Climate Change Denial for Creationist Kids
Originally posted in Righting America, October 29, 2024, and reprinted with permission. Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
Climate Change for Kids…and Parents Too!, the latest entry in a spate of climate change denial books aimed at a young audience, invites the reader to “[d]elve into the science of climate change and discover how science, removed from assumption and speculation, reflects the history and truth found in God’s Word” (in the words of the back cover). The reference to God’s Word is distinctive: the propaganda efforts in the same vein from the CO2 Coalition, Mike Huckabee’s EverBright Kids, and PragerU are ostensibly secular. But the authors of Climate Change for Kids are Ken Ham, the founder of the young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, and Jessica DeFord, who, armed with a master of science degree in wildlife ecology, works for the same organization. In consequence, their book is a mix of error and fantasy, with the errors resembling those of secular climate change deniers and the fantasies emanating from their own reading of — and creative additions to — the Bible.
A fair amount of the eighty-page book purports to address the evidence for climate change and for anthropogenic climate change from the historical record. It would be tedious to describe all of its errors, but a central misunderstanding deserves attention. Acknowledging that “[t]he observational data shows [sic] that the global surface temperature of the earth has been warming over the past 100 years or so since it has been recorded” and reporting that the amount of warming is estimated to be about 1.5–1.8 °C, Ham and DeFord then caution, “But this warming estimate didn’t come solely from the observational data collected at weather stations and by satellites. It’s based on computer models. What you input into these models will decide what predications [sic] the computer model provides” (p. 18). A footnote offers a 2022 paper by meteorologist Roy W. Spencer and climatologist John R. Christy, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as evidence for the middle sentence.