Part Two: The Great Climate Debate
Lesson Overview
The Great Climate Debate, Part 2 with Charles Clough
This session picks up an unfinished point from the previous night and then turns to the institution of science itself: how it is funded, how consensus is enforced, and why Clough believes the biblical worldview is what makes science possible in the first place. Use this overview to review the key points after watching the full video.
Finishing the Question: Is Warming Catastrophic?
Clough begins with the question the alarm depends on. If nothing is done, is the result a disaster?
His answer rests on three points. First, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but plant food, necessary for life, and unlike carbon monoxide or other genuinely dangerous gases. Second, history shows warm periods have generally been beneficial, since warming lengthens growing seasons and increases agricultural output. Third, he cites satellite observations of increased vegetation in areas that previously supported little plant life. His summary phrase is that more carbon dioxide produces a greener planet.
The Three Big Questions Revisited
Clough returns to the framework from the first session. The metaphysical question, what is reality, determines whether life has purpose, since if the whole has no purpose the parts cannot either. Scripture answers it by identifying God as Creator, judge, and savior.
He illustrates the alternative with Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, in which Gore describes searching for meaning after a serious accident involving his son and finding it in environmental activism. Clough’s point is not to mock but to observe that environmentalism functions here as a religious faith supplying purpose, which is what a worldview does.
The second question is whether truth exists. He argues absolute truth is under severe pressure in our generation, which sets up the rest of the session.
Post-Normal Science
Clough introduces the term post-normal science, quoting a description of it: that where normal science aimed at objective factual information, post-normal science establishes extended peer communities that admit input from non-scientific participants, treats the maintenance of quality rather than the establishment of factual knowledge as its key task, and requires participants to agree on perceptions, narratives, and interpretations.
His objection is that this makes science subjective, a matter of competing perceptions rather than of facts, and places it in service to social and political agendas.
Eisenhower’s Second Warning
The center of the session is Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. Clough notes that everyone remembers the warning about the military-industrial complex, but few read several paragraphs further, where Eisenhower warned that a government contract had become virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity, that the power of money is ever present and gravely to be regarded, and that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.
Clough explains the mechanism historically. Before the Second World War, much research was privately funded and scientists were relatively free to explore. The Manhattan Project created a network of federally funded national laboratories. When the war ended, those laboratories and their staffs remained, and they required continuing appropriations. To obtain them, a laboratory must persuade Congress that it is addressing a problem of national scope. That creates a self-reinforcing loop in which identifying a crisis secures funding, and funding sustains the institution.
He stresses that Eisenhower was not saying this is inherently corrupt, only that it must be watched.
Consensus and Its Enforcement
Clough repeats that science is not settled by consensus but by tested conclusions and observations. He adds a point about language: “science says” is a category error, because science is an abstract noun and not a person. Scientists speak; science does not.
On the widely cited ninety-seven percent figure, he quotes a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, a central institution in climate research, who called the underlying article poorly conceived, poorly designed, and poorly executed, and criticized officials for citing it.
He then gives three examples he considers intimidation of dissent: a congressman’s 2014 demand for disclosure of all funding sources for seven prominent skeptical scientists; a Wall Street Journal piece by MIT’s Richard Lindzen arguing that ambiguous findings are amplified by those with a vested interest in alarm, which raises the stakes for policymakers who fund further research; and a senator’s call for a racketeering investigation of fossil fuel companies and those who question the consensus.
The Models
Clough argues that all climate policy ultimately rests on models, and that a model is a mathematical picture of reality rather than reality itself, so it must be validated against observation.
He presents a graph comparing the output of forty-four climate models against satellite temperature records from two independent sources. The models agree that temperature should rise steadily as carbon dioxide accumulates. The satellite records, particularly since about 2000, show far less warming, with short spikes he attributes to El Nino events. His conclusion is that the models run consistently warm, which means they are not correctly capturing natural background variation, and that policy built on unvalidated models is unjustified.
Statements That Are Not About Science
Clough then reads several statements from public figures which he argues reveal the actual motive.
A former United States senator said the global warming issue should be pursued because even if the theory proves wrong, the resulting economic and environmental policy would be correct anyway. A State Department official said a global warming treaty must be implemented even if no scientific evidence exists to support the greenhouse effect. An official associated with the UN climate panel said one must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy, since it is really about redistributing the world’s wealth.
He also returns to the East Anglia professor, quoting from his book that the function of climate change is not about stopping climate chaos but about using the idea of climate change to rethink political, social, economic, and personal projects.
Students should know that some of these quotations, particularly the last two, are disputed as to context by those who gave them and by others who have examined them, and should look them up in full.
The Human Cost of the Policy
Clough argues the policy consequences fall hardest on the poor. Energy is embedded in every product, so raising its price raises the cost of manufacturing, transportation, heating, cooling, and lighting. He argues this depresses profits and government revenues, making the policy self-defeating.
He makes the point personal for a Christian audience by pointing to missions. Believers spend heavily to reach people in poor nations and then to love them, part of which means helping lift them out of poverty. At present technology levels, he argues, only energy-dense, reliable, inexpensive fossil fuels can do that at scale. He also mentions winter deaths in Britain among people forced to choose between food and heating, which he attributes partly to energy policy, a linkage others dispute.
He then makes his most serious charge: that behind some climate advocacy lies a desire to reduce human population, since more people means more energy use. He connects this to abortion and to the consequences of coercive population control, citing China’s sex imbalance and the trafficking and exploitation that follow. He ties this back to the ethics question, arguing that a worldview flattening the distinction between humans, animals, and plants inevitably lowers the value assigned to human life.
The Critique of Sustainability
Clough argues the word sustainability conceals an assumption: that technology is frozen at its present level and human beings will invent nothing new.
He gives three historical counterexamples. People once burned peat, a limited resource, until coal and oil replaced it. Homes were once lit with whale oil, and a growing population using that technology would have driven whales to extinction, until the light bulb made whale oil obsolete. Forests were once consumed for fuel, and he notes that New England, largely farmland a century ago, has substantially reforested as agriculture became more efficient.
His summary is that every mouth born into the world comes equipped with a brain. He traces the sustainability doctrine to Malthus and argues it underestimates the ingenuity God gave humanity, citing Proverbs 25:2, that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out, which he pictures as a divine game of hide and seek with treasures buried in creation.
Why Science Requires the Bible
Clough closes with his central conviction: modern science arose only in a civilization shaped by the Bible, and it rests on assumptions that cannot be justified apart from it.
Science requires an orderly, designed universe rather than one produced by chaos. It requires the laws of logic to hold. It requires that the human mind be capable of comprehending the design in creation. And it requires the uniformity principle, that a law demonstrated today will still hold next month, which cannot be proven by experiment but is guaranteed by an unchanging God who has bound Himself by covenant to the created order. He notes that Aristotle, for all his brilliance, never conducted experiments, and that experimental science did not develop in cultures that regarded nature as divine.
He then turns this on education, observing that a student spends thirteen years learning every subject as though God does not exist. Citing Romans 12:2, he argues that undoing that requires years of sustained study, not a weekly sermon. He also notes an irony in the movement he critiques: it insists humanity is a corrupting force on the planet, while its leaders seem to consider themselves exempt from that corruption and fit to direct everyone else.
His summary of the debate: climate has always changed, warming has historically been a blessing, carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth, recent warming has not been shown to increase extreme weather (he attributes greater storm damage to more building in vulnerable areas), the models are not validated, and the proposed policies would increase global governance while decreasing prosperity. His last words are that no one should be alarmed, because Jesus has the last word.
From the Question Time
Asked whether this is the strong delusion of 2 Thessalonians 2, Clough says he is not convinced we are in the tribulation, but notes Satan has always deceived nations. He offers his own explanation, drawing on Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear: every person is made with an innate awareness of accountability to God, and when that is suppressed, the fear does not disappear but attaches itself to other objects.
Asked about fracking and earthquakes, and about abiotic oil, he declines both as outside his expertise, which he notes is itself a scientific virtue. He does offer a related observation, that tide gauges measure the difference between sea and land, so apparent sea level rise can sometimes reflect subsiding land, as in areas where groundwater has been heavily extracted.
Asked about sunspots, he says solar activity is clearly correlated with terrestrial temperature even though the mechanism is not understood, and argues a correlation should not be dismissed simply because it cannot yet be explained.
Asked how to answer the claim that science and faith are mutually exclusive, he replies that science itself rests on three articles of faith: the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, and the correspondence between human thought and external reality.
Asked by a college student how to talk with a professor who feels strongly about sustainability, he advises maintaining rapport, avoiding a gruff or aggressive posture, asking first what she means by the term, and then raising the whale oil and peat examples as questions rather than accusations.
Key Terms
Post-normal science: science conducted in service of policy goals, treating findings as negotiated perceptions rather than objective facts.
Scientific-technological elite: Eisenhower’s phrase for the danger of public policy becoming captive to funded expertise.
Validation: testing a model’s output against real-world observation to determine whether it is reliable.
Uniformity principle: the assumption that natural laws remain constant, which Clough argues requires a theological foundation.
Sustainability: a term Clough critiques for assuming technology and human ingenuity are frozen.
Malthusian: the view, traced to Thomas Malthus, that population growth outruns available resources.
Verses to Know
Genesis 1:28, the command to be fruitful, multiply, and exercise dominion. Genesis 8:22 and 9:8-17, God’s covenant guaranteeing the stability of the created order. Proverbs 25:2, the glory of kings is to search out what God has concealed. Romans 12:2, do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Takeaway
Clough argues that the climate debate is finally a worldview debate: whether science exists to discover truth or to serve policy, whether human beings are a scourge on nature or image-bearers equipped with God-given ingenuity, and whether the created order is precarious or upheld by the covenant promise of God.