As we saw in Part 2 of this brief history, the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship didn’t work out as originally hoped. But that didn’t mean the Cornwall Declaration would lie dormant forever.

David Rothbard and Craig Rucker, whom I introduced in Part 2, kept in touch with me over the next few years, encouraging me to take up afresh the challenge of spreading the principles of the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship. At last in the summer of 2005—having finished my Ph.D. and taught each of my seminary courses at least three times—I decided I could take on the new task, and they helped me start what we first called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, using the Cornwall Declaration as our founding document.

We decided the first major issue we should address would be manmade global warming. So, beginning with communications on August 31, 2005, we arranged an initial planning session for October 2005, in Washington, D.C., at which the main speaker was Dr. Roy W. Spencer, NASA award-winning climate scientist from the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Roy’s presentation was scintillating, particularly when he explained how his meditation on Genesis 1:31, which says God saw that all He had made was good, led to his devising experiments testing the theory that a little global warming caused by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would be magnified by increased water vapor resulting from the increased evaporation that initial warming would cause.

That theory implied that the climate system was inherently unstable and prone to extreme consequences from relatively minute influences—something hard to reconcile with God’s declaration that all He had made was “very good.” It was also the sole basis for fears that CO₂ emissions could lead to dangerous warming. What if, instead, the climate system was robust, resilient, and self-correcting—something consistent with God’s evaluation of His creation—and increased evaporation from the initial warming resulted not just in more water vapor, which warms the earth, but also in more low-level clouds, which cool it?

Because of his work, with colleague John Christy, using NASA satellites to monitor the atmosphere, Roy was able to devise an experiment to answer the question: Does initial warming increase or decrease the clouds that cool the earth? After years of gathering data, he had a firm answer: it increases them, reducing the initial warming, not magnifying it. And he published that in a leading scientific journal.

The implication: though carbon dioxide emissions could make the earth’s lower atmosphere warmer than it otherwise would be, they weren’t likely to make it dangerously warmer.

At that meeting in October of 2005, we decided Roy and I, together with energy analyst Paul Driessen—senior policy analyst for the Congress of Racial Equality, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, and an expert on energy policy—would write a “white paper” defending an alternative view on global warming.

The result was An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change. Roy wrote on the climate science, Paul on the impoverishing effects of energy policy driven by fears of dangerous warming, and I on “seven Biblical principles for environmental stewardship” and how to apply sequential decision theory to achieve prudent decisions about how to balance prevention of global warming with adaptation to it. The paper has stood the test of time and applies as well to the climate-change debates today as it did then. That paper was the first major communication from the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, and it quickly got the attention especially of many evangelical leaders, we’ll see in Part 4 what that led to.

Go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Photo by Kaushik Panchal on Unsplash.