Ideas Have Consequences
Everything that we see around us is the product of ideas, of ideologies, of worldviews. That's where everything starts. Worldviews are not all the same, and the differences matter a lot. How do you judge a tree? By its fruits. How do you judge a worldview? By its physical, tangible, observable fruit. The things it produces. Ideas that are noble and true produce beauty, abundance, and human flourishing. Poisonous ideas produce ugliness. They destroy and dehumanize. It really is that simple. Welcome to Ideas Have Consequences, the podcast of Disciple Nations Alliance, where we prepare followers of Christ to better understand the true ideas that lead to human flourishing while fighting against poisonous ideas that destroy nations. Join us, and prepare your minds for action!
Ideas Have Consequences
Why are Climate Scientists Anti-Science? With Dr. David Legates
Climatologist David Legates challenges mainstream narratives on the climate, offering an important Christian perspective on the intersection of science, politics, and economics. Drawing insights from his book Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism, co-authored with leading scientists and economists, Legates builds upon our previous episode examining how climate science has shifted from objective inquiry to politicized advocacy.
We consider:
- Misleading claims in climate activism and how to respond critically.
- The implications of climate policy on global poverty, energy costs, and environmental stewardship.
- The rise of postmodern science and its impact on climate research
- Do climate change policies serve hidden agendas or impact broader societal transformations?
From the reliability of carbon dating to the role of the church in restoring scientific integrity, this episode invites you to question prevailing narratives and engage in practical, truth-centered environmental action.
Rediscover the essence of balanced climate science—and the hope for reclaiming stewardship that honors both creation and the Creator.
- View the transcript, leave comments, and check out recommended resources on the Episode Landing Page!
- Listen to our last episode with David Legates here: Climate & Energy: The Case for Realism with E. Calvin Beisner & David R. Legates
Well, welcome again everybody to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. My name is Scott Allen, I'm the president of the DNA and joined today by my colleagues and friends Luke Allen, dwight Vogt, and we're thrilled today to have back with us again David Legates. David was with us earlier, a couple actually a couple months ago, it seems like along with Calvin Beisner, and we were introducing your newest book. I believe it's your newest book called Climate and Energy the Case for Realism, and we want to continue that conversation today just with you, david. We really are so grateful for your work with the Cornwall Alliance and just your work as a scientist and this book.
Scott Allen:I just want to encourage everyone that has interest in the issue of climate, climate change, the whole narrative around that issue how do we think about it as Christians? This is the book you need to read this book Climate and Energy the Case for Realism. And, david, this is a book that is you're an editor of this book, right? It has multiple kind of authors and so it's kind of a compendium of not just your thinking but some of the best thinkers in the Christian world and science world on this subject as well. Do you want to talk just a little bit about the book, maybe? Before you do that, let me just reintroduce you, if I could, to our audience today. David is a climatologist, so he himself is a scientist. He specializes in precipitation and climate change. He received his doctorate from the University of Oklahoma and subsequently returned to the University of Delaware, where I believe you're from Delaware. Is that correct?
David Legates :Yeah, I got the PhD from Delaware, Okay okay okay, oklahoma, and then came back.
Scott Allen:yeah, got it. He's been very involved in this discussion of climate climate change and has even spoken to the United States Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works on different occasions, so he's been involved with policy as well. He's currently working for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which is another outstanding biblical worldview and science organization that you need to know about. So if you're not familiar with that organization the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation that's one that you do need to be following. So, as again I mentioned, david's, the co-author of Climate and Energy, the Case for Realism.
Scott Allen:Tell us, just before we jump into what we're going to help us understand the issue how do we think about the climate crisis? You know in quote quotations there. So we covered a lot of ground. We're going to move on from that a little bit today and kind of go a little bit deeper. But before we get into that, just tell us a little bit more about the book. How did you guys come up with the idea to write it and about it? You know, who did you invite to contribute and things like that. Just tell us a little bit about it.
David Legates :Well, cal Beissner came up with the idea originally of putting together a book that had several chapters on various scientific topics, various chapters on things associated with economics, christian economics and effectively to be able to hear other scientists' viewpoints on specific topics. So we have, for example, willie Toon talking about the sun. We have Vijay Jayaraj talking about the economics of things Case Van Kooten.
David Legates :There's a number of other people as well talking about the economics of things Case Van Kooten there's a number of other people as well, talking about specific topics related to what their expertise is and why climate change is not the end of the world that a lot of people want to make it out to be. It's one of the things. I've got a book excuse me, a journal article I'm trying to write. It's taking me a long time, it'll probably take a lot longer, but essentially it's climate change literacy versus climate literacy, and the idea here is to move away from teaching people to reuse, recycle and reduce usage and rather to teach what is the climate really all about? How does it interact? How do we understand?
David Legates :It's sort of like what I see in climate science is we sort of teach like if you were teaching chemistry by saying, well, it's better living through chemistry and here's all the great things that chemistry has done. Well, that's great, but that doesn't tell you what chemistry is about. That doesn't teach you about the atom and molecules and how they're put together and things like that. But in climate science, we're okay with this and I'm not okay with it, and so I think that's where the book comes at from the science side is to talk about what is the science associated with it.
David Legates :Why are greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases, what makes them different, for example, than nitrogen, oxygen and argon, which make up 99.9% of the atmosphere by volume? And so teach a little bit about what climate science really is, as opposed to climate change science.
Scott Allen:Okay, well, I want to. You wrote one of the chapters in this book and the chapter is chapter two. The title of the chapter is the History and the Politics of Climate Change, and that's where we want to start our discussion today. And let me, if I could, I'd just like to read a little bit of the. There's two things I want to get to today.
Scott Allen:I want to understand kind of what's behind this current, under this narrative let's just call it that of catastrophic climate change, the widespread belief that we're in a time of extreme crisis around the climate, people that talk about it being settled, science, etc. So, yeah, at the end of the chapter you write something that I think is very provocative and I'm just going to read it here. You say today the science of climate change is a well-funded and well-orchestrated campaign to fundamentally transform global societies and you're quoting somebody there as well. Those are in quotations and actually I'm going to just jump to the very final sentence. Here you say climate change is not about the science. It has morphed into climate change policy activism. So I want to talk about that's a really fascinating sentence Climate change, the science of climate change is a well-funded and well-orchestrated campaign to fundamentally transform global society.
Scott Allen:I guess my first question, just some basic questions about that. I guess my first question, just some basic questions about that. It's a provocative thing because, of course, most people think, no, it's about what it's about. It's about climate, it's about a true climate crisis, and so you know, what you're saying here is no, not so much. It's actually kind of a Trojan horse for another agenda. Right, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that correct?
David Legates :That is exactly correct.
Scott Allen:Okay, so that's what we want to explore today. First of all, who's behind this well-funded and well-orchestrated campaign?
David Legates :I'd like to just kind of explore that. Who question? Well, it came about originally in the late 1980s back in the UN. The UN put together, eventually, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it was a vehicle to be able to invoke Marxism on a global scale.
David Legates :The question is how do you get Marxism within a country? You put the haves versus the have-nots. The have-nots are not have-nots because the haves took it from them. So you therefore get the have-nots to join together to fight back against the haves and they take over. And that's sort of the Marxist attack on how do you overthrow the country. How do you do that internationally?
David Legates :Well, the problem is the poor countries of the world don't have militaries that can get together, that can take on the rich countries of the world, because they pretty much have an advanced military that could put them down. So how do we do this? And the idea came about in the 1980s that climate change could be the vehicle that rich countries got rich because they exploited oil, gas and other fossil fuels. It's destroying the planet. Therefore, the poor countries are being affected, they're adversely affected, they always are Poor, are less able to adapt to changes, to adverse changes and so forth, than the rich are, and so, therefore, this pits the rich getting rich at the expense of the poor. And so if we make the rich pay up and we give some of the money to the poor, but we give most of it back to the United Nations, then we can level the playing field. And that's what Marxism is all about taking money from the rich and effectively giving it to the elites.
Scott Allen:Marxism is all about taking money from the rich and effectively giving it to the elites. Who is so? That's historically, you said, people in the United Nations, motivated by a kind of a Marxist ideology and you know, theory of change. Who's behind it today? Who would you kind of put your finger on in terms of saying these are the people that are behind this well-orchestrated campaign to change society?
David Legates :It's all over the place. It started actually the United States government was pretty much Tim Wirth was re-engineering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to make sure that it said that climate change was an existential threat to the planet. The idea originally was if you look at the first IPCC report, the first report essentially says there's a lot of uncertainty. It was relying on the scientific method with a lot of uncertainty, with a lot of unanswered questions, a very complicated system. It provided a lot of details but not a lot of answers and by the time we got to the second climate assessment we had to have in there the preponderance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the climate, and that set the stage to make the motion. I mean. I often start this by saying back in 1990 I was a young faculty member at the University of Oklahoma.
David Legates :The land rush for central Oklahoma was in 1889 and then in 1890 they founded the University. So the University is its hundredth anniversary and the University decided to bring in a bunch of people to talk about where they thought math, physics, chemistry, social science, all that area was going to go in the next 20 to 100 years. And the School of Meteorology brought in Bob Correll from the federal government and he lamented the fact that atmospheric science didn't get much money. Most of the money was going to the solid earth geophysicists so they could dig big holes in the ground. Most of the money was going to the interplanetary astrophysicists so they could send probes into space, they could build large radio telescopes on the surface. They got all the money. Atmospheric science was sort of a poor stepchild, but this was about to change, because climate change is now on the verge of becoming ripe, if you will, and the idea was we're going to have money beyond our wildest dreams and I'm expecting him to say at the next step and what we're going to do is to use that to come up with better forecasts for tornadoes, to be able to protect people, be able to better predict hurricanes and their development and their paths, have a better understanding of floods and droughts and so forth. He said none of that. What he essentially said was, now that we're going to get all this money, we better not kill the goose that's laying the golden egg.
David Legates :The idea is tell Congress what they need to hear so they can keep this money coming If we rely on a scientific method and we say wow, it's a really complicated system. There's lots of uncertainties, there's lots of variability. We just can't come up with an answer. They we can rely on expertise that 97%, or whatever this magic number becomes of. Scientists all agree that it's an existential threat to the planet and we just need more money to codify that, to understand how important it's going to be to other factors associated with it.
David Legates :Keep the money coming, then. That was what we should be doing. And, of course, academics love to hear we want more money. Universities take about a third of the money that you bring in and use it as overhead. Some universities it's as much as the money you use. It's 50% or more. So the question is let's not kill the goose. That's laying the gold egg. What do we have to tell them in order to keep this going? And I think that's why we got into the demise of the scientific method, at least in climate change circles, and that's why we started to push the idea that it's an existential threat to the planet, even though there was no proof, and there continues to be very little proof that that is actually happening.
Scott Allen:Okay, so you're bringing up a kind of a second group here. The first group you referenced were coming out of the United Nations. People that had a kind of a Marxist and a revolutionary view and they wanted to use climate science in order to kind of pursue Marxism on a global scale. Here you're talking about self-interested academics in Oklahoma and other places that they want to keep the spigot of money flowing, and so they need to have a problem. You know, put forward a problem that essentially doesn't really have any kind of clear, immediate solutions.
David Legates :But remember too that academics tend to be socialists.
Scott Allen:Okay, okay, there's an overlap here.
David Legates :okay, You're playing into their wheelhouse.
Scott Allen:But I don't think of scientists, you know, in the academy. In that light, am I mistaken?
David Legates :And I don't think the problem with losing the scientific method holds across the board. I think it's primarily a problem in climate science, because of what climate science means from a social economic perspective on a global scale. I mean, nobody is fighting string theory, for example in physics. There aren't violent discussions, but there isn't a lot of money tied up in it. It's not a social structure and so you can believe whatever you want on string theory. You just join one side or the other and the argument continues. But climate change is a different beast. We have to have climate going out of control because of human actions. We've got to stop human actions in order to save the planet. And you can't be on the other side, because if you are on the other side, you are anti-human, you are anti-Earth and essentially you are an evil person in that small 3%.
Scott Allen:I want to talk more about what the impact is on science. You use the phrase postmodern science in this chapter and I want to talk more about that, but let's put that aside just for a little bit. Chapter, and I want to talk more about that, but let's put that aside just for a little bit. I want to keep kind of drilling in on this kind of agenda. Who's behind it? You talk about it in terms of, you know, global social and cultural change here well-funded, well-orchestrated campaign to fundamentally transform global societies. Talked a little bit about who they are and also about their motivation. I was going to ask the question what's their worldview? But it seems like you've kind of answered that a little bit. You want to say anything more about that in terms of just their? Obviously they're not Christians, you know. Or if they are, they're. What's the driving assumption is, you know, is a secular Marxist. You know anything more about the worldview that's motivating these people?
David Legates :Yeah, I mean one of the leading proponents. I mean I go into a lot of that in the book. There are references I cite that go into even more detail. But the history of the IPCC really centers around one person and that is Maurice Strong. He was a Canadian businessman. Ironically, he was involved in oil and gas industry in Canada.
David Legates :He headed the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and it was his plan to essentially change the world in order to make it a more socialist economy, he tells us, in 1992, he was talking about a plot of a book he wanted to write. And he said what if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of rich countries and if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment? Will they do it? The group's conclusion is no, the rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? And he says, this group of world leaders then forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. Well, it's not so secret, because it was through the UN and what eventually became the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
David Legates :But the idea is that he was very much a socialist. I mean, when he retired, he moved to the communist China to live out his last day. He is a socialist and has always been, and that was his goal was to invoke global socialism, global Marxism, into or through the UN that he was a part of. I gotcha Okay, he wasn't the only one. That's why, if it had just been him, he would have been an outlier. But there were a lot of other people saw this as making the UN the central government for the world and, as a result, that looked very appeasing, because, in particular, if you're the elitist, you always believe your view is the one that we should follow, and everybody else has got to be squelched so that we can get our work done. And that's where they went through the long and winding road, so to speak, to get down to where we are now.
Scott Allen:That's so interesting. Dwight and Luke, I'd like to have you guys jump in here as well, I'm sure, on this particular kind of line of questioning, if you have anything that you'd want to add.
Dwight Vogt:Well, I do remember Marie Strong's name. In 1990s I was working for an aid agency and we had, you know, un connections on different levels and Marie Strong's name was, I remember it. So, whether it was because of the climate meeting or not, but that's so interesting, I'm like whether it was because of the climate meeting or not, but that's so interesting, I'm like, wow, I'm going to jump ahead. My question is okay, I get that, david, that there were some people who had an agenda. They were socialists in their thinking.
Scott Allen:And utopians too.
Dwight Vogt:right, they had a vision for this world that, yeah, which is great the question and I could see them convincing somebody like me, a non-scientist. You know somebody that's into the arts, the humanities okay, that's great, but a scientist? How do you get a scientist to say, walk away from the scientific method and adopt a different one that you know isn't really science? You have a quote in the first sentence of your book. You talk about moving to post-normal, relativistic, post-modern science that encouraged subjective interpretations and the proposition that results are only valuable in the context of belief systems. That's so unscientific. And yet this is the audience that they went for and the audience bought it. It doesn't make sense Scientists yeah.
Dwight Vogt:Scientists. That audience the scientists, okay.
David Legates :See, I've had a number of scientists tell me you know I agree with what you say, but I could never come out and say that it hurts my book sales. I had a friend of mine say he's selling an introductory textbook and it was attacked by very strong Marxist view people because it doesn't go deep enough into why the planet is being destroyed by humans. And he said I didn't want to quite go there, but I don't want to go the other route. I like being treated well by my deans, I like the accolades that I get at the university and everything's going fine for me now I don't want to upset that apple cart, so I will go along to get along. And that's how we get to where we are. Is that people turn their eyes away and say, okay, I know what they're saying and I know it's wrong, but I don't want to rock the boat, because if I speak up I see what happens to you and I don't want that to happen to me. And so there's an awful lot of peer pressure for publication but also for getting tenure. I mean, if you're a new entry-level scientist, you cannot come out and say climate change is largely driven by a socialist left that wants a specific agenda and has co-opted science. You can't say that because you will never get tenure. The whole work you've done in putting into a PhD goes by the boards. It's all over. And so after seven years well, even longer if you get your PhD and then you go out and you do seven years at a university to get tenure.
David Legates :You've stayed away for so long, why not just continue? And I've even had friends of mine that were hot into the fight in the 1990s, early 2000s, who have dropped off the table, and I spoke to one of them lately and he said to me essentially yeah, I figured it was just going to be an argument back and forth, and so I didn't want to get involved in it anymore, so I walked away. But it's not just an argument back and forth. It has meaning, it has relevancy and that's the point. It's not like discussing string theory that if one side is right and the other side is wrong, it won't matter here. If one side wins or the other side wins, it's going to change the way in which the future plays out, and that's why I think it's very important.
Scott Allen:I just think what you're saying, david, is really important and I want to underscore it for our listeners because I think a lot of us, and of course science itself, kind of promotes itself still to this day, as this is. You know, we are the arbiters of what is true, what is factual, what is scientific. So it's a pursuit of truth and of fact. You know it's kind of unbiased, it's. You know it's all about getting at what's actually happening and I think for most people that's the way they understand science. But what you're saying is that it's been polluted, if I could use that word, and so you've got this force operating within science today that in a sense it's kind of cutting off the very foundation that it stands on right, which this gets back to Dwight's question.
Scott Allen:It's like you would think that scientists themselves would defend science as opposed to yeah, I understand right, you know it takes courage to stand up and challenge, you know, dominant narratives, especially when there's money and reputation and maybe my career is involved. I get that. That makes sense. At the same time, I'm a scientist and you know how can I be a credible scientist unless I, you know, follow the evidence kind of wherever it leads, and you know I'm really committed to that and not to just kind of give credence to whatever the dominant narrative is. I think it is a little shocking I kind of mowed the white on this that more scientists haven't.
Dwight Vogt:Well, it is and it isn't.
Scott Allen:Scott.
Luke Allen:Well, it is, and it isn't.
Dwight Vogt:Scott, I mean, money is money and security is security.
Scott Allen:I'm thinking of Jay Bhattacharya right now. This is not climate science, this is disease. He's the famous epidemiologist, virologist at Stanford University, was recently elevated to the director of the National Institute of Health by President Trump, but he was one who there was a dominant narrative when COVID came out and he thought that it wasn't scientific and he was sure of that and he had the credentials and the knowledge to be able to say that credibly. And he wasn't alone, but he was really. We saw that same dynamic. You can't say this You're going to be able to say that credibly. And you know he wasn't alone, but he was really. We saw that same dynamic. You can't say this You're going to be canceled, you're going to lose your funding, you're going to be censored, and he was all of those things. But he stuck with it. Right, he was a man of integrity in terms of the science and fortunately, it's working out for him well. But you see this dynamic across.
Scott Allen:You know, I first was made aware of this when I started questioning Darwinian evolution because it was you know, it was overwhelming scientific consensus that you know that this kind of basic, you know, mutation selection, you know, is a proven fact.
Scott Allen:You know this is a scientific fact and you're a fool. You know. Mutation selection, you know, is a proven fact. You know this is a scientific fact and you're a fool, you know, if you think that somehow we all came about through, you know, divine creation. And I thought, oh, that's a tough one for Christians, right, because you know it's pretty basic to our faith. And so and I had a lot of people asking me about my faith and saying, scott, how can you genuinely be a Christian if you don't believe the truth, the scientific truth of evolution? And when I started really pursuing it, I saw the same dynamic that there was actually not a lot of great evidence for this narrative of evolution that it dominated the scientific community and evolutionary biology. And you would be squished, squashed, and many were if you got out of line, you know, and so but that's not science. Now, we're not talking about science, we're talking about power, we're talking about, you know.
Luke Allen:Fear of the mob.
Scott Allen:Fear of the mob. We're not talking about science, and so still it's like we need people like yourself, david, frankly to say I've got to defend science.
David Legates :But see, that's what we've gotten in climate science. I won't necessarily say that all science is corrupted and that therefore, the scientific method is dead. In climate you adopt a 97% of all scientists agree argument and an appeal to emotion, and that's where we've gotten in climate science. But the rest of much of the rest of the science doesn't work that way, yeah.
Luke Allen:Yeah, On this note, David, when I look up your name on the old internet, you know you definitely did rock the boat and because of that you're in the crosshairs of CNN, NPR, New York Times. I've seen it all and they have some pretty nice words to say about you. What made you initially rock the boat in this area, I'm curious.
David Legates :I was at the University of Oklahoma and I'm watching what happened, and after getting tenure, there was a question as to why did you spend all this time to get tenure, why did you waste your life? Essentially Because that way, what tenure was originally designed to do was allow people the freedom to speak openly. What tenure was originally designed to do was allow people the freedom to speak openly. You could pursue things out of the box without fear of reprisal because you've demonstrated you are a good scientist. Nowadays, tenure means I can shut down the engines, I can teach my two classes, go home, I don't have to do any more work, I collect the paycheck, it's the gravy train and I'm only 35, 32 years old. Great, if you can get it. But that's not what tenure was all about.
David Legates :And so, looking at the facts I mean I'm trained as a climatologist, so I knew the science. I'm trained as a statistician, so I sort of knew what I was looking at in terms of data I said none of this adds up. Yet everybody else that I'm talking to is telling me no, no, no, no. Go along with the group, because we all know what we're talking about. There's never any proof and that it came down to where is the proof? Nobody has ever shown me. I mean, you know, if it was at Fred singer used to have on his emails? At the end it was a quote that said if the facts change, I change my views. What do you do, sir?
David Legates :I love that and so that's the same thing is, if the facts change, you know, I'll change my view, but right now what I see is that the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. It's responsible for 80% of the warming of the planet and everything else is secondary. So why are we not talking about water vapor? And that was one of the questions raised to Michael Mann at one of the scientific hearings on the Capitol Hill If water vapor is so important, why are we not worried about that? I thought he was going to give me an answer.
David Legates :Well, you know, water vapor varies quite a bit. The total precipitation on the next eight days, or, excuse me, the next 10 days, is equal to the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere right now. So it cycles quite a bit. Now his answer was we can't regulate water vapor, so it's all about regulation and control. I see and that was a scientist telling you why we don't worry about carbon, why we don't worry about water vapor and instead we worry about carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, because those we can regulate, even though they contribute very little to the warming of the planet.
Scott Allen:Wow. Well, david, I want to applaud you for your courage in standing for science, and I just want to remind our listeners that science is a beautiful thing. It grew out of a biblical worldview, because you need a commitment to objective truth in order to do science. You need all sorts of assumptions or principles that come out of the Bible, even to make science possible, and so science, properly understood, is a search for truth, for what is real, what is factual and you know. Behind all truth is, you know, the creator of all, and so it's essentially, it's a pursuit of God at the end of the day, and it's something that Christian scientists need to understand and fight for.
Scott Allen:Now that we're in this postmodern time, we still have science, but postmodernism is a rejection of ultimate objective truth, and so it becomes. If it's not a pursuit of truth, then what science gets co-opted in these power games is what it comes down to, and so this is what we have to be aware of, and that that's happening. So when we talk about science, we're not talking about just one thing. So when we talk about science, we're not talking about just one thing. We're talking about sciences that, historically and correctly, has been used, and the beautiful, powerful, truth-seeking thing that it is, and this newer, postmodern thing that really is using just kind of a veneer of science for power or for other agendas. I just think it's so important for people to understand that and for Christians like yourself who are scientists, david, to be fighting for that legacy, if you will. So sorry for my little sermonette there, but I love science and I really appreciate scientists like yourself so grateful.
Dwight Vogt:I want to follow up on that with a question. Then, Scott David, David, what's happening in the Christian world to encourage young people to pursue good science? I mean, is there a movement?
David Legates :I would hope there is. I mean, if you read Meghann Basham's book, it sort of implies that everything's going in the other direction, and that's one of the weird things is that I came across a book published in 2023 by InterVarsity Press called Following Jesus in a Warming World a Christian call to climate action, and one of the things they mention in that, or they talk about in, I guess it's chapter six is that effectively, what happens is that if we start talking about, let's say, hurricanes, and so we talk about Hurricane Katrina and how Katrina created all these problems, and we can say that Katrina was one of four storms in the last 25 years that landed as a category five Katrina, you know we've had 10% of storms. You know you do all these statistics and people's eyes glaze over because they can't put it in context, and instead, you know, in chapter six of the book, they point out that what you really don't want to, shouldn't talk about are the statistics. You shouldn't talk about that. What you want to talk about is feelings. And so there's a story of Robert and his family, who was associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Robert had an aging mother and a three-year-old granddaughter, and both of them died, and you know you feel bad about that because, wow, here's two people that he loved died in Hurricane Katrina.
David Legates :Now the question is would Katrina have occurred if humans had never gone to fossil fuels? Well, we don't ask that question. We say this is terrible, we want to stop it, and then the next answer is but if we address the climate crisis, then we will not have Hurricane Katrina anymore. His family would have been saved. This all sounds good, but it's all on feelings. When you start to realize you've got to have a direct connection, that this caused that and there's no connection there, then your feelings are terrible, but you feel bad that these people died. But solving the climate crisis isn't going to or isn't going to protect others in the future. But it sells a lot better, and so that's my concern is that it's selling rather than talking. Fact.
Scott Allen:And that's-. And in a postmodern culture like we live in, largely postmodern, feelings really do trump. They trump reason, you know. And yet science isn't the realm of feelings, you know, it's the realm of reason and data, you know. And so even to bring in feelings, you know, I'm not saying feelings aren't important. They are, but it's not, it's not. But that doesn't factor into our science, right yeah?
David Legates :But see, that's part of the problem with the scientific method is it does not work well when you've got really complicated systems with lots of causes, lots of feedbacks and lots of uncertainties. It's good for small problems, where everything is small and self-contained. You can comprise a simple experiment and carry it out in a reasonable time to see is my hypothesis real or can I reject the hypothesis and take the alternative. So what?
Scott Allen:postmodern science comes in and says or postnormal science comes in and says If I could just cut you off really quick before you make your point there. I just want to underscore what you said because I think it's really important. Science is super important and helpful, but I love the humility with which you just expressed its role, because today a lot of scientists say science explains everything. You know these theories of everything, we can know everything through science. And what I hear you saying is no, it's not. That method isn't appropriate to understanding everything. It's got a real value within certain kind of limited parameters. Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.
David Legates :Yeah, no, no, no, that's fine, and that was the issue with post-normal science. Is that what you can come back and say is that almost everyone is in agreement that this is a problem, even though I can't prove it because it's a very complicated system. These people are experts, these are peers, they all agree and since we have now widespread agreement, we can move forward to a solution, because if we wait for proof from the scientific method, it may well be too late to do anything about it and disaster hits us. So we need action, and we need it now, and this is how you get action is to say we're all in it together, we've all agreed together, even though we just can't prove any of it through a science that gets us back to where we started, you know, in terms of this global agenda to change society, and we're going to use science as a kind of a lever to get at that.
Scott Allen:Science again in quotations, not real science, yeah, go ahead, yeah.
Dwight Vogt:I mean it disturbs me because it reminds me of of something I heard a couple of years ago where 20 years ago or 15 years ago, I don't know, somebody did some brain scans and really look carefully at Alzheimer's and its connection to the brain and they produced some scans that showed some cloudiness or fogging around different neurons and things and said, oh, this is the key to Alzheimer's. And it turns out that they had actually manufactured their results, they doctored the scans, they had actually manufactured their results, they doctored the scans. And that took the entire Alzheimer's research community in the world with billions and billions of dollars, because we'll all spend that to get Alzheimer's fixed into the wrong direction and you don't want to manufacture anything.
Luke Allen:I mean it's nice that we're trying to solve global climate, but the downside is, if you do it wrong, you can anyway. Yeah, I think, david, there's a. In summary of what I'm hearing today is, whenever you hear these scientists try to use fear tactics or try to rush you and rush the science, those are both big red flags, am I right? I see those tactics over and over and over again and for me as a Christian, those should both always raise the red flag and I should be skeptical when people try to rush me into decisions and not let me, you know, wisely, try to approach it and use you know uh, my God, given you know, abilities of critical thinking to reason through it, or if they tried to use fear tactics and manipulate my feelings into making me, you know, come to a decision. I do sense, david I want to hear your thoughts on this a rise in skepticism around all of this.
Luke Allen:I might be wrong, but a few weeks ago, probably the most listened to podcast of all time came out with Joe Rogan and Trump, and on that they were openly expressing skepticism around wind energy. I believe it was, and maybe more than that, but I remember the section on wind energy specifically, and you know that's the biggest platform in the world, probably right now as far as media is concerned, and they're just talking about skepticism around one of the so-called solutions to the climate catastrophe. I'm guessing a lot of people listen to that and looked into it for the first time maybe and have a growing skepticism. I know, after COVID, a lot of people when it comes to diseases have a ton of skepticism and around vaccines right now, which makes me a little bit nervous. But skepticism good.
David Legates :I think critical thinking is a lot better and do you sense that growing curiosity, yes, I often said I mean the exit question is usually what do you think about the future? And my argument always was I go back to Trofim Lysenko. He's a Soviet peasant. He extended Lamarckism, which was the idea of environmental determinism. If you take seeds and you freeze them and then, after being frozen for a while, you put them in the ground and you grow a tree, the tree that grows will be resilient to cold temperatures. It's sort of like if you have a blacksmith and they develop tremendous arm strength, that their children will also have tremendous arm strength by virtue of being born from his stock, instead of the fact they work alongside dad in the blacksmith shop and build their muscles too.
David Legates :But the idea was, lysenkoism effectively went so far as to say we don't believe in genetics. And not only do we not believe in genetics, thou shalt not proclaim genetics as a science. And so the geneticists were killed, they were run off, they were excommunicated. You just didn't go that way. And it was all environmental determinism. And it wasn't until, I guess, khrushchev left in 64 that they said you know, our agriculture has suffered tremendously, maybe we should rethink this. And then it all turned over.
David Legates :It took at the time a whole cohort of people to pass away before then the new group said wait a minute, why are we doing this? That was my fear. It was going to take that long in our society. Because we've indoctrinated the kids. We've got to essentially get them to have kids so that those kids will not remember what the original argument was and will start to critically evaluate it.
David Legates :But maybe it's happening faster in our society, maybe because we're freer, maybe because we didn't quite go as far as Lysenkoism with banning the thought and killing people that had different views. But I think people are now starting to say, yeah, wait a minute, why are we doing this again? And when you see energy becoming more expensive, when you know that ubiquitous making energy available and affordable to a lot of people brought them out of poverty and effectively brought an end to slavery, and one of the main reasons for having slaves was to get energy cheap labor Well if you can get an equipment, to slavery, and one of the main reasons for having slaves was to get energy, cheap labor.
David Legates :Well, if you can get an equipment to do it through fossil fuel use, then that's better than having human labor and having to feed them and keep them happy and all that, and so slavery then became less of an issue. So all sorts of good things came about by having inexpensive energy. They're starting to see the idea that if we make energy more expensive, the poor won't be able to afford it. The rich will less be able to afford it. Things will become more expensive, problems will instill and we're doing it all to ourselves.
David Legates :It's not like we've run out of fossil fuels so we have no other alternative. We're intentionally doing this, and I think a lot of kids now are starting to ask that question. Wait a minute, why are we doing this? And a lot of other people along the way are asking the question, and I think that's healthy and maybe that's the future. Is that we, because we are a freer society, because we didn't quite go the way of Lysenkoism and mandating it, and you know at the tip of a sword, so to speak, that maybe it was able, that we could turn it all back faster than they could.
Scott Allen:I hope so. Yeah, I was going to follow up with Luke's question too, because I'm curious about kind of the state of play in this, you know, with this information operation, if you will. Today, you know, it seems like we've been kind of exposed to a heavy push on this narrative for quite a while. I mean, for me it goes back to, I guess, al Gore's book, you know, and for me it goes back to I guess Al Gore's book, you know. And then, but even before that I, you know, I think of kind of catastrophic global problems.
Scott Allen:The first one that I became aware of right out of college was overpopulation, you know, and those these are linked actually today. But there was, you know, paul Ehrlich, I think, at Stanford was the one that was saying you know, we are going to destroy the world because you know there's too many people. And then that kind of morphed into the climate. You know one. You know that we're going to destroy the world because of this rapid climate change. So we've been exposed to that heavy narrative for a long time, you know, and you know there's been a lot of fear, there's been a lot of coercion, don't you know that you've got to trust the science. This is settled science. Don't ask questions, just accept.
Scott Allen:I think of, uh, europe. I have a lot of friends in europe, christian friends, and it seems like in england it's really entrenched there. If I go over there and I start asking questions about climate, you know they're, they look at me like what you crazy American, or you know, like it's really deep there. But I do sense it's changing. As you were saying, david and Luke, both you know that. It seems to me that we're kind of almost at a critical mass, because I don't think it requires a lot to change these things. It just requires you know that. You know the emperor has no clothes, kind of a moment where you know somebody's courageous enough to say this isn't right, this is, you know, and willing to pay the price for that. And it seems like you know, once somebody does that, other people then kind of feel like they can follow. You know, courage begets courage and so is that your sense as well, david.
David Legates :It seems like that's what you're saying Very much. So, yeah, and I think that it's starting to be a different I can say environment that we're working in, that I can say things are changing. There's more of an allowance for discussion, as opposed to just make you're a denier. You're a denier Oil and gas interests. Now they realize no, that's not necessarily true. There's lots of money coming on the other side. Maybe they're the ones bought and paid for. Let's sit back and listen to both sides of the argument now, and that can only be a healthy thing.
Luke Allen:Yeah, that argument of you've been bought off by big oil. I hear that all the time.
Scott Allen:That's kind of the one response yeah. But to me that's kind of a projection, because it seems like so much if you're talking about money and interest, there's so much money in the climate, right on the climate side of things, right, that's subsidizing all of these things. Like you were talking about wind power and solar power. I mean that's heavily subsidized, isn't it, david oh? Definitely that's where the money is right.
David Legates :Yeah, that's what people usually say to me. Well, you're just in this for the money, you're getting money. It's like if I'm in this for the money, I am getting in with the federal government and saying climate change is a fundamental problem, give me big grants. Give me you know who has all the money. The environmentalists have all the money. I'd be on their side if money was the driving force. Yeah but yeah, it doesn't work that way.
Scott Allen:Well, I want to just underscore a point that you made earlier too. I think it's really important that when we, as Christians, if we're skeptical about claims that science are making you know, the proper response isn't to reject science, you know, or it's to recover. You know again, I think, especially for Christians, science is the fruit of Christians, working over time, seeking truth. You know, many of the great scientists behind the scientific revolution were committed Christians and you know it grew out of a biblical worldview and it's done such good, as you've said, david, in so many areas. You mentioned slavery, and we could just go on and on the good that science has done. But boy, we really are in a time where we can't reject science.
Scott Allen:I think I hear some postmodernists, even Christians who are influenced by postmodernism, say you can't trust anything. That scientists say, kind of like, just throw it out. And I'm like, no, don't throw it out. Yes, it's been corrupted because of postmodernism, you know, and power, and you know, and these socialist agendas that are using it for different reasons. But don't throw it out, recover it.
David Legates :You know, I mean skepticism is hallmark of science. I mean, that's one of the issues is to go against the way people think the world works. I mean, if you look at the history of the atom, I mean at one point we thought the atom was a microcosm of the solar system. Well, now we know it doesn't look anything like that. That's a bad model. Well, if we had ingrained that model as having to be the way in which you believe, we'd have never gotten to an understanding of the atom that we have now.
David Legates :But by constantly overturning I mean the Semmelweis is another example Gee, if you just wash your hands between people, then you would have cleanliness. That was just not thought of. But then the idea was that changes things. So you know, skepticism is important. And the other issue is, you know is when you're wrong, you'll be shown to be wrong. I mean, if someone believes the earth is flat, the way to do it is to say here's why the earth is not flat, instead of saying, oh, you're a flat earther, we're not going to even discuss this with you because you don't have the correct view. It leaves the question that's not how science operates. Science says you have a skeptical view, but we can demonstrate it's not a good view and it has to be able to be demonstrated.
Scott Allen:Can it be demonstrated to be not true? I ran into this with Darwinian evolution. I remember a discussion between it was Dawkins or somebody who's really a proponent of that and the Christian questioner got to that point in the discussion and said would you ever accept any evidence, right that or not evidence, but would you know, could it be proven that it wasn't true? And he thought about it and said no, it can never be. You know, and once you kind of make that claim, then you've moved beyond science into the realm of philosophy or religion. You know, and if it can't be proven to be untrue, you know, and I even think that's true for Christians. I mean, we don't. It's important that our faith is not based just on it's true because I believe it's true. It's true because it's true. You know, correct, if it could be proven, proven that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, as Paul said, then our faith has no basis Right.
David Legates :And there are numerous people set out to write a book to say I'm going to provide proof that either Jesus didn't exist, that he didn't do what he claimed exist, that he didn't do what he claimed, uh, that you know, and ultimately, their, their book resulted in demonstrating that he is, in fact, uh, lord of all.
Dwight Vogt:So yeah, yeah, I have a question for you, david, on this, on climate change. I'm thinking of scott, you're talking about evolution and I think of the intelligent design movement with discovery institute and, and they've done well for the layperson of saying there's some big questions that just point towards design. One is you know the?
Scott Allen:fine-tuning of the universe. Where do we get information?
Dwight Vogt:Fine-tuning of the universe and the answer to that is well, there's multiple universes. Well, that's a pretty strange answer. You know there's the. Cambrian explosion. Well, there's leaps in development that we don't know about that are just incredible, you know, and so they've come to some, some really key areas where they can say this this is a big question Is that is anybody working on that for the layperson in the climate change science?
David Legates :I've seen a lot of what answers in Genesis have been working on and they're coming up with issues. I know, for example, there was always a question in climate science is after the flood. How did a rainbow appear? So you had to have something. You can't expect that God went in and changed the actual physics equations that drove everything. So why did we not see one before the flood and then did see it after the flood?
David Legates :The answer was something must have happened so that the process that created it before was different than the process that now allows us to see it. And so those are kind of the interesting things of trying to figure out. Based upon that and that's where the vapor canopy theory comes from that there was a lot of water in the atmosphere, some of it in liquid form, stored very high up in the atmosphere, and eventually that all collapsed. When it did, sunlight came through and we saw essentially the breaking of the light through the water by prism action, and that produced a rainbow. So the rainbow was not possible before because, as the Bible says, there wasn't rain as we know it. The ground was watered from below. At night, when the temperature dropped, sort of a fog appeared and that condensed water out, so the process was different. So, in particular, that's one of the things that we can use to be able to say is the Bible correct, in which it is, and what happened? That can be used to explain how things changed. Okay.
Scott Allen:Can I throw a question just on that note? You know, one of the. I don't want to take us in too much of a different direction with our time running out, but I talked to Luke earlier about this and we were curious. You know, the issue of carbon dating, you know, is always kind of brought up in.
Scott Allen:You know dating, you know, is always kind of brought up in you know to kind of bolster the idea that we live in a world that's the earth is billions and billions of years old and it conflicts with kind of a biblical narrative of creation. But is this area I haven't looked into this and I don't know if you have David or not how trustworthy is that? Some of those claims around carbon dating?
David Legates :I mean carbon dating assumes that the half-life has been constant and that the process is constant. And if you start to have, you know, a lot of cosmic rays, if you start to have a lot of different association of environmental background, then your decomposition rates could change, which means your estimate of time can be quite a bit different, and so so there's a lot of variables in there. Right, and it's based on the assumption of continuity.
Scott Allen:I see. So it's okay to have some skepticism when you hear those claims using carbon data.
David Legates :And it's a statistical decay rate of small numbers. So it becomes a wide uncertainty range that gets bigger and bigger as time goes along. Yeah, Back in time I should say Okay, that's helpful.
Scott Allen:I tend to. I am not a scientist, I am a person who loves philosophy and ideas and I tend to kind of look at the I approach it from the side of who has an interest in having an Earth that be important and that you know that was a claim that evolution in order to produce all of the different life forms that are needed, you know, through this very slow process of genetic mutation and adaption and right.
Scott Allen:You know you need a long time for that to work out, you know, and so so they've got an interest in a really long time here, a long time table, so yeah, monkeys banging keys to produce the entire works of Shakespeare Right.
David Legates :That takes an awful long time and a lot of monkeys, yeah. So the idea is the longer you can make it plausible to the general public. It sounds yeah, right. Yeah, if there were billions of years, then we could have developed anything. Yeah, Except you know that's not how things operate. It always runs downhill, not up.
Dwight Vogt:Yeah, so so, david, I'm a normal person. I care about my planet. I'm a Christian, I want to steward environment. I have friends that care about the environment.
David Legates :They're worried about climate change? What do I do? What should I say? Climate changes. Climate always has changed.
David Legates :The question is are we invoking a change that is necessarily going to produce an existential threat to the planet? There were issues at times in the past when clean air, clean water was threatened. We have accommodated those. The world is much cleaner now than it was before. I don't see anything in terms of hurricanes, tornadoes, and I mean we go down the list of all sorts of natural disasters that are being exacerbated by human activity.
David Legates :In fact, a warmer world has been a better world simply because plants grow better. Civilization has always done better in warmer conditions In particular. Even, for example, severe winter outbreaks decrease under a warm world because the poles warm faster than the equator and, in particular, when you get a lot of storminess, it's because you've got really cold air and dry air coming out of Canada. You've got really warm, moist air coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, and it's that difference in air masses that creates violent storms, particularly, for example, in our springtime. Well, if a warmer world has less of an equator to pole temperature gradient, these storms will become less intense and, in fact, we're now going through periods where we've gone over a decade without a category or an EF5 tornado.
David Legates :We used to get them quite I won't say frequently. We used to get them quite often and we haven't seen one in ten years. If it were the other way around, then we'd be writing home saying, see, these are getting worse, but they're not. It can be explained scientifically and it's saying that we are not on the verge of destroying the planet. A warmer world is a better thing. We can feed more people. The planet does better, civilizations do better, more carbon dioxide. If it brings about a slightly warmer world, which it does, that should be a good thing.
Scott Allen:I want to come back to Dwight's question and just we can wrap up on this. You're talking at a macro level, but I do want to bring it back to kind of a micro level in terms of just what can people do, because people want to be a part of environmental stewardship and just stewardship of God's beautiful creation. They're told a lot of things. Again, I live in Oregon and you can't like, for example, one of the big things here is plastics. You can't even use plastic bags in grocery stores, it's you know, there's state laws against that and I remember hearing oh, I forgot his name, but he's a person that's prominent in this discussion right now and he was asked this question.
Scott Allen:He said if I could tell just everyday people one thing they could do to help improve kind of the environment, it would be don't recycle plastics or something like that, because they end up, you know, they end up being shipped around the world and eventually go into the ocean and are creating problems. There is a problem with plastics in the ocean, so just put it make sure it gets in a landfill. Any thoughts from you on that Kind of just what can we do in our daily lives that actually does make a difference and understanding that, yeah, we're not. You know the catastrophism and the fear that's not motivating us, but what is motivating us is desire to just be good stewards, you know Right.
Luke Allen:And leave the world.
Scott Allen:Leave this world better than we found it right. You know, you know right. And leave the world. Leave this world better than we found it right.
David Legates :You know, and that's what I think it's, it's the act locally type of thing. There's things you can do in your neighborhood that you know need to be fixed. Um, but to worry about this global thing, I mean a lot of people think that green energy is the solution because it's clean. It's not. It is very pollutive to get these rare earth minerals out. It involves child labor in Africa.
Scott Allen:So don't buy a battery operated car. That's not going to help, okay.
David Legates :With this demand for more of these batteries and things like that is only exacerbating the problem, you're actually making it worse.
Scott Allen:I've thought this for some time that if you actually care about good environmental stewardship, this climate agenda is actually moving you in the wrong direction. Correct, so yeah, so okay, yeah. Well, I know I brought up this issue of recycling. Any thoughts on that?
David Legates :I think you can do better locally, because you know in your neighborhood what needs to be fixed and what's not going well.
Scott Allen:Well, I do like that answer and everybody likes the idea of you know I'm saving the planet.
David Legates :It sounds so altruistic.
Scott Allen:Yes, doing something. What can you do? Is there trash on your street that you can pick up? Or if there's a polluted river that runs through your town, what can you do to help clean that water or whatever it is? Yeah, I think that's really good, dwight. Any follow-up for you on that? I still have a gas mower.
Dwight Vogt:So I'm in trouble, uh-oh, and I have real grass and peanuts.
Scott Allen:Yeah, those are outlawed as well here. Yeah, that's right, I am the worst person possible, yeah yeah.
Dwight Vogt:It is interesting. I saw a discussion on plastics and I don't know where it was on the internet someplace and it showed which countries in the world are the most prolific in polluting the waters with plastic and it came down to I think 80% of the world's plastic in rivers and into the ocean comes from one country, the Philippines, and they had a map showing all the light where that was happening and I thought I can imagine that you know if you're in the Philippines, you throw your plastic on the ground, it goes into the water, it goes into the river, it goes into the ocean. And I thought, wow, so I need to be careful here with my straw.
David Legates :But why the Philippines and not Japan, for example? I don't know. I think it's a cultural thing, exactly.
Scott Allen:Yeah, I know that ethic of actually putting trash into a garbage can and, you know, eventually putting it into a landfill is something that has to be kind of taught culturally. You know, and that's an important thing, you know, right, trash should, you know, go underground, it shouldn't just be on the side of the street or, you know, going into the water supply or eventually into the oceans and things like that. But it is that needs to be done culturally change the culture so that you know a culture of cleanliness, right? Yeah Well, david, this has been fantastic. I just again so grateful we're honored that you would take time with us non-scientists who can let us ramble on about our unscientific. That's fine, it was a fun discussion.
Scott Allen:Yes, anyways, thank you so much. Keep up the good work, keep seeking the truth, keep pursuing the truth through science.
Dwight Vogt:It's so important and we're really grateful for that. I think you should get your one chapter out by itself, because it's a really good chapter in that book. It is, it is.
Scott Allen:If you get the book for that one chapter alone.
Dwight Vogt:I fully agree that one chapter is the one that you want to read, so thank you for writing that.
Scott Allen:I appreciate it. Yep, we'll continue to do our small part in trying to help people be more aware of your important work.
David Legates :I appreciate it, thank you.
Scott Allen:Well, thank you guys for listening to yet another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance.
