April 2, 2025 Show with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner on “Climate & Energy: The Case for Realism”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on the second day of April 2025.

I am so thrilled to have a returning guest today, who is one of my favorite guests to interview. His name will likely not be unfamiliar to most of my listeners. His name is Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, and he is founder, president, and national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and today we are going to be addressing his new book, Climate and Energy, the Case for Realism, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Cal Beisner.

Well, thank you very much, Chris. It's.

Great to be back with you on the show and really appreciate just the opportunity to share a bit with your listeners. And I was just having a.

Conversation today with a pastor here in town when he was asking me about today's episode of Iron Sharpens Iron, and I realized when I was thinking about it that you were a very key person in my own life as a Christian going back to the 80s.

You were the one individual, along with Dr. Walter Martin, who introduced to me through the John Ankerberg show a fascination over an interest in apologetics and theological debates, which eventually led me to organize probably close to 30 live public moderated debates by now, primarily featuring my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, but it was interesting to reflect on that, and so you are definitely a blessing to the.

Body of Christ. That's delightful to know. I mean, I had no idea that we went that far back, Chris, and certainly Walter Martin had an enormous impact on me, as did John Ankerberg. It was a privilege to do that, what, five episode debate with Walter Martin against two leaders of the United Pentecostal Church talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, and yeah, that was exciting, and my goodness, that's 40 years ago, and I still get emails every once in a while from former United Pentecostal Church pastors who say that seeing that debate series, the Lord used that to deliver them from oneness, anti-Trinitarian theology, to Trinitarianism and ultimately to the to the tree gospel of justification by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone, not by a combination of grace and works, and not faith, not grace and merit, not faith and works, not Christ plus ourselves.

So that's exciting, and one more indicator here, as you just said, of the value of that experience.

40 years ago. Amen, and I even wound up arranging two debates with Dr. James R. White and one Pentecostal, Bernard Nathanson, which was a radio debate. It wasn't on my show, it was on the Andy Anderson Live program on WMCA radio, where I worked for 15 years.

This is before I had my own radio show, and then later, after I started my show, I arranged a live public moderated debate between Dr. White and Robert Sabin, and I remember that was a huge disappointment, because Dr. Sabin was expecting to see an aggressive and biblical effort to defend his beliefs, but he was primarily eulogizing Michael Servetus for the entire debate, trying to pull on the heartstrings of the audience.

When was that? When was that, Chris? That would have been in the early 2000s, the Robert Sabin debate. It was at a secular high school, or might have even been an elementary school building in Patchogue, Long Island, and my friend, who is now deceased with the Lord, Larry Carino, was the moderator, but I'm sure that that's available somewhere, probably on the Alpha and Omega Ministries website, aomin .org.

Yeah, right. Well, tell our listeners about the Cornwall Alliance.

Well, thanks much for the opportunity. The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is, well, one really brief way to put it is, we're trying to save the planet from the people who are trying to save the planet.

That's a great way of phrasing it. My wife made that up, and I think it's about as good a quick way to tell people what we do as anything I can imagine. To get a little more technical here, we're a network of just under 70 evangelical Christian scholars.

Roughly a third of them are scientists, including, since we're going to be talking about the topic of climate change, we have among our scientists some of the world's top climate scientists. About a third are economists, most of them specializing in either environmental or developmental economics, and about a third are theologians, philosophers, ministry leaders.

And our mission is to educate the public and policymakers on what we call biblical earth stewardship, which is very different from environmentalism for a variety of different reasons, plus economic development for the poor around the world.

You know, what are the conditions that are necessary for people, for whole societies to rise and stay out of poverty? And then third and most important, the gospel of Jesus Christ, together with the biblical worldview, theology, and ethics that come linked with that gospel.

And I suppose you could say sort of the thrust of what we seek to do is to teach how human beings made in God's image, male and female, are supposed to fulfill the mandate that God gave to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 -28, when having created them, he blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and everything that moves on the face of the earth.

So, our vision is for a world in which the gospel reigns, in which billions of people know the saving Lord Jesus Christ and have repented of their sins and come unto the kingdom of God and submitted to his lordship in their lives, a world in which because people begin to understand God's creation the way he meant it to be understood and who have begun to use it the way he intends us to use it, what we see then would be men and women working together lovingly to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors, so that really we're fulfilling the two great commandments, to love God and to love neighbor.

And we link this with the Great Commission. The cultural mandate of Genesis 1 -28 to fill, subdue, and rule the earth is linked to the Great Commission in that as long as people stay in rebellion against God, they're not going to exercise dominion over the earth in a godly way.

But as they are reconciled to God, they will increasingly understand God's calling on their lives. They'll increasingly understand God's earth and how he structured it to be ruled, to be used by human beings, and then they will begin to really reflect his glory in all that they do.

Tom, and the website is CornwallAlliance .org, and we will...

That is correct.

We will repeat that later on in the program. And one of the reasons why what you're doing is so extremely vital, and perhaps you could word it in a different way than I am about to, but it's not just that environmentalists and those on the left are incorrect about many things that they advocate in the public sphere regarding climate change and a whole host of other things.

It's not just incorrect. Their views are very, very seriously and dangerously harmful. Am I right.

Here?

Yes. Yeah, you sure are, because, well, a lot of reasons, some of which go back hundreds of years, literally. But fundamentally, most environmentalism is built on an anti-biblical worldview that is either atheistic and materialistic—that would be the more secular sort of environmentalism that grew up in Europe and North America, basically, in the 1960s and 1970s, much of that, by the way, as leaders of socialist and communist countries began to realize that there was no way that they were going to outperform capitalism at producing wealth and getting it into lots of people's hands.

And so because they still believed in Marx's vision of the state controlling all property, they decided that environmentalism was a better excuse for state-run economies than socialism had been. But either you have that secular, humanistic, materialistic worldview underlying much environmentalism, or a lot of the environmental movement is also now influenced by Eastern thought, Eastern religious thought, particularly pantheistic thought, where the world, the universe is God.

Or if not exactly that, well, perhaps panentheism, the notion that God is to the universe as the soul is to the body. And sometimes animism, there are lots of gods who inhabit rocks and streams and forests and whatnot.

But either way, either because you deny the existence of God as a secularist, or because you equate God and the universe, you deny the creator-creature distinction. And the apostle Paul tells us clearly in Romans chapter one, that when you deny the creator-creature distinction, when you begin to worship and serve the creature instead of the creator, well, then God gives you over to a reprobate mind, professing yourself to be wise, you become a fool, and you pursue all kinds of counterproductive activities, all kinds of sinful activities.

So most of the environmentalist movement, there are exceptions. There are the Christian creation care organizations here and there. But most of the environmentalist movement is firmly rooted in anti-Christian worldviews.

And unfortunately, even a lot of the Christian creation care organizations like the Evangelical Environmental Network or AROHA and Plant with Purpose and things like that, they tend not so much to embrace the underlying worldview of the environmentalist movement, but they do embrace uncritically the claims of the movement about environmental degradations, about ecological catastrophes happening all over.

And unfortunately, well, actually, fortunately for the good of mankind, most of those claims are at least badly exaggerated, lacking in solid scientific evidence, or just outright false, just made up.

And consequently, most environmentalists wind up embracing policies to try to address various environmental catastrophes, whether it's so-called overpopulation or species extinction or climate change or ocean acidification and the destruction of coral reefs.

All of these things are at best grossly exaggerated, mostly just outright false, but they embrace policies to try to fight these problems that turn out to deprive human beings, especially in developing countries, of the means they need to rise and stay out of poverty.

And frankly, poverty is a much greater risk to human health and human life than anything related to the environment, to climate, to species extinction, anything of that sort. And so, if we care about our neighbors, if we care particularly about the poor, and the scriptures teach us that we must, then we want to be sure that we promote economic and environmental policies that are not harmful to the poor, but helpful.

And I'm going to give our listeners our email address if you'd like to join the conversation with a question of your own for Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Let's say you are in agreement with Dr. Beisner and are very concerned about the insanity of much of what comes under the umbrella of a left-wing understanding of science and of climate change and so on.

And you fear that publicly identifying yourself as an opponent of the left on these matters may get you fired or have some other horrible consequence for you. Well, we understand that things like that would compel you to remain anonymous, but if you're just asking general questions, please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

Why don't you tell our listeners about your co-editor David R. Legates or Legates?

Yeah, David Legates is a PhD climatologist. In fact, he was the first American ever to earn the degree of PhD in climatology quite a long while ago. He's a retired professor of climatology at the University of Delaware.

He has specialized in archiving and studying hard empirical data about all kinds of different climate measurements about rainfall, about wind, about temperature, about storminess, and you name it. But frankly, he's been all over the field of climatology, long, long time professor.

And he retired a couple of years ago and came to work with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation as our director of research and education. He's the author or co-author of I believe it is 149 refereed articles in science journals, most of them journals specializing in climate studies.

So he's a true expert in the field, and he has many connections with other great experts in the field. So we wanted to put together this book that is fundamentally based upon a Christian worldview, but that doesn't sort of wave the flag about that because we wanted to communicate with scientists in the non-Christian world who tend to immediately sort of disregard something if it has a Christian label on it.

But most of the authors of the book are solid Christians, and I think we've got a really good thing put together here. What we've tried to do is to present a position that is the best supported by solid empirical research, and that makes it very different from two positions.

One is the climate alarmist position that says, you know, human emissions of carbon dioxide when we burn fossil fuels are so rapidly heating the planet that, well, as Al Gore said, the oceans will boil.

That's utterly absurd. Or that most of Florida will be underwater within a few decades or something like that. That's also totally absurd. The climate alarmist position is one, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is what we would call the climate change denialist position that just says, ah, climate doesn't change, and human activity has nothing to do with climate.

Neither one of those is supported by solid empirical evidence. Instead, we present a position that says, yeah, climate has always changed throughout Earth's history, and it always will change. And carbon dioxide, because it's what's called a greenhouse gas or an infrared absorbing gas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to making the Earth's surface a little bit warmer than it otherwise would be.

And as we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and several other activities that we do, like making concrete, yeah, basic physics tells us that it ought to be making the atmosphere toward the surface of the Earth a little warmer than it otherwise would be, colder, high in the atmosphere, because what happens with these radiative heat absorbing gases is that they re-radiate some of that back toward the surface.

So they cool the stratosphere at the same time that they warm the surface. But the question is not whether, the question is how much. And all of the claims of rapid warming driven by greenhouse gases rest on computer models that are just hideously incapable of reasonably accurately retrodicting, that is, predicting in reverse, global average temperatures over the last 50, 60 years.

And that means that the models are not credible. They don't give any rational basis for any predictions about future temperature. The best evidence that we have comes from empirical measurements from satellites, from weather balloons, from various other sources.

And those estimates tell us that CO2 and other greenhouse gases contribute a tiny bit to the warming that we've seen over the last couple of hundred years, total warming of about, oh, 1 .3 degrees, 1 .2 degrees Celsius.

But they are not the main driver. And the main driver is natural cycles in energy output from the sun, in ocean currents, and so on. And frankly, a warmer world is also a better world, very clearly. That's demonstrable through history.

So we try to present what we call a climate realist position in this in 16 chapters by 16 authors, including nine climate scientists and a number of economists and energy experts, to sort of blaze a path toward intelligent policy related to climate and energy that especially pays attention to the importance of rising and staying out of poverty, because poverty is a far greater risk than anything having to do with.

Climate. Now, you have a very important phrase in the very name of your organization, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. And the left has, at some points in history, been very bold on the side of truth over certain issues that involve the environment.

They have very often been in the forefront of opposing multi-million dollar corporations from polluting the water systems of communities and flagrant disregard for not only the condition of our planet surrounding them, but also the very lives of individuals.

So we have to be careful that we don't go overboard in just condemning all people who are more liberally minded when it comes to areas of environmental concern. But when do you think that there historically began a radical shift, may have been a gradual shift, but a shift from that kind of rightful concern and righteous indignation over people being horrible stewards of this planet to the point where science was being fabricated and the global warming, or as they constantly seem to change the way they phrase it, to make a conservative sound more insane if he were to say that he disagreed with it, now it's just climate change.

But to believe that this is, next to white supremacist racism, the greatest existential threat to the existence of humanity. But how did this shift occur?

Well, that's a great question. And frankly, it would require a good deal of time to go through a lot of history, but I can sort of sum things up for you a little bit.

In fact, maybe if you do that when we come back from our first break, I don't want to interrupt you mid-sentence.

All right. Let's do that.

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord and his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

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Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.

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And we're now back with Dr. Cal Beisner. We were discussing his book, Climate and Energy, The Case for Realism, which he edited with David R. Legates, and our email address for questions is chrisorenson at gmail .com.

And we ask of you to be patient. I know that some of you are waiting to have your questions asked and answered, but I wanted to have Dr. Beisner give us a little history lesson about how the liberal understanding of environmental concern went from a very noble cause and very truthful in many cases, how it turned to the fabrication of false science and even the creation of a public mindset and even public policy mandated by governments all over the world that have been harmful to human beings.

But if you could give us that little history.

Lesson, Dr. Beisner. Yeah. First, I might mention that those who are interested in a bit more in-depth look at this might want to get my book, What is the Most Important Environmental Task Facing American Christians Today?

And in fact, Chris, as a special deal to your listeners to this program, from now to the end of April of 2025, if they will go to CornwallAlliance .org and click on the donate button and donate any amount, tax-deductible donation, no matter what amount they donate, if they ask for what is the most important environmental task, all right, or even just environmental task, if they can only remember that, we will be glad to send them a free copy of that book.

And that will give them some more of the history of this than we have time to go into on this program. But essentially, environmentalism is an outgrowth of what was first known as the conservationist movement.

And conservationists, like Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, they thought, yeah, the earth exists to the glory of God, and human beings are the top of all the created order. And we ought to be able to use the earth for human benefit, but in our using it, we should use it in a way that conserves its value for future generations.

That's not exactly the same thing as preservation, because in preservation, you try to keep something exactly the way you found it. But rather, conservation says, you use things sustainably, you use things in a way that can continue for centuries to come.

But much of the environmentalist movement arose out of a very different sort of a notion that was fueled first by the fears of population growth. Those fears, by the way, go back literally thousands of years.

One of the church fathers, Tertullian, actually wrote that the earth was already full, all the islands were full, there were people, people everywhere, and far too many of them. That's a rather strange thing at a time when earth's total population was, oh, perhaps 1 ,100th of what it is today.

But we can just go back, for instance, to Thomas Robert Malthus, who, sad to say, was a Presbyterian minister, but also a self-educated economist. In 1798, he published a book called, a book on the principle of population.

And in that book, it was an essay on the principle of population. In that book, he argued that population grows exponentially, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, et cetera. But food supply can only grow arithmetically, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.

Well, obviously, population will very rapidly outgrow food supply, and therefore, population will be kept in check only by one of three things, famine or disease or war. Now, Malthus being a pastor and loving people didn't want them to suffer famine, war, or pestilence, disease.

So he urged that we should begin to use means of controlling population, of reducing population growth through a sort of family planning long before the foundation of planned parenthood. And his ideas actually influenced Charles Darwin, because Darwin figured, well, so if food supply doesn't grow as rapidly as population does, then there is competition for food supply.

And animals that are better equipped for that competition are going to outdo animals that are not. And that fed into his thinking about evolution, about naturalistic evolution, the preservation of what he called favored races through natural selection.

Well, he had a nephew by the name of Francis Galton, who then wrote books on what we later came to call eugenics. And his attitude was, well, we need just the best kind of human beings, not the worst kind of human beings, because the best kind need to have plenty of food, and we shouldn't have to be competing with the worst kinds.

Well, for Galton and Darwin, the best kind of human beings were white Anglo-Saxons, and then other northern Europeans. You mentioned earlier white supremacists, right? Well, this was actually sort of the origin of the white supremacist kind of thinking, right smack in Darwinian evolutionary thought.

So this launched the population control movement, which was then promoted by the eugenics movement, which was then promoted in America by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and in Europe, especially by Adolf Hitler, the founder of the Nazi movement.

So a lot of the environmentalist movement, as it began to distinguish itself from the conservationist movement, starting basically in the 1940s and 50s, embraced this anti-population growth mentality.

Now, here's how it connects to your question about, well, after all, the left for a long time really sought to protect people from pollution, and they rang the alarm about corporations that were emitting toxic chemicals into the air and water and the like.

How did that turn into such, in many cases, bogus claims of environmental catastrophe? Well, what was happening in the 19th century, the early 20th century in places that we would now describe as the developed world, okay, wealthy countries, right, was that industrialization was lifting people out of poverty by taking them out of subsistence agriculture, which cannot provide for a large population, for a highly dense population.

Industrialization was lifting them out of that. Now, prior to the Industrial Revolution, average human life expectancy at birth was around about 27 to 28 years. The infant and child mortality rate was right about 50%.

Half of all children born would die before their fifth birthdays. That, by the way, was true, whether you were wealthy or not. Queen Anne of England had 19 children, and not one of them survived to adulthood.

The Industrial Revolution brought about a great increase in productivity of farming by providing all kinds of implements to improve human productivity, but also of all sorts of other things, the building of housing and transportation and communication and so on.

Well, economists of the environment speak of something called the environmental transition, the environmental transition. This is an insight that recognizes that in the early stages of industrialization, while productivity rises rapidly and therefore human health and life expectancy increase rapidly, at the same time, pollution increases quite a lot.

And so you wind up with sooty skies and with the streams and rivers polluted by toxic chemicals. And in the early stages of industrialization, people can't afford to do much about fighting those things.

But as people get wealthier and wealthier, when food, clothing, shelter, some medical care, education, transportation, when those become very predictable and you're confident that you'll have enough of those, then you think to yourself, I don't like the way this smog feels in my eyes and my lungs.

I don't like the fact that I can't use the water out of this stream. I can't eat the fish out of this river if I catch them because of the toxic chemicals. And not only do they not like it, but now that they can afford to spend something to try to reduce that.

So what happens is that you get an increase in pollution in early industrialization and then it peaks and then it begins to decline. And by the time you get to a highly refined industrial economy, pollution in the air and in the waters and in the soil begins to go way below what it was with just subsistence farming for everybody.

So unfortunately, a lot of environmentalists just got used to the notion, industry pollutes. Well, industry doesn't have to pollute heavily and we can prevent pollution as we become wealthy enough to do so.

But cleaner processes are more expensive than dirtier processes. So you have to have the industrial increase in the first place to enable people to afford that. So what happened was that in the 1950s and 60s, when Pittsburgh's skies, for instance, were black with all of the smoke and soot and whatnot from steel mills, you had environmentalists just automatically associate industrialization with harm to humanity.

When in fact, we can industrialize and then actually clean things up better. That's shown clearly by the fact that human life expectancy has risen from before the industrial revolution from around 27 or 28 years to in highly developed countries now around 80 years and even in developing countries to around 70 years.

So now too many of the environmentalists just always point at any kind of pollution and say, this is a disaster when in fact, it's something that can be taken care of reasonably well. We addressed this, by the way, in the founding document of the Cornwall Alliance, which actually was written five years before we started the Cornwall Alliance, the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship.

And we pointed out that real environmental problems tend to be local, well understood, not speculative, and solvable by reasonable policy that does not impoverish human beings. Whereas fake environmental problems tend to be regional or global, highly speculative, not supported by solid empirical evidence, and extremely costly to address.

Costly enough that it actually is harmful to people.

You know, when I see the parade of scientists being promoted in the leftist media, these people are not only very articulate, but I think that they are likely to be very, very gifted actors because they seem, they appear to be absolutely convinced of the arguments they're making.

Now, I know you do not have the ability to read hearts and minds, and I obviously wouldn't want you to impugn the motives of individuals by name, but is there a way of knowing, especially the brilliant scientists that you know that are involved with the Cornwall Alliance, is there any level of certainty that any of you folks have that these scientists, or so-called scientists, are knowingly and libelously fabricating information just because they either don't want to lose their jobs, or they want to further enhance their career and income, or whatever the case may be?

Yeah. You know, back in 2009, there was a large tranche of emails released to the public on the web originating from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit in Great Britain, and from various other climate research organizations around the world, and that became notorious as what was called ClimateGate.

Those thousands of emails showed very clearly that some of the people involved were intentionally exaggerating some data to support the climate alarmist message. They were working hard to suppress data that was contrary to that message.

They were controlling the editorial decisions of refereed scientific journals to keep well-qualified papers that questioned the climate alarmist message from being published in them. Sometimes they were outright fabricating data, and in many, many instances, they were just plain and simply mishandling data.

You know, somebody can be a brilliant scientist in a particular field and yet make very big mistakes, even, well, what some people might think of, what experts might call elementary errors in other fields.

So, for example, a couple of scientists produced what became very famous as the hockey stick graph of global average temperature over the past 2 ,000 years. It was published in 1998 in one of the major scientific journals.

I think it was Science. And this purported to show that global average temperature had been pretty much stable for about 1 ,800 years and then had suddenly begun to rise rapidly from the mid -19th century onward.