Well, Creationists from “Is Genesis History?” are giving reasons why we should not worry about climate change.
Here it is in a short blog showing their arguments to be dubious and duplicitous and thus misleading their flock. It also shows how bad science or pseudoscience can lead to bad ethical decisions – here on climate mitigation.
Before you read this, here is an account of Evangelicals and climate Change taking the story up tp 2010, so is now rather out-dated https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2018/07/10/evangelicals-and-climate-change-1990-to-2011/
So here is there blog from the glaciers of Washington State;
Part is all about a winter’s visit to the glaciers of Washington state and Vardiman and Purifoy use that backdrop to play down climate change. Read the whole article, which is like a cosy chat with some dubious ideas thrown in.
I reproduce their dubious ideas and then show why they are flawed both in their explicit comments and what is implicit.
Del, Larry, and the other guys in our crew had donned their snow shoes and were slowly making their way to the passage we had dug out. I was amazed to see them climb up, put one foot on the snow…and not sink in! Del, who is from Colorado, chuckled at my comments about snowshoes: he had spent years using them and knew how necessary they were in deep snow.
It was an incredibly beautiful day. The snow flurried a bit in morning, then the clouds cleared away and the sun came out. The ice on the glacier literally shone with a blue light. It was amazing.
I love the mountains of Washington but have only climbed Mt St Helens in October 2009. Many are covered in glaciers and what is most evident is that these glaciers are receding. No mention is made of retreating glaciers. This has been considerable in the last century and in itself indicates a warming temperature, whether the warming is natural of not. This is a useful article and shows some of the changes in Washington State where there visiting.
I enjoyed seeing the new glacier on Mt St Helens in 2009
Here is an article on Washington glaciers
https://glaciers.us/glaciers.research.pdx.edu/Glaciers-Washington.html
During the Ice Ages much more of the Rockies were glaciated right down to New Mexico. The evidence for glaciation is clear above Taos around Wheeler Peak.
To put a spanner in the works this photo looking north from Wheeler Peak NM is either of a rock glacier, or a short-lived glacier from the Little Ice Age, i.e. about the 18th century. I’d like to go back and check it out.
Surely not mention glacial retreat is rather selective and shows at least an unconscious bias? Or conscious?
Virtually all glaciers have receded in the northern hemisphere since about 1815 with the end of the Little Ice Age. I have seen many examples in the Alpes
As we settled in to listen to Larry and Del, I was absolutely fascinated. Larry explained the cause of the Ice Age and how it related to the unusual atmospheric conditions in the world immediately after the global flood.
This begs so many questions. Larry admits to an Ice Age, but then fails to say the the Ice Ages started 2 million years ago and there have been a whole succession of Ice Ages and warmer periods . This has been gradually worked out and in Britain the main period is the Late Devensian reaching a maximum 18,000 years ago. This carved out most of the glacial features in British mountains. Later, there was a smaller glaciation – the loch Lomond Stadial, which was a short cold spell and resulted in much less glaciation, often leaving smaller moraines where the previous glaciation had been active.
Larry is showing a conscious bias by not mentioning the wider context.
When the Ice Age(s) were discovered it was almost assumed there was only one Ice Age and not a succession. Agassiz and Charpentier were there first to discover the Ice Age in the 1830s in Switzerland. When Buckland visited Switzerland in 1838 Agassiz convinced him of the Ice Age and then on a visit and tour of Northern England and Scotland Agassiz, Lyell
and Buckland demonstrated that Britain too had an Ice Age. They found their first proof in a drumlin between Lancaster and my house in Garstang. They also challenged Darwin’s blunder at Glen Roy.
The following October Buckland and Sopwith went to Snowdonia in appalling weather and identified the main glacial features there. (picture of Buckland here often wrongly claimed to be of Mary Anning!)
In june 1842 Darwin checked out Buckland’s work and concurred! He found various glacial troughs which could not have been formed by piddly little streams!!
a re-enactment (almost) as it was sketched by de la Beche in 1831
Darwin made much of these boulders found in Cwm Idwal
To read more see https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/darwins-boulders/
To most geologists this was the final draining of the Flood, but in some illegible notes Buckland argued that the Flood was a result of all the ice melting.
However there have been several sets of Ice Ages during geological time with five significant ice ages throughout the Earth’s history: the Huronian (2.4-2.1 billion years ago), Cryogenian (850-635 million years ago), Andean-Saharan (460-430 mya), Karoo (360-260 mya) and Quaternary (2.6 mya-present). Approximately a dozen major glaciations have occurred over the past 1 million years, the largest of which peaked 650,000 years ago and lasted for 50,000 years. The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago.
The Cryogenian is often known as Snowball Earth as it seems the whole planet was covered in ice. I was lucky enough to work on the Numees glaciation of Cryogenian age in South Africa , at a time when its glacial basis was questioned. What convinced me were dropstones falling into varved sediments. I have also seen Ordovician glaciation in rocks of the Howgill Fells of Northern England.
So much for a summary of standard glacial geology, so back to the specious nonsense from these expert geologists of “Is Genesis History?”
i am simply gobsmacked by his suggestion of “the unusual atmospheric conditions in the world immediately after the global flood.” There is simply no evidence. Further the last great diluvial geologist, William Buckland, argued that the Flood was the result of melting ice from the Ice Age. He was not far off.
I’d love to know what these supposed atmospheric conditions actually are!! It may sound convincing to those who are aware there was an Ice Age but little more! It is simply duplicitous bullshit.
This led to an explanation of current concerns about climate change, and how they are the result of a deep confusion about earth history.
WHAT!!!! This just dismisses earth history in a throw away comment. It is simply absurd to say there is “deep confusion about earth history” when earth history is so well known and understood and has been for over two centuries. The deep time of earth history goes back further than the Periodic Table and even Dalton’s atomic theory and predates Phlogiston! Geology was on the right track before chemistry!!
This is a duplicitous way of getting ill-informed readers to believe that earth history is unfounded and thus “Is Genesis History?” s claim of a 10,000 year old earth is correct.
By casting Climate Change as a result of confusion over earth history, doubts are implied about climate Change and the unreliable arguments and claims about it.
Duplicitous is not the right description of this. The wording is vague but is intended to lead readers into thinking that Climate Change is not happening and thus is of no concern.
There is no doubt that Climate Change is happening and that much/most of caused by humans and is have a bad effect of the whole planet and the conditions many people live under.
He then moved to the question of ice cores and explained how they actually point to a major catastrophe in the past.
Really? I’d love to see the evidence for that. This is another unsubstantiated throwaway comment, which the less-informed will take as indicating a Flood in the past.
This is a must-see video if you want to dispel the concerns and hysteria that have overwhelmed so many people today concerning climate change.
This is cleverly and deceitfully put as if concerns about Climate Change are to be equated with the hysteria which some come out with. We need to see firstly the reality of issues of Climate Change and thus of dangers as well as hysteria, which is whipped up by some, including school truants wanting you to panic.
Only a fool would deny the seriousness of Climate Change and the need for carefully thought-ought action and mitigation
The concerns are real. The amount of CO2 has doubled in my lifetime and it is clear that world temperature is rising.
Without going into details CO2 and CH4 emissions must be reduced. Not all agree on how that should be done. Often the emphasis is on governmental level action, with insufficient on the sum of actions of individuals. ???
Too often Climate Change is considered above all other environmental issues, and then only in relation to fossil fuels. The more extreme wish only renewables (which are insufficient) a rapid disengagement with fossils and an refusal to use nuclear power. As we see in the energy crisis of late 2021 this will result in fuel poverty and associated deaths as winter draws in.
There also needs to be consideration of more “natural” solutions; tree-planting (but only the right trees in the right places!), restoration of wetlands (peat bogs), inter-tidal zones as well as shallow seas. There will need to be changes in agriculture and not necessarily those put forward by activists like Vandana Shiva!!
Here is a useful article from an Oxford/Oriel professor
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-10-11-natural-world-critical-climate-professor-yadvinder-malhi
What I wrote previously are the real concerns of Climate Change which need addressing.
There is also the hysteria.
This comes out with protesting youngsters holding up placards “You will die of old age, we will die of climate change.”
That is due to extreme green groups whipping up hysteria and over-egging the problems so that all seems apocalyptic. It is seen when founders of Extinction Rebellion untruthfully say billions will die of climate change.
It comes out with school kids write of their fears of the future and creating eco-anxiety. Certain truants from school add to this hysteria, along with some scintists, who let their activism guide what they say.
This is not helped by activists slating others and being quick to dismiss the unhysterical as climate deniers. There are some climate deniers but many of the so-called deniers don’t buy into the hysteria.
Here the right buttons of the Creationist audience are pressed and with carefully crafted dismissal, Creationists are liable to reject the essential truth of Climate Change and the need for action by implying it is simply hysteria.
If you’d like to learn more about creationist ideas concerning the Ice Age, I recommend two books by Mike Oard, another scientist who worked closely with Larry Vardiman: The Frozen Record (on ice cores) and Frozen in Time (on the Ice Age).
https://creation.com/michael-j-oard
Oard’s arguments for an Ice Age lasting only a few hundred years are simply poor and also depend on the rejection of geological Time and the previous four glaciations going back two billion years. I wonder how he ties the Cryogenian into a Genesis timescale. Maybe it was after Cain murdered Abel!!!
For more information on climate change, consult The Cornwall Alliance. (Sign up for their emails – they are fantastic!)
Actually they are fantastical and have no grounding in reality.
Dr. Vardiman’s full interview is included in Beyond Is Genesis History? Vol 1 Rocks & Fossils. The topics he talks about are extremely important to understanding what happened after Flood.
Jer 17 vs9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin 
Given that continental drift didn’t start getting factored into geological processes until the 1960s – and is now considered key to understanding geological history – you might like to revise the claim here that “…earth history is so well known and understood and has been for over two centuries”. However that’s a relatively minor point.
What interests me is your reference to the old-earth doctrine as predating the phlogiston theory. So often the Bible is disparaged for being “old”, yet here you are citing the antiquity of the OED as a point in its favour – the implied argument being that it’s therefore well-established (despite what I noted above re. CD) and should be taken for gospel.
But the main thing that needs to be said – or rather asked – here, is this: what do Agassiz, Charpentier, Lyell, Buckland, Sopwith and so many others relevantly have in common?
Answer: they all died long before 1930, let alone 15 July 2015.
And if you don’t know the significance of that date, it means you don’t even realise why any old-earth argument made by those men is automatically invalid.
Cutting a long story very short, that was when New Horizons discovered a range of evidence on Pluto that highly perplexed the mission team, particularly the extensive Sputnik Planum with not a single crater, meaning it was impossible to put a lower limit on its age. At first the group threw out a wild “150 million years” for an upper age limit, but later had to admit it could be no more than 10 million. (So where did 140 million years suddenly vanish? They never existed except in the scientists’ preconceptions.)
But the key conclusion is that because Pluto itself is so small, it couldn’t stay warm enough to drive such formations for “billions of years” or anything like it. Actually even the above 10 million year upper limit estimate rests on relative cratering considerations involving the false belief that Pluto was 4 byo, which when corrected means that 10 myo is approx. the upper limit of the age of the dwarf planet itself. This is Kelvin redivivus on steroids.
Moreover this isn’t just “one swallow”. We’ve been here before several times particularly with objects in the outer solar system. Michael, could it be that your very specialism in the relatively *old* science of geology has left you blindsided by the fresh new data from space science of the last few years and decades – a discipline in which you yourself are maybe little more than a layman?
Since nothing in the solar system looks 4 byo or anywhere near it, it’s idle to think you can simply help yourself to such vast stretches of time as you did several times over in an opening paragraph. Instead of throwing million-year units around like confetti, you are rather to start regarding them as gold dust or hen’s teeth. And you may as well start working on telescoping all past earth geological activity into a 10 million year timeframe, because that’s exactly what geologists in general will eventually have to do.
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