Reading Darwin causes mass shootings. Mike Johnson says so. I have the transcript

By now you will know that the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Louisiana 4^th District) was among those who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. You may also know that he is opposed to the concept of same sex marriage, which in some way he regards as undermining individual religious freedom, and wants to pass a law making abortion illegal throughout the US. You probably also know that he has denied that human activity is a cause of global warming, and has accepted more campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry than from any other source. There is a high chance that you have heard him share Marjorie Taylor Greene’s view that the problem in mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the human heart (Guns don’t kill people. Human hearts kill people.) What you may not know are his views on the causes of the moral decline that, like authoritarian pulpiteers throughout the ages, he sees happening all around him. He has, however, stated those views very plainly, at a presentation he gave in Louisiana in 2016, available [actually, no longer available] here. I have read the transcript of this, suffering so that you don’t have to, by good luck retained it, and despite many decades of following the utterances of people who share his views I was surprised by what I found.

Here he is, speaking at a less than overcrowded Shreveport Christian Center, which describes itself as mandated “to participate with the Lord in establishing His kingdom in all areas of our culture. We desire to use the authority given to us to promote and participate in seeing the Lord’s purposes rule in the church, business, media, arts, education, government and family arenas.” The authority, of course, is given by God. He is standing at the front of a platform, and behind him are musical instruments and two flags. The flag of the United States, and the flag of Israel. The Israeli Right has been wooing the American Religious Right for decades, and the unquestioning support of the American Religious Right has done much to make Israel what it is today.

Here’s part of what he said; the link the YouTube has gone dead, as with so many of his presentations, but I had collected the transcript and will make it available to anyone who asks for it privately. Like all academics, I am easy to find.

My account is rather rambling, although nowhere near as rambling as the original material, so I will place the main points here above the fold.

• He thinks that he became a lawyer in response to divine calling.
• He would rather have been born at the time of the founding fathers, but thinks that he is where he is now because that’s where God wants him to be.
• He thinks that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired.
• He thinks that the United States is a Christian nation.
• He thinks that the only real way to be a proper Christian is naïve biblical literalism, so rigorously that nowadays only 4% make the grade.
• He thinks that the US is in moral decline, and that we must identify the disease that caused that decline.
• He thinks that the disease is teaching about Darwin, imposed in the 1930s by a liberal educational elite with the collusion of progressive Supreme Court judges such as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• He thinks that darkness is encroaching, Christians are being persecuted, students who profess a belief in God are ridiculed in universities, and he himself has been shot at with flaming arrows for his religious beliefs.
• He thinks that learning about Darwin causes people to stop believing in God, whereupon they become completely amoral.
• He thinks that the results include no-fault divorce (I don’t know why he regards that as a bad thing, but I expect his audience would agree with him), feminism (the same comments apply), the legalisation of abortion which is murder (the Bible says it isn’t, but Bible believing Christians don’t seem to know that), and in due course to mass shootings.

Creationism in the service of climate change denial

Update 25 October 2023: Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisiana) was today elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Johnson, who is heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry, is an occasional guest author for Answers in Genesis, and is on record as saying that he does not believe that human activity is the cause of current climate change.

Changes in global surface temperature over the past 170 years (black line) relative to 1850–1900 and annually averaged, compared to CMIP6 climate model simulations of the temperature response to both human and natural drivers (red), and to only natural drivers (solar and volcanic activity, green). IPCC/Efbrazil via Wikipedia

Young Earth creationist organisations are united in rejecting the secular science of climate change.  This science, they say, incorporates the study of positive feedback loops as demonstrated by data from Ice Age cores (true). But all of this is part of the secular science that regards the Earth as ancient (also true) and is therefore unsound (no comment). The creationist organisations are left with the task of explaining the Ice Ages, which they do with a degree of ingenuity worthy of a better cause. This in turn leads to a creationist climate science, in which positive feedbacks are ignored. It follows that conventional climate science can be discarded, and our current concerns rejected as alarmism.

This conclusion fits in well with the aims of the right-wing organisations with which the creationists are intertwined. One frequent commentator on environmental matters in Answers in Genesis  is Calvin E. Beisner, founder and CEO of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which exists to oppose any environmental constraints on industry, and Beisner’s work has been praised by the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute. The Cornwall Alliance itself is deeply linked to creationist theology, and its Statement of Faith commits to separate creation of a historical Adam and Eve, original sin as a historical fact, and “the bodily resurrection of the just and unjust, the everlasting punishment of the lost, and the everlasting blessedness of the saved.” The conservative commentator Jay W. Richards, Senior Fellow of the evolution-denying Discovery Institute, is a Fellow of Heartland and a former adviser to Cornwall. But the political agenda of creationist organisations is a major topic in itself, to which I shall return.

We must also remember that while there is no commercial interest in denying evolution, denying the need for action on climate is a well-funded industry, to whose voluminous output the creationist climate change deniers have full access.

Back in 2010, Answers in Genesis¹ (AiG) spelt out clearly what’s at stake:

“It will be shown that the Bible provides sufficient counsel to enable Christians to evaluate the claims of global warming and arrive at a confident position that is in accord with real science. The contention that man’s activities are causing global warming, as described in the media and by its advocates, is a myth. There is no reason either biblically or scientifically to fear the exaggerated and misguided claims of catastrophe as a result of increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide (CO₂).”

This August, AiG, whose Creation Museum and Ark Encounter are located in flood-ravaged Kentucky, reiterated its earlier position even more clearly:

Flood damage in Kentucky. Matt Stone/Courier Journal/USA Today Network via CNN

“Really, this zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets. These activists and scientists have no idea what is really happening or what is going to happen” because “they have the wrong starting point (man’s word) and the wrong history (evolution and millions of years), so they come to wrong conclusions about the future.” Moreover, “we don’t need to wail and bemoan the future. The only true Creator has promised, ‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (Genesis 8:22).” One related article (by Beisner) on the AiG web page goes on to highlight the statement that “Fear of environmental catastrophe grows out of the lack of the fear of God”, as exemplified by what the prophet Jeremiah said regarding drought in ancient Judaea.

As I was writing this piece, Creation Ministries International (CMI) hosted its Third European Creation Conference, including a lecture offering “a Christian response to climate change”, which we know from CMI’s other statements will come to much the same conclusions. Statements by other major Young Earth creationist organisations (Institute for Creation Research , Is Genesis History?) are similar. In response to growing public concern, there has been a rhetorical shift from describing secular scientists as fraudsters, to more measured tones downplaying the significance of what is happening, and denouncing those calling for action as alarmists and catastrophists. None of this makes any difference to the final conclusion. The creationists, these days, keep telling us that they do not deny climate change itself, but only the need to do anything about it.

In the circumstances, we need to pay attention to what creationist climatology actually consists of, and the best place to start is comparison between different accounts of the Ice Ages. What we have learnt about the Ice Ages has contributed greatly to the scientific understanding of climate, while the alternative, allegedly Bible-based, analysis gives valuable insights into creationist thinking.

Esker in River Teith valley, Scotland. Photo by author

In the development of the science (what creationists call the “secular science”) of climate change, the Ice Ages have played a special role. From around 1840 onwards, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz developed the concept that large areas of what is now the temperate zone had been covered by an ice sheet, with glaciers reshaping the landscape, gouging out the underlying rock (glacial striations), dumping piles of ill-sorted rock and soil at their edges and ends (moraines), transplanting boulders (erratics) far from their original location, and leaving long ridges of transported material (eskers) from rivers flowing beneath the ice. By the end of the 19^th century, it was realised from the location of these features that there must have been at least four separate ice ages, with more temperate periods in between.

In 1864, James Croll suggested that the ice ages were caused by irregularities in the Earth’s orbit, and although his detailed theory proved incorrect he also made the interesting observation that the initial climate forcing through changes in solar irradiation would be amplified by a positive feedback when the ice caps expanded, since that would increase the Earth’s albedo (fraction of sunlight reflected back into space). In the 1920s, Milutin Milanković developed a more complete theory of these oscillations, showing the existence of long-term cycles. There are three separate cycles, involving wobbles in the amount by which the Earth’s orbit, an ellipse, is different from a perfect circle, the direction of the Earth’s axis (cause of the seasons, currently around 23° away from vertical, relative to the plane of the orbit), and the time of year at which the Earth is closest to the Sun. These changes are small, but have their largest effect on the polar regions, and change not only the total amount of the sun’s energy that reaches the surface, but the time of year at which it does so. This in turn influences the growth and shrinkage of the polar ice caps.

Results of ice core drilling at Vostok Station, Antarctica, via Wikipedia. From top, CO2 in ice bubbles, temperature, methane content, oxygen-18 shift, calculated Milankovitch cycle effect on insolation. Note direction of time axis; other shifts follow behind insolation, showing effect of feedbacks. [J. R.Petit et al., via Wikipedia]

In principle, we can test this theory against observation. The timing of the cycles can be worked out from the mechanics of the Earth’s motion, using methods going back to Newton. All we need now is some way of determining the growth and shrinkage of the ice caps in the past.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways we can do this by experiment. The easiest to understand is analysis of ice cores, drilled in the Antarctic ice in a research programme going back to the 1970s. Inspection of these ice cores shows annual bands, on average between 5 and 10 mm thick, so that the age of any particular band can be found simply by counting. The identification of the bands as annual has been independently confirmed for ice cores drilled in Greenland, containing volcanic ash from the numerous eruptions in nearby Iceland, which can be radiometrically dated. The annual bands contain small bubbles of entrapped gas, which can be analysed to give information about the composition of the atmosphere when each band was formed, and the Earth’s temperature at that time (more strictly, the amount of water tied up in the ice caps) can be estimated from the ratio of the isotope oxygen-18 to the much more common isotope oxygen-16 in the water molecules that make up the ice.²

We now have ice cores going back more than 400,000 years, and these clearly show the effects of the Milankovitch cycles. So these cycles are the primary drivers for the Ice Ages. However, the changes in solar irradiation are not enough in themselves to explain the size of the temperature swings. So there was some kind of positive feedback going on. Considering the Earth’s climate system, such feedbacks are unavoidable. At a time when the solar cycle is driving an increase in temperature, the ice sheets will shrink, reducing the amount of sunlight that the Earth reflects directly back into space. At the same time, because carbon dioxide is less soluble in warm water, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase, and so of course will the amount of water vapour, and both of these are greenhouse gases. Such changes in carbon dioxide concentration are directly confirmed by analysis of ice core bubbles. These and other feedbacks amplify the effects of the primary driver, as explained here and shown in the above Figure.

At present, that primary driver is the increase in our emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (for how we know that the increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere comes from this source, rather than from any natural geological process, see here). But this inevitably calls into play the positive feedbacks mentioned in the last paragraph. This is of course a greatly oversimplified picture, and there are some negative as well as positive feedbacks, creating opportunities for confusion and obfuscation by those who would prefer us not to change our behaviour, but the realities of our situation are already all too clear, and will become even more clear in the future.

In the general (not specifically religious) denialist literature, I have seen materials in which self-styled climate change “sceptics” have in turn claimed that there has been no overall increase in atmospheric CO2, that this increase is not due to human activity, that the greenhouse effect of CO2 would not be enhanced by further additions (for my own small part in refuting this particular absurdity, see here), and even that there has been no actual increase in temperature. A more sophisticated recent strategy is acceptance of the reality of human-caused change, but continued denial of the existence of positive feedback, and hence of the existence of a situation serious enough to require action.

The latest round of creationist commentaries on climate change fits in well with this strategy, with the Bible-based pseudoscience of the Ice Age playing a central role. Indeed, Is Genesis History? proclaims it “the #1 reason you shouldn’t worry about climate change” and cites in support the Cornwall Alliance, which I mentioned in the opening paragraphs. (Is Genesis History?, a relatively new arrival on the creationist scene, is described by my friend Joel Duff  as part of “a growing and dynamic new wave of creationism”.)

Young Earth creationists admit the existence of an Ice Age. They could hardly do otherwise, given the gross evidence of sculpted landscapes, changed sea levels, and glacial deposits. Moreover, they are forced to place the Ice Age after Noah’s Flood, since it has refashioned sediments which they claim to be of Flood origin (for a typical Young Earth timeline, see here). In these circumstances, we can understand the creationist insistence on a single Ice Age, although the fact of multiple ice ages has been known for over a century. It immediately follows that conventional climate science, linked as it is to the study of cycles of glaciation and retreat over two million years, must be rejected, and so must the predictions of global warming that are linked to this science.

It remains for creationists to explain the causes of this Ice Age, in a manner compatible with the Bible, and they do so by regarding it as a consequence of Noah’s Flood. Indeed, with enormous (some might say blasphemous) effrontery, AiG tells us that “We know from Scripture that the worldwide Flood changed the earth’s climate dramatically.” Scripture, of course, says no such thing, but the conjuring trick is to make it appear as if the Ice Age was an inevitable consequence of the Flood. Once this is done, the Ice Age and its purported explanation can be celebrated as “biblical science”, in contrast to the secular science that lies behind demands for action.

Whitcomb and Morris’ The Genesis Flood, the foundational document of the modern Young Earth creationist movement, now available in its 50 year anniversary edition, attributed the Ice Age to the removal of a vapour canopy that surrounded the Earth before the Flood, combined with the effect of uplift of the mountains. The canopy theory is now rejected, for reasons that AiG spells out, and Creation Ministries International includes appeal to the canopy in their list of arguments that should not now be used. However, the idea of rapid mountain-building after the Flood persists in Young Earth creationist thought, since if the mountains were at their present height, there would not been enough water to cover them. Another argument common to all the creationist organisations is the invoking of volcanic dust. For instance, Creation Ministries International (CMI)  cite a very interesting paper in Earth Science Reviews that reports multiple volcanic deposits in the Greenland ice cores, mainly (as shown by their composition) from Icelandic sources. These cores go back over 123,000 years, as shown by direct counting of layers, radiometric dating of the ash, and correlation with deposits elsewhere. Assuredly, the combined effect of these eruptions would have been very effective in blocking out sunlight, if we ignore the small complication that they were spread out over a period 20 times as large as what CMI regards as the age of the Earth. CMI, like other creationist sources, shows admirable zeal in scouring the regular scientific literature, combined with amazing selectivity in what they take away from it.

The creationist timeline allows only a very small time window, so there must have been a mechanism for rapid deposition of massive amounts of snow in the polar regions and on high ground. As pointed out by the meteorologist Mike Oard as far back as 1979 , this is only possible if the atmosphere was very humid, consistent with the oceans having been much warmer than today. But they would have been after the flood, because floodwaters came from release of the waters of the deep, and these would have been geothermally warmed (Oard’s own suggestion), or because the oceans were warmed as a result of accelerated plate tectonics following the flood, as postulated by present-day creationists to explain the separation of the continents and the elevation of mountains. In addition, according to a suggestion by Andrew Sibley (the speaker on climate at the CMI London conference), warming and the dissolution of nutrient minerals in the oceans, caused by the Flood itself, would have led to massive algae blooms, drawing down atmospheric CO2 and adding to the effects of the volcanic dust.

Oard’s calculations led him to conclude that the ice caps and Ice Age glaciers could have been formed in about 500 years after the Flood. This takes us into the time of the Hebrew patriarchs, but no matter, since the ancient Near East would have been protected from cold by those warm oceans (remember?) The mechanisms proposed by secular scientists cover millions of years, but millions of years were not available, therefore these mechanisms must be wrong, and it follows that secular scientists, unlike creationists, have no good explanation of the Ice Age.

The creationist position is spelt out with admirable clarity in a 14,000 word article (updated August 2022) from CMI. This is based, not on ignorance, but on carefully collated disinformation, with all the standard arguments against current climate science shamelessly repeated despite the fact that they have been repeatedly rebutted. What I find most interesting about this article is its recent date, its protestation, despite repeated CMI articles going back at least as far as 2009, that climate change is not a core issue for them, and the statement that the article was written in response to questions raised at church meetings.

The article relies on Oard’s warm waters theory about the Ice Age. It more or less correctly summarises the current scientific position, and then claims that secular scientists have imposed the Milankovitch interpretation on the data, introduced the concept of a multiplier to explain the size of the observed effects, and then by circular reasoning grafted this concept onto their predictions regarding current CO2 emissions. Such accusations of circularity abound in the creationist literature, where the outcomes of scientific studies are brushed aside as inputs.

The very opposite is the case. We have, as explained above, a coming together of arguments from planetary dynamics, the isotope chemistry used to monitor ancient temperatures, the fundamental physics behind the greenhouse effect, experimental observations on ice cores and ocean sediment borings collected over more than 50 years, and current observational climate science. This is not circular reasoning, but the very opposite; the mutual reinforcement of separate lines of argument leading to the same conclusion, as beautiful in its way as the mutual reinforcement of the arches in a Gothic cathedral.

However, the creationists’ biblical worldview is the ultimate in circular reasoning. They start from the assumption that the Bible is absolute historical truth. The Ice Age happened, therefore it must be compatible with the Bible, therefore there must be some process to make this compatibility possible, therefore this process is what must have happened, and even though there is no mention of Ice Age in the Bible itself, all of this is yet another confirmation of biblical truth. Therefore there is no need for any further discussion, the positive feedback scenario can be rejected, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 corresponds, not to somewhere between 2.5^oC and 3^oC, but, according to CMI, to an unamplified 1^oC, and so, CMI tells its followers, there is no need to worry.

But there is. That 1^oC has already been exceeded. Creationist biology is just a bad joke. Creationist climatology is toxic.

One final irony. The Genesis Flood, published in 1961, speculated on what caused the end of the Ice Age, with among the possibilities an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. It described how the then projected increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as a result of industrial activity, would provide a natural experiment to test its effect on temperature, and noted with approval the attention being brought to that issue by the 1957-8 International Geophysical Year, and plans for ongoing studies. It is precisely the results of these studies that creationists now deny.

1] Strictly speaking, not AiG itself, but an opinion piece in its journal, accompanied by disclaimer. This level of deniability is typical of AiG’s tactics.

2] Oxygen occurs mainly on Earth as oxygen-16, but includes about one part in 5000 of oxygen-18. Water containing oxygen-18 is very slightly less volatile than that containing oxygen-16, so that water vapour over the oceans is slightly depleted in this isotope, and so, as a result, is the snow formed from this vapour. As a result, when the ice sheets are more extensive, the oceans are slightly richer in oxygen-18, and so is the snow that falls that year.

I thank the Rev. Michael Roberts for helpful discussions.

This article first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.

Leading creationist organisation appoints conspiracy theorist to key position

Posted on Monday, Jun 12, 2023 1:10AM by Paul Braterman

by Paul Braterman

One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.

Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.

AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.

There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)

Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.

It is therefore a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”

For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.

To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.

Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.

The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.

Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.

Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)

If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs.  It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.

Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.

Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.

The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.

For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.

***

Image from AiG site. I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments.

1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/06/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position.html; also at https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/

Newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis is cause for concern

By Paul Braterman

June 12, 2023 14:00 MST

Source: AiG.

This is a synopsis of a fuller version that has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.

Panda’s Thumb readers will be familiar with Answers in Genesis, its position as the most vocal and best funded of Young Earth Creationist organisations (assets in excess of $82 million; owner of the Kentucky Creation Museum and Ark Encounter), its links with the Cornwall Alliance and hence with the fossil fuel industry, and its use of biblical arguments to dismiss concerns about the current environmental crisis. In my own reading of AiG materials, I have detected a progressive repetitiveness and loss of vigour. I have also noticed worrying signs of openness to the suggestion that we are living in the Last Days, with all that that implies for the abdication of long-term responsibilities.

These worries are intensified by AiG’s appointment last month of the lawyer Martyn Iles, until recently Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, to the newly created post of Chief Ministry Officer. Ministry is after all AiG’s entire reason for existence, and Iles, a skilful orator, also has a track record of effectiveness in political interventions, and in fundraising. Ken Ham is now 71, and we can expect Iles, 34, to become increasingly important in shaping AiG’s direction.

Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, argues from Genesis that God approves of population growth, preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world,” and regards the World Economic Forum as part of a grand conspiracy bent on suppressing individual liberty.

You can see Iles at his most frightening in his YouTube video, The Truth of It, Climate Totalitarianism (notice the carefully crafted title of the YouTube series, as well as of this particular item). In this, he uses quotations from Genesis to claim that this planet was created for the benefit of mankind.

It follows that environmentalist policies are misguided. And where do such policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.”

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

However, “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his then intended Australian primary audience.

Consider the logic of this argument. Restraint in resource use is unbiblical, and therefore uncalled for. Unbelievers have cause for anxiety, but for believers this anxiety is unnecessary, because God. I am forced to conclude that he sincerely believes that we are in the End Times, or, if not, that God will somehow intervene to save us from the foreseeable consequences of our actions.

To sum up, an eloquent preacher who is also a skilled political operative is rising to the top in the world’s most significant creationist organisation, while objecting in principle to concerns about what we are doing to the planet, because worrying about the planet is God’s job, not ours, and He will look after it all in His own good time.

Not good news.

Repost of https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/06/newly-appointed-chief-ministry.html

Heartland Institute says there isn’t any warming

The Heartland Institute tells us that there is not, and cannot be, a climate crisis, because for most of the past 12,000 years the climate was warmer than it is today. A recent (October 5) posting by James Taylor, president of the Institute, states as follows (full text; fair use claimed):

CLIMATE CHANGE: The so-called climate crisis is a sham

There cannot be a climate crisis when temperatures are unusually cool.

• Scientists have documented, and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, that temperatures were warmer than today throughout most of the time period that human civilization has existed.
• Temperatures would have to keep warming at their present pace for at least another century or two before we reach temperatures that were common during early human civilization.
• There can be no climate crisis – based on the notion of dangerously high temperatures – when humans have thrived in temperatures much warmer than today for most of the last 12,000 years.

None of this is true. Here is a graph of climate change in the past 12,000 years; note the value for 2016, on the right-hand axis of the main figure, as well as the rapid rise over the past century shown in the inset, which also shows the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I have seen Heartland’s claim before, accompanied by graphs such as the one below, but without the insert and recent date, thus effectively suppressing everything that’s happened in the last century:

Answers to everything, according to God, according to Answers in Genesis’Chief Ministry Officer

Martyn Iles (L), Ken Ham (R), Ark Encounter in background. From Vision Christian Media

Abused women should submit to their husbands. Also, it is ungodly to be concerned about the climate, because rainbows. Such, at least, is the advice of the leader-in-waiting of the world’s largest and most influential Creationist organisation.

When people tell you what they are, believe them. In the 2021 Facebook posting attached below, still available [1], Martyn Iles tells us exactly what he is, and since, in May this year, he became Chief Ministry Officer at Answers in Genesis, the $28 million dollar a year concern that runs Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and has its own private jet, we ought to pay attention. All the more so since the announcement just one month ago that he is now the designated successor to founder and CEO Ken Ham [2]. So here are his answers to the burning questions of our times, given in full to avoid the risk of quote mining, with my own commentary just in case there is any ambiguity about what is being said. And he saves the worst till last, when he explains exactly how it comes about that people disagree with him, and how we should look on such disagreement.

The answer to gender identity – “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” [Gen 1:27]

I share Iles’ concerns about the use of extreme clinical procedures, but for the very opposite reason. I do not believe in rigid gender roles, and think that people should be free to live as they wish, subject to the rights of others, without the need for mastectomy or castration. Iles, on the contrary, thinks that gender roles are God-given and rigid (more on that below), and that for that very reason people should stick to the roles that they were born for.

The answer to sexual orientation – “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” [Gen 2:22, 24]

It is difficult to know what to make of this.

How is this even meant to be an answer to someone who feels romantically attracted only to members of their own sex? But I fear that Iles will be unmoved by the observation of homosexual behaviour in numerous animal species, because he does not consider that we share a common origin with them.

The answer to racism – “since [God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…” [Acts 17:26]

This on the face of it is unexceptionable. All humans share the same deep ancestry and deserve the same respect. However, as so often with Iles, there is a hidden agenda; Answers in Genesis is opposed to any kind of action to compensate groups that have been the victims of racism, on the grounds that such action is itself discriminatory and racist.

The answer to abortion – “God said to them, ‘Be Fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…’” [Gen 1:28]

Here as elsewhere (see e.g. the next item) Iles cuts through all the usual arguments by introducing a Bible verse, imposing his own interpretation on it, and using this interpretation to tell us what God wants. No need for further discussion. In this particular case, however, most of us would think that the commandment referred to has been more than fulfilled already.

The answer to climate alarmism – “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” [Gen 8:22]

Notice the question-begging language. However, he is not just attacking what he regards as excessive concern over the climate crisis, but denying on the strength of this verse that such a crisis could possibly exist in the first place. And this is the verse now quoted on every conceivable occasion by all the major creationist organisations, who are united in their opposition to fossil fuel reduction policies. None of them, however, seem to quote the parallel verse [Gen 9:11];

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Both verses are very limited in what they promise, the second one explicitly so. Nothing here to promise stable or temperate conditions, or to absolve us of our own responsibilities. Drought and failed harvests play a prominent role in later chapters of Genesis, while in a biblical exhortation to look after what has been provided for us, Leviticus 25:4 says that every seventh year the land itself needs to rest and recover.

The answer to abuse – “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” [Eph 5:22, 25]

This is presented, not merely as the recipe for domestic harmony on Iles’ terms, but as “the answer to abuse,” i.e. guidance on how people should behave when such harmony has completely and dangerously broken down. To tell an abusive husband to love his wife may be well-intentioned, though he will probably reply that he really does so already. To tell an abused wife to submit to her husband is to ask her to behave as so many women tragically do; to accept the completely unacceptable, at risk to her happiness, her health, and, all too often, her life. And when Iles says “submit,” he really does mean submit [3].

The answer to historic wrongs that cannot be undone – “forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” [Col 3:13]

We are dealing here with a question that is the subject of much recent debate. What obligations if any do those of European descent owe to the peoples whom they have abused or enslaved, and whose land they have stolen? The answer according to Iles is very simple. The victims should simply forgive those who have wronged them, and the problem will disappear. I should mention, to put his opinion in context, that Iles is a white Australian [4].

The answer to life – “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [John 3:16]

I’m not sure how this verse would actually prove useful to anyone faced with major decisions. However, I note that this is the only verse he quotes from the Gospels. It is indeed relatively rare from creationists to quote the Gospels, apart from this one verse, and even rarer for them to quote any of the actual words attributed to Jesus [5].

But how does Martyn Iles describe those who disagree with him? The final section of his post tells us:

The contemporary answer for every one of these issues is Cultural Marxism… divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing between warring identity groups.

God’s answers bring peace and contentment, if only we’d submit to them, and stop running away from them.

So, for Iles, disagreement is Marxism, just as for Tim LaHaye it was humanism, and for the creationists of the McCarthy era it was Communism. If we only listened to God’s answers to these questions, all the conflicts between different interest groups would immediately disappear. Any assertions that things may be a little bit more complicated than that are “divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing.”

Rebellion, of course, is the gravest of all possible sins in his theology. It is the sin of Satan, from which all others follow. But Iles’ way of looking at it does raise an interesting question. If homosexuals, assertive women, proponents of reparations to historically disadvantaged groups, and those concerned about environmental degradation, are all into the business of power-grabbing, just who is it that they are grabbing power from?

***

1] The Facebook page is here, and I am commenting on the entry for 19 May 2021, screenshot below (fair use claimed), which can also be retrieved by keyword search (Iles is so prolific that I expect some culling is unavoidable. However, the Facebook page, like the Answers in Genesis website, is out of order, difficult to search, and with numerous duplications.)

2] Some of us wondered when Ken Ham took him to his bosom how soon Iles would upstage him, just as Ken Ham, decades ago, upstaged Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research, but I don’t think we expected things to start happening quite so quickly. It might also be significant that while on the Answers in Genesis website, Iles is described as Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis, on his own Facebook page Iles describes himself  as “Answers in Genesis Chief Ministry Officer (USA) Managing Director (Australia).”

3] Iles, Facebook, 6^th June,

A word like “independent” is a direct assault on God’s design for women… A woman who prizes strength in independence is a woman rebelling against her nature.

4] As Iles puts it on his Facebook page, entry for 4^th September,

[R]econciliation is a once forever act. Warring parties are reconciled through repentance by the one and forgiveness by the other. That is when the past is treated as if it never happened, and a new day dawns. New wrongs may be addressed, but past wrongs may not.

The ‘reconciliation’ movement is far from that model. It is a grievance movement, pouring [sic] over sins of the past, resisting forgiveness. This opposes God’s very nature.

5] One exception is Matthew 25:41, “‘Depart from me, you who are cursed…”, Freely quoted in connection with the severity of God’s judgement, but never in its context about clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, that kind of thing.

This article was first published in 3 Quarks Daily

While Canada burns, Cornwall and Heartland say nothing to worry about. Meantime, in just one week…

by Paul Braterman

Wildfire south of Lillooet, British Columbia. Reuters handout via Al Jazeera, July 17

Within a single week, the raging Canadian wildfires have provoked opposite reactions from different wings of US evangelism, both claiming that their position is based on Genesis, with The Atlantic reporting on the churches’ deep political divisions. Statistical analysis confirms (is anyone surprised?) that July’s unusual heatwave across the northern hemisphere is almost certainly linked to human-caused climate change, which has also caused serious water shortfalls and aridification in the Colorado River basin, and is destabilising the North Atlantic system of currents on which the UK and northern Europe indirectly rely to keep Arctic weather at bay. Meanwhile, the fallout from the unexpected result of a by-election in a London suburb has exposed the dangerous vulnerability of climate policy to political disruption.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Nature, channelling the Heartland Institute, tells us (July 19, 2023) that we are mistaken in associating Canada’s wildfires with global warming, assuring us that “[t]he truth is hard data, as opposed to climate model-generated speculation, belies [sic] the link between climate change wildfires and the recent heatwave.” If news outlets say otherwise, that is either the result of ignorance, or, worse, because they are “in the bag of climate alarmism”. Wildfires happen every year anyway, smoke darkening the skies over the US Atlantic seacoast is not unprecedented (the article quotes a total of nine precedents in the last 300 years), and New Yorkers are only seeing the smoke because of the way the wind happens to be blowing. The actual causes of the fires include inadequate management, as well as “short-term weather conditions such as a drought in some regions, less winter snowfall and warmer temperatures,” as if these had nothing to do with global warming. And ruling out “model-generated speculation,” reasonable though it may sound, would make scientific explanation impossible in any area, since explanation always involves comparison of observations with a model.

Heartland, in a July 21 video presentation hosted by Anthony Watts on its Stopping Socialism TV channel, tells us that “If you turned the news on this last week, you’d probably think parts of the Earth are literally on fire. The corporate media continues pushing the narrative that temperatures are the highest ever, but it’s simply not true.” For good measure, the presentation goes on to tell us that health concerns about particulates from the smoke are greatly exaggerated.

Anyone interested in the climate disinformation industry will be familiar with the name of Watts, whose Watts Up With That? is among the world’s most popular websites. Watts is an equal opportunity climate change denialist, having at various times rejected claims that the climate is warming, that human activity has anything to do with it, or that it is in any way harmful. I even recall seeing him giving prominence to a claim that atmospheric CO2 hasn’t really increased since the 1800s, citing obviously inaccurate Victorian data.

As my regular readers will know, the Cornwall Alliance bases its positions on the Bible, and in particular on the verses in Genesis that give Adam dominion over nature. The inference is that natural resources are there for us to use, so that leaving fossil fuels in the ground would be a refusal to take full advantage of God’s bounty. Cornwall has strong links with Answers in Genesis, as well as with the Heartland Institute, as this example shows, and through Heartland with the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential of established US conservative think tanks, with an annual revenue in 2018 of more than $86 million. So we are not looking at the lunatic fringe here, but at major players whose influence goes to the heart of American politics.

Heartland’s belittling of the health dangers of particulates may have been triggered by a strongly contrasting piece (July 17) from the Evangelical Environmental Network, with the title Why is It So Hazy Out? Climate Change, Wildfires, and How You Can Respond. This 800-word article, rich in links to the underlying health research, describes the dangers of particulate inhalation, which “contributes to shorter lifespans, dementia, autism, and ADHD. Pregnant women and their babies are also at heightened risks of low birth weight, preterm birth, and infant mortality due to this pollution.”

The connection to global warming is spelt out, with practical advice about how individuals can reduce their own carbon footprints, and a plea, also invoking Genesis, to take care of what has been entrusted to us.

We see here a deep schism within US Evangelical Christianity. The Cornwall Alliance only acquired its present name in 2006, but its roots can be traced back to 2000. It was launched in specific opposition to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Climate Initiative. The Association is deeply concerned about climate change, and especially its impact on the poor.

In recent years, this schism has widened. Within the churches, the emergence of the cult of Trump has led to a breakdown of civility. Now even theologically conservative leading figures find themselves accused of wokeness, being social justice warriors, and promoting critical race theory, to the point where some no longer feel themselves at home in their own church. Here the churches are reflecting, and contributing to, deeper conflicts within American society. It is worth remembering that Franklin Graham was among the first to endorse Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential nomination bid.

But back to the wildfires. On 18^th July, the New York Times told us that Canada’s wildfires have eclipsed previous records, even though the fire season still has a month to run. Canada has warmed twice as fast as a planet as a whole, with loss of ice and snow contributing to greater absorption of solar energy, and this fire season has been quite unusual, not only in its early start, but in how widespread it is. Extreme heat on the other side of the Atlantic has also led to wildfires on the island of Rhodes, a popular holiday destination, and we have the ironic spectacle of UK holidaymakers being airlifted home, while the cheap night flights that took them to Rhodes will have contributed to global warming (night flights are cheaper for obvious reasons, and more damaging than daytime flights because while their vapour trails are keeping heat in, there is no solar input for them to keep out. Disclosure; I have often taken such flights from Scotland to the Mediterranean myself, without a second thought.)

Even the London Daily Telegraph, a right-of-centre newspaper that at one time gave a platform to the extreme denialist James Dellingpole, now tells us that the Mediterranean heatwave responsible for the fires in Greece is “the latest clear sign of an impending climate catastrophe.” As for the argument that there have been extreme fire seasons in the past, a detailed analysis published by Imperial College London (short synopsis here and analysis by New York Times here) shows that the coincidence of such record hot weather across North America, Europe, and China would have been almost impossible without global warming.

In other climate news, Nature Communications warns (July 25) of the present weakening and potential collapse within decades of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, weakening the Gulf Stream-North Atlantic current system that protects northern Europe from freezing. The Hill, an American political newspaper whose name is a reference to Capitol Hill, reported on a study showing that the loss of water from the Colorado Basin in the past two decades adds up to the capacity of Lake Mead. This despite the fact, much quoted by climate change denialists, that warmer weather and higher CO2 concentrations cause plants  to shrink the openings in their leaves, thus slowing down respiration.

Meanwhile, the fallout from a freak parliamentary by-election result (July 20), in the suburban London constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, shows the vulnerability of climate policy measures to political opposition. The freak result was that the Conservative government narrowly held the seat, made vacant by Boris Johnson’s resignation, with a swing against them of “only” around 7%, while other by-elections on the same day showed swings of 20% and higher. The successful candidate ran on a policy of opposition to the pending expansion of ULEZ, London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone, from central London to the suburbs, proposed by the highly popular Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. ULEZ demands that vehicles meet standards laid down for emissions, and the policy is thought to have been responsible for saving around 4000 lives a year by reducing air-borne particulates.

No matter that the issue is one for local government, rather than for Parliament anyway. Nor that the ULEZ policy was first introduced, in central London, by no other than Boris Johnson, when he was Mayor. No matter either that the expansion was a bipartisan policy, urged on Khan in 2020 by Grant Shapps, then UK Transport Secretary and now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, no matter that exemptions are available for special cases (such as some vehicles operated by charities), and no matter that virtually all petrol vehicles registered since 2006, and diesel vehicles registered since 2015, meet the required standards. Labour appears to have been blindsided by the tactic, with canvassers reporting voters with electric vehicles in their driveways concerned about how they would be affected.

One would have hoped that the leader of the Labour Party would at this point have stepped in to point out the advantages of the extension. That is not Keir Starmer’s style; instead, he asked Khan to “reflect”, because the issue could be exploited by the Conservatives in the next general election. But Sadiq Khan has stood his ground and also overcome a legal challenge from Conservative-controlled London boroughs. So the extension will presumably be coming into force at the end of August as planned. But it may now be unwise to presume anything.

On Saturday, the headline in the left-of-centre Guardian’s print edition was “Don’t abandon clean air policies, warn scientists.” But that is only one small part of what is at stake. There is a small but vocal and well-organised group of Conservative MPs, led by former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, opposed to any serious action on the environment (Rees-Mogg, incidentally, backed Trump in the 2016 election). A senior minister, Michael Gove, had called on July 22, two days after the by-election, for a relaxation of green policies during the current economic crisis (in the UK, when is there not a current economic crisis?) As for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, he has said since the by-election that his approach to the U.K.’s 2050 zero emissions target will be a “proportionate and pragmatic” course that “doesn’t unnecessarily give people more hassle and more costs in their lives,” and the implied threat to conservation policies has already led a coalition of concerned organisations, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the World Wildlife Fund (whose environmental concerns featured in an earlier column here), the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, and the National Trust to write to the Prime Minister expressing their concerns. On Saturday evening, the Daily Telegraph reported that Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Parliamentary climate change committee, along with more than 40 Conservative MPs and peers, want to push back the 2030 date set to phase out new petrol car sales in the UK, because of costs to motorists. It was reported on Sunday that at least for now the Prime Minister is resisting this pressure, although the Telegraph‘s front page was dedicated to his declaration that he is on the motorists’ side, and ordering a review of anti-car schemes. And today, Sunak has announced hundreds of new oil and gas licenses for the North Sea, citing the need for energy security.

We know that Net Zero by 2050 will only slow down global warming, since the warming is taking place even at present CO2 levels. We know that the commitments made towards achieving Net Zero are inadequate, and unlikely to be honoured. And we know that what is happening at present is a mere foretaste of what is now in store for our children and grandchildren.

And Margaret Thatcher was already warning of “the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself”, in 1989.

This post first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily

Roy Spencer’s stratospheric levels of denial

Frontispiece of article, Climate fearmongering reaches stratospheric heights, by Roy Spencer, also published by the Cornwall alliance. Fair Use.

When a scientist who has won awards for his work in the field disagrees with his colleagues, we must ask how much attention we should give to his opinion.

The image you’re looking at is copied from the website of Dr Roy Spencer, whose piece was also published by the Cornwall Alliance. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, was involved in the development of satellite-based atmospheric temperature monitoring technology for which in 1996 he was honoured by the American Meteorological Society, and has received funding from NASA, NOAA, and DOE. Yet here he is using gutter tactics to assert that a piece of significant new work on the mechanism of climate change is part of an alarmist conspiracy, that the conspiracy is failing to persuade, and that the conspirators are now being forced to invoke arguments based on observations of the stratosphere. Who benefits from this conspiracy and why the overwhelming majority of climate scientists have joined it is not clear For what it’s worth, acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis is increasing among Americans, as elsewhere, for reasons that are all too obvious, and the smoke of Canadian forest fires is much more persuasive than the scholarly discussion of the stratosphere that has triggered Spencer’s extraordinary reaction.

What is going on? I’m doing my best here to make sense of what is happening, in terms of the development of the disagreements between Spencer and his scientific colleagues, and Spencer’s own personal beliefs, to the extent that these are public knowledge. This is not an ad hominem attack on Spencer’s scientific output, which has been thoroughly criticised elsewhere, but a good faith attempt to understand how he came to his present position.

In 1990, Spencer and his colleague John Christy reported that their satellite data implied less atmospheric warming than that suggested by ground-based thermometers. This disagreement with the generally accepted view deepened over the following years, with Spencer claiming that everyone else’s work was hopelessly contaminated by failure to account for the effect of clouds and that the generally agreed temperature record was distorted by the urban heat island effect, while downplaying studies that had shown his work to be in error. In 2006, he and the corresponding author of the paper he is now attacking collaborated on a report by the US Government’s Climate Change Science Program (CCSR). This report identified and corrected errors in the satellite temperature record, so that according to its press release, “There is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere.” The report then drew the inference that “the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone.” According to an eyewitness account, the putting together of the report involved correcting an error in Spencer’s equations, and Spencer seemed unhappy with this.

Spencer has continued to maintain that the consensus view overestimates the amount of global warming, and is one of a handful of scientists who continues to attribute what is happening to changing cloud cover. This of course is an important factor, and it is perhaps natural for Spencer, a meteorologist, to see it as a driver, rejecting the conventional view that while important, it is not a primary cause. In 2008, Spencer wrote Climate Confusion, the first of a series of books in which he defends his view that CO₂ is not an important driver of climate change, describes policies aimed at CO₂ reduction as “global warming hysteria”, accuses politicians of pandering to special interests, and claims that such policies will harm the poor by restricting economic growth. We should not totally ignore those last two arguments. Biofuel programmes, for example, are beneficial to the US farming lobby but their value in reducing CO₂ emissions is hotly contested. And as I was writing this piece, the United Kingdom seemed at one point close to reneging on its commitments to Third World countries, largely as a result of its own poor economic performance. (On the other hand, it is very much the case that the heaviest direct costs of climate change are falling on the poorest countries, thus contributing to the flow of refugees from such countries towards the UK, Europe as a whole, and the US.)

Spencer has come to be closely associated with US conservatism. He has self-published a book on Amazon Kindle in praise of free-market economics, and free-market advocates would rather ignore or deny the damage caused by emissions, since that is an externality built into the true cost, but ignored by the market. He has given testimony to congressional hearings several times, and I should explain to readers outside the US that such hearings are not attempts to discover the truth and influence policy, but political street theatre. In 2010 the right-wing rabble-rouser Rush Limbaugh claimed Spencer as his official climatologist.

Spencer is a member of the advisory board to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, where he also has the status of a Senior Scholar. The Cornwall Alliance is a rather unusual organisation, as I have discussed earlier here here and elsewhere. The Alliance derives its deep motivation from its reading of the Bible, interpreting stewardship in terms of the dominion granted (Genesis 1:28) by God to a newly created literal Adam and Eve; see their statement of faith. Its main activity is arguing on scientific grounds against the consensus view that additional fossil fuel use will cause severe environmental damage, and it has direct links to the fossil fuel lobby and its dark funded activities.

The Cornwall connection immediately raises the question of Spencer’s own religious beliefs, which he discussed in a 2014 blog post. There he describes himself as a Bible-believing scientist, but avoids all discussion of evolution and the age of the earth. He tells us that he disagrees on some matters with the position of the Cornwall Alliance, and in particular that he rejects the argument that we are safe from environmental disaster because God is looking after the planet. However, he uses terminology and strawman arguments common in the creationist literature. Thus he attacks the concept of “settled science,” makes the strawman claim that the origin of life is presented as part of settled science, and describes the search by evolutionists (sic) for such a natural origin as “just as religious as the belief in a creator.”

Spencer is being less than open here. In a more complete statement preserved in the Discovery Institute’s Uncommon Descent archive, he addresses evolution directly, and repeats all the standard arguments against it. Macro evolution has never been observed, and “has virtually no observational evidence to support it.” Moths are still moths. Observed similarities can be as well explained by common design, there are no intermediate fossils connecting amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds et cetera, and punctuated equilibrium theory is merely an attempt to explain away the absence of the required evidence. Accepting either evolution or intelligent design is a matter of faith, and both should be discussed in schools. “At the very least, school textbooks should acknowledge that evolution is a theory of origins, it has not been proved, and that many scientists do not accept it.” There is no indication of his beliefs about the age of the Universe. However, both here and in the 2014 blog post he denounces attempts to explain its origin by natural means, claiming that this would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The same argument is made in Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, and repeated in young earth creationist rhetoric.

In the 2014 post, he told us that a scientist’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to judging the quality of the science, while at the same time maintaining that scientists are influenced in their work by their presuppositions. These two statements are not always entirely compatible.

Climatology is very much a case in point. If, for example, Spencer is a young earth creationist (and his choice of arguments, and self-description as “Bible believing,” suggest that this may well be the case), he will automatically reject all the information on climate change amplification that has emerged from the study of the Ice Ages, and if millions of years of variation are shoehorned in his mind into the last few thousand, then it is certainly possible for him to regard present changes as superficial by comparison.

After so long an introduction, analysis of the scientific development that prompted Spencer’s latest post seems almost anticlimactic. Greenhouse gases, as their name implies, reduce the efficiency by which Earth radiates energy into space by virtue of its infrared emissions. An increase in the temperature of the troposphere, the well-mixed lowest level of the atmosphere, combined with stratospheric cooling, is diagnostic of an increased greenhouse effect, since it directly relates temperature increase at low level to a decrease in upwards energy transfer. (The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere. It is well mixed, and extends from around 6 km above the surface at the poles to 17 km at the equator. The stratosphere is the 50 km or so above that, and shows relatively little mixing between horizontal layers.) For example, if recent warming were simply due to increased solar activity, the stratosphere would have been warmed along with the troposphere, but it wasn’t.

This much is indeed established science. In 1967, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherall calculated the specific changes to be expected with height as the result of increased CO₂ . Repeated observations using balloons and satellites, for example here here, have confirmed that such changes are indeed taking place, and Manabe’s work on climate modelling was recognised by a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The variation of temperature with height, especially in the lower part of the stratosphere, is also affected by changes in the ozone layer and in particulate content. Moreover, other events such as volcanic eruptions and changes in solar illumination can disrupt the temperature profile, and observations of the signal due to this profile are also contaminated by weather-like random fluctuations (technically known as noise). And as if this were not enough, the noise itself is distorted by the slow responses of the oceans to atmospheric temperature changes. The mathematical methods required to sort out signal from noise under these conditions, so as to specify a fingerprint that would be characteristic of human activity, were developed by Klaus Hasselmann, who with Manabe shared in the 2021 Nobel Prize.

Until recently, unambiguous experimental data were only available for the lower part of the stratosphere. The work described in the paper under discussion, a collaboration involving nine separate investigators and ten different institutions, extends our information to the entire stratosphere. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, the predicted signal of human activity actually increases with height, while the effect of weather-like fluctuations falls away. This leads to an improved signal-to-noise ratio (by a factor of five), greatly enhancing the statistical significance of the findings. Secondly, it is the lower stratosphere that contains the ozone layer, which has of course been changing recently for various reasons, and these changes affect the local temperature profile. This complication is less important at greater heights. Thus the new data enable the most rigorous test to date of Manabe’s predictions, and hence by implication of our intimate understanding of human-caused global warming. There can be few topics more important at present.

And the conclusion is unavoidable even if unsurprising. The planet is heating up, because of our actions.

Except that, with great intellectual agility, Spencer manages to avoid this conclusion, writing

The authors are taking advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge concerning the temperature effect of increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere, making it sound like stratospheric cooling is part of the fingerprint of global warming.

It isn’t. Cooling is not warming. [Emphasis in original]

It is hardly taking advantage of the public to publish in PNAS, but let that pass. It gets worse. Spencer claims there is nothing new in the paper, because there have been many earlier accounts of the temperature of the stratosphere. But the whole point of the paper is to extend our earlier knowledge to new heights (ouch! unintended pun, but let it stand.) He refers to Manabe and Wetherall’s seminal theoretical paper (see above), and accepts that its conclusions have been vindicated as regards the stratosphere. Nonetheless, he denies that the work has any real implications for what is happening lower down. But the whole point is that we now have an integrated account of the complete temperature profile of the atmosphere, from ground level to the top of the stratosphere. And he accepts this account (in view of the data in the paper, he could hardly do otherwise) of what is happening in the stratosphere, which doesn’t directly affect us, while arbitrarily rejecting its implications for climate down at the level where we all live, because it’s cloudy and complicated.

I started this piece by asking how much attention we should pay to Spencer’s opinions. I think we have our answer.

This article first appeared on The Panda’s Thumb

Answers in Genesis appoints dangerous climate change denier as Chief Ministry Officer

Image from AiG site

 “Though some weather events result from conditions on a fallen earth, Scripture is quite clear that God is in control.” This carefully crafted tweet by Answers in Genesis a few days ago is almost certainly the work of their newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer, Martyn Iles. Since God is in control, human activity cannot be responsible for the state of the planet, and the suggestion that we should adjust our policies because of their global impact is not only misguided, but impious. 

Temperatures may be higher than at any time since the origin of humankind, ice caps may be melting in Arctic and Antarctic, and the smoke from forest fires may be making the air in New York unbreathable, but all of that is beside the point, because such things are to be expected on a fallen earth. The underlying reason for global warming is not fossil fuel burning, but Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden. Thus the entire corpus of scientific evidence and climate observation is pre-emptively dismissed as irrelevant.

Notice that Iles is, despite the headline, not actually a climate change denier. He simply bypasses the question of whether climate change is happening, in order to move directly to the conclusion that if it is, we shouldn’t be trying to do anything about it. Because God. Such sophistical subtlety is central to his impressive rhetorical technique.

It would be wrong to dismiss such thinking as lunatic fringe. Lunatic, yes, but fringe, in the context of both Australian and North American politics, anything but. Over the past 20 years, a strong alliance has emerged, with its own special pseudoscience as justification, between young earth creationism, climate change denial, and conservative politics. There are, in the US at least, direct links between the creationist ministries, the fossil fuel industry, and influential right-wing think tanks. The alliance between evangelicals and climate change deniers played a major role in the election of Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister until last year, and of Donald Trump, both of whom did everything they could to block attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions. Similar alliances are at work in Alberta, and in Texas where the legislature is placing obstacles in front of the emerging renewables energy industry, despite its massive contributions to the State’s economy.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, has been a major force in Australian religious politics. He was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.

AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.

There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)

Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.

It is thus a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”

For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.

To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.

Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.

The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.

Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.

Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)

If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs.  It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.

Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.

Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.

The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.

For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.

I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this material Appeared on Panda’s Thumb and 3 Quarks Daily.

1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/06/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position.html and https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/

Is there something fishy about radiocarbon dating?

A map of the route taken by the Viking Great Heathen Army. Hel-hama, own work, via Wikipedia

The Vikings started out as raiders, but then, in the way of these things, ended up as rulers, and their influence stretched from Greenland to what is now Russia. They first enter English history in 793, with the sacking of the Monastery of Lindisfarne. By the late 9^th century, they were colonising Iceland, and serving as mercenaries to the Emperor of Byzantium. In 862, Vikings under Rurik established themselves in Novgorod, forming the nucleus of what would become Kyivan Rus. In 885, Vikings besieged Paris, and although they were beaten back settled in what is now Normandy (Norman, Northmen). In 865, the Viking Great Heathen Army arrived in England, and a year later, under Ivar the Boneless, captured York, which would remain their capital in England until the defeat of Eric Bloodaxe in at 954.

The Vikings’ goal was to establish themselves as rulers over Anglo-Saxon England, divided at that time into the four kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex, and in this they were almost successful. After establishing their kingdom in York, they swept south, taking control of East Anglia and killing its king, who had earlier provided them with horses. They then spend the next five years consolidating their hold over what had been the most powerful of the Saxon kingdoms, Mercia, stretching from the Thames to the Humber, whose king took refuge in Paris. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that in 873-44, a date that will prove significant for us, the army spend the winter in Repton, then a town of some importance. It then divided, one part going north to consolidate control over York, while the other swept south through Mercia into Wessex, which they effectively overran over the next two years.

Silver coin of Alfred the Great/Seolfring þæs cyninges Ælfredes. Safforrest, own work, via Wikipedia

The then King of Wessex, Alfred, was not obviously born to kingship, but the throne had passed to him after the death of his brothers. He was forced to take refuge in the Somerset marshes, where according to legend he burnt the cakes while busy contemplating his next move. Despite these reverses, he was able to raise an army from Somerset, Wiltshire, and the part of Hampshire not directly under Danish control. There he developed the strategy of building strategically located burhs, some taking advantage of fortifications surviving from Roman times, where the nearby Saxons would gather and organise if attacked. Alfred’s forces inflicted a major defeat on the Danes at the Battle of Edington, after which their leader, Guthrum. made peace with Wessex. Guthrum and Alfred agreed terms of trade and established a boundary to the Danish domain (the Danelaw) stretching roughly from London to Chester, while Guthrum himself agreed to be baptised, with Arthur acting as his godfather. The ruler of Mercia accepted Alfred as a superior and married his daughter, and Alfred assumed the title of King of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danish forces then dispersed. Guthrum himself became king of East Anglia, and some Danish forces returned to the Continent, while others remained in the Danelaw, which was not finally brought under English domination until 954.

English schoolbooks describe the entire episode as a great victory, and so it was from the point of view of Wessex, with the rival kingdoms of East Anglia and Mercia conveniently eliminated. The Danes, however, had managed to gain control of almost the whole of northern and eastern England, where they would retain a major presence for 70 years.

England in the late ninth century. Hel-hama, own work, via Wikipedia

Alfred was probably the most able ruler that England has ever had. He rebuilt London, which had been destroyed in the wars. Realising that the existing militia system responded to slowly to the Danes’ hit-and-run tactics, he organised a standing army and navy paid for by taxation, and located burhs strategically where bridges crossed major rivers. Among his other accomplishments, he established schools and required the children of nobles to be educated, codified laws, and had key documents translated into the English of the time, which became the language of instruction.

There is a large defensive ditch enclosing the Saxon church of St Wystan in Repton, where the Vikings had overwintered. Within the enclosed area is a mound, containing over 250 skeletons, mostly of men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five. This collective grave had been lined with clay at the bottom, suggesting a single mass burial event. There are a few coins, all dated to the period 872-4. Other, smaller graves nearby show Scandinavian-style burial practices and grave goods, including a silver amulet Hammer of Thor, so it would be natural to suppose that we are looking at burials connected with the Viking army. It should be easy enough to test this hypothesis, by radiocarbon dating of the collagen in the bones, but the results of this were quite surprising. While some of the radiocarbon age estimates included the relevant date, others appeared to be about a hundred years older. It was of course possible that skeletons already in the ground at that point had been reburied, but that does seem rather unlikely.

So was there anything about the Vikings that could make their skeletons seem older than they actually were? Yes; they ate a lot of fish.

St Wistan, Repton. The tower and spire are later (1340) addition. Image from Staffordshire Live, March 2018, celebrating the work reported here.

To understand why that could be making a difference, we need to look closely at how radiocarbon dating works. Most dating methods depend on long-lived radioactive nuclei that date back to the formation of the earth. Carbon-14, however, has a half-life of a mere 5,700 years. The only reason why there is any at all is that it is continually replenished by cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen-14 in the upper atmosphere. This new carbon-14 is then circulated through the atmosphere, and taken up by plants and hence by animals. When an organism dies, it is no longer taking part in this circulation and its carbon-14 is no longer replenished as it decays. Thus the radiocarbon age of once-living material would be expected to correspond roughly to the time since death.

However, we’ve known for a long time that if for any reason an organism gets its carbon from a pool that is isolated from the general circulation, radiocarbon dating can be spectacularly wrong. 60 years ago, a freshwater mussel collected live from a tributary of the Mississippi gave a radiocarbon age of 2300 years. The river at that point was flowing over a limestone (calcium carbonate) bed, and if around one quarter of the carbon that ended up in the growing mollusc came from that source, that would explain the result, since the limestone being ancient contains no radiocarbon at all. Less spectacularly, marine environments are known to give anomalously old apparent ages, because of the time it takes for atmospheric carbon dioxide to diffuse into the oceans. The effect is even bigger for river fish, because of the influence of dissolving limestone. As a demonstration, a group of German and  Danish researchers tried cooking fish in a clay pot over a wood fire, and then dated the organic residues. The apparent age was 700 years. And you are what you eat; the radiocarbon in your bone collagen will reflect the radiocarbon in your diet at the time the collagen was formed.

So do Viking eating habits explain the anomalous dates at Repton? In order to check this, we need to do two things. We need to show the Vikings really did eat a lot of fish, and we need to show that doing so really does make the expected difference to apparent radiocarbon age. Fortunately, a study of the fate of the Viking settlement in Greenland gives us the answers to both these questions.

The Vikings first settled in Greenland under the leadership of Eric the Red in 985 CE, after he had been banished from Norway for manslaughter. The settlement grew to a population of around 5000, but was abandoned in the mid-15^th century. One possible explanation is local climate change. 985 was during the Mediaeval Warm Period, which brought mild climates in the North Atlantic basin, but by 1450 this was giving way to the Little Ice Age. If this colder climate had been responsible for crop failures, this may be reflected in the settlers eating more fish. Moreover, the skeletons in Iceland also gave anomalous radiocarbon ages, with some apparently predating the original settlement.

R: Sheet from Lake Saga of Eric the Red/Eiríks saga rauða; image by Gilwellian via Wikipedia

We can study ancient diets by looking at a stable minor isotope of carbon, carbon-13, present in around 1.1% abundance. Students are often told that different isotopes have different masses, but identical chemistry. This is not quite true. For reasons well understood in terms of quantum mechanics [1], carbon-13 is slightly less reactive than carbon-12, and is selected against to different extents by different kinds of plant. This eventually results in small but measurable changes in human collagen carbon-13 abundance, depending on diet. The amount of carbon-13 can now be measured to high accuracy using mass spectrometry, and is larger in fish eating populations, such as British Columbia First Nations, than with those on a low fish diet such as inland rural populations without major rivers.

The carbon-13 and carbon-14 data for the Greenland Vikings should therefore be examined together. It was found from the carbon-13 data that, as hypothesised, fish became more and more important in their diet at later dates. It was also possible to estimate how anomalous the carbon-14 data were for the skeletons, by comparing them with their woollen grave clothes (sheep do not eat fish). And indeed, the more important fish had been in any individual’s diet, the greater the disparity between apparent and true age. This is in fact a quantitative relationship, so that after measuring the carbon-13 content of a skeleton, we can calculate the expected radiocarbon age anomaly, and correct for this. When this is done, we find as expected that the true age of death of all the skeletons was late night century. Notice that there is no circular reasoning involved here. The relationship between carbon-13 and fish eating was established directly from observations of populations with known differences in diet. The reality of carbon-14 anomalies in dating the skeletons of fisheaters at Repton was established using actual known dates of death from Greenland. It was only after these relationships have been established, that it was possible to calculate the appropriate corrections to the Repton data.

The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) reported on this study, shortly after it was published, under the clickbait title Viking Bones Contradict Carbon-14 Assumptions. Their report goes on to say, quite correctly, that when it comes to radiocarbon dating one size does not fit all, and from this draws the inference that scientific evidence (radiocarbon dating) is intrinsically less reliable than eyewitness testimony (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). This of course is exactly back to front; we regard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is pretty reliable because its account matches the archaeological findings. The ICR article’s author, James Johnson, has a law degree, and arguments based on the correction of scientific errors seem to have a particular appeal to lawyers, who treat the science as they would a witness who had changed their story under cross-examination. This shows total misunderstanding of what is really going on, and it is deplorable that lawyers (and juries) regard eyewitness accounts as more reliable than forensic evidence. There is the further irony that the eyewitness evidence regarding age to which Johnson is appealing is the alleged testimony of the Creator as laid out in Genesis. This, technically, is hearsay evidence, and as any lawyer should know is at best only as reliable as the process of reporting.

What we have here, contrary to ICR’s claim, is an example of science at its best. We had an initial hypothesis that the skeletons were Viking, strongly supported by grave goods and the known presence of the Heathen Great Army in Repton. But there was an anomaly, namely the radiocarbon dating of the bones. A suggested resolution involved the effect of diet on apparent age, but without further confirmatory evidence this will be a highly unsatisfactory ad hoc solution. However, the carbon-13 evidence allows us, using calibration obtained from a separate set of data (Greenland), to apply the appropriate correction, and the anomaly then disappears.

The story has important implications for studies of England and presumably elsewhere during the Viking period. There is long-standing puzzlement among archaeologists about the apparent lack of Viking skeletons, and it now seems that this might be resolved by re-dating skeletons thought to be pre-Viking, applying the appropriate correction for diet. It is also a splendid example of science in action. Hypothesis (that we are looking at skeletons from the Viking Great Army), anomaly (mismatch of measured dates), subsidiary hypothesis (the effect of diet) proposed to resolve the anomaly, and independent support for that subsidiary hypothesis, without which we would have had to suspect special pleading.

As might be expected, radiocarbon dating anomalies play a special role in creationist arguments. We have seen how ICR put a creationist spin on this anomaly. That was back in 2018, when the story was fresh. For reasons I do not understand, Chick Tracts, who describe their output as “Cartoon Gospel Stories That People Love To Read”, featured the story in their most recent product, March 2023, contrasting the unreliability of scientific evidence with the unquestionable weight of eyewitness testimony in the Gospel. Chick Tracts’ most famous offering being Big Daddy?, in which a godless science teacher is converted to Christianity by an evolution-rejecting student, who uses a number of arguments that will be very familiar to anyone acquainted with a creationist literature. Moreover, the science teacher cannot explain what holds atomic nuclei together, until the student tells him that all things are held together by Christ. The current version of Big Daddy? has the student using arguments long since refuted, telling us that Lucy was a chimpanzee, that vestigial organs are not really vestigial because they have vestigial functions, that the use of index fossils involves arguing in a circle, and that polystrate fossil trees prove the reality of Noah’s flood. The original (1972) version was to my mind far superior, invoking instead actual dating anomalies (including the mollusc we met earlier), correctly criticising the then-popular view that the problem of the origin of life had been solved (it hadn’t, and it hasn’t), and pointing out the differences between evolution driven by chance, evolution as progress, and theistic evolution. As the 1972 version shows, the author Jack Chick (1924 – 2016) was at that time powerfully influenced by the misguided but more or less intellectually reputable creationists around Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, while towards the end of his life, as shown [2] by the tract In The Beginning, Chick fell under the influence of the extraordinary Kent Hovind, who maintains that income tax is unconstitutional. Hovind has also claimed, among other things, that the US government is using implanted microchips to track people, that “FEMA is already developing detention camps to put prisoners in when they do not agree with the New World Order”, and that 666 in barcodes fulfils a prophecy in the book of Revelation. In The Beginning includes at least two arguments (the canopy, the Glen Rose footprints) that Creation Ministries International has listed among the arguments that creationists should no longer use.

The 1972 version of Big Daddy? thanks Dr Bolton Davidheiser, PhD Johns Hopkins, who wrote genuine scientific papers (about sex determination in beetles) before becoming involved in creationism, cites Melvin A. Cook, Professor  of Metallurgy at Utah, and correctly states the findings of several scientific papers, although it misinterprets the implications. The 2000 version refers only to creationist sources, apart from one journal reference (New Scientist September 6, 1999) that does not exist.

Do such changes matter in an intellectually negligible comic strip? Yes, when the world is as it now is, and when the comic strip series in question has sold over 1 billion items.

(Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/05/is-there-something-fishy-about-radiocarbon-dating.html; also at California State University Northridge https://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Nr101Fishy.pdf)

1] Zero-point energy has the effect of causing lighter isotopes to prefer environments in which they are more loosely bound, including the transition states involved in chemical reactions.

2] Private communication from Kurt Kuersteiner, who was generous with information even though aware that I totally disagree with him. Kurt maintains an informative website dedicated to Jack Chick’s work.

I thank Glenn Branch, of the National Center for Science Education, for information and suggestions.