Earlier this week someone sent me a link to Katharine Hayhoe’s column “I’m a Climate Scientist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out,” published in the New York Times October 31. In it Hayhoe, whose Ph.D. is in atmospheric science but who teaches in the political science department at Texas Tech University, criticizes the thinking of fellow evangelicals who disagree with her about the causes, magnitude, consequences, and appropriate responses to climate change/global warming.

Referring to “attacks” she’s received “via email, Twitter, Facebook comments, phone calls and even handwritten letters,” she says, “I’ve noticed two common denominators in how most of the authors choose to identify themselves: first, as political conservatives, no matter what country they’re from; and second, in the United States, as conservative Christians, because the label ‘evangelical’ has itself been co-opted as shorthand for a particular political ideology these days.”

She says she’s an evangelical, by which she means “someone who takes the Bible seriously.” (That, of course, is a rather inadequate definition, since it would include most Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and others outside of Protestantism—and evangelicalism is a subset of Protestantism.)

This definition, she says, “stands in stark contrast to today’s political evangelicals, whose statement of faith is written first by their politics and only a distant second by the Bible and who, if the two conflict, will prioritize their political ideology over theology.”

As a factual matter, perhaps Hayhoe needs to know that Cornwall Alliance’s Statement of Faith is adapted largely from that adopted generations ago by Wheaton College, one of the premier evangelical institutions of higher learning. So much for its having been written first by our politics.

She puts considerable effort into distancing faith from science, writing:

… my favorite question is the one I often hear from fellow Christians: “Do you believe in climate change?”

One of the first times I remember being asked this it was by a visitor to the evangelical church I attend here in Texas, who was surprised (and possibly a little horrified) to learn that the pastor’s wife was a climate scientist.

“No, I don’t!” I cheerfully replied.

A puzzled silence ensued. Wary of calling out the pastor’s wife, the man haltingly asked, “But aren’t you … didn’t you just say you study climate science?”

“That’s right,” I said with an encouraging nod.

“So how can you not believe in it?!” he asked, perplexed.

And with that question, he opened the door to an incredibly constructive conversation about science, faith and truth. As I always do now when someone asks this, I explained that climate change is not a belief system [emphasis added]. We know that the earth’s climate is changing thanks to observations, facts and data about God’s creation that we can see with our eyes and test with the sound minds that God has given us. And still more fundamentally, I went on to explain why it matters: because real people are being affected today; and we believe [emphasis added] that God’s love has been poured in our hearts to share with our brothers and sisters here and around the world who are suffering.

Her bifurcation of faith (belief) and scientific knowledge (as derived from observation) is a common misunderstanding. She writes as if thinking that 2 + 2 = 4 (or that human activity is driving dangerous climate change) is not faith (belief), while thinking that Jesus rose from the dead, or “that God’s love has been poured in our hearts,” is.

On the contrary, as demonstrated in a book-length discussion of the meaning of faith/belief by one of the 20th century’s premier Christian philosopher/theologians, Gordon H. Clark, faith (belief) is simply assent (not merely spoken but actually mental) to understood propositions, regardless whether those propositions are religious or not. Whether she realizes it or not (for there is indeed widespread confusion over this among genuine Christians), her view is actually rooted in the existentialist epistemology of Søren Kierkegaard, who saw faith as a leap in the dark, indeed, contrary to evidence. That, of course, is not the Biblical understanding of faith, for which eyewitness testimony to the risen Christ (1 Corinthians 15) is just one example of the kinds of empirical evidence mustered by its authors for various elements of the Christian faith.

But let us leave that aside. Our principal concern is for the caricature she draws of at least some of those who disagree with her about climate change. She thinks their views are driven first and foremost, as we’ve already seen, by their politics, and second by fear. The latter she raises when she writes, “… much of this opposition to the idea that the climate is changing, that humans are responsible, that the impacts are serious and that the time to act is now, comes from fear: fear of loss of our way of life, fear of being told that our habits are bad for society, fear of changes that will leave us worse off, fear of siding with those who have no respect for our values and beliefs.”

Well, for some people no doubt much does come from such fears. If that proves their views wrong, do not the fears of climate catastrophe so widely stoked by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United States’ Global Change Research Program (of which she’s a part), politicians, entertainers, and the media prove their views wrong?

No, that a view might be linked to, or even prompted by, fear does not prove it false. Arguing that it does is an example of the motive fallacy. It is equally wrong to try to get people to renounce an idea by scaring them as to try to get them to embrace an idea by scaring them.

My chief objection to Hayhoe’s column, however, is simply this: that she fails completely to engage with the hundreds of evangelical (and other) scientists (and other scholars) who disagree with her view that humans are primarily responsible for climate change, that its impacts are serious, and that the time to act is now.

Yes, I think some evangelicals reject her view, some in part and some entirely, for some of the reasons she names—political perspective, fear, linking it to evolutionism or naturalism in science, etc. Yet here, and in many similar articles and her recorded talks, she assiduously avoids engaging with the kinds of reasons we at the Cornwall Alliance, and many other “global warming skeptics,” have for rejecting her view (which purports to be the mainstream in her profession, although there’s good reason to question that, too), e.g.:

• Global climate models greatly exaggerate CO2’s warming effect and so, for that reason as well as many others, are very unreliable.
• Geologic history indicates that earth’s atmosphere has warmed and cooled cyclically throughout earth history, and that atmospheric CO2 concentration has not driven (led) but responded to (followed) the warming and cooling.
• Even if the mainstream (represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is right about CO2’s warming influence, the amount of warming likely is too little to cause catastrophes such as are commonly claimed by climate activists.
• Policies promoted to curb global warming would (a) have very little impact on temperature—too little to have significant effect on human wellbeing or ecosystem health; (b) deprive people of the abundant, affordable, reliable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty; yet (c) history clearly shows that poverty is a far greater risk to human wellbeing than anything related to climate.

These are just a few. Hayhoe doesn’t address any of them in her article. Far more can be found here and in many other articles on Cornwall Alliance’s website, not to mention in many other websites and in many articles published in refereed journals.

Now, I’m about to move onto dangerous ground here, but I think it’s important to do so, despite the risks. I harbor no ill will toward Hayhoe, and I don’t mean by what follows to challenge her integrity or sincerity. Indeed, I don’t mean this to be in any way a personal attack. It is instead a serious, and sincere, challenge to one of her tactics.

With that caveat, notice afresh the headline on her article: “I’m a Climate Scientist who Believes in God. Hear Me Out.” There and in many other communications Hayhoe makes much of her status as a climate scientist—essentially claiming that status as giving her authority.

Has she really earned that authority?

Consider first that there are many climate scientists with far longer experience in the field who disagree with her—and some of them are, like her, evangelicals. I think immediately of evangelicals like Roy W. Spencer, John Christy, David L. Legates, Anthony Lupo, James Wanliss, G. Cornelis van Kooten (okay, he’s an environmental economist, but he’s specialized in climate science research for decades and published a major academic book on the subject), Neil L. Frank, Charles Clough, or of non-evangelicals like S. Fred Singer, Judith Curry, Patrick Michaels, William Happer, and more. Appeal to authority is fine if no authorities disagree. When they do, it’s fallacious.

Second, consider this extraordinary remark about Hayhoe by one of the world’s leading climate scientists, long a high-ranking author with the IPCC, former professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and now president of Climate Forecast Applications Network, Dr. Judith Curry.

In commenting on a recent paper in Nature that urged editors and others to give less coverage (which is difficult to imagine) to “climate skeptics,” she produced a list of “real scientists” of whom the authors approved. Then she wrote, “Katherine Hayhoe (with HUGE MSM presence) doesn’t make this list; is anyone concerned about her outsized Kardashian Index?” Basically, people speak of the “Kardashian index” as an index of how famous someone is simply for being famous, not because of any substantive achievements. In this context, Curry meant by it (as quoted in the article to which she linked about it) “a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists”—i.e., a lot more fame than was justified by achievement.

When I read that statement, I was shocked, because, frankly, it’s quite unlike the usually much more gentle Curry. I wrote and asked her about it, and she replied:

KH has a PhD in atmospheric science. She is a faculty member at Texas Tech (a 2nd rate univ at best) in the political science department. Apparently none of the nearby universities in TX (her husband is a pastor there) would hire her in atmospheric science dept.  Her published science that qualifies as atmospheric science is rather meager. She mostly publishes stuff like ecological impacts of climate change. She also does regional climate change projections using downscaled climate models (a dubious endeavor).
 
Her PhD advisor at U of Illinois was Don Wuebbles, who is the coordinating lead author for the National Climate Assessment. He assigned KH in various key lead author roles, which helped bolster her scientific credibility.
 
So color me unimpressed.  I realize she has carved out quite a niche among evangelicals.

It is, frankly, time for Katharine Hayhoe to stop waving her credentials as a means of impressing (persuading?) evangelicals and instead deal seriously with the actual arguments of those evangelical scientists who disagree with her about climate change.

For years Cornwall Alliance has publicly challenged Dr. Hayhoe to debate one of our climate scientists (e.g., here). She has never responded.

Photo by Breno Machado on Unsplash.