Heavenly Father, Your Law clearly commands us not to bear false witness against our neighbors.
Right now eight courageous people weigh heavily on my mind—eight climate scholars targeted by a politically motivated and baseless attack on their personal integrity because they are so intrepid as to stand against a powerful tide driven by enormous political and financial interests.
Father, please vindicate Dr. Robert C. Balling of Arizona State University, Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama, Dr. Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Steven Hayward of Pepperdine University, Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware, Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, and Dr. W.-H. “Willie” Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
These excellent scholars are under a concerted attack, orchestrated at the very highest levels of the United States government in cooperation with environmental activists and all-too-compliant media figures, alleging that their scientific findings about anthropogenic climate change have not been reached by honest scientific research but have been bought by corporate funding they’ve sought to hide.
Father, the injustice of this attack is apparent in many ways:
- the assumption that funding sources might compromise the integrity of research for people on only one side of the debate;
- the failure to apply the same criteria of transparency to scientists on the other side;
- the falsity of charges of failure by these scholars to disclose potential conflicts of interest;
- the failure to hold scholars of contrary opinion to the same standard;
- the resort to personal attack rather than addressing the actual scientific arguments these scholars have raised;
- the cover-up, by many of these same accusers, of real corruption and real violations of scientific standards by many leading figures on the other side of the debate.
I ask You, Lord, not only to vindicate Dr. Balling, Dr. Christy, Dr. Curry, Dr. Hayward, Dr. Legates, Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Pielke, and Dr. Soon, but also to strengthen them for the contest, to give them perseverance and renewed courage, to bring many other scholars around them to defend their intellectual, academic, and political freedom from the attack.
And I ask You also, Father, to burden the hearts of many other Christians to pray likewise for them, and to persevere in prayer until the attacks stop and are exposed for their wickedness, and the attackers repent publicly and restore the reputations of those against whom they have born false and injurious testimony.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
