Kyle Meyaard-Schaap is passionate. If all Christians were as committed to seeking God’s purpose for this earth, the United States would not be in the mess it is.  

But this does not mean I endorse Meyaard-Schaap’s conclusion, in his book Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action (InterVarsity Press, 2023), that Christians should view manmade climate change as a crisis that demands spending trillions of dollars fighting it. 

Meyaard-Schaap depends heavily on stories to convey his message, beginning with his own. So, here is mine. 

I was born in northwest Kansas in a farming community. As a pre-teen, I experienced the dust bowl. We always took goggles with us when going to grade school because you never knew when a dust storm would blow in and you had to protect your eyes.   

It was very cold in the winter. Everyone used wood burning stoves for heat. Dad would stoke up the stove at night, but the fire would be out by morning. We stayed warm under thick feather blankets. All the streams and lakes froze over with ice thick enough to skate on. Today, because of the warmer earth, there is little ice skating on my granddad’s old property. 

Before widespread irrigation, my granddad and his neighbors figured they could survive with one good crop every three years. Needless to say, they welcomed a warmer earth. 

In college, I majored in science. After I graduated, I served in the Air Force’s meteorology program. Later, I earned a Ph.D. in meteorology at Florida State University. I joined the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in 1961, served as its director from 1973 to1987, and then became chief meteorologist for the CBS affiliate in Houston, Texas, where I served for 21 years. 

My first awareness of global warming came in the 1980’s, when the first warnings were issued. I had no reason to doubt them because I respected those who gave them. 

The warnings were strong and very disturbing. We were told mankind was destroying the earth and that catastrophic results could occur in our lifetimes. I believed fossil fuels were the cause.  

The first person to challenge my belief was the late Dr. Bill Gray, the first meteorologist to begin predicting the number of hurricanes that would occur each year. He sent me the book Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming (1992), by Virginia State Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, Research Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Virginia. 

Sound and Fury was among the first books to question catastrophic global warming theory. Its main message was to first look at, then be guided by, the data. This began my conversion path to hardcore skepticism. Today, having done much more research and read many more books and articles on the subject, I no longer consider CO2 a major determinant of the earth’s temperature. 

Meyaard-Schaap told his story. Now I’ve told mine. But to make a rational decision about climate change, we need not personal stories but scientific evidence subjected to careful scrutiny. Meyaard-Schaap doesn’t offer that. Instead, he tries to discredit skeptics of dangerous climate change. On page 80 he states, “I’ve often wondered about the peculiarity of climate denial. It’s not a universal response to the overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change.” On pages 31–32 he accuses skeptics of spreading false information and accuses them of tactics similar to the tobacco industry’s to mislead people. 

I challenge Meeyard-Schaap’s concept of climate-change skeptics. I have read over thirty books by well-qualified scientists who became skeptics after examining the data. 

Dr. Alan Carlin was a senior scientist in the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and spent most of his career as a proponent of global warming. Challenged to look at the data, he did so, became a skeptic, and wrote Environmentalism Gone Mad: How a Sierra Club Activist and Senior EPA Policy Analyst Discovered a Radical Green Energy Fantasy (2015). 

Dr. Patrick Moore was a founder of Greenpeace. When it deviated from its original purpose, he left it and investigated global warming. He concluded that CO2 was not a major factor in the earth’s temperature and wrote Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (2011). 

Dr. Tim Ball, an internationally known Canadian climatologist, once worked for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Eventually he became disillusioned with what he considered its corruption and left, documenting his experience in The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science (2014). 

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth prompted multiple scientists to respond. John Kehr, B.S., a chemical engineer, devoted two years to a search to verify or falsify Gore’s claims. The results are in his book The Inconvenient Skeptic: The Comprehensive Guide to the Earth’s Climate (2011). Gregory Wrightstone, M.S., a geologist, wrote Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know (2018), then became executive director of the CO2 Coalition, a group of over fifty skeptical scientists. M.J. Sangster, Ph.D., an electrical engineer, wrote The Real Inconvenient Truth: It’s Warming: But It’s Not CO2: The Case for Human-Caused Global Warming and Climate Change is Based on Lies, Deceit, and Manipulation (2019). 

Many other excellent scientists—mathematicians, physicists, chemists, meteorologists, climatologists, atmospheric physicists or geologists, and others with appropriate qualifications—have examined the arguments for and against the claim that human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are causing climate change that is or will become catastrophic and have concluded to the contrary. A short list of their books appears at the end of this review. 

In his introduction, Meeyard-Schaap claims that “90 to 100% of all climate scientists agree that the climate is warming at an alarming rate” and that the primary cause is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.” The average level of consensus across all studies is 97 percent.” Later he claims, “In almost every country on earth, the scientific findings of anthropogenic global warming are as accepted as the laws of gravity” (p. 80). 

The 97% claim comes from a paper by John Cook et al. that has been debunked multiple times, for example, my article “What’s Wrong with the Claim that ‘97% of Climate Scientists agree about Global Warming’?” There I show that this and similar studies badly mishandled data and misrepresented both scientists and the scientific literature. The 97% cited by the author is extreme misinformation. 

In 2013, 49 retired NASA scientists and astronauts challenged NASA’s position on global warming. The mainstream media largely ignored them. 

In 2019, when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. General Assembly, the Secretary-General had in his hand a letter signed by 500 international scientists proclaiming there was no climate emergency. Greta was in every media outlet across the world, but the letter was ignored. Has anyone ever told Greta that Sweden has cooled 2°C in the last 8,000 years? 

The proclamation by 500 scientists has been upgraded by a new international group of professionals that formed in 2019 in the Netherlands called the Global Climate Group. In 2022, 1,500 of its members signed its declaration, “There Is No Climate Emergency!” 

This is only a small sample of climate scientists, and other scientists, who would challenge the 97% consensus claimed in Following Jesus in a Warming World. But science doesn’t work by popular (or expert) vote. Consensus is a political statement, not a scientific value.  What does the data show? 

Meyaard-Schaap writes that “climate scientists agree the climate is warming about a hundred times faster than normal trends in the past” (p. 3). No, where is his data to support this statement? The earth has warmed over the past 175 years as we emerge from the Little Ice Age (roughly 1300–1850). We should all be delighted we are not living through winters like George Washington experienced in Valley Forge, or in Europe, where millions died because of crop failures caused by the cold. 

The earth’s temperature rises and falls in cycles. One of the longest cycles is Ice Ages. They last 100,000 years and are separated by 10,000-year warm periods. It has been 10,000 years since the last ice age ended, and the present warm period is the coldest of the 10,000-year warm periods separating the last four Ice Ages, as shown in the graph below. 

In addition, over the last 10,000 years, there has been a 1,000-year cycle in the earth’s temperature. Currently, we are experiencing one of the warming peaks as we emerge from the Little Ice Age. During the last peak 1,000 years ago, it was warmer than today, and Vikings farmed in Greenland for 400 years. The Little Ice Age forced them to move on. 

It was warmer than today 2,000 years ago, during the Roman period, and much warmer 3,000 years ago. The peaks at 4,000, 5,000, and 6,000 were not so dramatic, but the temperatures 7,000 and 8,000 years ago were 2-3°C warmer than today. In fact, today, we are still in the coldest part of the current 10,000-year warm period, not the warmest.  

Data from weather satellites show the earth’s temperature may be peaking. Except for a few El Niño years, there has been no significant increase in temperature for the past two decades even while CO2 levels continue to rise, suggesting CO2 does not control the earth’s temperature.  

Throughout his book, Meyaard-Schaap attributes events like heat waves, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, and sea-level rise to climate change (e.g., pp. 82, 93) But are such events really increasing, in either frequency or intensity?  What does the data show? 

1. There has been no increase in droughts. There are a number of ways the government measures the trend in droughts, and all agree that, as shown in this graph, dry hot spells are decreasing in number and intensity. Nothing we have seen in recent years compares to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. 

2. There has been no increase in wildfires. Since 1926, the U.S. government has kept yearly records on the number of wildfires and acres they destroy. Wildfires caused great damage before and during WWII. In the 1950s, there was a gigantic improvement when the government initiated several “Save Our Forest” programs. All was well until environmentalists shut down some of these programs in the name of saving endangered species. The result has been a small increase in wildfire damage caused by environmentalists’ policies. 

3. The increase in temperature has not been catastrophic. The alarmists have deceived you with misleading statements. One headline states, “Last month, the earth was the warmest ever measured and the hottest on record.” Measured means as determined by thermometers, and the thermometer record only dates back to 1880. As I said above, the earth’s temperature has been warmer than today every 1,000 years for the last 10,000. 

4. There has been no significant acceleration of sea-level rise. Records dating back to 1855 for at least 1,277 tide gauges show, as this graph illustrates that sea level has been rising about 1.92 centimeters per decade (about 7.5 inches per century), and there has been no significant change in the rate in recent years. That will not flood New York City in 2100. If former President Obama really believed his own alarmist claims, why did he buy an $11 million waterfront home? 

5. There has been no increase in the number or strength of hurricanes. On average, there are 47 hurricane-type storms worldwide every year. Only 37 hurricanes occurred in 2021, the fewest since we started keeping records 40 years ago. Meyaard-Schaap suggests that manmade global warming made 2005’s Hurricane Katrina far more intense than it otherwise would have been and stronger than anything in the past. “Robert had lived through many hurricanes. He was used to the usually placid waves of the Gulf of Mexico making their occasional intrusion into the city, only to recede again to rest within their usual boundaries. This time was different though” (p. 97). But if Meyaard-Schaap had checked the hurricane records, he would have known that over 50 years ago—before most of the modern warming—Camille was as powerful as Katrina and had devastated the New Orleans area. Even assuming that manmade warming did make Katrina stronger than it otherwise would have been, it could only have added (as I will explain below), at most, about 1% to its windspeed and rainfall. In other words, manmade warming could be blamed for only about 1.2 mph out of the 120 mph sustained winds at landfall and for about 0.08 to 0.1 inch of the 8 to 10 inches of rain deposited on New Orleans. 

Powerful killer hurricanes are a norm along the Gulf Coast. In 1935 the strongest hurricane in U.S. history devastated the Florida Keys, killing 408 of the sparse population. In 1928 a hurricane over Lake Okeechobee, Florida, killed 2,000. Ten thousand died in a hurricane in 1900 when the entire Island of Galveston went underwater. Some of our worst hurricanes occurred in the 1800s. Two in 1893 killed 2,000 on both the Louisiana and South Carolina coasts. Indianola, Texas, was a thriving seaport on the south shore of Matagorda Bay in the 1850s, with a population of around 20,000 people. It was seriously damaged by a major hurricane in 1875. The rebuilt city was totally destroyed by another in 1886. Seven hurricanes lashed the Gulf Coast in 1886, and 4 struck Texas. This is the record for the most U.S. hurricane landfalls in one year. 

In summary, not one of the five meteorological events we have been warned about has increased in frequency or intensity. Yet we face a daily barrage of misinformation by the media. Global warming has become a classic example of what Mark Levin calls propaganda in his book Unfreedom of the Press. Forty-eight out of 79 dramatic warnings about global warming issued by so-called experts since 1970 have failed, so why should we be concerned about the remaining 31 that are yet to be verified (International Journal of Global Warming)?  

Meyaard-Schaap says Al Gore “knows the science better than almost anyone on the face of the earth” (p. 104). Yet Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a climate scientist (neither Gore nor Meyaard-Schaap is one), says in a book-length critique of Gore’s movies An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel and his accompanying books, “Gore’s portrayal of climate change and his blaming humanity for it is a mishmash of untruths, half-truths, and misrepresentations.” 

Spencer points out that Gore falsely claimed “that wheat and corn yields in China are down by 5% in recent decades. Wrong. They have been steadily climbing, just like almost everywhere else in the world.” Gore blamed Syria’s civil war on a 2006–2010 drought he called “record-breaking” and the “worst in 900 years”—though there had been no drought covering the period, and “Only the last year (2010) … [was] significantly below average in precipitation, yet nowhere near a record.” 

Even when Gore made claims that were not factually incorrect, Spencer explains, “he was a master at wordsmithing his statements to imply greater alarm than the evidence justified.” Thus, at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Gore warned that there was a 75% chance that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free in summer “within five to seven years.” But he did so in a way that led many reporters to take it as a firm prediction, and the scientist he cited, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, disowned the claim, while other specialists in Arctic ice loss said, “Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.” (In the 14 years since then, Arctic summer sea ice area declined until 2013 but has recovered significantly since then.) 

Gore, according to Spencer, “took virtually every dramatic event that normally occurs in nature and somehow tied it to human activities”—though, in fact, at most about 1% of such an event might properly be tied to human activities since human additions of greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere have only reduced the climate system’s ability to cool itself by about 0.25% to 1.0%.  

Several times in his book Meyaard-Schaap refers to the importance of a healthy environment and stable climate (e.g., p 79), suggesting global warming brings more harm than good. Not so! Societies advance during warm periods and rapidly decline in cold periods. The earth’s climate has changed in the past, it is changing now, and it will change in the future. There is no such thing as a stable climate. 

I would like to close with a tale of two women. Both have PhDs in meteorology, both have had successful careers, both have written books, and at times both were supporters of global warming. 

One is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University, and the other is Dr. Judith Curry, formerly Professor and Chair in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech University and now President of Climate Forecast Applications Network. 

Hayhoe is a major star in the alarmist community and the author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (with Andrew Farley, 2009) and Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (2021). In the 1990s, Curry held that same view and toured the world seeking support for the global warming alarmist position. 

Two things changed Curry’s mind. First, she was disturbed by all the corruption revealed in Climategate—the release, in 2009 and 2011, of thousands of emails among leading climate alarmists showing that they had fabricated data, suppressed contrary data, intimidated skeptical scientists, and corrupted climate science. They controlled the meteorological professional journals, and no skeptic’s papers were published. Second, she went back and took a hard look at the data. She is now a mild skeptic. 

Two women looking at the same data and yet taking different actions. Whom should we believe? The evidence I’ve offered above suggests we should believe Curry. 

A third woman is Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology. At one time, she was the president of the American Meteorological Society. In the latter part of her career, she was a senior scientist with NASA. Upon retirement, she expressed her true belief: “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization, nor receive any funding, I can speak quite frankly. For more than a decade now, ‘global warming’ has become the primary interface between our science and society. A large group of earth scientists voiced in an IPCC statement, have reached what they claim is a consensus of nearly all atmospheric scientists that man-released greenhouse gases are causing increasing harm to our planet. … But as a scientist, I remain skeptical.” 

The primary objective of Following Jesus in a Warming World was to discredit skeptics and demonize fossil fuels. The skeptics I’ve cited have excellent academic backgrounds and are extremely well-informed. Meyaard-Schaap is trying to convince readers that skeptics convey misinformation. The opposite is the truth. If CO2 is not a major factor in the earth’s temperature, then Meyaard-Schaap’s premise is false, and his book serves no laudable purpose. 

So, what is driving this gigantic international effort to convert to green energy at the cost of trillions and trillions of dollars?   

Is it powerful people wanting more control? Is it being driven by money? However real these reasons are, they cannot explain the worldwide intensity of this movement. 

The answer can be found in the opening statement at the first international conference on global warming in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. The late Maurice Strong, a rich Canadian who had been working with the U.N. for years to establish a one-world government, was the chairman of that conference, and he said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” There it is. The purpose is in plain sight, and we missed it. This position was verified some time later by a senior U.N. official, Ottmar Edenhofer, who said, in an interview with a reporter, “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.”  

Historically, public policy has depended heavily on science. Not so with global warming. The roles have been reversed. Now science depends heavily on public policy. Almost unlimited global warming money has forced science to produce results that justify claims of dangerous global warming. 

The result of this misinformation may be the establishment of a One World Government. People, be very careful what you endorse about global warming. 

Neil L. Frank, Ph.D. (Meteorology) was the longest-serving director of the National Hurricane Center (1974–1987), is a former chairman of the World Meteorological Organization’s International Hurricane Committee, served as Chief Meteorologist of KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston (1987–2008), and is a Senior Fellow of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. The author is very grateful to Dr. Calvin Beisner for the time and effort he spent in reviewing this document. Many of his excellent suggestions are included in the final draft. The Cornwall Alliance is an excellent resource for those seeking the truth about global warming. 

For Further Study 

In a world inundated with propaganda favoring belief in catastrophic manmade global warming, everyone needs sources of corrective information. Here are 39 books that do that. 

Balling, Robert C. Jr. The Heated Debate: Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality (1992). 

Carter, Robert M. Climate: The Counter Consensus (2010). 

Curry, Judith A. Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (2023). 

Essex, Christopher, and Ross McKitrick. Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming, 2d ed. (2007). 

Gerondeau, Christian. Climate: The Great Delusion: A Study of the Climate, Economic, and Political Realities (2010). 

Idso, Craig D., Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer. Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus (2016). 

Koonin, Steven E. Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021). 

Lomborg, Bjørn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). 

Lomborg, Bjørn. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020). 

Michaels, Patrick J. Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (2004). 

Michaels, Patrick J., and Paul C. Knappenberger. Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything (2016). 

Michaels, Patrick J., and Robert C. Balling Jr. The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming (2000). 

Michaels, Patrick J., and Robert C. Balling. Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know (2008). 

Michaels, Patrick J., ed. Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives (2011); contributors include Roger Pilon, Evan Turgeon, Ross McKitrick, Ivan Eland, Sallie James, Indur M. Goklany, Robert E. Davis, and Neal McCluskey. 

Michaels, Patrick J., ed. Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming (2005). 

Montford, A.W. Hiding the Decline: A History of the Climategate Affair (2012). 

Montford, A.W. The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010). 

Moore, Thomas Gale. Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry about Global Warming (1998). 

Moran, Alan, ed. Climate Change the Facts 2014 (2014); contributors include Ian Plimer, Patrick J. Michaels, Richard S. Lindzen, Willie Soon, Robert M. Carter, John Abbott, Jennifer Marohasy, Nigel Lawson, James Delingpole, Garth W. Paltridge, Joanne Nova, Kesten Green, J. Scott Armstrong, Rupert Darwall, Ross McKitrick, Donna Laframboise, Mark Steyn, Christopher Essex, Bernard Lewin, Stewart Franks, Anthony Watts, and Andrew Bolt. 

Morris, Julian, ed. Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (1997); contributors include Robert C. Balling Jr., Roger Bate, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Deepak Lal, and Thomas Gale Moore. 

Mosher, Steven, and Thomas W. Fuller. Climategate: The CRUTape Letters (2010). 

Paltridge, Garth W. The Climate Caper (2010). 

Pielke, Roger Jr. The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You about Global Warming (2010). 

Plimer, Ian. Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science (2009). 

Robinson, G. Dedrick, and Gene D. Robinson III. Global Warming Alarmists, Skeptics, and Deniers: A Geoscientist Looks at the Science of Climate Change (2012). 

Sangster, M.J. The Real Inconvenient Truth: It’s Warming: but it’s Not CO2; The case for human-caused global warming and climate change is based on deceit, lies, and manipulation (2018). 

Singer, S. Fred, and Dennis T. Avery. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, 2d ed. (2008). 

Singer, S. Fred, with David R. Legates and Anthony R. Lupo. Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, 3d ed. (2021). 

Solomon, Lawrence. The Deniers: The World-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud* *And those who are too fearful to do so (2008). 

Soon, Willie Wei-Hock. The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection (2003). 

Spencer, Roy W. An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy (2017). 

Spencer, Roy W. Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor (2008). 

Spencer, Roy W. The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists (2010). 

Spencer, Roy. W. Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People (2018). 

Svensmark, Henrik, and Nigel Calder. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007). 

Vahrenholt, Fritz, and Sebastian Lüning. The Neglected Sun: Why the Sun Precludes Climate Catastrophe (2013). 

van Kooten, G. Cornelis. Climate Change, Climate Science and Economics: Prospects for an Alternative Energy Future (2013). 

Vincent Gray, Vincent. The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of ‘Climate Change 2001’ (2002). 

Zyrkowski, John. It’s the Sun, Not Your SUV: CO2 Won’t Destroy the Earth (2008).