Earth and Climate Science

The earth has warmed about 1.3 °C, mostly from fossil CO2, and none of that rests on deep time. The real dispute is how much more: 1.5 to 3 °C per doubling, not CMI's 0.5. Skeptics are right about hot models and failed forecasts. Harms outgrow benefits by 2 to 3 °C. The post-Flood ice age fails the ice cores.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"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, 20051

"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, 20142

"The initially positive impacts have vanished: The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative." — Richard Tol, the economist whose earlier surveys founded the claim that warming does net good, 20243

Summary

The eight articles in this group take the climate questions a reader asks, in the order a reader asks them.  Is the earth warming?  Is it us?  How much more warming will more CO2 bring?  Have the predictions held?  Has the science been honest?  Does warming do more good or harm?  Then two articles turn to the young-earth side:  what young-earth writers claim about climate and why, and the one climate question tied directly to the Flood, the Ice Age.  This overview puts their answers side by side.  It adds no new research, because no two of the articles contradict each other.

The overall verdict.  The measured part of the climate question is settled, and none of it depends on the age of the earth.  Thermometers, satellites and the ocean all show about 1.3 °C of warming since the late 1800s, and most of it comes from burning fossil carbon.  The honest scientific dispute is how much more warming each doubling of CO2 brings:  about 1.5 to 2.5 °C on the instrumental record alone, 3 °C in the IPCC's assessment.  Skeptics have won real points on hot models, the tropical upper air, failed public forecasts and the first hockey stick, and none of those points touches the measurements.  Whether warming does more good than harm is mixed so far and turns negative by 2 to 3 °C, and what to do about it is a question of values the data cannot settle.  The young-earth writers concede more than their tone suggests and dispute mainly the sensitivity, where the best-known young-earth figure, 0.5 °C, fails.  The post-Flood ice age is the most serious model-building on the young-earth side, and it has not answered the ice cores, the count of glacial cycles, or the squeeze between ice volume, rebound and sea level.

One line per article.

  1. Is the Earth Warming? Yes, by about 1.3 °C. Three surface records, two satellite records and the heat gained by the ocean agree, and the adjustments to the records reduce global warming rather than create it.
  2. Is the Warming Caused by Humans? Mostly. The CO2 rise is fossil carbon by its isotopes and its bookkeeping, and the sun's output has been flat since satellites began measuring it in 1978.
  3. How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? About 1.2 °C per doubling before feedbacks, 1.5 to 2.5 °C with feedbacks on the instrumental record, 3 °C in the IPCC's assessment. A sensitivity of 0.5 °C cannot reproduce the warming already measured.
  4. How Well Have Climate Predictions Done? Mixed. Older model projections matched once their forcings are corrected, many new models run hot, the tropical upper air has warmed less than predicted, and famous public forecasts failed.
  5. Has Climate Science Been Dishonest? In places, but not in the measurements. The conduct and the statistics that skeptics exposed were real, and the temperature records have been rebuilt independently and agree.
  6. Does Warming Do More Good or Harm? So far mixed and of uncertain sign. The benefits come first and the harms grow faster, so the balance turns negative between about 1.5 and 2.5 °C, and the losses fall hardest on hot, poor countries.
  7. Creationism and Climate Science The young-earth writers concede that CO2 warms the earth and dispute how much. Creation Ministries International's (CMI's) main article is right on failed forecasts, hot models and the hockey stick's statistics and wrong on its core science. The link between creationism and climate skepticism is mostly politics.
  8. The Ice Age Michael Oard's post-Flood model makes several successful climate predictions, but one 700-year ice age cannot explain 110,000 Greenland layers, about 50 glacial cycles, stacked tills, sea-level fall, rebound and its own heat budget.

Three findings appear only when the articles are read together.

  1. The climate questions and the age question come apart. The first six articles rest on thermometers, satellites, ocean floats, flasks of air and the 2,000-year Law Dome ice core, all inside any young-earth chronology. Only the deep ice cores, the warm periods of millions of years ago and the sensitivity drawn from past ice ages depend on old-earth dating, and setting those aside still leaves a sensitivity of 1.5 to 2.5 °C. The Ice Age article examines that deep record on its own terms and finds it strong. So a young-earth reader can dispute the age of the ice without disputing the warming, and a mainstream reader can grant that the warming case does not need the old ice (Part 10).
  2. The skeptics' own measurements agree with the mainstream. The satellite record kept by Roy Spencer and John Christy shows warming. Their own sensitivity estimate is 1.9 °C on the newer forcing history, inside the instrumental range and nearly four times CMI's figure. A group founded by a physicist who doubted the records rebuilt them and got the same answer. Where skeptics have been right, it is mostly about models, forecasts and conduct. Where the measurements have favoured them, it is about the pace of the warming, a slowdown in the early 2000s and a pause in Arctic sea-ice loss since 2005, never about whether it happened (Parts 1, 3, 5 and 10).
  3. A low sensitivity leaves less room for natural causes, not more. At 0.5 °C the measured forcing explains a fifth of the measured warming, and the rest would need the sun to have brightened by about 2.7 % when satellites show it flat.4 Two claims that CMI's article makes together, that sensitivity is low and that the warming is natural, pull against each other: the lower the sensitivity, the larger the natural push the warming needs, and the measured sun supplies none (Parts 2, 3 and 10).

Verdict.  The earth is warming, mostly because of fossil CO2, by an amount that no young-earth doctrine needs to deny.  The live questions are how much more, which is a scientific dispute between about 2 and 3 °C, and what to do, which is a dispute about values.  On the one climate question that does touch the Flood, the young-earth model is serious work that has not yet fitted the evidence into 700 years.

Part 1: Is the earth warming?

Is the Earth Warming? answers yes, from measurement rather than inference.  Three surface records built by different groups put 2015–2024 at 1.20 to 1.33 °C above the late 1800s.5  The satellite record kept by Spencer and Christy, which uses no thermometers, shows the lower atmosphere warming 0.16 °C per decade since 1979,6 and the top 2,000 metres of ocean gained about 22 × 10²² joules between 2005 and 2025.7  The article grants that the US land record has been adjusted upward and that Arctic September sea ice has not declined significantly since 2005, which mainstream researchers attribute to natural variability offsetting the human trend.8  It finds that over the whole globe the adjustments reduce the warming, mostly by correcting old ship measurements, and that CMI's claims of flat ocean heat and of little change in the satellites after 1988 fail on the data.

Part 2: Is the warming caused by humans?

Is the Warming Caused by Humans? answers mostly.  In the Law Dome ice core, CO2 stayed between 271.6 and 283.9 parts per million from AD 1 to 1799, a span inside any young-earth chronology.9  Mauna Loa recorded 427 in 2025.10  The rise is fossil carbon by its isotopes and by the bookkeeping, which shows nature taking carbon up rather than giving it off.  The sun's measured output has been flat since 1978, with a trend of 0.003 W/m² per decade,11 and the IPCC's best estimate is that humans caused 1.07 °C of the warming to 2010–2019, with natural drivers between −0.1 and +0.1 °C.12  The article grants that the warming of 1910 to 1940, before most emissions, is real, and that regional influences such as Atlantic water entering the Arctic are worth knowing.  It finds each alternative CMI names human, regional or small, and notes that cleaner air has unmasked warming that pollution had been hiding, which points to a higher sensitivity, not a lower one.

Part 3: How much warming does more CO2 cause?

How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? calls this the honest dispute.  Doubling CO2 warms the earth about 1.2 °C before feedbacks, and nobody on either side disputes it.  With feedbacks, estimates built on the instrumental record alone run from 1.50 °C (Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry) to about 2.5 °C, and Spencer and Christy's own estimate is 1.86 °C on the newer forcing history and 2.49 °C on the older.1314  The IPCC assesses 3 °C, likely 2.5 to 4.12  The IPCC's figure is higher because it expects the pattern of warming to change and because it uses the ice ages;  the pattern effect is unresolved.  CMI's figure of about 0.5 °C is not in that range:  at 0.5 °C the measured forcing explains a fifth of the measured warming, and the rest would need the sun to have brightened by about 2.7 %.4  The article finds that the low figure rests on saturation numbers read at 86 km, from a paper whose own answer is 2.3 °C once water vapour is allowed to rise, and on a single-layer model.

Part 4: How well have climate predictions done?

How Well Have Climate Predictions Done? answers mixed, and gives the skeptics real points.  Of seventeen projections published from 1970 to 2007, ten matched the observed warming as published and fourteen once the forcings they assumed are set beside the forcings that occurred.15  But five mainstream modellers warned in 2022 that "a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’".16  The tropical upper air has also warmed more slowly than models predict, a gap that skeptical and mainstream researchers both report.  Public forecasts of drowned nations by 2000, an ice-free Arctic by 2014, empty Australian dams and a dead Great Barrier Reef failed.  Against that, warming has gone on at about 0.2 °C per decade for fifty years, sea-level rise has sped up, Antarctic ice loss has risen sixfold, and several of CMI's failed-prediction quotations are cut short or misquoted, among them the IPCC's 2001 sentence on the climate as a chaotic system.

Part 5: Has climate science been dishonest?

Has Climate Science Been Dishonest? answers in places, but not in the measurements.  The British review of the Climatic Research Unit's leaked e-mails found that the unit's "rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt," and also found "evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them."17  The US National Research Council agreed that the first hockey stick "used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions," and still concluded "with a high level of confidence" that recent decades were warmer than any in the preceding four centuries.18  The 97 % figure was stretched in public use, and one reef-fish researcher was found to have fabricated results.  None of this reaches the records:  thermometers, satellites and ocean floats run by different groups in different countries agree with one another and with the satellite record kept by two skeptics.  The article's two scorecards, where skepticism has been right and where it fails, gather the verdicts of all six climate articles in one place.

Part 6: Does warming do more good or harm?

Does Warming Do More Good or Harm? answers that the effects so far are small, mixed and of uncertain sign, and that the balance turns negative somewhere between about 1.5 and 2.5 °C.  The benefits are real and often ignored:  satellites show greening over 25 to 50 % of the world's vegetated land, which models credit mostly to CO2,19 and milder winters have, on the best global model, saved more people from cold than heat has killed.  The harms are real too:  37 % of warm-season heat deaths in 43 countries are attributable to human-caused warming,20 maize and wheat yields are a few percent below what they would have been, and seas are 20 cm higher.  The benefits come first and the harms grow faster, and every central economic estimate is a net loss by 3 °C, about 2.1 % of world income on William Nordhaus's model21 and about ten times that on studies of how economies respond to hot years.2223  Even the Cornwall Alliance, the leading evangelical critic of climate alarm, grants that "most models find that human well-being improves because of economic growth with or without warming but improves less with significant warming."24  The gains go to cool, rich places and the losses to hot, poor ones, and how to weigh them is a question of discount rates, risk and justice to the poor that the data cannot settle.  Two articles below it carry the detail:  Do Cold Deaths Outweigh Heat Deaths? finds that cold still kills 9 to 17 times as many as heat, with a modelled net saving that turns toward harm with more warming, and What Do Economists Say Warming Will Cost? finds the estimates agree on direction and differ tenfold on size.

Part 7: Creationism and climate science

Creationism and Climate Science weighs what the young-earth writers claim.  They concede more than their tone suggests.  CMI grants that CO2 warms the earth, Jake Hebert of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) writes that "The real issue in the climate change debate is climate sensitivity,"25 and Michael Oard wrote for Answers in Genesis (AiG) in 2005 that skeptics also accept man-caused warming.  The article tests Don Batten's long article for CMI claim by claim:26 of 62 claims, 15 hold, 18 hold in part, 4 report a source accurately but use it for a conclusion it does not support, 23 fail and 2 were not assessed.  CMI is right on failed forecasts, hot models, the tropical upper air and the hockey stick's statistics, and wrong on ocean heat, saturation, the sun, sea-level acceleration and a sensitivity of 0.5 °C.  On why creationism and climate skepticism go together, Pew's 2022 survey concluded that "The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion,"27 and the one study that tested the creationism link directly found that doubting evolution added nothing once political ideology and trust in science were known, leaving a small extra skepticism among evangelicals.28  No young-earth organisation has yet published a sensitivity calculation from data, though an energy-budget estimate from the instrumental record needs no old-earth assumption.

Part 8: The Ice Age

The Ice Age is the one climate question tied directly to the Flood.  Young-earth writers have answered it four ways over a century:  George McCready Price denied that the continents were ever glaciated, Henry Morris's collapsing vapour canopy was abandoned after creationist modelling found that the canopy cooks the earth, Michael Oard's warm-ocean model became the standard, and several variants compress or move it.  Oard's model is genuine quantitative work by a career meteorologist, and some of its predictions look good.  Mainstream science still has no agreed cause for the onset of ice ages or their 100,000-year pacing, and a warm-ocean ice age predicts the wet Sahara, the great pluvial lakes and mild winters in unglaciated Siberia.  But Greenland's GISP2 core holds about 110,000 counted annual layers,29 matched to a uranium-dated Chinese cave to better than 800 years across 60,000,30 and the deep-sea record holds 51 numbered glacial stages,31 repeated in wind-blown dust, stacked tills with buried soils, coral terraces and caves, and still counted when the orbital tuning is removed.  To build the ice sheets in 500 years the model halves their thickness, and half-thickness ice cannot account for the measured rebound of Hudson Bay or the 130-plus metres of sea-level fall.  AiG's own research journal concluded in 2024 that Oard's model, the glacial evidence and the Masoretic timeline "are not consistent."32  Frozen Mammoths, filed under it, finds that no mammoth was flash-frozen, that young-earth writers retired that legend decades ago, and that their model still cannot supply the silt the mammoths are buried in.

Part 9: The eight questions side by side

Every entry below is carried over from the article named in the first column.  The confidence column gives how firmly that article holds its answer and why.  The last column is the strongest point against the article's own answer that the article itself grants.

Question The article's answer Confidence The strongest point it grants against its answer
Is the earth warming? Yes, about 1.3 °C since the late 1800s, on three surface records, two satellite records and the heat gained by the ocean. High. Direct measurement by independent groups, including a satellite record kept by two skeptics. Arctic September sea ice has not declined significantly since 2005, and the US land record has been adjusted upward.
Is it us? Mostly. The CO2 rise is fossil, the sun's output is flat, and natural drivers added between −0.1 and +0.1 °C. High on the CO2 and the sun. The size of the human share rests on the IPCC's attribution. The warming of 1910 to 1940 came before most emissions, and regional influences such as Atlantic water in the Arctic are real.
How much per doubling? About 1.2 °C before feedbacks; 1.5 to 2.5 °C on the instrumental record; 3 °C in the IPCC's assessment. Not 0.5. High that it is not 0.5. Open between about 2 and 3. The estimates from observation, including skeptics', sit below the IPCC's central value, and cloud feedback could in the IPCC's own range be slightly negative.
Have the predictions held? Mixed. Older projections matched once their forcings are corrected; many new models run hot; famous public forecasts failed. Moderate. The record differs by kind of prediction. More than a quarter of the newest models have sensitivities above 4.7 °C, and the tropical upper air has warmed less than the models predict.
Has the science been honest? In places, but not in the measurements. High that the records are sound. The bad conduct is documented. The Climatic Research Unit resisted reasonable requests for data, with evidence that e-mails were deleted to avoid them, and the first hockey stick used a biased method.
Good or harm? Mixed and of uncertain sign so far. Net harm by 2 to 3 °C, falling hardest on hot, poor countries. Low on the sign so far. High on the direction. The size spans a factor of ten. Tol's latest confidence interval "now includes no impact for very considerable warming."3
Creationism and climate science Young-earth writers concede that CO2 warms the earth. CMI's core science fails. The link to climate skepticism is mostly politics. High on the science claims. The sociology rests on two surveys. 15 of CMI's 62 claims hold outright and 18 in part, and a small extra skepticism among evangelicals survives the political controls.
The Ice Age Oard's model is serious work with some good predictions, but one 700-year ice age fails the ice cores, the cycle count and the squeeze between ice volume, rebound and sea level. High against the 700-year fit. Several of the model's predictions hold. Mainstream science has no agreed cause for the onset of ice ages or their 100,000-year pacing, and the warm-ocean model predicts the wet Sahara and the great pluvial lakes.

Read down the third column and the eight questions sort into four kinds.  Two are settled by measurement:  whether the earth is warming and whether the CO2 behind it is ours.  One is a live scientific dispute, how much more warming each doubling brings.  Two are mixed records, the predictions and the conduct, where each side has scored.  And one, good or harm, is partly measured and partly a question of values.  The young-earth writers' real disagreement with the mainstream sits in the live dispute and the question of values.  It is not in the measurements.

Part 10: Where the articles meet

The warming case does not need deep time

The first six articles rest on records a young-earth reader has no reason to doubt.  A thermometer reading from 1900 set beside one from 2020 is not an extrapolation, and neither is a satellite sounding, an ocean float's profile or a flask of Mauna Loa air.  The Law Dome core reaches back 2,000 years, and the evidence on the Roman and Medieval warm periods comes from the same span, well inside a chronology that puts the Flood about 4,500 years ago.  What does depend on old-earth dating is the 800,000-year Antarctic record, the warm periods of millions of years ago, and one of the IPCC's lines of evidence for sensitivity, the size of past climate changes set against their causes.

Two articles handle that deep record from opposite directions, and they fit together.  Creationism and Climate Science quotes Hebert's objection that "Orbital tuning involves a huge potential for self-deception",25 and also his concession, quoting a mainstream scientist, that "The main limit on the [climate] sensitivity value is that it has to be consistent with paleoclimate data."25  It then shows what is left if a young-earth reader sets the deep record aside:  the instrumental record, which gives 1.5 to 2.5 °C.  Rejecting the old ice loosens the upper limit on sensitivity.  It does not move the lower one.  The Ice Age takes up the tuning objection itself and finds that it answers the wrong question:  tuning assigns ages to the cycles but does not create them, and the count of about fifty glacial cycles survives every test that has been run with the tuning removed.  So the deep record is strong on its own terms, and the climate case does not need it.  A young-earth reader who rejects it loses some certainty about how high sensitivity could be, and keeps a lower limit far above 0.5 °C.

The skeptics' instruments agree with everyone else's

Roy Spencer and John Christy are two of the dissenting scientists CMI names, and the creationism article counts them as the creation-friendly side's own climate scientists.  Across the articles, their work agrees with the mainstream on every measured quantity.  Their satellite record shows the lower atmosphere warming 0.16 °C per decade (Part 1).  Their 2023 sensitivity estimate is 1.86 °C on the newer forcing history and 2.49 on the older (Part 3).  Spencer has asked fellow skeptics to drop the claim that there is no greenhouse effect.2  The scorecard in Has Climate Science Been Dishonest? lists ten points on which skeptics have been right.  Eight are about models, forecasts, statistics or conduct.  The other two are measurements, and both concern the pace of the warming:  surface warming slowed in the early 2000s, and Arctic sea ice has not declined significantly since 2005.  Neither says that the warming did not happen.  Where skepticism fails, the same article lists nine claims, and every one of them is about the measurements or the physics of CO2:  the warming, ocean heat, the source of the CO2, the sun, saturation, sensitivity, sea level, the records' honesty and the medieval climate.

A low sensitivity and a natural cause cannot both carry the warming

The sensitivity and cause articles answer two claims that CMI's article makes together:  that more CO2 does little, and that the warming is mostly natural.  They pull against each other.  The energy budget ties sensitivity, forcing and warming together.  At a sensitivity of 0.5 °C the measured forcing explains a fifth of the measured warming, and the other four fifths need 6.5 W/m² of extra forcing from somewhere, which from the sun alone would mean a brightening of about 2.7 %.4  The sun's measured output has been flat since 1978 (Part 2).  A low sensitivity damps the effect of every cause, natural or human, so it leaves less room for the sun, not more.

Part 11: Where the articles differ

No two of the eight articles contradict each other on a fact, a number or a verdict, so this overview settles nothing from the sources.  Two differences of wording could look like contradictions to a reader moving between them.

  1. When Arctic sea ice stopped declining. Is the Earth Warming? dates the end of the September decline to about 2007 in its prose and to 2005 in its Issues, and Has Climate Science Been Dishonest? uses 2005. Both dates are right for their own measure. The 2007 date is the article's own trend in the National Snow and Ice Data Center's September extent, and the 2005 date is Mark England and colleagues' finding for September sea-ice area.8
  2. The range for sensitivity. Creationism and Climate Science puts it between about 1.5 and 4 °C. How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause? gives 1.5 to 2.5 °C from observation and 2.5 to 4 °C as the IPCC's likely range. The first is the span of the second's two ranges, not a different estimate.

Objections and responses

From a young-earth reader:  "Climate science assumes deep time, so a young-earth Christian should reject it."  The six climate articles rest on thermometers, satellites, ocean floats, flasks of air and a 2,000-year ice core, all inside a young-earth chronology.  Only the deep ice cores, the ancient warm periods and the sensitivity drawn from past ice ages depend on old-earth dating, and setting them aside still leaves a sensitivity of 1.5 to 2.5 °C (Part 10).  Nothing in a young-earth reading of Genesis requires doubting a thermometer.

From the mainstream:  "Treating the deep record as optional is special pleading."  This overview does not say the deep record is wrong.  The Ice Age article tests it directly and finds the ice-core count and the cycle count strong.  The point is narrower:  the conclusions about modern warming do not hang on it, which is worth knowing for a reader on either side.

From a skeptic:  "These articles side with the IPCC on everything."  They side with the skeptics on the newest models running hot, the tropical upper air, observational sensitivity below the IPCC's central value, failed public forecasts, the first hockey stick's statistics, the stretched 97 %, the Arctic pause, the misused high-emissions scenario, the IPCC's error on Himalayan glaciers and the reality of the benefits of CO2 and milder winters.  On sensitivity they prefer the estimates of Lewis, Curry, Spencer and Christy to the IPCC's 3 °C.  The last column of the table in Part 9 lists what each article grants.

From the other side:  "Conceding failed forecasts and hot models hands ammunition to deniers."  The concessions are true and anyone can check them.  None of them touches the measured warming, the fossil source of the CO2 or the flat sun.  A case that could not survive admitting its forecasters' failures would be weak, and this one survives it.

"The science tells us what policy to adopt."  Neither side's policy follows from the data alone.  Does Warming Do More Good or Harm? separates what the measurements settle from three questions of value:  how much to pay now to spare people later, how to weigh harm to the poor from warming against harm to the poor from expensive energy, and how much to spend against unlikely catastrophes.  Evangelicals on both sides appeal to the same texts on stewardship and the poor and reach opposite answers.

"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 an ice age came and went in the centuries after the Flood (Creationism and Climate Science).

"If the post-Flood ice age fails, the Flood fails with it."  The Ice Age article's verdict is narrower than that.  It finds that a warm-ocean catastrophe producing a glacial episode is physically respectable, and that the published attempts to fit the glacial record into 700 years after the Flood have failed their own community's tests.  Whether the rock record is the product of a global Flood is the subject of Flood Geology, not of this group.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Sensitivity. Whether about 2 °C, from the instrumental record, or the IPCC's 3 °C is closer turns on the "pattern effect", which is unresolved (How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause?).
  2. The tropical upper air. Why it has warmed more slowly than the models predict is not settled; errors in the forcings and in the models' physics are both candidates (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  3. Arctic sea ice. Whether the pause since about 2005 ends soon, as the study that documents it expects, is open (Is the Earth Warming?).
  4. The costs. The sign of the net effect of warming so far, and the size of the loss at 3 °C, which differs tenfold between families of economic estimate, are not settled. Neither is whether the CO2 boost to plants is fading (Does Warming Do More Good or Harm?).
  5. A young-earth sensitivity estimate. No young-earth organisation has published a sensitivity calculation from data. An energy-budget estimate from the instrumental record needs no old-earth assumption, and young-earth scientists could produce one (Creationism and Climate Science).
  6. The ice-age model. Before it can claim the evidence, it must answer 110,000 cross-checked layers in Greenland ice, about fifty glacial cycles that survive without orbital tuning, the squeeze between ice volume, rebound and sea level, the Flood's own heat budget, and a chronology that AiG's own journal says does not fit (The Ice Age).
  7. Sources not read in full. Each article lists its own, and none of them changes a verdict here.

Verdict

Taken together, the eight articles find that the measured part of the climate question is settled and does not depend on the age of the earth.  The earth has warmed about 1.3 °C since the late 1800s, most of it because of fossil CO2, and the creation-friendly scientists whom young-earth writers cite measure the same warming.  The honest scientific question is how much more each doubling of CO2 brings, somewhere between about 2 and 3 °C on the best evidence, and not the 0.5 °C of CMI's article.  Skeptics deserve credit for exposing hot models, failed forecasts, a flawed hockey stick and bad conduct, and none of that reaches the measurements.  Warming has so far done mixed good and harm, and with 2 to 3 °C more the harm outweighs the good, falling hardest on hot, poor countries.  What to do about it is a question of values on which Christians reading the same Scriptures disagree.

Nothing in the young-earth view of history requires climate skepticism, and the best young-earth writers concede the core of the case.  The one climate question tied to the Flood, the Ice Age, is where the young-earth side has done its most serious modelling and where its own journals record that the model and the biblical chronology do not yet fit together, and where the ice cores and the cycle count remain unanswered.  A careful reader on either side should be able to say both:  the warming is real and mostly human, and the post-Flood ice age is a serious hypothesis that has not yet met its evidence.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Christian Reluctance to Jump on Global Warming Bandwagon Attributed to Skepticism of Evolution.”  Answers in Genesis.  Sep 8, 2005.  A guest commentary by the young-earth meteorologist Michael Oard, answering a Christianity Today article that blamed evangelical doubt about global warming on doubt about evolution.  Oard grants that humans cause some warming and argues that the dispute is over how much and whether it harms.

    1. 1a.

      Paragraph after the opening quotation from Crouch:  “Crouch is correct that the issue is not that man is causing global warming, since skeptics also believe in man-caused global warming. However, he fails to inform his readers that the issue is over how much warming and whether it will have a net harmful effect.” ↩

  2. 2.

    Spencer, Roy W.  “Skeptical Arguments that Don't Hold Water.”  Roy Spencer, PhD (blog).  Apr 25, 2014.  A short post by the UAH climatologist and prominent skeptic listing ten arguments he asks fellow skeptics to stop using, each with a one-paragraph reason.

    1. 2a.

      Section argument 1, "There is no greenhouse effect":  “Please stop the “no greenhouse effect” stuff. It’s making us skeptics look bad.” ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Tol, Richard S. J.  “A meta-analysis of the total economic impact of climate change.”  Energy Policy 185:113922.  2024.  Tol's latest meta-analysis of published estimates of the total economic effect of warming, with a separate review of studies that relate economic growth to weather.  It overturns his own earlier finding of an initial benefit.

    1. 3a.

      Page 11:  “(1) The initially positive impacts have vanished: The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. The effects of carbon dioxide fertilization and reduced winter cold on heating costs and human health are still positive, but newer studies reckon these are relatively smaller than earlier studies. (2) The confidence interval about the estimates has widened considerably, and now includes no impact for very considerable warming.” ↩ ↩

  4. 4.

    The energy-budget relation is ΔT = ECS × (ΔF − ΔN) / F2×, with the IPCC's values for 1850–1900 to 2006–2019:  warming ΔT = 1.03 °C, forcing ΔF = 2.20 W/m², heat still entering the ocean ΔN = 0.59 W/m², and F2× = 3.93 W/m² for doubled CO2 36.  At ECS = 0.5 °C the forcing gives 0.5 × 1.61 / 3.93 = 0.20 °C, a fifth of the warming observed.  Producing 1.03 °C at that sensitivity needs ΔF = 1.03 × 3.93 / 0.5 + 0.59 = 8.7 W/m², which is 6.5 W/m² more than the IPCC's estimate.  Solar forcing is about the change in the sun's output × (1 − 0.29 albedo) / 4, so 6.5 W/m² of forcing needs the sun to brighten by about 37 W/m², 2.7 % of its 1,361 W/m².  At Harde's 0.7 °C the gap is 4.2 W/m², a brightening of about 24 W/m².  Harde's own solar sensitivity, 0.17 °C per 0.1 % rise in the sun's output 37, needs a 0.26 % rise, about 3.5 W/m², for his 0.44 °C of solar warming.  The measured output has stayed within 1361.2–1362.6 W/m² since 1980 11.  At Spencer and Christy's 1.86 °C, the equilibrium warming for the IPCC's 2.72 W/m² of human forcing from 1750 to 2019 is 1.86 × 2.72 / 3.93 = 1.29 °C. ↩ ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Annual global means from HadCRUT5 version 5.2.0.0 33, Berkeley Earth 34 and GISTEMP v4 35, each re-expressed as the difference from its own 1850–1900 mean (1880–1900 for GISTEMP).  Means:  2011–2020, 1.12, 1.18, 1.05 °C;  2015–2024, 1.27, 1.33, 1.20;  1940–1949, 0.33, 0.33, 0.26;  2024, 1.55, 1.62, 1.50.  Least-squares trends in °C per decade:  1975–2025, 0.209, 0.208 (to 2024), 0.207;  2000–2025, 0.254, 0.257, 0.265;  1988–2006, 0.209, 0.209, 0.193;  1910–1940, 0.167, 0.130, 0.113;  1940–1975, −0.032, −0.017, −0.019;  1860–1880, 0.134 and 0.119 for HadCRUT5 and Berkeley. ↩

  6. 6.

    Spencer, Roy W. et al.  UAH global temperature, lower troposphere, version 6.1, monthly anomalies.  2026.  The satellite record of lower-atmosphere temperature built by Spencer and Christy from microwave sounders, December 1978 to the present, by region, with its own trend line.

    1. 6a.

      The Trend row at the foot of the table:  The file's printed trend for the global column is 0.16 °C per decade. ↩

  7. 7.

    NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.  Global ocean heat content, 0–2000 m, yearly.  2026.  NOAA's yearly series of heat stored in the top 2,000 metres of the world ocean, in units of 10²² joules, built from Argo floats and other profiles, 2005 to the present.

    1. 7a.

      World ocean, 0–2000 m:  10.171 × 10²² J for 2005, 32.533 × 10²² J for 2025. ↩

  8. 8.

    England, Mark R. et al.  “Minimal Arctic sea ice loss in the last 20 years, consistent with internal climate variability.”  Geophysical Research Letters.  2025.  A study by mainstream polar researchers of the pause in Arctic sea-ice loss since 2005, testing it against large sets of climate-model runs.  It finds the pause consistent with natural variability offsetting the human-forced decline.

    1. 8a.

      Section Abstract:  “Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”  “The modeling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades.” ↩ ↩

  9. 9.

    Etheridge, David M. et al.  “Law Dome Ice Core 2000-Year CO2, CH4, and N2O Data.”  IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, Data Contribution Series 2010-070.  2010.  The Australian Antarctic record of greenhouse gases from air trapped in Law Dome ice and snow, AD 1 to 2004, joined to direct air measurements at Cape Grim, Tasmania, with smoothed curves and dating uncertainties.  The original paper is MacFarling Meure and others, Geophysical Research Letters, 2006.

    1. 9a.

      Tables CO2 spline, column 6:  The smoothed CO2 curve gives 276.8 ppm for 1750, 286.1 for 1860, 296.1 for 1900, 310.5 for 1940 and 315.7 for 1959.  From AD 1 to 1799 it stays between 271.6 and 283.9 ppm. ↩

  10. 10.

    NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.  Mauna Loa CO2 annual mean data.  2026.  The yearly averages of the continuous CO2 record begun by Charles David Keeling at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in 1958.

    1. 10a.

      Annual means, ppm:  1959, 315.98;  2020, 414.21;  2024, 424.61;  2025, 427.35.  Average growth 0.86 ppm a year over 1959–1969 and 2.63 over 2015–2025. ↩

  11. 11.

    Coddington, Odele et al.  “NOAA Climate Data Record of total solar irradiance, version 3, annual.”  NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.  2026.  NOAA's yearly record of the sun's total output at the earth, measured by satellites since 1978 and reconstructed from sunspots before then.

    1. 11a.

      Annual values 1980–2025 lie between 1361.17 and 1362.56 W/m².  Least-squares trend 1980–2025:  0.003 W/m² per decade.  Means:  1980–1990, 1361.76;  2008–2019, 1361.50;  2015–2025, 1361.77. ↩ ↩

  12. 12.

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  “Summary for Policymakers.”  Climate Change 2021:  The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report, 3–32.  Cambridge University Press.  2021.  The summary of the IPCC's 2021 physical-science assessment, approved line by line by government delegates.  It states the consensus position on observed warming, its causes, and climate sensitivity.

    1. 12a.

      Section A.1.3, page 5:  “The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019”.  “is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C.”  “other human drivers (principally aerosols) contributed a cooling of 0.0°C to 0.8°C, natural drivers changed global surface temperature by –0.1°C to +0.1°C, and internal variability changed it by –0.2°C to +0.2°C.”  Its footnote 11 gives the observed warming to 2010–2019 as 1.06 [0.88 to 1.21] °C. ↩

    2. 12b.

      Section A.4.4, page 11:  “The AR6 assessed best estimate is 3°C with a likely range of 2.5°C to 4°C (high confidence), compared to 1.5°C to 4.5°C in AR5, which did not provide a best estimate.” ↩

  13. 13.

    Lewis, Nicholas, and Judith Curry.  “The Impact of Recent Forcing and Ocean Heat Uptake Data on Estimates of Climate Sensitivity.”  Journal of Climate 31(15):6051–6071.  2018.  The leading skeptical energy-budget estimate, by the independent researcher Nicholas Lewis and the climatologist Judith Curry, formerly of Georgia Tech.  It divides observed warming between 1869–1882 and 2007–2016 by the IPCC's forcing minus ocean heat uptake, and finds sensitivity at the low end of the IPCC range.

    1. 13a.

      Page 6051:  “medians are derived for ECS of 1.50 K (5%–95% range: 1.05–2.45 K) and for TCR of 1.20 K (5%–95% range: 0.9–1.7 K).”  “Using infilled, globally complete temperature data give slightly higher estimates: a median of 1.66 K for ECS (5%–95% range: 1.15–2.7 K)”.  “Allowing for possible time-varying climate feedbacks increases the median ECS estimate to 1.76 K (5%–95% range: 1.2–3.1 K), using infilled temperature data.” ↩

  14. 14.

    Spencer, Roy W., and John R. Christy.  “Effective climate sensitivity distributions from a 1D model of global ocean and land temperature trends, 1970–2021.”  Theoretical and Applied Climatology 155:299–308.  2023.  A peer-reviewed estimate by the two UAH climatologists, fitting a simple heat-flow model of land and ocean to measured surface, deep-ocean and borehole warming trends for 1970–2021 under two forcing histories.  It finds sensitivity near the low end of the IPCC range and below 34 of 36 current models.

    1. 14a.

      Paragraph abstract:  “EffCS is lower using the newer Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP245, 1.86 °C global EffCS, ± 34% range 1.48–2.15 °C) than the older Representative Concentration Pathway forcing (RCP6, 2.49 °C global average EffCS, ± 34% range 2.04–2.87 °C).” ↩

  15. 15.

    Hausfather, Zeke et al.  “Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections.”  Geophysical Research Letters 47:e2019GL085378.  2020.  A check of seventeen model projections of global temperature published from 1970 to 2007 against the warming that followed, scored two ways:  temperature against time as published, and warming per unit of the forcing that actually occurred.

    1. 15a.

      Section Results:  “Using the temperature versus time metric, 10 of the 17 model projections show results consistent with observations.”  “Using the implied TCR metric, 14 of the 17 model projections were consistent with observations”. ↩

  16. 16.

    Hausfather, Zeke et al.  “Climate simulations:  recognize the 'hot model' problem.”  Nature 605:26–29.  2022.  A comment by five climate modellers and researchers warning that a subset of the newest generation of models warm too much for a given rise in CO2, and urging users to weight models by how well they match other evidence, as the IPCC's 2021 report did.

    1. 16a.

      Page 26:  “Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’”.  “and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence”.  Page 28:  “In CMIP6, more than one-quarter of models have sensitivities that are greater than this”.  “Numerous studies have found that these high-sensitivity models do a poor job of reproducing historical temperatures over time”.  The superscript reference numbers in the original are left out.  "This" is the 4.7 °C maximum of the previous model generation. ↩

  17. 17.

    Independent Climate Change E-mails Review.  The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review.  Edited by Sir Muir Russell.  Jul 2010.  The British inquiry into the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, chaired by a former university principal, with findings on the scientists' honesty, their science and their openness.

    1. 17a.

      Paragraph 13:  “we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.”  Paragraph 15:  “But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA”.  Paragraph 18:  “responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.”  The sentence begins "We find that CRU's".  Paragraph 27:  “there was unhelpfulness in responding to requests and evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them.” ↩

  18. 18.

    National Research Council, Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years.  Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years.  National Academies Press.  2006.  The US National Academy of Sciences' review, requested by Congress, of the hockey-stick dispute and of temperature reconstructions generally.  It agreed with several of the statistical criticisms and with the main conclusion for the last four centuries.

    1. 18a.

      Chapter Summary, page 3:  “It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”  “Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600.”  Page 4:  “the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.”  Chapter 11, page 113:  “As part of their statistical methods, Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions.”  “In practice, this method, though not recommended, does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric mean temperature”.  “uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated.” ↩

  19. 19.

    Zhu, Zaichun et al.  “Greening of the Earth and its drivers.”  Nature Climate Change 6:791–795.  2016.  Three satellite records of leaf area for 1982–2009 combined with ten ecosystem models run with and without rising CO2, nitrogen deposition, climate change and land-use change, to apportion the observed greening among them.  The shares are model attributions with wide uncertainty.

    1. 19a.

      Page 791:  “We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning).”  “suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%).”  LAI is leaf area index, the leaf area above each unit of ground.  In the paper's own table the CO2 share is 70.1 ± 29.4 %. ↩

  20. 20.

    Vicedo-Cabrera, Ana M. et al.  “The burden of heat-related mortality attributable to recent human-induced climate change.”  Nature Climate Change 11:492–500.  2021.  A study of warm-season deaths in 732 places in 43 countries, 1991–2018, comparing heat deaths under the actual climate with those under a modelled climate without human influence.  It measures the heat cost of warming so far and does not count cold deaths.

    1. 20a.

      Section Results:  “The overall estimate is 37.0% but this percentage varied widely across subregions and countries. The largest climate change-induced contributions (>50%) were in southern and western Asia (Iran and Kuwait), southeast Asia (Philippines and Thailand) and several countries in Central and South America”. ↩

  21. 21.

    Nordhaus, William D.  “Revisiting the social cost of carbon.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(7):1518–1523.  2017.  The 2016 revision of Nordhaus's DICE model, the most widely used model linking the economy, emissions, warming and damage.  It gives a social cost of carbon and shows how that cost changes with the discount rate and other assumptions.

    1. 21a.

      Page 1519:  “Eq. 3 assumes that damages can be reasonably well approximated by a quadratic function of temperature change.”  “Including all factors, the final estimate is that the damages are 2.1% of global income at a 3 °C warming, and 8.5% of income at a 6 °C warming.” ↩

  22. 22.

    Burke, Marshall et al.  “Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production.”  Nature 527:235–239.  2015.  A study of 166 countries' annual output against their annual temperature, 1960–2010, finding that productivity peaks near a country-year average of 13 °C and falls at higher temperatures, then projected to 2100.  The 13 °C is a national annual mean, not a global one.

    1. 22a.

      Section Results:  “climate change reduces projected global output by 23% in 2100 (best estimate, SSP5) relative to a world without climate change, although statistical uncertainty allows for positive impacts with probability 0.29”. ↩

  23. 23.

    Bilal, Adrien, and Diego R. Känzig.  “The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change:  Global vs. Local Temperature.”  NBER Working Paper 32450.  National Bureau of Economic Research.  2024.  A working paper that estimates how world output responds to year-to-year swings in global, rather than national, temperature, and builds a model of the cost of warming from it.  Its damages are far larger than those of the sector-by-sector models.

    1. 23a.

      Section Abstract:  “Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1°C warming reduces world GDP by over 20% in the long run.” ↩

  24. 24.

    Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.  A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor:  An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming.  2009.  The longer companion to the Cornwall Alliance's Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, with chapters on theology, science and economics.  Its summaries argue that warming is mostly natural and that cutting fossil fuels would hurt the poor.

    1. 24a.

      Section Executive Summary of Chapter Three:  “Although some sector-level economic studies in agriculture and forestry indicate that warming might enhance well-being, most models find that human well-being improves because of economic growth with or without warming but improves less with significant warming.” ↩

  25. 25.

    Hebert, Jake.  “Climate Alarmism and the Age of the Earth.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Mar 29, 2019.  ICR's clearest statement of its climate position, by its physicist Jake Hebert.  He argues that the whole dispute turns on climate sensitivity, that the models have run hot, and that the evidence for high sensitivity from past ice ages rests on dating he rejects.  He gives no sensitivity calculation of his own.

    1. 25a.

      Section Climate Sensitivity:  “The real issue in the climate change debate is climate sensitivity.”  “If the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere were to double while everything else stayed the same, the increase in global average surface temperatures would be small, only about 1°C (less than 2°F).” ↩

    2. 25b.

      Section on orbital tuning:  “Orbital tuning involves a huge potential for self-deception because it gives the “tuner” the freedom to selectively stretch and compress different parts of the chemical wiggle patterns in the sediment and ice cores.” ↩

    3. 25c.

      Section Computer Climate Models:  “The main limit on the [climate] sensitivity value is that it has to be consistent with paleoclimate data. A sensitivity which is too low will be inconsistent with past climate changes”.  Hebert is quoting a mainstream scientist, whom he cites in his note 10. ↩

  26. 26.

    Batten, Don.  “Climate Change:  A biblical and scientific approach to Anthropogenic Global Warming.”  Creation Ministries International.  Feb 17, 2026 (edition of 2020).  CMI's main statement on modern climate, a long essay by its scientist Don Batten, a former research horticulturalist, written with colleagues.  It sets out a biblical history of climate, a case for low climate sensitivity, and a policy section on energy and the poor. ↩

  27. 27.

    Alper, Becka A.  “How Religion Intersects With Americans' Views on the Environment.”  Pew Research Center.  Nov 17, 2022.  A Pew survey of 10,156 American adults in April 2022 on climate change, religion, end-times belief and the idea that God gave humans dominion over the earth, with a statistical model separating party from religion.

    1. 27a.

      Page 6:  “The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion.”  Page 18:  “when controlling for political party, age, etc., evangelical Protestants are 5 points less likely than religiously unaffiliated respondents to say that global climate change is a serious problem”.  The marginal-effects table on page 17 gives the gap between Republicans and Democrats, after the same controls, as 54 percentage points. ↩

  28. 28.

    Ecklund, Elaine Howard et al.  “Examining Links Between Religion, Evolution Views, and Climate Change Skepticism.”  Environment and Behavior 49(9):985–1006.  2017.  A national survey of 10,241 Americans in 2014 by Rice University sociologists, testing whether doubting evolution predicts doubting climate change once politics, trust in science and religion are taken into account.  It is the one study found that tests the creationism link directly.

    1. 28a.

      Section Results, Full Model:  “In the Full Model predicting climate change skepticism we include our demographic measures and our measures of political ideology, confidence in the scientific community, and interest in science. After including these measures we see that the coefficient for evolution skepticism becomes non-significant, indicating that the initial overlap between these two views is explained by the other measures included in the model.”  “The only significant association that remains is the difference between Evangelical Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated”.  “The effect of this measure is more than two times that of any other predictor.”  "This measure" is political conservatism. ↩

  29. 29.

    Meese, D. A. et al.  “The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 depth-age scale: Methods and results.”  Journal of Geophysical Research 102(C12):26411–26423.  1997.  “The ice at 2800 m is dated at 110,000 years B.P. with an estimated error ranging from 1 to 10% in the top 2500 m of the core and averaging 20% between 2500 and 2800 m.”  NOAA's archive adds:  “it is clear the record is disturbed [below 2800 m]… so any ages beyond 2800 m must be used with extreme caution.”  The depth-age scale for the GISP2 ice core from central Greenland, built by counting annual layers with several measured signals at once, down to 2,800 m.  The layer count gives more annual detail than the official GISP2 timescale, the Meese/Sowers timescale.  The article uses it for the count of 110,000 years at 2,800 m and for the error bars the authors publish on it. ↩

  30. 30.

    Svensson, A. et al.  “A 60 000 year Greenland stratigraphic ice core chronology.”  Climate of the Past 4:47–57.  2008.  The maximum counting error: uncertain layers counted at ½ ± ½ year, accumulating to.  “950 years or 5%”.  for the 41.8–60 ka section.  Compared with the Chinese Hulu Cave speleothem record, the paper reports.  “absolute age differences of less than 800 years throughout the 60 ka period”.  and adds:  “Such a good agreement would be unlikely if one of the records had a significant dating error.”  Laschamp: 41,250 ± 814 counted vs 40,400 ± 1,000 Ar-Ar; NAAZ II: 55,380 ± 1,184 vs 54,500 ± 1,000 Ar-Ar.  The paper also reports the GISP2-GICC05 disagreement of up to 2,400 years near 52 ka, where "no other chronology shows a similar behavior", and an unquantified layer-shape bias.  Both are fairly citable by critics of layer counting, and both are an order of magnitude too small to help a 4,500-year chronology.  A 2008 time scale for Greenland ice that extends the layer-counted GICC05 chronology by 18 ka, so that it covers the past 60 ka, with error estimates taken from the number of uncertain layers.  It checks the result against a Chinese cave record and against dated volcanic and magnetic markers.  The article uses it for the agreement of the layer count with independent dates over the glacial period. ↩

  31. 31.

    Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo.  “A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ¹⁸O records.”  Paleoceanography 20:PA1003.  2005.  The published marine-isotope-stage boundary table (https://lorraine-lisiecki.com/LR04_MISboundaries.txt) contains 102 stage boundaries within the Quaternary — 51 even-numbered (glacial) stages, MIS 2 through MIS 102.  A stack, which is one averaged curve, of 57 deep-sea records of oxygen isotopes covering 5.3 million years, built from over 38,000 measurements from 57 sites.  The authors built it as a common reference timescale for marine records.  The article uses it for the count of 51 numbered glacial stages in the Quaternary and for the published table of stage boundaries. ↩

  32. 32.

    Tweedy, Eric.  “Oard's Ice Age and Settlement of Northern Europe on Masoretic and Septuagint Timelines.”  Answers Research Journal 17:763–783.  2024.  “The conclusion is that accepted historical glaciation extents, Oard's Ice Age model as he parameterized it, northern Europe settlement traditions, and the Masoretic biblical timeline are not consistent.”  The catch-22:  “Access to and from the land bridge (no glaciers in the way) might be established only at the expense of higher sea levels… arrival before the glaciers means eviction by the glaciers as they peak.”  A 2024 Answers Research Journal paper that tests Oard's model of one 700-year post-Flood ice age against accepted glacial extents, northern European settlement traditions and the Masoretic biblical timeline.  The article uses it for the finding that these cannot all hold together, and for Tweedy's catch-22 on the Bering land bridge. ↩

  33. 33.

    Met Office Hadley Centre;  Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.  HadCRUT5 analysis, global annual summary series, version 5.2.0.0.  2026.  The British global surface temperature record, combining land stations from the Climatic Research Unit with the Hadley Centre's sea-surface temperatures, 1850 to the present, as anomalies from 1961–1990 with uncertainty limits. ↩

  34. 34.

    Berkeley Earth.  Global land and ocean temperature, annual summary.  2026.  The independent Berkeley Earth global surface record from 1850, built with its own station selection and statistical method.  This file runs to 2024. ↩

  35. 35.

    NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  GISTEMP v4, global land-ocean temperature index.  2026.  NASA's global surface temperature record from 1880, as monthly and annual anomalies from 1951–1980. ↩

  36. 36.

    Forster, Piers et al.  “The Earth's Energy Budget, Climate Feedbacks and Climate Sensitivity.”  Climate Change 2021:  The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, 923–1054.  Cambridge University Press.  2021.  Chapter 7 of the IPCC's 2021 assessment, the chapter on the earth's heat budget, the size of each feedback, and climate sensitivity.  It combines model, observational and ice-age evidence, and it sets out the energy-budget method and the "pattern effect" argument for why observed warming understates long-term sensitivity.

    1. 36a.

      Section 7.5.2.1, page 996:  “Employing these values within the traditional global energy balance framework described above (following the methods of Otto et al. (2013) and accounting for correlated uncertainties between ΔF and ΔF2×CO2) produces a TCR of 1.9 [1.3 to 2.7] °C and an effective ECS of 2.5 [1.6 to 4.8] °C.”  The inputs on the same page:  energy imbalance change ΔN = 0.59 ± 0.35 W m–2, warming ΔT = 1.03 ± 0.20 °C, forcing ΔF = 2.20 [1.53 to 2.91] W m–2, all between 1850–1900 and 2006–2019. ↩

  37. 37.

    Harde, Hermann.  “Radiation Transfer Calculations and Assessment of Global Warming by CO2.”  International Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 9251034.  2017.  A single-author paper by a laser physicist at the Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, combining line-by-line radiation calculations with a two-layer energy-balance model.  Its low sensitivity depends on taking a rising sun from one of the competing solar records and on attributing observed cloud changes to the sun.

    1. 37a.

      Paragraph abstract:  “Including solar and cloud effects as well as all relevant feedback processes our simulations give an equilibrium climate sensitivity of C S = 0.7°C (temperature increase at doubled CO 2 ) and a solar sensitivity of S S = 0.17°C (at 0.1% increase of the total solar irradiance).” ↩