The interview above was first published in the October 12, 2019 issue of Christian Renewal magazine (www.crmag.com) and is reproduced by permission.

Part one of this interview was published on our website here.

From the Ministry to the Climate and Some Points in Between

You may have noticed the growing attention to the subject of climate change that continues to captivate the media. That is because a pact was agreed upon by over 250 media outlets to blitz people around the globe with articles about the subject, a subject that TIME magazine recently pronounced was “settled science.” What they claim is settled is man-made (person-made?) climate change. No ifs, ands, or doubts. We did it, and now we’ve got to solve it. And the messiah is more gov­ernment.

“Settled science” is an interesting term that is intro­duced to end all debate and to vilify and isolate anyone who thinks differently. We’ve heard that term used before when it comes to evolution. The media declares that the science is settled. When it comes to homosexu­ality, the science is settled. When it comes to any cause or agenda item that the left is pushing, science is called upon as the arbiter of “truth,” which is interesting, because truth today is considered to be “relative,” and also because on other subjects, such as gender, for example, settled science would mean only two genders – male and female.

“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, Columbia Journalism Review’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many orga­nizations from across the US and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists – to report this hugely important story.” Well, there is reporting, and then there is blatant pro­paganda.

We, too, are covering climate now, just not in the way the rest of the media seems to be toeing the line. —John Van Dyke, Editor, Christian Renewal Magazine

Climate Change and the Battle for People’s Minds (Part 2 of 2)

by Gerry Wisz

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is small when compared to institutions, and the foundations that support them, that advocate for vast re­trenchment of the world’s energy infrastructure because of climate change. Yet it’s had a consider­able impact.

The Cornwall Alliance has ed­ucated, and continues to educate, the Christian community and others about what’s truly known and unknown about the sources of climate change, provides expla­nations for climate change that have been ignored or censored by the media, and researches and analyzes the impact on economic development that vast “green” infrastructure replacement would actually cause.

In Part II of Christian Renew­al’s interview with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, Founder and National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance, Dr. Beisner addresses issues such as climate-change “consensus,” how false or incom­plete information is provided to exaggerate climate change, and attempts made by climate alarmists to infiltrate Christian evangelical institutions.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Isn’t it true that the ice in Greenland has increased in the past few years?

CAL BEISNER: There have been ups and downs in Greenland ice cover. What’s crucial is that the long-term trend doesn’t portend rapid sea-level rise.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: There are so many “glob­al” initiatives: the Conference of Parties (2018), the Paris Climate Agreement (2015), UNFCCC, Agenda 2030. Would you explain the thrust of these initiatives? Which are the ones we should pay close attention to and why?

CAL BEISNER: The United Nations Frame­work Convention on Climate Change is the treaty under which the annual Conference of the Par­ties (COP) takes place, and the annual COP seeks to create trea­ties or agreements to control CO2 emissions. The Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. never ratified, was the first one. President Barack Obama embraced the Paris accord by executive agreement, but nev­er submitted this to the Senate because he declared it not a trea­ty (although most other countries considered it one). The accord was hammered out in 2015 and ratified by most countries in 2016. President Trump an­nounced in June of 2017 that the United States would withdraw from it (a multi-year process that isn’t finished yet). This replaces the Kyoto Protocol.

Full compliance with the Paris accord by all nations would cost from 1 to 2 trillion dollars per year and, even accepting all the framers’ assumptions about how much warming would be prevent­ed per Gigaton of CO2 emissions prevented, would reduce GAT in 2100 by no more than about 0.3 degree Fahrenheit – meaning a cost of 23.3 to 46.6 trillion dollars per tenth of a degree tem­perature reduction. And that tem­perature reduction is only barely enough to detect and certainly not enough to have any impact on any ecosystem or the human economy. It’s worse than a total waste, because it would slow eco­nomic development for the poor, subjecting them to high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany poverty, for generations to come. Poverty is a far greater threat than anything related to climate. Slowing its conquest for such an insignificant tradeoff is immoral.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Why have so many scientists signed on to the climate change “consensus,” particularly the no­tion that CO2 has to be drastically curtailed, even if doing so won’t have much of an effect? There clearly seems something other than simply “climate” that proponents are pushing for.

CAL BEISNER: First, the “consensus” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, as veteran meteorologist and former National Hurricane Center Di­rector Neil Frank demonstrated in a major article for the Corn­wall Alliance’s website. The real consensus is probably something more in the range of 50 to 60%, and it’s not a consensus that human emissions of CO2 are causing, or will cause, dangerous global warming, but simply that GAT has risen over the past cen­tury and a half and that human activity has contributed to that warming.

Second, consensus isn’t a scientific value. It’s a political value. Want to know who won an election? Count votes. Want to know how much a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will raise GAT? You don’t count votes, you do the hard empirical research. So anyone who starts appealing to consensus isn’t real­ly talking science.

Third, many scientists who do embrace the dangerous-to-cata­strophic anthropogenic warm­ing idea probably do so largely because of group pressure, as Judith Curry discussed in a major paper on how the IPCC created consensus.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Tell us about the climate alarmists taking aim at evangel­ical colleges and other Christian institutions.

CAL BEISNER: Backed by major left-wing foundations like Rockefeller, Tides, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett, and several of George Soros’s organizations, climate alarmists have been working since the mid-1990s to get evan­gelicals onto the climate alarm­ist bandwagon. They’ve largely failed – and a Soros-funded study concluded in 2015 that it was largely Cornwall Alliance’s work that stopped them. Most recently, they’ve been presenting a vid­eo lecture by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech to students at evangelical colleges – showing them only one side of the argument – and recording sig­nificant shifts toward alarmism among them. That they present only the one side is of course bad pedagogy. Students learn more when they’re presented with arguments for various positions. But it’s good brainwashing.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Has the Cornwall Alliance been misrepresented?

CAL BEISNER: Sure, all the time. People say we deny all human contribution to global warming. We don’t. We affirm it. They say we’re a front group for fossil fuel interests. We’re not. The vast majority of our donations come from private individuals, and none comes from any major corporation. There are plenty of other misrepresenta­tions, but the best thing for people to go to CornwallAlliance.org and see what we say.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: How do climate alarmists deflect concern and resources from genuine needs that affect billions of people?

CAL BEISNER: All sorts of ways, but espe­cially by focusing government and private spending on prevent­ing or reducing climate change, the benefits of which are minus­cule compared with the costs, rather than on specific risks associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, sewage sanitation, reliable and affordable electricity, adequate nutrition, health care, safe transportation, and so on. Every dollar spent on those yields significant improve­ments for people. Every dollar spent on fighting climate change is basically wasted or worse.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Despite the current admin­istration’s openness to assessing climate alarm as baseless, the EPA still has a considerable influence on policy in this area. Please comment.

CAL BEISNER: A President appoints heads of agencies and some of their top assistants, but there are thousands of career bureaucrats – what many now call the “deep state” – who stay on for decades, and it’s very difficult to overcome their influence on policy.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: What are some of the tricks played by climate alarmists?

CAL BEISNER: One trick is to talk of “car­bon emissions” when what’s really meant is carbon dioxide emissions. When people think of carbon, they think of black soot and the like – nasty stuff that irritates the eyes and lungs and makes breathing difficult. That’s real pollution. But carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas, nontoxic except at concentrations hundreds of times higher than it is in the atmosphere or frankly ever could become even if we burned all the world’s fossil fuels at once tomorrow.

Instead, carbon dioxide is essential to life. Plants need it for photosynthesis, and the more they get the better they grow. For every doubling of CO2 concen­tration, you get an average 35% increase in plant growth efficiency. They grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures and wetter and drier soils. They make better use of soil nutrients. They resist disease and pests better. All that means they ex­pand their ranges, which means all the animals that depend on them can expand their ranges, too – great for biodiversity. They also improve their fruit-to-fiber ratio. The result is more food for everything that eats plants – and ev­erything that eats something that eats plants. The poor benefit the most from this, as food becomes cheaper.

Another trick is to include everyone who agrees that the world has warmed in the last 200 years and that human activity has contributed to it in the catego­ry of the “97% consensus” that anthropogenic global warming is dangerous to catastrophic.

Yet another has been to get peo­ple to think that computer model output is evidence. It isn’t. It’s hy­pothesis, and it needs to be tested by empirical observation. When that happens, we find that the models project two to four times the warming actually observed, which means they’re wrong and provide no rational basis for any prediction of future temperature or any policy to deal with it.

Two more tricks, among many: (1) In the last five to ten years they’ve been “adjusting” raw temperature data from stations around the world to push earlier readings lower and later readings higher, exaggerating the apparent warming. Data homogenization is legitimate in principle, but if errors were random and homoge­nization techniques were entirely consistent, you would expect to find upward and downward adjustments equally common all through the time series. That’s not happening. It’s pretty obvious that the adjustments are meant to support a predetermined conclu­sion. (2) They call anyone who questions catastrophic man-made warming a “climate denier” or “science denier,” which is both wicked rhetorically and false sci­entifically. “Denier” is intended to associate them with Holocaust deniers, so it’s a smear. But besides that, it’s really those who insist that empirical evidence is more important than hypothesis and theory – even sophisticated computer climate models – who are the real science affirmers.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: The Cornwall Alliance has had an outsized impact on helping reshape or at least questioning cli­mate alarmist assumptions. Please share some “wins” and why the Cornwall Alliance, despite its small size, is making such an impact.

CAL BEISNER: It’s really difficult to point to major, clear “wins” in what we do, because so much is a matter of incremental influence here and there, all adding up to the fact that evangelicals remain the most skeptical of climate alarmism of any demographic in America. But I can name a couple of things.

Most recently, there was the cover story of Christianity Today magazine about oil and climate change that quoted us respect­fully and said our arguments are persuasive. Given CT’s past coverage of climate change, that was quite a departure.

A few years ago, as I mentioned earlier, George Soros’s New America Foundation commis­sioned a major, year-long study by two academic sociologists to discover why over 20 years of effort funded by many millions of dollars had failed to bring evangelicals aboard the climate alarmist bandwagon. Their con­clusion, which they reported in their paper Spreading the Gospel of Climate Change: An Evangelical Battleground, basically, was that the Cornwall Alliance had per­suaded evangelical leaders and laity against it.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: Describe some of your current projects, such as working on the EPA’s “CO2 endangered [sic] finding,” Wikipedia, and others.

CAL BEISNER: Our financial resources are quite limited, so we have to be careful where we put our efforts. This year and next we’re likely to focus heavily on three things: (1) reaching more of the American public through speaking engage­ments, our website, and our books and videos; (2) explaining why a “carbon tax” (really a “car­bon dioxide tax,” but there’s that tricky language again) is a bad idea; and (3) explaining why the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment find­ing” about carbon dioxide was based on poor science and should be reversed – something that would take out the legal basis for all regulation of CO2 emissions.

CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: The ins and outs of climate change arguments and the politics in which these arguments stew is not top of mind for most people. Why is it important for people to be informed?

CAL BEISNER: It’s important because tril­lions of dollars ride on it, as does people’s access to the abundant, affordable, reliable energy that lifts and keeps them out of pover­ty, and along with both of those, people’s freedom from excessive government control of their lives, since energy is an element in everything we do. The more control over energy government has, the more control over our lives it has.

It’s also important because the international/global climate-regu­latory efforts all involve massive forced redistribution of wealth from developed to developing countries. If such wealth redistri­bution were a proven success at lifting people out of poverty, that would be one thing – but instead it’s the opposite. Long-term stud­ies show clearly that nations de­velop fastest that receive the least foreign aid, and nations develop slowest that receive the most. That, of course, is aside from the moral question of whether it’s right to take from some what they produce and give to others to whom it doesn’t belong. The Eighth Commandment doesn’t, after all, say “You shall not steal unless you are the government.” The added danger of such agree­ments is that they increasingly move law and policy decisions to unelected, unaccountable global bureaucrats, away from elected, accountable representatives, and that’s the sure road away from liberty and into tyranny.

Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash.