Creationism and Climate Science

"Please stop the “no greenhouse effect” stuff. It’s making us skeptics look bad." — Roy Spencer, climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and co-founder of the satellite temperature record, 2014¹

"Crouch is correct that the issue is not that man is causing global warming, since skeptics also believe in man-caused global warming." — Michael Oard, meteorologist and the leading young-earth ice-age modeller, writing for Answers in Genesis, 2005²

Summary

In American surveys, people who doubt evolution are also more likely to doubt man-made global warming, and many young-earth writers argue against it.  This article asks whether that skepticism is supported by the evidence.  It tests the best-known young-earth treatment, Don Batten's long article for Creation Ministries International (CMI), claim by claim, and compares it with what the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Answers in Genesis (AiG), and the creation-friendly scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy have published.

What the young-earth writers claim.  They concede more than their tone suggests.  CMI grants that CO2 warms the earth, ICR's Jake Hebert treats the human cause of the CO2 rise as settled, and AiG's Michael Oard wrote in 2005 that skeptics also accept man-caused warming.  What they dispute is how much warming more CO2 brings, and they do not agree among themselves on that number (Part 1).

The science, one question at a time.  Five sibling articles take the scientific questions in turn, and the verdicts here rest on them.

1. Is the Earth Warming? Yes, by about 1.3 °C since the late 1800s, measured by thermometers, satellites and the heat gained by the ocean.
2. Is the Warming Caused by Humans? Mostly. The CO2 rise is fossil carbon, and the sun's output has been flat since 1978.
3. How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? About 1.5 to 2.5 °C per doubling on the instrumental record alone and 3 °C in the IPCC's assessment, not CMI's 0.5 °C.
4. How Well Have Climate Predictions Done? Mixed. Many models run hot and famous public forecasts failed, but the measured warming and sea-level rise have gone on.
5. Has Climate Science Been Dishonest? In places, but the temperature records have been rebuilt independently and agree.

On the CMI article.  Batten's article is the most complete young-earth treatment of modern climate, and it is right on several points:  activist forecasts that failed, models that run hot, the statistical defects in the original "hockey stick", and the gap between sensitivity estimated from observations and from models.  Its core science fails.  It misreads its own sources on CO2 saturation, quotes the IPCC with the qualifying sentence cut off, reports an ocean-heat record that is the opposite of the measured one, and arrives at a sensitivity that cannot reproduce the warming already measured.  It also treats sensitivity, which is warming per doubling of CO2, as if it were the total warming.  The full scorecard is in Part 4, with each row linked to the sibling article where the claim is argued.

Why creationism and climate skepticism go together.  Mostly politics.  Pew's 2022 survey of 10,156 Americans concluded that "The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion."³  The one study that tested the creationism link directly, by Elaine Howard Ecklund and colleagues, found that doubting evolution added nothing to doubting climate change once political ideology and trust in science were known, leaving a small extra skepticism among evangelicals.⁴  Nothing in a young-earth reading of Genesis requires climate skepticism (Part 2).

Measured warming is not an age clock.  A thermometer reading from 1900 compared with one from 2020 is not an extrapolation into deep time, and nothing in the measured warming, its cause or the effect of CO2 depends on the age of the earth (Part 3).  The deep ice cores and the sensitivity estimates drawn from past ice ages do depend on old-earth dating, and those are argued in the sibling articles on the ice age and ice-core layer counting.  A young-earth reader who sets the deep-time evidence aside still has the instrumental record, and the instrumental record alone gives a sensitivity of 1.5 to 2.5 °C, not 0.5.

What young-earth writers should drop.  "There has been no warming."  "Ocean heat shows almost no change."  "CO2 is saturated, so more does nothing."  "The sun did it."  "Sensitivity is 0.5 °C."  "The temperature records are fraud."  "Sea-level rise is not accelerating."  What they can keep, with evidence:  many models run hot;  observed sensitivity is likely below the IPCC's central value;  many headline impact forecasts failed;  the first hockey stick had real statistical faults;  the case for any given policy rests on costs and values that science does not settle.

What follows for policy?  That is a question of values and costs, not of data, and this article says little about it (Part 5).  Whether warming does more good or more harm is weighed in the sibling article Does Warming Do More Good or Harm?.

Part 1: What the young-earth writers actually claim

There is no single young-earth position on climate.  In 2009 CMI's editor Carl Wieland, replying to readers about a viewpoint piece by Russ Humphreys, wrote that it "was not our official position (we don’t have one on global warming)".⁵  Answers in Genesis printed Michael Oard's 2005 commentary under an editor's note saying "AiG does not typically get involved in the debate concerning controversial environmental issues."²  So the positions below are those of named authors.  They agree on more than a reader might expect.

CMI: Don Batten's article

Don Batten's "Climate Change:  A biblical and scientific approach to Anthropogenic Global Warming" first appeared in November 2020 and was last updated in 2026.⁶  Batten holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and worked for twenty years as a research horticulturalist with the New South Wales Department of Agriculture.⁷  He says the article runs to "over 14,000 words" and calls it "a joint effort" of colleagues inside and outside CMI.  It is the fullest young-earth treatment of modern climate found for this article.  Its standfirst states its thesis:  "Biblical and scientific evidence show that human-generated carbon dioxide will produce some warming, but there is no climate emergency."⁶

The article has four parts.  The first sets out a biblical history:  a high-CO2 pre-Flood world, a climate "designed to be broadly stable" after Genesis 8:22, and a Roman and a Medieval warm period warmer than today.  The second argues that the climate movement is driven by a "humanistic and neo-Marxist" worldview and lists failed predictions.  The third, the longest, is the science:  the temperature and CO2 records, the 97 % consensus, climate models, sensitivity, the sun, "data tampering", sea level, coral reefs and extreme weather.  The fourth is about policy and the poor.  Its closing summary says the models "have failed all five tests applied to them", that "Because positive feedback does not operate, the warming from a doubling of the CO2 is likely to be less than 1°C", and that "There is no climate emergency."⁶

The article also concedes more than its tone suggests.  It grants that CO2 warms the earth, that the direct effect of doubling CO2 "is generally agreed upon, at about 1.1°C", that "The satellite data (Figure 2) show some global warming since 1980", and that "Unquestionably, if ice sheets on land melt, then sea levels will rise."⁶

ICR: Jake Hebert

Jake Hebert holds a PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Dallas and is ICR's main writer on climate.⁸  His doctoral adviser was Brian Tinsley, a researcher on cosmic rays and clouds.⁹  His framing is the clearest of any young-earth writer.  In 2019 he wrote that "The real issue in the climate change debate is climate sensitivity," and that a doubling of CO2 "while everything else stayed the same" would warm the earth by "only about 1°C".⁸  In 2020 he set aside three questions as not in dispute:  that CO2 is rising, that humans are mainly responsible, and that more CO2 would warm the earth.  "It would, but this increase would be very slight."¹⁰  His published journal work is on how cosmic rays might affect clouds, and his most candid paper lists the "apparent difficulties" with the mechanism he favours.¹¹  ICR's own topic page is blunter:  "Climate change appears to reflect the natural ebb and flow of Earth's temperatures," and "many proponents of climate change have been caught in blatant lies or have fabricated data to push their agenda."¹²

AiG: Michael Oard

Michael Oard holds an MS in atmospheric science from the University of Washington and spent 30 years as a meteorologist with the US National Weather Service.¹³  He built the post-Flood ice-age model that AiG, CMI and ICR all use.  In 2005 he wrote that "skeptics also believe in man-caused global warming" and that the real dispute is "how much warming and whether it will have a net harmful effect."²  In 2006 he estimated the human share of warming by assumption:  "I will assume that half of the 1.2°F (0.7°C) rise is caused by natural long-term climatic cycles and the other half is due to man-made global warming."  From that he concluded that "a doubling of CO 2 will produce only a 1°F temperature rise," about 0.5 °C.¹⁴  How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? shows why that arithmetic understates the answer:  it leaves out the heat still going into the ocean.

Roy Spencer and John Christy

Spencer and Christy are not young-earth writers, but CMI names both as dissenting scientists, both are openly Christian, and they are the strongest creation-friendly contributors to the field.  Christy holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois and a Master of Divinity from Golden Gate Baptist Seminary, taught physics and chemistry "as a missionary teacher in Nyeri, Kenya for two years", and has served as an IPCC "Lead Author, Contributor and Expert Reviewer".¹⁵  Spencer signed the Cornwall Alliance's 2009 "Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming", which says "Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid."¹⁶¹⁷  Together they built the satellite temperature record and publish in mainstream journals.  Their 2023 paper is the most important creation-friendly contribution to the sensitivity question, and How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? uses it.  Spencer has also told fellow skeptics which arguments to drop, starting with the claims that there is no greenhouse effect and that CO2's absorption bands are already completely opaque.¹

The other side of the evangelical world

Evangelicals are not of one mind either.  The 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative, signed by what Oard counted as "eighty-six prominent Christian leaders",¹⁴ said that "Since 1995 there has been general agreement among those in the scientific community most seriously engaged with this issue that climate change is happening and is being caused mainly by human activities".¹⁸  Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical atmospheric scientist, writes:  "I don't accept global warming on faith: I crunch the data, I analyze the models".¹⁹  And the young-earth homeschool-science writer Jay Wile, after reading a survey of the American Meteorological Society that he cites against the 97 % figure, still concludes:  "Yes, a majority of climate scientists do think that climate change is mostly due to human activity."²⁰

Which treatment is best?

Batten's is the most complete, and it is the one this article tests in detail.  Hebert's is the most careful about what is and is not in dispute.  Spencer and Christy's is the only one that is original, peer-reviewed climate research.  The young-earth writers do not agree on the number that matters most.  Oard's arithmetic gives about 0.5 °C per doubling, Hebert gives "only about 1°C" for the no-feedback case, Batten gives "about 0.5°C" with feedbacks, and the paper Spencer and Christy published in 2023 gives 1.9 to 2.5 °C.

Part 2: Why creationism and climate skepticism go together

The pattern

In an August 2014 Pew survey, 50 % of all American adults said the earth is warming mostly because of human activity.  Among white evangelical Protestants the figure was 28 %, with 33 % blaming natural patterns and 37 % saying there is "no solid evidence" of warming.²¹  Elaine Howard Ecklund's national survey, discussed below, found that Americans who doubt evolution are also more likely to doubt climate change.⁴  So the overlap a reader notices is real.  The question is what causes it.

What the creationist writers say causes it

The young-earth writers give a theological answer.  Batten says "the fake, anti-Bible deep-time evolutionary history of planet Earth, based on naturalism ... feeds into a radical environmentalist ideology."⁶  Hebert's ICR article is titled "Climate Alarmism and the Age of the Earth", and he argues that belief in an unstable climate rests on old-earth ice-age theory.⁸  Both add Genesis 8:22, "While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat ... shall not cease," as a reason to expect a stable climate.¹⁰⁶  Oard gave a social answer in 2005:  climate skeptics "are treated almost as badly by the mainstream establishment as believers in young-earth creationism (or intelligent design)."²

What the surveys say

The survey research points mainly to politics.

1. Party is the largest single predictor. A meta-analysis by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues of 25 polls and 171 studies in 56 countries found that "The largest demographic correlate of climate change belief is political affiliation," with an effect "roughly double the size of any other demographic variable."²² It did not measure religion.
2. Religion adds little once party is known. Pew's 2022 survey of 10,156 Americans concluded: "The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion." After controlling for party and other factors, Republicans were 54 percentage points less likely than Democrats to call climate change a serious problem. Evangelical Protestants were 5 points less likely than the religiously unaffiliated.³ Evangelicals who vote Democratic look like other Democrats: 78 % of them call climate change extremely or very serious, against 17 % of Republican evangelicals.³
3. Creationism itself adds nothing once politics is known. Elaine Howard Ecklund and colleagues tested the creationism link directly, with a 2014 survey of 10,241 Americans. Doubting evolution and doubting climate change did go together. But when the model added demographics, political ideology, "confidence in the scientific community, and interest in science", the authors report: "After including these measures we see that the coefficient for evolution skepticism becomes non-significant". Almost all the religion measures became non-significant too. Political conservatism had an effect "more than two times that of any other predictor." What remained was a small evangelical effect: "The only significant association that remains is the difference between Evangelical Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated".⁴ Their summary: "religion has a much stronger and clearer association with evolution skepticism than with climate change skepticism."⁴
4. End-times belief has a modest link. Pew found that Americans who believe "we are living in the end times" were less likely to call climate change serious, 51 % against 62 %. That comparison does not control for party.³

What this means

The overlap between creationism and climate skepticism in the United States is mostly a shared political identity, with a smaller share of distrust of scientific institutions and a small residue specific to evangelical belief.  Rejecting evolution does not by itself predict rejecting climate science once those are taken into account.

That cuts two ways.  For the skeptical reader, it means climate skepticism among creationists is not evidence that the climate evidence is weak, and it is not a product of reading Genesis.  For the creationist reader, it means the young-earth case does not require climate skepticism.  Nothing in a young-earth chronology depends on whether the earth warmed 1.3 °C since 1880.  Oard, Hebert and the Evangelical Climate Initiative's signers all read the same Bible.  The argument from Genesis 8:22 promises seasons and harvests "while the earth remains";  it does not specify a sensitivity to CO2.  And the creationist ice-age model itself, built by Oard and adopted by CMI, is now tested with the same kind of global climate model that CMI calls "simply wrong".  When Steven Gollmer ran one at Cedarville University, Oard reported the result himself:  "Climate models with a warm ocean show that winters would be too warm after the Flood for the Ice Age."²³  Young-earth science uses climate models when it needs them, and should judge them by the same standard either way.

Part 3: Measured warming is not an age clock

Young-earth readers are used to hearing that an ice core or a rock is hundreds of thousands of years old, and they have learned to ask what assumptions stand behind the number.  It is natural to bring the same suspicion to climate science.  It is worth being careful about which parts of the climate case depend on old-earth dating and which do not, because the answer is different for each.

What depends on no age at all

A thermometer reading from 1900 compared with one from 2020 is not an extrapolation.  Neither is a satellite sounding from 1979 compared with one from 2025, an ocean float's profile from 2005 compared with one from 2025, or a flask of Mauna Loa air from 1959 compared with one from 2025.  The sibling articles Is the Earth Warming?, Is the Warming Caused by Humans? and How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? rest on records of that kind, and on laboratory physics of how CO2 absorbs heat.  Nothing in them requires the earth to be older than the instruments.

What depends on a few thousand years

The Law Dome ice core reaches back 2,000 years.  Its air is dated to within three to five years, and its youngest samples overlap direct measurements of the atmosphere.²⁴  That span lies well inside any young-earth chronology, which puts the Flood about 4,500 years ago.  So does most of the evidence on the Roman and Medieval warm periods, which comes from tree rings, corals, lake and ocean sediments and historical documents.  Tree-ring chronologies themselves are examined in the sibling article on tree-ring dating, which finds that the ring counts for the last few thousand years hold up, a test run by a creationist.  The last two thousand years can therefore be argued on their own terms.

On those terms CMI's claims about the warm periods fail in their strong form.  CMI says that in the Roman Warm Period "temperatures were 2°C above the current temperatures for that region of the earth", citing a 2020 study of Mediterranean sediments by Giuseppe Margaritelli and colleagues.⁶  The study compares the Roman peak with something else.  It found the Roman period "about 2 °C warmer than average values for the late centuries for the Sicily and Western Mediterranean regions", meaning the later centuries of its sediment records, and it does not set the Roman warmth beside present-day temperatures.²⁵  It is also a regional sea-surface record, not a global one.  CMI also says the Medieval Warm Period was "about 1°C warmer than now".⁶  The reconstruction most favourable to warm Roman and medieval periods is Fredrik Ljungqvist's of the northern extra-tropics, and it says those periods "reached or exceeded the 1961–1990 mean temperature level".²⁶  The decade 2015–2024 averaged about 0.9 °C above the 1961–1990 level.²⁷  On Ljungqvist's own numbers the medieval peak was close to the mid-twentieth century and well below today.  And Raphael Neukom's team, looking at where on earth the warmest period of the past two thousand years fell, found "no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs", and that the warmest period "occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe."²⁸

The warm periods were real in places, and CMI is right that they were times of prosperity and that the Little Ice Age brought hardship.  What the evidence does not support is that the earth as a whole was warmer than now.

What depends on deep time

The 800,000-year Antarctic ice cores, the record of glacial cycles, and the warm periods millions of years ago do depend on old-earth dating.  So does one of the main lines of evidence the IPCC uses for climate sensitivity:  the size of past climate changes compared with the forcings that caused them.  Hebert attacks exactly this line, arguing that the ice-age chronology is tuned to the theory it is used to test:  "Orbital tuning involves a huge potential for self-deception".⁸  He also concedes why it matters, quoting a mainstream scientist:  "The main limit on the [climate] sensitivity value is that it has to be consistent with paleoclimate data."⁸  CMI's statement that "Even secular geologists agree that ancient ('Palaeozoic') CO2 levels were much higher, even 15 times more" belongs here too.⁶  Robert Berner's GEOCARB III model, which CMI cites, does show "very high CO2 values during the early Paleozoic, a large drop during the Devonian and Carboniferous", with "300 ppm" standing for "the present".²⁹  On its curve the high values belong to the early Paleozoic, and the Carboniferous and Permian, when most Paleozoic coal formed, sit near the present level.  How a young-earth reader maps those rock layers onto pre-Flood and Flood time is argued in the Coal article.  Whether the deep ice cores and their chronology hold up is argued in the sibling articles on the ice age and ice-core layer counting, and is not repeated here.

The useful point for this article is what is left if a young-earth reader sets the deep-time evidence aside entirely.  The instrumental record is left, and it is enough to estimate sensitivity on its own.  That is what Lewis and Curry, Spencer and Christy, and the IPCC's energy-budget calculation do, and they find 1.5 to 2.5 °C.³⁰³¹³²  Without the ice ages, the upper limit is less certain;  the IPCC's energy-budget range runs to 4.8 °C.  The lower limit does not move.  Rejecting the old-earth evidence does not lead to a sensitivity of 0.5 °C.  It leads to a sensitivity estimated from thermometers, which is lower than the IPCC's central value and higher than CMI's.

Part 4: The CMI article, claim by claim

Every factual claim in Batten's article that can be checked against data, in the order it appears, with a verdict and the reason.  "Holds" means the evidence supports the claim as CMI states it.  "Partly" means it is right in part, or right as stated but used to support a conclusion it does not reach.  "Fails" means the evidence contradicts it.  Theological claims and claims about motives are left out;  they are not questions of measurement.  Each row links to the section, in this article or a sibling article, where the claim is argued.

Of the 62 rows, 15 hold, 18 hold in part, 4 report a source or quotation accurately but use it for a conclusion it does not support, 23 fail, and 2 were not assessed or not established.  The pattern matters more than the count.  CMI is usually right about what particular people said and did, about failed forecasts, and about genuine problems with models.  It is usually wrong when it makes a quantitative claim about the physical climate.

Part 5: What follows for policy

Science can say how much the earth has warmed, roughly how much more a given amount of CO2 will bring, and what is happening to sea level, ice and heat extremes.  It cannot say how to weigh the cost of cutting emissions against the cost of not cutting them, how to weigh people alive now against people not yet born, or how much risk is worth paying to avoid.  Those are questions of values and economics, and this article does not try to settle them.  The measured benefits and harms of warming are weighed in the sibling article Does Warming Do More Good or Harm?.

The two evangelical statements quoted in Part 1 show the disagreement is about values more than data.  The Evangelical Climate Initiative warned that "Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors."¹⁸  The Cornwall Alliance warned that cutting emissions "will greatly increase the price of energy and harm economies", hurting the same poor.¹⁶  Both appeal to the same biblical concern for the poor.  CMI's own policy section makes the case for cheap energy and against "Unscientific, illogical environmental extremism", while granting:  "This is not to say that the use of fossil fuels is without problems."⁶  Those are legitimate arguments.  They stand or fall on economics, not on whether CO2 traps heat.

What the science in this article does constrain is the starting point of any such argument.  The earth has warmed about 1.3 °C.  Most of it is human.  Each doubling of CO2 brings, on the instrumental evidence alone, roughly 1.5 to 2.5 °C at equilibrium, and on the IPCC's fuller assessment about 3.  Current policies point to about 3 °C by 2100, not the 5 °C of the highest scenario.³³  A Christian may reasonably conclude that the response should be slower, cheaper or different from what activists demand.  He cannot reasonably conclude that there is nothing to respond to because sensitivity is 0.5 °C.

Objections and responses

"The climate has always changed.  The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today."  Climate has changed, and regional warm periods were real.  The evidence from the last two thousand years, which lies inside a young-earth chronology, does not show the earth as a whole warmer than now (Part 3).  And past natural changes say nothing about the cause of this one:  the cause of this one is measured (Is the Warming Caused by Humans?).

"Genesis 8:22 promises that the climate will stay stable."  The verse promises that seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter will not cease.  It does not set a temperature, and young-earth writers themselves hold that the centuries after the Flood saw an ice age that came and went.  It cannot be used to fix a climate sensitivity.

From the mainstream:  "Treating the ice-age evidence as optional is special pleading."  The article does not argue that the deep-time evidence is wrong;  that is argued elsewhere.  It shows that the main conclusions here do not depend on it, which is useful to a reader on either side.

From CMI:  "We were not represented fairly.  We concede warming and some human contribution."  The article quotes CMI's concessions in Part 1 and in its Summary.  It tests only the specific claims the article makes, in the article's own words, and it credits CMI wherever the evidence supports it:  15 of the 62 claims in Part 4 hold outright, 18 hold in part, and 4 more report their sources accurately.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Costs and benefits. This article does not assess the economic costs of warming or of cutting emissions, or the benefits of CO2 to plants. Those decide policy.
2. Young-earth climate research. No young-earth organisation has published a sensitivity calculation from data. An energy-budget estimate from the instrumental record would need no old-earth assumption, and young-earth scientists could produce one. Until they do, Spencer and Christy's 1.9 °C is the best estimate from creation-friendly scientists.
3. Sources not read in full. Smith and Leiserowitz's 2013 survey of American evangelicals was not read in full. The sources not read for the scientific questions are listed in the sibling articles.
4. The deep-time record. The 800,000-year ice cores, glacial cycles and the sensitivity they imply are argued in the sibling articles, not here.

Verdict

The earth has warmed about 1.3 °C since the late 1800s.  This is measured by independent thermometer networks, by two satellite records including one kept by creation-friendly skeptics, and by the heat accumulating in the ocean.  Most of it is human:  the CO2 is fossil by its isotopes and its bookkeeping, and the sun's output has been flat.  How much more warming each doubling of CO2 brings is the honest question, and the evidence puts it between about 1.5 and 4 °C, with observation-based estimates near the low end.

Creation Ministries International's article is right that many confident forecasts failed, that many models run hot, that the original hockey stick had statistical flaws, and that policy is a question of values.  It is wrong about the ocean, the satellites, saturation, the sun, sea-level acceleration and the medieval climate, and its central number, a sensitivity of about 0.5 °C, cannot reproduce the warming already measured.  Young-earth writers should drop those claims.  Nothing in the young-earth view of history requires them, and the measured record of the last century and a half, and the ice of the last two thousand years, sit inside any young-earth chronology.

Sources