Why a key creationist climate change denier has gone antivaxx

Summary: The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Nature presents itself as a Christian thinktank on environmental ethics. In reality, it is a direct link between evolution denial and climate change denial, with personnel overlapping Answers in Genesis, and

direct links to the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and the influential Heritage Foundation. It is now engaged in assembling an ideological package, based on rejection of the principle that policy should be guided by scientific knowledge, and linking together everything from evolution to environmental concerns to elementary measures for restricting the spread of Covid. The rhetoric is masterly; the consequences, lethal.

A friend just sent me a copy of materials that the Cornwall Alliance is sending to its supporters. Here is an extract [fair use claimed]:

BE ARMED AGAINST THE DANGERS OF SCIENCE SO CALLED

Question any part of the climate-change “consensus” (how much climate change is going on, how much humans contribute to it, what if anything we should do about it), and you’re instantly declared “anti-science” or even a threat to the future of the human race.

But don’t be intimidated—or fooled. That response is itself anti-science. It is rhetoric designed to win not by persuading others but by silencing them.

And it arises not just about climate change. From good old Darwinism (goo to you by way of the zoo) and Malthusianism (population growth inexorably exceeds food production and causes a sudden die-off), to the Obama Administration’s insistence that employers must provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion regardless of their religious conscience, and COVID-19 mask, social distancing, travel, church worship, and vaccine policies.

People in America and around the world are in danger of becoming slaves of scientism and scientocracy.

The rest of the piece is a blurb for an essay by John G West that forms part of a forthcoming book on CS Lewis and his views on the relationship between science and religion (science ought to know its place), leading up to an appeal for funds. The Cornwall Alliance is a charity under US law, rather than a political body, and contributions are tax-deductible.

Creationism and climate – birth of a new pseudoscience

The usual creationist nonsense is just tedious. But creationist “climate science” is toxic, disastrous in its implications for policy, and frighteningly well-connected politically

Major event	Date (using Ussher)1
Creation	4004 BC
Curse	4004 BC (Day 10 after creation)
Global Flood	2348 BC
Tower Babel	2242 BC
Egypt began	After 2242 BC but prior to Abraham going to Egypt (Genesis 12)
Call of Abraham	1922 BC
Ice Age peak	1848 BC (500 years after the Flood)
Time of the Judges (Moses was first)	1491 BC (God appearing to Moses in the burning bush)
Time of the Kings (Saul was the first)	1095 BC
Split kingdom	975 BC
Christ was born	~4 BC

Timeline of major events, according to Answers in Genesis

We are all too familiar with creationist life science (theory of kinds) and creationist Earth science (Flood geology). As I explain in an article at 3 Quarks Daily, recent decades have seen the emergence of a creationist climate science, which is a direct attack on the “secular” climate science of climate change. Creationist climate science rejects, as it must, the palaeoclimatology that helped establish the existence of positive climate feedbacks, and from this draws the inference that our present concern about human effects on climate is unbiblical, unscientific, and exaggerated. This fits in directly with the agendas of the organisations opposing fossil fuel restraint, and even involves some of the same people. We need to pay attention.

Yes, there is a strong consensus on climate change

I have been corresponding about these matters with one of the authors (Dana Nuccitelli) of the lead paper on the subject ( Cook et al. 2013 “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature“) for some years.

Arctic Sea Ice Volume, from Polar Science Center (http://psc.apl.uw.edu/)

Climate change denial shares many interesting features of evolution denial. Misrepresentation of data, accusations of fraud (remember Climategate?), allegations of non-existent scientific disagreement, reporting on genuine scientific debates about rates and mechanisms as if they were fundamental disagreements of principle, and repeated attempts (especially in the US, at state level) to pass laws requiring schools to “teach the controversy”. In the US, although not as far as I know in the UK, there is strong overlap between evolution denial and climate change denial, both being linked to the Evangelical Right that has more or less captured the Republican Party. In both cases, there are Orwellian mislabellings. Thus the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is dedicated to the unrestricted exploitation of the planet’s resources, while Evolution News and Views consists of nothing but attacks on the science that supports evolution. We also have the endless and shameless repetition of blatant falsehoods. Creationists keep on telling us that evolution has never been observed, that the fossil record is too sparse to be interpreted, and that there is a “missing link” between humans and their common ancestors with other apes. Climate change deniers seem oblivious to the massive loss of Arctic ice, while trumpeting every intermittent uptick as a major recovery, and use the then unique 1998 spike (exceeded several times since) as if it were an appropriate baseline. Other climate denial falsehoods that refuse to go away include the allegations (repeated on UK TV Channel 4 and elsewhere) that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans (the reverse is true, by a factor of over 100), and that present warming is due to Milankovich cycles (no; it is much too fast for that). Both have their own glossy websites, and setting up counters to these (such as talkorigins and pandasthumb for evolution, and Skeptical Science for climatology) is a major cottage industry.

Climate change denialists, however, take quote mining and misattribution to a whole new level. Thus denialists regularly accuse climate scientists of having switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change or vice versa because the case for warming was so weak or because global warming sounds more frightening (versions vary). In reality, it was the denialist Frank Luntz who proposed the change in vocabulary, in an internal thinktank memo leaked to Mother Jones:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation ” instead of preservation. “Climate change’’ is less frightening than “global warming”

(In this memo, Luntz shows mastery of how to use words for effect; we would do well to study his methods closely.) And while both kinds of denialists accuse the scientists they are attacking of wholesale fraud, at least the evolution denialists do have one real case they can cite (Piltdown Man), while despite half a dozen investigations in two continents into alleged misconduct, the climate denialists have none.

There are two other important differences. One is scale of funding. The funding available to promote climate change denial is major, large enough to finance attempts to set up an entire bogus curriculum. The other is potential impact. If large numbers of people persist in a creationist view of reality, remaining obstinately misinformed about what kind of universe we inhabit and what kind of creatures we are, that is an enormous pity but has no obvious further implications. But if large numbers of voters, especially in the US, persist in denying our influence on climate, the implications for policy making are very serious indeed.

The Logic of Science

Even if you have never paid any real attention to the climate change “debate,” you have probably seen someone say that, “97% of climatologists agree that we are causing climate change.” This is a number that I have personally cited on numerous occasions, and it is a number that is highly contested by the climate change deniers. Indeed, I rarely mention the consensus without people responding by adamantly proclaiming that the 97% number is a myth, and the study that produced it (Cook et al. 2013) has been debunked. Therefore, in this post, I want to deal with the consensus on climate change from several angles. First, I want to focus on the prominent Cook et al. study and explain what the authors actually did, what they found, and why their study was robust. I also want to deal with some of the common criticisms of their study. Finally, I…

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