threats of legal force. As Beisner reports:

Many climate alarmists (former NASA researcher James Hansen, Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr., and many others) have for years called for criminal punishment of “climate skeptics.” Not long ago Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) proposed using RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) against them. . . . This spring Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA and joined by others) tried to use their Congressional power to jeopardize the jobs of “climate skeptic” scientists. . . . Recently 20 climate-alarmist scientists wrote an open letter supporting Whitehouse’s proposal. In Europe the chief weather forecaster for France’s government-run television station, France Télévisions, Philippe Verdier, was put on “forced holiday” and threatened with termination after he published a book giving evidence against catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the UK Supreme Court in September hosted a semi-secret meeting of some of the world’s most influential judges, lawyers, and legal scholars (some whose travel costs were paid by the UN Environment Programme or the Asian Development Bank, both with vested interests in upholding climate alarmism) at which they proposed making it illegal for anyone to question the scientific evidence for man-made global warming. Such threats to free inquiry, free speech, free press, and even—because religious worldview and ethics influence views on climate change and policy—freedom of religion and conscience are real and growing.[25]

More recently, the Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified in Congress that the Justice Department has considered prosecuting climate skeptics under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) and has referred it to the FBI to consider “whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,”[26] and seventeen state attorneys general (all Democrats) have formed “AG’s United for Clean Power,” announcing their intention to pursue such prosecutions—though their name (taken from the Obama Administration’s legacy environmental regulation, the “Clean Power Plan”) strongly suggests politics, not law, drives their effort.[27]

To sum up: a relatively benign rise in global temperatures expressed in tenths of a degree has been used to trigger fear of a geophysical apocalypse that demands a global assault on the supposedly dangerous chemical element carbon that is fundamental to all life on the planet. It is a complex cultural transformation stemming from a revival of ancient paganism in which man must cower before divinized Nature. Providing economic impetus to this transformation is the ethical vulnerability caused by modern scientific research’s becoming almost exclusively dependent upon competition for vast amounts of politically allocated funding. Finally, the developing global consciousness involving international monetary concerns, nearly instant world communications, and the lust for power by ambitious leaders is shaping the legal and political use of climate change as a rationale for international cultural change.

It is time that we Bible-believing Christian citizens do what informed Christians have always done: go back to the authority of God’s inerrant revelation and look at this developing situation through the lens of Scripture. Only then can we be salt and light in our society. We still have political rights in this nation significantly greater than those of Roman citizen Paul, so like him we should not be reluctant to stand on those rights (note, for example, Paul’s ‘sit-in’ against government authorities in Acts 16:35–40). To do so however, we need to have a systematic method of using God’s revelation to analyze, to uncover fundamental issues, to guide our prayers to the Him who stands above all creation, to truly educate our children, and to act wisely as Christian citizens with powerful assurance of the righteousness of our cause.

Using the Tool of the Biblical Framework

As I have consistently pointed out for several decades, to engage the culture around us—especially given the fact that most of us grew up within a secular educational system where we learned to exclude Biblical revelation from every subject we studied—a systematic, all-encompassing knowledge of the Biblical framework is required. God’s Word is not to be left in a religious compartment off in the margins of life. It is historic revelation by creation/providence (real space-time actions) and by information-conveying, logically coherent, verbal conversation—a ‘show-and-tell’ program that should be front and center in every area of life.

Figure 4. The earliest frequently-cited events in Biblical history with the doctrines pictured

People often confuse the framework depiction of Biblical revelation with a worldview built from Scripture. But the framework actually is the precursor to developing a world view, because it is simply a catalog of the events most commonly referred to by Biblical authors together with the way those events depict doctrinal truths of revelation (see Figure 4). We use this tool to bring special revelation into full contact with general revelation, which means we act on the self-authenticated authority of Scripture. This portion of the paper now applies the Biblical framework not only to the available information on climate change but also to the manner in which this information has been treated by the scientific and political communities.

Creation: ‘two-ism’ vs. paganism’s ‘one-ism’. It is clear from Genesis 1 forward that the God of the Bible is the ‘Creator of heaven and earth,’ a truth expressed in all major Christian creeds. Very important implications necessarily follow. First, it implies that there are two levels of existence: the eternal, self-contained, infinite being of God and the temporal, dependent, finite existence of angels, man, and nature. Fundamentally opposed to that truth, the pagan deception insists on only one level of existence, whether a mixture of spirit and matter (Platonic Idealism), spirit alone (Hinduism), or matter alone (atheistic materialism). Peter Jones recently has succinctly portrayed the contrasting views as ‘two-ism’ and ‘one-ism’ respectively.[28] The environmentalist undercurrent in the climate crisis is thoroughly pagan in re-divinizing nature and imputing normative value to it so as to protect it from man’s alleged misrule.[29] But if there are two levels of existence as Genesis 1 implies, then protecting nature from man’s misrule doesn’t require re-divinizing nature. Nature is fully protected when man is informed by and submits to the self-revealing Creator of nature. The environmentalist re-divinization of nature is thus an error built on top of a previous error, viz., the denial of Biblical creation.

The second implication of Biblical creation is that man is lord of nature (Genesis 1:26–30). As made in God’s image, man is distinct from nature in kind, not merely in degree, as Mortimer Adler thoroughly argued in the Encyclopedia Britannica Lectures of 1996.[30] It is this implication that most sharply and comprehensively contrasts with the entire modern environmental movement, because it separates man from nature and places him over nature. It’s the trigger that ignites vigorous emotional reaction against human fossil fuel emissions as well as explaining the anti-human character of the proposed political ‘solutions’ to the alleged climate crisis. Faced with the problems of garbage, chemical contamination, unhealthy smoke emissions and other negative byproducts of a society passing through an age of Industrial Revolution such as Europe and the U.S. in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, environmentalists jump to the conclusion that man inevitably wrecks nature, that he is a virtual ‘cancer’ on planet earth—as in the theme of James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. They blame in particular the Christian faith because of this notion in Genesis that man is lord of nature.[31]

What they forget is that passing through a stage of industrialization provides a society with a wealthier economy that can then afford to take better care of nature.[32] People in poverty are concerned about their next meal, not about the environment. This is why today India and China will not curb their fossil fuel emissions until they emerge from their respective industrial revolutions and have access to an equally cheap, continuous source of energy. Harmful things to creation like garbage, chemical contamination, and smoke pollution, of course, are to be dealt with, as we shall see below, not by a silly war against carbon but by the moral law against theft. To include in the list of harmful things the colorless, odorless, invisible, non-polluting gas of CO₂, the food needed by every plant on earth and exhaled by every human and animal, has no ethical justification. And to fear one’s “carbon footprint” shows a complete misunderstanding of the role of carbon atoms in organic molecules that make up all living things.

Increasing environmental regulations lower man’s value to that of animals and plants and express the pagan notion of the ‘continuity of being’—that all living things though differing in degree are basically the same in kind and thus supposedly share equal value. Yet by such regulations man isn’t even equal in value to other living things. Destroying eggs of certain species is punishable by fine or jail whereas butchering a human fetus is actually protected by law. Leaving his once-Christian culture for the new religion of nature worship, Prince Phillip of England, President Emeritus of the World Wide Fund for Nature, wrote in his book If I Were an Animal: “In the event I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” [33] Overlooked completely in these emotional tirades against man is the model of Genesis 2:4–25, which pictures what God meant in Genesis 1:26–30 by “having dominion.” What deep ecologists now call a pristine wilderness to be left off-limits to man God changed into a beautiful and fruitful garden to be cultivated by man. Nature is not to be off limits to man but is to be brought into aesthetic and productive completeness by its divinely designated lord, humanity, as it fills and rules the earth in obedience to Genesis 1:28. So-called “creation care” is thus modeled by these scriptures. Genesis 1:26–28 must be read together with Genesis 2:4–25 to show how man and nature are to function cooperatively according to their creation-design.[34]

A third implication of creation is that human beings, exercising their God-given intelligence and dominion, can produce sufficient resources from the raw materials they find in the earth to sustain human population growth until the return of Jesus Christ (Genesis 1:28: 9:1). This assertion flies in the face of the claim of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) that human population grows geometrically whereas the means to sustain such a population only grows arithmetically. Malthus’s view has always been held in high esteem by those concerned for the environment. (Think here of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb with former Senator Al Gore’s endorsement.) It especially is held currently by those who fear a climate change crisis. Typical of this thinking is a piece by associate professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College, Sarah Conley, who writes:

… the idea that people should limit the number of children they have to just one is not, I would argue, a bad one, for the Chinese or for the rest of us. … We can see the damage that is already being done by our present population of ‘just’ 7.3 billion. We all know about climate change with its droughts, storms, rising sea levels, and heat. But it’s also soil depletion, lack of fresh water, overfishing, species extinction, and overcrowding in cities.[35]

Notice Ms. Conley’s uncritical acceptance of a linkage between extreme weather events and global warming, a linkage which has not been empirically demonstrated and, even if it were, would still require a demonstration that man was responsible for the global warming.

Note, too, her Malthusian undertone that a world population of 7.3 billion somehow is straining the earth’s resources. What reveals the fallacy of Malthus’s thesis is that man made in God’s image has the creative power to invent new ways of harnessing nature’s riches. ‘Dominion man’ by design is fully capable of carrying out the necessary scientific and technological labor to support an ever-growing population. Each man comes equipped not only with a mouth but also with two hands and, most important, a mind! Malthusian mumbling about “sustainability” assumes man is all mouth. If Malthus were correct, the overall cost of natural resources would increase with their supposed increasing scarcity. It hasn’t. When old resources become scarce and therefore expensive (like whale oil for lighting lamps), mankind discovers new, cheaper resources (like electricity and light bulbs). Man is not only a consumer, as the Green movement caricatures him; he is an intelligent discoverer and inventor of new technologies propelled by his God-given curiosity about God’s handiwork and the economic law of supply and demand.

More serious than all of the above in Ms. Conley’s essay is her proposed legal action to limit the number of children in a family. And the ethical justification for such tyrannical laws? Malthus’s thesis, of course, resting on a denial of the creation assignment given to man. The Bible makes clear that man is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). Contrary to the Malthusian opponents, the Bible encourages a growing population: “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.” (Psalm 127:3–5 NKJV). A warrior uses arrows to conquer his enemies. In God’s design, children are supposed to be the cultural transmitters and improvers of godliness in a nation as well as the caretakers of parents in old age. The productive family is thus the life-source of a nation.[36]

The combination of restrictions on children allowed per family and climate alarmism is not accidental. Here’s why. The global bulk fossil fuel emission per year is a product of the average amount of CO₂ emitted per person, say “c”, multiplied by the number of people, say “n”. The bulk emission is then “c x n.” The only way to reduce the mathematical product is to reduce either “c” or “n” or both. To reduce “c” you have to come up with alternate energy sources that are readily available, steadily productive, and cost-equivalent. Neither wind nor solar qualifies when computed costs include the cost to manufacture and install wind turbines or solar panels. Nor are these steadily available, which means either expensive batteries to store energy in place or expensive new grids to transmit energy from windy to windless regions and from day to night zones on the planet. Nuclear power and hydroelectric power might help, but the Green lobby has successfully restricted both.  Trying to reduce “c” with higher cost alternatives raises energy prices, which seriously damages advanced economies (since energy is used everywhere, including transportation of almost every product sold) and dooms primitive economies to perpetual poverty.[37]

The other strategy is to reduce “n,” the portion of the world population using fossil fuel or other CO₂ emitting energy sources. To do that, you could simply reduce the population itself, which leads to restriction on making babies, promoting abortions, and thus violating God’s creation mandate. Malthus’s hatred of the Genesis mandate is thus resuscitated not on the direct basis of man-as-consumer but on the indirect basis of man-as-polluter.

So far our Biblical framework analysis has found three implications of creation that directly pertain to climate change issues: (1) Creation’s view of reality—that there is a Creator/creature distinction in existence with a major second distinction between man and nature that totally conflicts with environmentalism’s pagan view of reality as a continuity of being in which all objects differ only in degree but not in kind and therefore are of equal value. (2) The Creator puts man in charge of nature and therefore makes him of higher value than nature—Jesus expressed this view when He said of men, “you are of much more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31 NKJV)—which is the inverse of the value system of environmental regulations that place nature above man. (3) The doctrine of creation says creative man can produce sufficient natural resources to support a growing world population until Jesus returns, which opposes the Malthusian math used in the Green eschatology.

The Fall: ‘abnormalism’ against pagan ‘normalism.’ The Fall, like creation, carries implications that are important to understanding not only that man can terribly misinterpret nature but also why he does so. One fundamental implication of the Fall for our analysis is the effect sin has on man’s intellect and conscience. Man is not intellectually neutral, as so often claimed. Adam and Eve quickly rebuilt their view of reality after the Fall, constructing a fantasy world in which they thought they could cover their psychological sense of guilt with “fig-leaf therapy.” This re-engineered fantasy world, they thought, made it possible for them to hide from the omnipresent God. As the psalmist put this kind of thinking, “God has forgotten; He hides His face. He will never see” (Psalm 10:11 NKJV). So as fallen man we all—apart from saving grace—must live hypocritical and schizophrenic lives in which on one hand we have to believe in the reliability of our powers of observation, reason, and moral judgment—the necessary prerequisites of science—yet on the other hand we expend great energy to suppress any conscious connection these have with our Creator. It’s not that in unbelief we can’t justify our faith in the scientific method. It’s that we won’t. We dare not think deeply on these matters lest we be reminded of our status as eternally accountable creatures dependent upon our Creator metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically, with whom we’re morally unacceptable.

For an entire culture raised in unbelief this attempted suppression of God’s revelation leads to another phenomenon seen in the climate discussions: fear of a geophysical apocalypse. It seems the guilt-precipitated fear of judgment that lodges in every unbelieving heart since Adam and Eve cannot be totally suppressed. To illustrate, University of Texas Professor J. Budziszewski uses the image of a full solar eclipse when the moon blocks the sun but not quite. A flaming corona extends beyond the lunar disk.[38] Similarly, human fear of judgment leaks out beyond one’s defenses and attaches itself to whatever seems at the moment to be an impending threat. Psychologists commented on the popular but scary King Kong movies in the post-Hiroshima years, particularly in Japan. I remember that time from my childhood. Fear of a nuclear apocalypse was thought to be the subliminal theme in those films. Michael Crichton in his book State of Fear had it right. There exists something in the human condition—we Bible-believers would say fear of God’s wrath—that is at work in transforming a straightforward matter of climate change into a fear of global disaster.

Alarmist agenda promoters capitalize on this undercurrent of fear. An early climate alarmist, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, openly admitted such: “To capture the imagination we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and [make] little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.”[39] After viewing Gore’s movie, Inconvenient Truth, enough children had nightmares that in the United Kingdom legal steps were taken. A judge ordered that prior to any showings of the film in U.K. classrooms, teachers had to follow published guidelines that listed its errors and warned students that the film was primarily a political statement, not a serious science statement.[40] Unfortunately U.S. secular educational leadership thought scaring students was just fine.

If the first implication of the Fall concerns how sin affects man’s intellect and conscience, a second implication concerns how sin affects man’s relationship with the natural environment. Notice the first environmental catastrophe happened just after the Fall when God cursed the ground so that it henceforth resists man’s dominion. Man’s entire geophysical, biological and anatomical situation was profoundly affected (Genesis 3:17–19). Under God’s design and providence, as goes man, so goes nature. The relationship between man and nature is synergistic. The next two major environmental catastrophes after the Fall—the Flood and the Exodus—continue this relationship in which the environment is subjected to divine judgment because of man’s sin, not because of man’s failure to follow environmental protection wisdom. All of nature now awaits not the EPA’s new set of regulations but God’s supernatural redemption of man (Romans 8:19–22).

Some evangelicals sympathetic to the Green lobby and concerned about man abusing his environment point to Bible passages like Jeremiah 2:7–8 and Isaiah 24:5, which speak of man “defiling the land,” to justify their position. They misread these texts, however, by hastily concluding that the sins mentioned are failures to care physically for the environment. Instead, the sins spoken of clearly are religious sins of idolatry:

I brought you into a bountiful country. To eat its fruit and its goodness. But when you entered, you defiled My land. And made My heritage an abomination. The priests did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’ And those who handle the law did not know Me. The rulers also transgressed against Me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit. (Jeremiah 2:7–8 NKJV)

Ironically, Jeremiah here is accusing the prophets of worshipping the nature deity, Baal, the very kind of nature deity welcomed at the UN conference in Cancun! Similarly in Isaiah: “The earth is also defiled under its inhabitants, Because they have transgressed the laws. Changed the ordinance, Broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore the curse has devoured the earth, And those who dwell in it are desolate. …” (Isaiah 24:5–6 NKJV) [Emphasis added] Beisner summarizes: “Divine judgment is expressed on the natural world in response to human sin. In Biblical terms, defilement and devastation of the earth are different things. Human sin defiles the earth—makes it morally polluted and impure—regardless whether it takes place in the midst of sound or unsound environmental policy.”[41]

The Fall and subsequent sin, then, imply specific effects on both man’s intellect and conscience, and on nature itself. The Fall made both man and nature abnormal and subject to divine judgment. Catastrophic environmental devastation occurred under the hands of a judging God at the Fall and subsequent events (the Flood and the Exodus). This is not to say that trashing and abusing nature are OK and that no consequences follow, but that that is not the point when Scripture speaks of “defiling the land.” Neither the present state of man nor the present state of nature is normal by God’s original design, whereas unbelief insists that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:4) The difference between the two is profound.

The Flood and the Covenant: stability of nature vs. pagan capriciousness of nature. The Bible insists upon a global geophysical judgment that radically changed the earth—the longevity of man (and probably all of the animal kingdom with him), the geography, and the climate. Creation scientists have constructed very plausible models of these changes that match scriptural narratives and are internally physically consistent. Figures 5 and 6 depict one such model of the ocean temperatures and sea-level heights from the Flood to today.[42] As large-scale and as fast as these changes occurred due to the Biblical chronological record, they all were under the sovereign control of God and conformed to His verbal revelation. The point to be made here is that the post-Flood Noahic Covenant guarantees a stability of nature. It is a preservative covenant that concerns both man and nature. By it God has, for example, established measurable limits to sea-level:

“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease. . . . I establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you: the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you. . . . Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 8:22; 9:9–11 NKJV)

Figure 5. Postulated ocean temperature starting with the heated ocean due to tectonic and volcanic action during the flood, declining to below current ocean temperature during the post-flood ice age, and then reaching quasi equilibrium at today’s average ocean temperature. [from Oard, p. 112]

Figure 6. Postulated sea level height beginning with the end of the flood, significantly declining as massive amounts of water were trapped in glaciers during the post-flood ice age, and then after glacier melting reaching today’s level. [from Oard, p 174]

This kind of assurance of geophysical stability is utterly unknown in pagan thought and must be. If nature is all there is with no personal Creator, then empirical observations of nature are the only data available. But empirical data are always contingent upon the next data acquired, so no set of empirical observations can assure us of any such stability. Uniformity of any sort in nature without God revealing to man His creation and covenant agreements can only be a hypothetical proposal constantly and anxiously waiting on the next observation. Notice how God comforted the suffering exilic Hebrews centuries later: “‘But with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you,’ says the LORD, your Redeemer. ‘For this is like the waters of Noah to Me for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be angry with you nor rebuke you.’” (Isaiah 54:8–9 NKJV) Believers in God’s Word need not live lives in a state of fear of a man-made climate apocalypse.

Since fear of anthropogenic global warming came into prominence over the past several decades, there have been attempts to scare people with forecast rises in ocean sea-level of 15–20 feet in this century—enough to inundate many coastal cities (e.g., Gore in An Inconvenient Truth). This number is an exaggeration. Sea-levels have been rising over the past several millennia at a rate of about two inches per century.[43] Like the atmosphere, however, ocean physics is complex. While sea-level heights rise as land-based ice fields slowly melt adding to ocean volume and as oceans somewhat warm and expand, it is also true that warmer oceans cause more evaporation that produces more frozen precipitation over Greenland and Antarctica, adding to the glacial volume, decreasing ocean volume, and lowering sea-level. Further complicating matters is the fact that sea-level computed from a tide gauge is a relative measurement of water level compared to land level. If coastal land sinks such as the Pacific Ocean Maldives and Venice, Italy, there is an apparent rise in sea-level. The mean of all the world’s tide gauges only provides a global average of sea-level relative to land at many locations not an absolute measurement of sea-level itself. With satellite measurement techniques an absolute measurement can be obtained, but such data only go back to the 1990s and cannot help in determining quantitatively the long-term trend in sea-level rise.

A few millimeters rise per year in ocean level, anyway, is far below the massive tidal storm surges experienced year after year by coastal areas the world over. If we want to “fix” the threat to low-lying coastal land areas from a really imminent danger—storm-surge damage—instead of fearing Al Gore’s scary stories, we should trust God’s assurance that nature is predictable enough to engineer successful mitigation. Possibilities include simple things like not building on exposed sandy areas, not building or maintaining cities below sea level, or, if we do, protecting them with dikes, as the Dutch have done for centuries, or landfills, like the one that protected much of Staten Island, NY, during Hurricane Sandy.[44] Landfill costs are already built into local economies, so costs would be extremely less than massively raising energy costs to support down-regulation of fossil-fuel use on the slim hope that it might help by the year 2100.

Israel: the model society vs. pagan tyranny. In the Biblical framework of Figure 4 above, there is a cluster of events: the call of Abraham, the Exodus, and Mt. Sinai. This set of events created in history a virtual “laboratory” for humanity to observe a divinely-managed nation whose laws and policies were directly revealed by God. In Moses’ words,

“This is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ . . . .And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law. ….” (Deuteronomy 4:6, 8 NKJV)

Why did God call this unique nation into existence? Although we know little about the spiritual state of humanity after the flood, we do know that every people group had access to verbal revelation given up to that time, what I call the “Noahic Bible,” through their ancestral line back to Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Unfortunately, for various reasons fear got the best of them. Presumably the earth took centuries to calm down geophysically and climatologically from the Flood (cf. Figures 5 & 6). There may also have arisen differing beliefs that led to social conflict. In any case as a relatively small population they feared separation whether geographically or religiously.

They fell for the same great deception we see at work in today’s trend toward one-world government and religious belief. At Babel, at the same location of the much later Babylonian empire of Daniel and Ezekiel and of the global commerce system mentioned in the Book of Revelation, the idea arose described here: “Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top in in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4 NKJV) The deception, of course, is that fallen humanity can only be unified by tyrannical force. Any such world government, however it tries to impose environmental ascetism, cannot alter the way God administers the environment in relation to man’s sin. Nevertheless, the core apostate idea is expressed in the words “let us make a name for ourselves,” viz., man, not God, demands to define his existence, and not just his individual existence but his total, corporate existence.

Peter Jones writes about the contemporary revival of this Babelesque thinking. He reviews the work of University of Buffalo secular sociologist Ernest Sternberg.[45]

Sternberg believes that ‘we are in the midst of the worldwide rise of a non-religious chiliastic movement, announcing global human renewal and predicting planetary catastrophe as its woeful alternative.’ … This vision is decidedly globalist. ‘As old nation-state boundaries fade away, communities will coordinate with each other globally by means of … non-governmental organizations (NGOs),’ that is, non-elected pressure groups, granted status by those who control political power. Sternberg calls this a ‘myth,’ comparable to the old impossible myth of the New Man of Marxism. …

Millions around the globe already find this dogma so persuasive that it shapes their politics for a new era. … The new order will be sustainable. It will run on alternative energy and organic farming. People will occupy green buildings liberated from carbon emanations. …

To create such a society, ‘another ‘us’ is necessary.’ … The new ‘us’ sees itself as engaged in a cataclysmic, even apocalyptic, struggle against an avowed toxic enemy. … The enemy is comprised of United States (US) militarism, multinational corporations, the capitalist system, patriarchal domination, corporate media, technologies of surveillance—all in alliance with Zionism. … To put it briefly, the enemy is the fruits of Western (Christian) civilization.”[46] [Emphasis supplied.]

Clearly, this modern ‘resurrection’ of Babel has no room for those acting today on the implications of creation, the Fall, the flood, and covenant. A global culture conflict thus ensues.

That’s because shortly after Babel God defiantly called into existence a counterculture whose identity God will define: “Get out of your country. … I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great. … I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1–3 NKJV) From Abraham through the giving of the Law at Sinai God created an unending antagonism within human civilization between two faiths that constantly vie for ascendency.

What implications follow from this set of events—the call of Abraham, the Exodus, and Sinai—to help us view the climate crisis agenda? The great debate today over climate change is taking place within a society conflicted between a reviving paganism amidst the ashes of the so-called Enlightenment and God’s stubborn counterculture. Because this set of Biblical events brought into existence an alternative, divinely managed model society, we can evaluate what’s actually happening today in our society by that standard.

We already know the key ideological points of conflict between the Bible and the climate crisis agenda. Creation implies that man is over nature and capable of inventing new ways to bring nature into greater productivity to support a growing population. Both ideas are heresy to the Green movement. The Fall implies that man is intellectually and ethically damaged, prone to cosmic fears, and related to his material environment’s quality through God’s blessing or cursing his ethical performance. These ideas are inconceivable to contemporary thinkers. The global Flood and subsequent ecological covenant imply an earth system stable enough to guarantee the survival of humanity. The confidence such a guarantee produces is considered by environmental activists as a serious inhibition to their efforts to scare the public into political action. These conflicts are ideological.

With the revealed standard of a model society we now can focus on the behavior of the establishment, business, and political elites involved. The behavioral norms of the model society stem from the Ten Commandments publicly given at Mt. Sinai. The Israelite theocracy was uniquely ruled by God spatially present in the Tabernacle and later Temple. He, not man, was king. The Ten Commandments have a chiastic structure given in Figure 7A, which helps us understand the structure of a society operating according to its created design as a literal Kingdom of God on earth shown in Figure 7B. A society whose population manifests an inner heart allegiance to God has a firm behavioral foundation. An immediate behavioral consequence of this inner commitment is the proper use of language to convey truth. Every social interaction depends for its integrity on speaking truth, whether it’s a business contract, maintenance of accounting records, making political statements, family communications, teaching, or reporting scientific findings. Science is a labor and thus its value and productivity depend upon researchers’ integrity of communication, which is the prerequisite of efficient and productive labor.

Figure 7A (left). The chiastic structure of the Ten Commandments. Figure 7B (right). The chiastic ‘layers’ of God’s design of human society.

As a society spiritually retreats into paganism, fallen man’s heart allegiance becomes more and more to himself, his job security, and his ego. His use of language becomes more like the Greek Sophists who, with their skepticism that truth exists, championed a mere rhetorical use of language. Sophists taught their students to focus on how to use language to persuade rather than to seek to communicate truth. The truthfulness of what they were persuading was less important than the persuasion itself. In the climate change controversy think here of what Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider said: “we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and [make] little mention of any doubts we might have.”[47] Or think of the “revised” datasets by Michael Mann and NOAA mentioned above that led, and still lead, to objections like the Wegman Report in the Appendix below. What about the misrepresentation of thousands of members in scientific organizations by so-called spokesmen at politically powerful locations like Washington, D.C., mentioned above? What does this behavior do to science? And how do popular media presentations that exaggerate or present outright fraudulent imagery like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth eventually affect public confidence in science or, even worse, affect the direction of public policies?

What is the situation of honest scientists working in typically large laboratories or universities when they don’t approve of misrepresentation of their work? I have been somewhat acquainted with scientists working for both government and universities who feel uneasy about how their work contributes to projects that because of political funding are more oriented to the latest environmental storyline than to realistic science. However, their families depend upon them to bring home the bread. Notice the words of a retired but still eminent U.K. scientist, James Lovelock, who formerly supported the climate crisis agenda. In an interview on MSNBC, he said:

The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books—mine included—because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened. … There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. … The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time ... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising—carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that. … As an independent and loner I do not mind saying, alright, I made a mistake. … A university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.[48] [Emphasis supplied.]

His last sentence is a chilling admission of the career trap that scientists with integrity face. Here is the ethical problem that Eisenhower pointed out arising from government (i.e., political) funding of scientific research. Recipient scientists are only too aware of the high-level threats waged against those who dare to disagree publicly with the climate change crisis agenda.[49]

Students of the climate change debate will observe that many of the scientific critics of anthropogenic-induced global warming are either retired from their former employment organizations or now work independently: James Lovelock, Richard Lindzen (formerly of MIT), William Happer (formerly of Princeton University), Fred Singer (formerly of the National Weather Service and NOAA), Neil Frank (formerly director of the National Hurricane Center), and the list goes on. The very structure of modern scientific research is so closely wedded to political policies that the ethical principles of the language-centered 3^rd and 9^th commandments get suppressed or compromised.

The most blatant exposure of corruption within the climate science establishment came in November 2009 when several thousand emails were leaked from the computer system of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. This organization had always been considered to be one of the world’s best institutions in climate science. It was and still is a repository of meteorological data from all over the globe. It no longer, however, deserves the international respect it had before 2009. Judging from selected content of the leaked information there probably was at least one scientist within the CRU, possibly more, who had enough integrity to blow the whistle on the corruption going on. Brian Sussman reports:

The emails reveal that the world’s leading climate scientists were working together to block Freedom of Information requests to review their data; marginalize dissenting scientists; manipulate the peer-review process; and obscure, massage, or delete inconvenient temperature readings. … Phil Jones, the director of CRU … between 2000 and 2006 was the co-recipient of roughly $19 million worth of research grants, six times what he was awarded in the previous decade. It seems the louder Jones yelled ‘fire,’ the more the money poured in. …[50]

Included in the email authors was Michael Mann of Hockey Stick fame. He had become angry over a paper published in the January 2003 issue of Climate Research in which Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon showed from 200 climate studies that the twentieth century was not the warmest century in the previous 1000 years. [Remember the MWP controversy discussed above to see the implication here.] Mann emailed to a colleague: “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”[51] Here we see clearly the behind-the-scenes arm twisting that went on in the climate science community, corrupting the peer-review process. This behavior must be remembered when we hear that the “science is settled” and that “97% of scientists” agree that we are in a climate crisis. Besides outright falsehoods in these claims, the behavior just noted does produce a consensus of sorts—a forced and therefore artificial consensus.[52]

That this kind of behavior corrupts science becomes even more obvious when it is explicitly justified in academia. Science is no longer supposed to search out truth, according to a highly influential educational and political elite. Classical science that enabled Western Civilization to excel was “normal” science. Now we live in a new age of “post-normal” science. As Eva Kunseler puts it:

A new concept of science was introduced by Funtowicz and Ravetz during the 1990s…. The concept of post-normal science goes beyond the traditional assumptions that science is both certain and value-free. … The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors. … In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists. … Scientists have to contribute to society by learning as quickly as possible about different perceptions … instead of seeking deep ultimate knowledge.”^[53] [Emphasis supplied]

In this new “post-normal” era climate scientists must be under the control of outside political powers rather than pursuing their professional curiosity about how the planetary geophysical system works. They must understand how to satisfy “different perceptions” of different social players, lest they offend. If not, no federal funding! The combination of a Babelesque mentality of collective man defining his own existence coupled with the mechanism of funding science by politically controlled governments conspires to weaken the scientific enterprise that made modern civilization possible.

Older scientists recognize what is going on, like Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who explained his departure from the mainstream Green movement this way:

Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? … Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. … In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. …[After my] fellow directors proposed a campaign to ‘ban chlorine worldwide’ … I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. … Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave. [Emphasis supplied.]

Moore then addressed the political environment surrounding climate science:

The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and its mandate. … The most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”
So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse. [54]

He’s saying here that the politically funded mission of climate science is to ‘discover’ exactly what the social actors want, just as Mike Hulme said: “see how we can use the idea of climate change … to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come. …”[55]

“Very fine to point out corrupt behavior,” the Greens will ask, “but what do you Bible believers propose we should do about the other numerous threats to the environment such as poisonous gas emissions other than CO₂, sewerage dumps in rivers and oceans, non-decomposing garbage on land and sea, and contaminated drinking water?” Let’s refer to Figures 7A &7B. On the next higher level above integrity of language we see labor and property. What do the labor-property 4^th and 8^th commandments say? They speak to the value of labor and theft. They are developed in subsequent Biblical case law to fill out negatively the meaning of what “theft” includes and positively what respect for labor and property includes.[56] It can be shown that abuse of nature by inconsideration of the harm emissions, contaminants, and garbage do to other peoples’ labor and property is a form of theft to be dealt with by mandated restitution over and above the damage caused. If environmental laws were established that clarified what individuals or corporations or even government agencies (such as the EPA itself, which recently let loose contaminated waters from a gold mine in several western states) are to be held criminally responsible for explicitly stated amounts of theft and the restitution amounts to be paid to those harmed (not “fines” that merely fund government bureaucracies), we would see much less abuse of nature. A few publicized cases would soon have an effect throughout society.

To sum up: By using the Biblical framework tool to analyze what we know of the climate debate we have exposed both the ideological and the behavioral conflicts with Biblical Christianity. The early events in God’s historic revelation—the creation, the Fall, the Flood and covenant, and the establishment through Abraham of a counterculture on earth—provide measuring sticks of the science and politics at work. The science of the environmental movement is slipping away from its Biblical foundation through a revived pagan view of man and nature. The utter dependence of climate science on federal funding has opened a wide door for fallen man to compromise his labor. And the global dimension of the problem is tempting man to return to Babelesque tyranny.

Conclusion

The climate change agenda has created a worldwide fear that man faces a geophysical apocalypse, a global crisis that demands a global solution. It has generated widespread efforts by educational, media, and political elite to convince the world that the “science is settled” and action is needed now. Knowledgeable observers, however, recognize it as the latest extension of the environmental movement, which brings along an all-encompassing revived paganism.

It provides an excellent opportunity for Christians, particularly those raised in a life-long secular educational system, to develop skill in thinking Biblically about unfamiliar subject areas. To do so challenges one to re-examine his view of God, creation, man, nature, sin, and ethics in thinking how they apply to the climate change crisis agenda. When one accomplishes this task, he realizes that our Western Biblically influenced culture is in deep trouble. Unrestrained sin has brought about the ancient deception that Nature is a virtual god (or goddess) to be worshipped as supreme over man. As it takes hold of mind and heart it eats away the Biblical truths so necessary to sustain what Eiseley has called the “invented cultural institution” of science. He warned that this institution is subject to decay and death. And if that happens, liberty, prosperity, health, and support for human population—growing or not—will also die.

The process is clear: sin leads to deception, which leads to the corruption of science. May a faithful remnant of citizen-believers in the Lord Jesus Christ become so rooted in the Word of God as their absolute authority intellectually and ethically that the advance of tyrannical paganism will be stopped by their prayers, by their public debate, and by their living out their faith in the public square whether in business, in the educational establishment, in the media, or in academia—even in legal conflicts if they are necessary. The other side is a deception that feeds on suppression of the truth, lack of logic, empty rhetoric, and intimidation.

“God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7).

APPENDIX:
Conclusions and Recommendations of the Wegman Report[57]

Conclusion 1. The politicization of academic scholarly work leads to confusing public debates. Scholarly papers published in peer reviewed journals are considered the archival record of research. There is usually no requirement to archive supplemental material such as code and data. Consequently, the supplementary material for academic work is often poorly documented and archived and is not sufficiently robust to withstand intense public debate. In the present example there was too much reliance on peer review, which seemed not to be sufficiently independent.
Recommendation 1. Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.

Conclusion 2. Sharing of research materials, data, and results is haphazard and often grudgingly done. We were especially struck by Dr. Mann’s insistence that the code he developed was his intellectual property and that he could legally hold it personally without disclosing it to peers. When code and data are not shared and methodology is not fully disclosed, peers do not have the ability to replicate the work and thus independent verification is impossible.
Recommendation 2. We believe that federally funded research agencies should develop a more comprehensive and concise policy on disclosure. All of us writing this report have been federally funded. Our experience with funding agencies has been that they do not in general articulate clear guidelines to the investigators as to what must be disclosed. Federally funded work including code should be made available to other researchers upon reasonable request, especially if the intellectual property has no commercial value. Some consideration should be granted to data collectors to have exclusive use of their data for one or two years, prior to publication. But data collected under federal support should be made publicly available. (As federal agencies such as NASA do routinely.)

Conclusion 3. As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.
Recommendation 3. With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, review and consultation with statisticians is expected. Indeed, it is standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health and also when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.

Conclusion 4. While the paleoclimate reconstruction has gathered much publicity because it reinforces a policy agenda, it does not provide insight and understanding of the physical mechanisms of climate change except to the extent that tree ring, ice cores and such give physical evidence such as the prevalence of greenhouse gases. What is needed is deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms of climate change.
Recommendation 4. Emphasis should be placed on the Federal funding of research related to fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of climate change. Funding should focus on interdisciplinary teams and avoid narrowly focused discipline research.

Endnotes\

[1] Mark Musser, Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust (Advantage Books, 2015), 15f.

[2] Loren Eiseley, “Francis Bacon,” in The Horizon Book of Makers of Modern Thought, introduction by Bruce Malish (New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1972), 95–96.

[3] James Hannam documents this in The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2011).

[4] Pearcey and Thaxton write of these men that “their goal was to secularize society, replacing the Christian worldview with scientific naturalism. … They understood very well that they were replacing one religion by another, for they described their goal as the establishment of the ‘church scientific.’” Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 19. Hannam comments on the book particularly responsible for this fiction by the President of Cornell University, Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology: “[It] gave the illusion of meticulous scholarship. But anyone who checks his references will wonder how he could have maintained his opinions if he had read as much as he claimed to have done.” Hannam, Genesis of Science, xvi.

[5] William F Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Garden City, NY: 1968), 259, 262. Albright gave more credit to neighboring Phoenicia than to Israel for starting this intellectual revolution, but he also upheld a very close contemporary relationship between the two. He strongly opposed the traditional liberal view that the concepts started with the Greeks and then spread eastward in the Levant by asserting the opposite flow westward from Israel-Phoenicia to Greece.

[6] http://www.worldmag.com/2014/04/slaughtering_conventional_history_s_sacred_cows (accessed 2/20/2016)

[7] John E. Oliver, Climate and Man’s Environment (New York: Wiley, 1973), 365.

[8] H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Future (London: Methuen, 1977).

[9] See excerpt from David Deming, “Global Warming, the Politicization of Science, and Michael Crichton’s ‘State of Fear,’” Journal of Scientific Exploration, v. 19, no. 2, June 2005, cited in Brian Sussman, Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam (Washington DC: WorldNetDaily Books, 2010), 32.

[10] Sussman, 32–35. Author Sussman notes that Deming shared this story before a Senate Committee in Washington, DC so he personally interviewed Deming to find out who he thought was the author of that email. Deming said he thought it was from a fellow by the name of Overpeck. Sussman investigated and found that there was a Jonathan Overpeck working on climate change issues with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). During the Climategate scandal of leaked email traffic there is an email from Overpeck in which he is agitated by the perception that he wrote the email to Deming although Deming never mentioned Overpeck before the Senate committee hearing. Sussman investigated further: “I discovered an official 1998 government press release regarding the MWP, quoting Jonathan Overpeck [who] declares, ‘the so-called Medieval Warm Period did not exist.’”

[11] This report is available at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf.

[12] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus

[13] See Ross McKitrick, “A First Look at ‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus’ by Karl et al., Science 4 June 2015,” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possible-artifacts-of-data-biases-in-the-recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus-by-karl-et-al-science-4-june-2015/, accessed March 15, 2016; Judith Curry, “Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming?” at https://judithcurry.com/2015/06/04/has-noaa-busted-the-pause-in-global-warming/, accessed March 15, 2016; Patrick J. Michaels, Richard S. Lindzen, and Paul C. Knappenberger, “@NOAA ‘s desperate new paper: Is there no global warming ‘hiatus’ after all?” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaas-new-paper-is-there-no-global-warming-hiatus-after-all/, accessed March 15, 2016; Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts, “NOAA/NCDC’s new ‘pause-buster’ paper: a laughable attempt to create warming by adjusting past data,” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data/, accessed March 15, 2016; The Global Warming Policy Forum, “Reports of the Death of the Global Warming Pause are Greatly Exaggerated,” at http://www.thegwpf.com/reports-of-the-end-of-the-global-warming-pause-are-greatly-exaggerated/, accessed March 15, 2016; Christopher Monckton, “Has NOAA / NCDC’s Tom Karl repealed the Laws of Thermodynamics?” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/05/has-noaa-ncdcs-tom-karl-repealed-the-laws-of-thermodynamics/, accessed March 15, 2016.

[14] Happer notes that the EPA, too, failed to follow published peer-review guidelines when it issued The Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding in support of new environmental regulations. His letter to Congressman Lamar Smith, Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives, “In Pursuit of Integrity, Transparency, and Accountability in Scientific Work Guiding Government Policy” was put up on the website of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation requesting scholars from pertinent fields to sign.

[15] Cited by E. Calvin Beisner, “The Ecological Utopia,” in The Coming Pagan Utopia, edited by Peter Jones (Escondido, CA: Truthxchange, 2013), 54. Beisner reports (61) how a joint project of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development together with two Marxist world leaders—former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and Canadian billionaire Maurice Strong—with Zen Buddhist Steven Rockefeller and neopagan Mary Tucker, Research Scholar at Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Divinity School created the Earth Charter (see http://www.earthcharterinaction.org). Filled with Marxist-socialist policy points placing man under nature, it is “kept in an Ark of Hope, modeled on the Mosaic Ark of the Testimony and carted around the world for religious ceremonies in which people dedicate themselves to implementing the Charter.”

[16] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1^st edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 263. Paganism always deifies nature and puts man under it in contrast to the Bible, which places man over nature and forbids its worship.

[17] “Dwight D. Eisenhower: Farewell Address,” The Annals of America (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), vol. 18, 4.

[18] Richard S. Lindzen, “Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?” p 5. A paper prepared for a meeting sponsored by Euresis (Associazone per la promozione e la diffusione della cultura e del lavoro scientifico) and the Templeton Foundation on Creativity and Creative Inspiration in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering: Developing a Vision for the Future. The meeting was held in San Marino from 29–31 August 2008. Its Proceedings were expected to be published in 2009, but so far I have been unable to obtain a published copy.

[19] Lindzen, “Climate Science,” 5. The public must be aware, therefore, that such organizations do not necessarily reflect the views of their membership.

[20] Discussed in the supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 96, No. 12, December 2015, entitled “Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 From a Climate Perspective.” Acknowledgement is made that “because of the fundamentally mixed nature of anthropogenic and natural climate variability … results are necessarily probabilistic and not deterministic” (page S1).

[21] David Legates, “Carbon Dioxide and Air Temperature: Who Leads and Who Follows?” (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, 2012), at http://cornwallalliance.org/2012/12/carbon-dioxide-and-air-temperature-who-leads-and-who-follows/, accessed April 7, 2016.

[22] Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 329, 362.

[23] Interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14 November 2010, reporter Bernard Potter. http//www.wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18. Accessed February 23, 2016.

[24] Herald Sun , Melbourne and Victoria, Australia, July 28, 2011

[25] See at http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2015/10/19. Accessed February 23, 2016. Senator Whitehouse angrily mentioned Dr. Beisner by name for his influence in raising opposition to climate alarmist policies.

[26] Wills Robinson, “Attorney General Loretta Lynch has ‘considered taking legal action against climate change deniers,” DailyMail.com, March 10, 2016, at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3485864/Attorney-General-Loretta-Lynch-considered-taking-legal-action-against-climate-change-deniers.html, accessed April 7, 2016.

[27] “Al Gore and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman Launch AGs United for Clean Power Coalition,” ClimateRealityProject.org, March 30, 2016, at https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/al-gore-and-new-york-attorney-general-eric-schneiderman-launch-ags-united-clean-power-coalition, accessed April 7, 2016.

[28] Peter Jones, “Preface,” The Coming Pagan Utopia, edited by Jones, 9.

[29] This point is denied by some within the movement who promote an attempted syncretism of Christianity and paganism due to their varying degrees of commitments to Christianity.

[30] Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1968).

[31] Musser points out that this anti-pagan animosity begun in the 19^th century by philosophers like Schopenhauer became one of the impulses for Nazi hatred of the Jews. Musser writes, “Schopenhauer’s anti-Semitic environmental ethics specifically targeted the domineering attitude towards nature and animals found in the Bible. … [He] even knew precisely which primary text was to blame, ‘These are the effects of the first chapter of Genesis. …’” Nazi Oaks, 117.

[32] Forgotten in both media and academia is the improvement in cities’ pollution after the automobile replaced horses for transportation. The increasing volume of horse-drawn vehicles left city streets constantly polluted with manure and urine in the ‘good ol’ days.’ Fossil-fuel driven automobiles completely did away with this health-hazard.

[33] Fleur Cowles and Prince Phillip, If I Were an Animal (New York: William Morrow, 1987), foreword.

[34] For a Biblically based treatment of man’s place in nature together with the economic and sociological implications, see E. Calvin Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans/The Acton institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 1997).

[35] http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/10/31/here-why-china-one-child-policy-was-good-thing/GY4XiQLeYfAZ8e8Y7yFycI/story.htmlhttp://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/10/31/here-why-china-one-child-policy-was-good-thing/GY4XiQLeYfAZ8e8Y7yFycI/story.html, accessed February 25, 2016.

[36] To sustain a nation economically the birthrate must average 2.1 children/family or higher. Today nations like Japan and most European nations have birthrates significantly below 2.1. In the U.S. the more liberal “blue” states have declining birthrates whereas the more conservative “red” states do not—a demographic with important economic and political implications and a consequence of the rejection or continuation of Biblical influence in the respective regions.

[37] This is why the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation morally opposes energy-restrictive global policies that are all risk and no reward, built as they are on the questionable science of climate change. See “Protect the Poor: Ten Reasons to Oppose Harmful Climate Change Policies,” at http://cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/protect-the-poor-ten-reasons-to-oppose-harmful-climate-change-policies/ accessed March 3, 2016.

[38] J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know (Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 2003), 161.

[39] Mentioned in Discover Magazine sometime in 1989 according to an editorial in the New Jersey Trentonian, 9 April 2012.

[40] Discussed in Sussman, 103.

[41] Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness, 51.

[42] Figures taken from Michael Oard, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1990), 112, 174.

[43] Alabama State Climatologist John Christy, before the U.S. House Committee on Resources, 13 May 2003.

[44] See the NY Times story about the Fresh Kills landfill at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/how-a-former-landfill-helped-absorb-hurricanes-surge/?_r=1, accessed March 5, 2016.

[45] Jones is quoting from Ernest Sternberg, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For,” Orbis 54:1 (Winter 2010): 61–86. Note Gore’s parallel statement about a “new faith” in a quote above.

[46] Peter Jones, “The Coming Pagan Utopia,” 218–219.

[47] See note 38.

[48] http://www.climatedepot.com/2012/04/23/alert-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-reverses-himself-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change-so-was-gore-the-problem-is-we-dont-know-what-the-climate-is-doing-we-thought-we-knew-20-years-ago/, accessed February 23, 2016.

[49] See the serious legal threats discussed in text above referencing note 27.

[50] Sussman, 16f.

[51] Ibid., 18

[52] The oft-cited “97%” claim itself is a fraud coming from a 2013 paper that instead of surveying a sample confined to climate scientists’ published papers also included psychology studies, marketing papers, and even a survey of the Bangladesh public’s choices of stoves! “Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males, and the 97%” at http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/ignore-climate-consensus-studies-based-on-random-people-rating-journal-article-abstracts, accessed October 23, 2015.

[53] Quoted in “Climate Change and the Death of Science,” by Christian British blogger Kevin McGrane at

https://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/, accessed February 25, 2016.

[54] Moore gave a detailed lecture to justify his disbelief that climate change is a crisis at http://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/, accessed February 25, 2016.

[55] See note 23.

[56] See for example, Exodus 21:2–22:17; Deut 19:14.

[57] Available at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf.