Where does climate change fit into this picture presented to us in the book of Revelation?
The following is from NASA’s website, Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
TAKEAWAYS
- While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.
- According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact.”1
- Scientific information taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.
- From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.
The problem is if you should type in “Climate change debunked” in the Google search line, the only articles that come up are those that support the theory. No dissenting articles appeared in my search that I could find. Additionally, it appeared to me that the conclusions were drawn from computer models which have been notoriously wrong in the past. I would warn Christians to be careful with this. The blind acceptance of man-made global warming theories is just one sign of the times — a sign of how deception and coercion works today. I believe it’s effectively being used to undermine the Bible, its message, and therefore the Christian faith.
However, I am struck by the apocalyptic language that is being used from all quarters to describe the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
Fox News Article, January 22, 2023
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/al-gore-history-climate-predictions-statements-proven-false
During remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, Gore warned that continued carbon emissions into the atmosphere would destroy the planet and lead to widespread calamities.
“We’re still putting 162 million tons [of greenhouse gas] into it every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth,” Gore said. “That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.”
Gore then noted a prediction that the number of climate refugees worldwide would surge to a billion within the century. He added that such a surge would lead to nations losing their “capacity for self-governance.”
Gore is not alone in the use of such language. I hear it regularly today. Here’s where I think the Christian needs to be level-headed and biblically grounded. I do believe it’s entirely possible that global warming is taking place at an accelerated pace. I also think it’s possible that man in his hedonism and greed is doing damage to the earth over which we are to be stewards and not plunderers. The question is how much has man contributed to the problem. Not nearly as much as Al Gore and those like him would suggest I’m sure.
The question is who it is that is ultimately to blame for it. Whereas man-made climate change advocates see man as the guilty party, namely through his abuse of the environment, we as believers, without discounting the validity of climate change, might want to consider that God is behind it, and yes, due to man’s sin, but not entirely, or even mostly, due to his abuse of the environment, but due to his rebellion against God in every category imaginable as evidenced by his having been given over to a depraved mind (more on this in a later post).
Another way of saying it might be this: The climate is indeed changing. It is warming faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. At this pace, combined with the drying up of major water aquifers under the earth’s surface (a fact established by satellite imaging), we could be facing severe draughts and apocalyptic famines in the not too-distant future. Consider this article written by Lucas Besire, who doesn’t appear to me to be a radical environmentalist.
Besire, Lucas. The Atlantic, The Next Disaster Coming to the Great Plains, December 21, 2021
GARDEN CITY, Kan.—A century after the Dust Bowl, another environmental catastrophe is coming to the High Plains of western Kansas. The signs are subtle but unequivocal: dry riverbeds, fields of sand, the sound of irrigation motors straining to pump from dwindling aquifers.
“We face a fundamental choice,” Connie Owen, the director of the Kansas Water Office, said to a group of state legislators, lobbyists, groundwater managers, and experts who assembled here last summer to debate the future of the region’s groundwater, now in steep decline due to overuse by industrial agriculture. “What hangs in the balance is even more than the loss of livelihoods, communities, or an entire region’s economy—it is the character of who we want to be as a people.”
Similar conversations are under way across the American West, as an unprecedented water crisis comes into sharp focus. It is no secret that one of the worst droughts in 1,000 years is intensifying heat waves and megafires; that historic drops in surface-water levels coincide with historic spikes in demand as the region grows hotter, drier, and more populated; or that conflicts are escalating over who gets to use how much of what remains. Acute scarcity drives the search for water underground. But the West’s major aquifers are in trouble, too.
Aquifers are essential resources for human survival. Groundwater provides the only source of drinking water for one-third of the world’s people and supports nearly half of the planet’s irrigated agriculture. Yet far more groundwater is being pumped out than can be naturally replenished. Most dry-area aquifers are vanishing. These include the two primary groundwater systems in the western United States: California’s Central Valley aquifer and the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies America’s heartlands from South Dakota to Texas. If we lose these aquifers, we lose nearly 20 percent of the world’s grain crop, more than 40 percent of our nation’s beef production, and about 40 percent of the vegetables, nuts, and fruits consumed in the United States.
The main cause for this warming climate and depletion of the aquifers could be God’s judgment against man’s sin in general. If man want’s to prevent the “unnatural” global warming we are experiencing, the answer is not in the green movement placating mother earth, but in man repenting from his sins and turning to the Creator of all things.
We as Christians don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don’t need to overreact to the Al Gores of this world’s claims that it’s all due to man’s abuse of the environment and that man can fix it through radical tactics in reducing fossil fuel emissions and all the other social justice nonsense associated with the Green movement by rejecting everything they are saying. Satan doesn’t lie without mixing it with truth. That’s his MO and that’s how he’s been so productive since the beginning. This is what it means to be wise as a serpent — to know his ways — and yet be innocent as doves. We don’t have to reject everything that comes out of the mouth of radical evironmentalists. Truth is truth whether it’s on the lips of Satan or men. Our responsibility is to filter out the error from the truth and deal with it from God’s perspective.