Back in June I had the tremendous privilege of interviewing 32 scholars and leaders on camera for Cornwall Alliance’s forthcoming documentary, Where the Grass is Greener: Biblical Stewardship vs. Climate Alarmism, and our already posting YouTube video series Greener on the Other Side: Climate Alarmism—Facts, Not Fear (subscribe to our YouTube channel and you’ll be notified of new videos when they post). Many of these are giants in their fields. All are brilliant people and dedicated to the service of their fellow human beings, and especially to protecting and helping the world’s poor and most vulnerable.

I was like a kid in a candy shop. My interests are extremely broad: theology, philosophy, history, law, economics, political philosophy (but I confess I largely detest party politics), the natural sciences, music, art—on and on.

Take the natural sciences. I’ve been fascinated by them for decades and studied climate science in particular a great deal in the last two decades, but this gave me the opportunity to talk face-to-face with some of my heroes in the field and ask them questions that have intrigued me for years. I wasn’t disappointed by their razor-sharp answers.

Climate’s a tremendously complex thing to study. There’s not only the atmosphere to think about—and as my long-time friend and climate adviser Dr. Roy W. Spencer (Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and NASA award-winning U.S. Science Team Leader for the Aqua Satellite remote sensing program, the source of satellite-obtained global temperature data) is fond of quoting a 1960s song he and I both liked about just one aspect of the atmosphere, “We really don’t know clouds at all!”—but also the oceans, the lithosphere, the cryosphere, and the whole biosphere, all of which combine to give us our ever-changing climate. So to do a well-balanced, well-informed documentary on climate change, I realized I needed to interview a wide variety of scientists.

Roughly speaking, the natural sciences most directly related to the climate-change controversy are layers of understanding, building from the most basic to the most specialized. At the very base is mathematics. Next comes physics, then chemistry, engineering, geology, geography, biology, and (for our purposes) climate (meteorology and climatology).

So I interviewed top scholars in all those fields.

But there’s another whole aspect of the climate controversy, and that’s what, if anything, to do about climate change, whether natural or manmade. Science tells us what’s happening in the world; it can’t tell us what we ought to do about it. For that we need other disciplines.

My late mentor Dr. Russell Kirk, one of the twentieth century’s finest political philosophers and historians and known as the father of the modern American conservative movement, was fond of saying, “The economic problem is rooted in the political problem, and the political problem is rooted in the ethical problem, and the ethical problem is rooted in the theological problem.” I.e., you start with God and work your way up through ethics and politics to economics.

So I interviewed two theologian/philosophers, five political scientists and public policy experts, and four economists—and one uncategorizable polymath who used to be a policy adviser to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Doing 32 half-hour video interviews in two busy days during the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change was grueling but, for me, great fun. Now I’m delighted that I can share the fruits with you through our YouTube videos and forthcoming documentary. As you watch the YouTube videos, please make comments. Tell us what you most appreciate, what you find most useful, what you’d suggest we do differently. We want to meet your needs, and hearing from you is one step toward that.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Rojer, Creative Commons, used by permission.