At last check, the article Religion Rejuvenates Environmentalism was posted at about 167 sites around the Internet—newspapers, blogs, environmentalist advocacy groups. It’s the product of one Courtney Woo, a college student writing for News21. And it trots out what has become a ho-hum story over the last five years: evangelical pastor discovers that caring for the planet is a really important thing, he has a new conversion experience, and suddenly his congregation springs to life! And, guess what? Evangelicals all over America are turning Green and demanding action on manmade global warming.

Except it’s not true—or, rather, it’s a lamentably skewed, unbalanced picture.

Here are a few points that bear making:

• The article cites the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action (CCECA), a declaration that lists no authors, offers no evidence or argument, cites no scientific studies, but just announces conclusions and says, “Trust us,” but ignores the Cornwall Alliance’s A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming, an evidence-filled, scientifically referenced study by four named experts in the field that garnered more signatures by better-qualified people. Should the author have known about this? She mentioned the Cornwall Alliance in the article, and the Evangelical Climate Initiative. If she did a little investigative journalism, she knew.
• The article cites the deceptively named Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI) but doesn’t point out that it didn’t represent the Southern Baptist Convention, which took an opposite position at its 2008 annual convention. A little investigative journalism would have turned that up, too.
• It ignores the Cornwall Alliance’s Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, released in December by The Cornwall Alliance and in three months already endorsed by more than have endorsed the CCECA or the SBECI.
• It ignores the Cornwall Alliance’s A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming, a 76-page scholarly study by 30 Ph.D.‘s specialists, also released in December. Not only are both of these more recent and thus more newsworthy, but again, a little investigative journalism would have discovered them both.
• It ignores the fact that polls repeatedly show little belief in dangerous, manmade global warming among evangelicals. Indeed, as a Barna poll found, “Evangelicals are among the most skeptical population segments when it comes to global warming - just 27% firmly believe global warming is happening. In particular, evangelicals express the greatest caution regarding their perception that media has hyped the story (65%), their belief that cyclical climate change is not primarily caused by human activity (62%), and their concern that proposed solutions would hurt the poor, especially in other countries (60%). “
• One of the most alarming elements in this article is the extent to which it shows some evangelical pastors substituting environmentalism for the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, diverting churches’ attention from their primary mission to something entirely secondary.
• The article says mainstream scientists say the evidence for warming is unequivocal. But that’s an irrelevant point. The debate is not whether there’s been warming but whether (a) it’s been unprecedented and (b) it’s been largely caused by human action. Former University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit Director, lead author of the key chapter on global temperature changes in the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report, and for twenty years a central figure in promoting belief in manmade warming Dr. Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview last Saturday (linked and summarized in Cornwall’s Special Edition Newsletter February 16, 2010) both that (a) he didn’t believe the scientific debate about whether the warming was manmade was over, and he didn’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists believed so, either, and (b) the late-twentieth century warming was not unprecedented but was not statistically significantly different from warming periods 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 and might well not have been as warm as the Medieval Warm Period. Indeed, a little investigative journalism might have led the author to discover that 26% of broadcast meteorologists “strongly disagree and 24% disagree with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Assessment Report’s assertion that “Most of the warming since 1950 is very likely human-induced,” while only 18% agree and only 8% strongly agree with it. It might also have led to the discovery that over 31,000 American scientists, including over 9,000 with Ph.D.‘s, have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, stating, in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” And it might have led her to discover that Climategate and a veritable blizzard of other scandals have destroyed the IPCC’s credibility.

The story originates out of News21, a cooperative project of a bunch of university journalism programs around the country. And here’s a laugh. The project’s website describes itself this way: “The nation’s leading journalism schools come together in this unique program to experiment with new forms of in-depth and investigative reporting. Students travel the country to report on critical issues facing our changing nation and then find innovative ways to tell those stories.”

This story is investigative journalism? Gimme a break! This is advocacy, pure and simple. My father—a lifelong journalist and former graduate professor of journalism, devoted to journalistic objectivity and ensuring fair play to all sides of a story—must be rolling over in his grave right now.