For over a decade, evangelicals have been the most skeptical subset of the American population about claims of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).

Don’t count on their staying that way.

Recently Physics World reported on an experiment conducted at three evangelical colleges to see how students’ views about global warming/climate change would shift if they viewed a professionally done one-hour presentation designed to persuade them that it’s real, mainly human-induced, dangerous, and ought to be high on our list of priorities.

At Houghton College in rural upstate New York, Tyndale University College and Seminary in Ontario, Canada, and Dallas Baptist University in Texas, students watched a video lecture by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and Professor of Political Science (you read that right!) at Texas Tech University, where she is also Director of the Climate Science Center.

Time magazine named Hayhoe one of America’s 100 most influential people in 2014. The honor surely rested more on celebrity and politics than on Hayhoe’s respectable but not extraordinary scientific accomplishments.

She’s David versus Goliath (courageous young woman in a field dominated by older men) and man-bites-dog (professed evangelical who firmly embraces the view that global warming is primarily human induced and dangerous enough to justify spending trillions to mitigate it) wrapped up in a single person. (Well, no, not single in that sense—she’s married to an evangelical pastor, which gives her even more celebrity and, with evangelicals, street cred.)

What the experiment showed, according to the formal report on it in Environmental Research Letters, was that students expressing concern about global warming rose from below 50% to over 70%, and even at the school with the most conservative students, Dallas Baptist, the percentage who thought global warming was happening rose from 51% before to 87% after.

Of course that’s not surprising. They were given only one side of the story. Were it not for the importance of evangelicals as a voting bloc, this experiment might never have been conducted. One doesn’t spend a bunch of time and money conducting an experiment the outcome of which was perfectly predictable. (For a more detailed critique of the “experiment” and “study,” see here.)

But one does so if one can use those results as bait for funding for repetitions at other evangelical colleges. And that’s exactly what the experimenters revealed in the final sentence of their report, of which Hayhoe’s father was lead author (though they didn’t reveal that obvious conflict of interest):

This study suggests a need for a new, broadly evangelical alliance to be formed, strongly supported by academics, business people, and religious and church leaders, to take the lead and focus on this urgent issue, to speak with one voice especially to the 25% of evangelicals in the United States.

That’s code for “If you’re a big foundation with millions of dollars to spend trying to shift evangelicals’ opinions on global warming so they’ll stop blocking policies meant to fight it, look what we can do for you! Give us a million or two and we can replicate this at lots more evangelical colleges—and, presto chango!—evangelicals will jump on board your bandwagon!”

But hidden in plain sight in that report is another important fact. In the second paragraph, and again in the last paragraph, the authors mention one organization that has had greater influence on evangelicals than those on the alarmist side of the global warming controversy: the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

As George Soros’s New America Foundation discovered when it commissioned two scholars to figure out why, after half a dozen or more leftwing foundations spent many millions over two decades to convince evangelicals to embrace climate alarmism, those pesky folks remained more skeptical than any other part of the population, the Cornwall Alliance’s efforts were the main reason.

The Cornwall Alliance has been critically important, and hugely effective, in blocking harebrained schemes to fight global warming that would do nothing about climate but would trap billions in poverty for generations to come. So if you’ve been one of our supporters, thank you! Please keep it up. And if you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so now. The battle’s getting hotter all the time, and it’s clear that the other side is focusing its big guns increasingly on the evangelical world. You can donate by clicking here or on the “Donate” button on most pages of our website, or by mailing your check to Cornwall Alliance, 3712 Ringgold Rd. #355, Chattanooga, TN 37412.