A Christian View of Climate Change

I have been thinking for well over a decade (see blog postings below) about so-called "global warming" (GW), now rechristened "climate change" because the climate, with record cold weather being reported as often as record highs, is so obviously not warming. Yesterday I was looking over a new book that republished my essay "Thanking God for Factory Farms and Processed Food" and saw another rant on climate change a few pages away, so I decided to look up the numbers and do the math.

You need to understand that for all the whine about climate change presented by the mythmakers, the only true catastrophe they ever offer, and the only catastrophe that the sci-fi novelists -- probably representing the public at large -- have replaced their obsolete worry over atomic annihilation with, is rising sea levels. Google "rate of sea level rise" and all the top-ten hits will cite one of two statistics: In 2018, global mean sea level was 3.2 inches (8.1 centimeters) above the 1993 average (which comes out about 5mm/yr over the 15 years, and about 23cm above 1880 (which comes out as 2mm/yr). Taking these numbers at face value, that suggests two important facts impressed on me today:

1. The actual sea level rise is very tiny, insignificant compared to storms and tsunami wave damage.

2. If we did nothing at all -- as was obviously the case in the 100 years after 1880 -- the rate of sea rise might in the worst case double every century.

Now we ask, how long would that take? The math turns out to be easy for a computer geek like me, I can do it in my head. The sea rise over the last century was a little less than 0.1% of the total when all the ice has melted, a factor of 1000, which is slightly less than ten doublings -- but since it is accumulating, that adds effectively one more doubling -- so something over 900 years from today all the ice will be melted. Because we are assuming a worst-case doubling every century, half of those 70 meters happened in the final century, and half of the rest in the century before that, so at the end of 2700AD the sea level will have gone up only 17m. Nobody alive today will see a sea level rise of more than a foot in their lifetime, if nobody does anything at all to mitigate this ridiculous "disaster"! The government expenditures would be far better spent moving people out of below-sea-level cities like New Orleans to rebuild cities a couple (or more) feet above sea level. After that all the oil will be gone, so (if you believe that burning fossil fuels is responsible) the sea will stop rising.

Me, I think history shows a cyclic rise and fall of global temperatures, and I've seen claims (and charts showing) that global temperature rise leads (not follows) CO₂ levels, so nature will eventually cycle back down. Once the scientists figure out that their gravy train has stopped, they will look around for another handout and -- if the government chooses to fund it -- perhaps discover the true reasons for global warming (if that is indeed happening) and the (probably unrelated) sea rise, and thus be in a better position to manage our response. Trump did the right thing, pulling out of the Paris accord.

So much for the science.

The book I got published in -- Cultural Engagement (ISBN 978-0-310-53457-0) -- sees itself as a Christian perspective in contemporary issues, and Jonathan Moo's contribution is titled "Climate Change Is a Christian Issue" so I want to see the question in that light. First off, Dr.Moo's bio on his employer's website reports that he "holds graduate degrees in both biblical studies and wildlife ecology," neither of them directly related to the causes of alleged climate change. From his bio in the book we learn that he teaches New Testament and environmental studies. He is obviously getting his information, not from his own research, but from other sources, which as I argue below probably cannot be trusted. When I did this same analysis on Darwinism, I learned that nobody doing primary peer-reviewed research in any topic at all had any evidence that favored the descent from a common ancestor hypothesis over the fiat creation model, everybody always pointed to somebody else's work. I have not put that same effort into climate change, but the evidence so far clearly points toward it being Religion (believing what you know ain't so) and not science. So Dr.Moo's title is correct; it's just his conclusions that are wrong.

So now today, I go to the primary source(s) for the answer to my title question, God Himself, who told the ancient poet Job in one of the most magnificent put-downs ever recorded anywhere,

Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb,
When I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,
When I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place,
When I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'? -- Job 38:8-11, oNIV

"I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth." And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth." -- Gen.9:11-16, oNIV

So yes, there is a Christian perspective on climate change, and it is "Stop the lies! Start telling people to move away from coastal cities, or remain there at their own peril." People do risky things all the time: they drive cars and motorcycles and jump out of airplanes. More people died from automobile accidents this year than will die from global warming in the next decade. More people died from abortions this year than will die from global warming in the next century. Stop the lies. If you really care about lives, then spend that money to save lives. If this is nothing more than public welfare for the over-educated, say so. Stop the lies.

Tom Pittman
2019 November 21

A couple months after I wrote this essay, I see significant scientific support for what I said here, published in a heavily footnoted ICR booklet "The climate change conflict: Keeping Cool over Global Warming" (ISBN 978-1-946246-28-8, available from ICR, P.O.Box 59029, Dallas TX 75229, and probably also online from their website ICR.org, but it is encrypted so I wouldn't know). This booklet offers credible scientific data against the notion of runaway global warming -- including evidence of scientific fraud used in support of the alarmism -- and cites several PhD scientists complaining about the politicized bigotry suppressing the evidence against the popular alarmism. Does that sound familiar? We see the same kind of fraud perpetrated in the name of the Darwinistic religion, which ICR was founded to combat. [2020 Jan 13]
 

Previous Remarks:

Did you ever hear of Greenland? It's a very large island -- much bigger on the maps than it really is in nature, because it's so far north that the perspective is wrong -- which is covered with ice hundreds of feet deep. Do you know why its name is "Greenland"? It used to be green and livable when the Vikings discovered it. That was hundreds of years ago, long before there were enough people in the world to drive SUVs that presumably make things warmer. "Global warming" is a fraud perpetrated by leftist politicians and the pseudo-scientists who feed at the public trough. Temperatures go up and down every year. Some years are warmer, some are cooler. We didn't do it, God did. The world won't die from a half-degree rise in temperature over the next decade or three (until it cycles back to cooler again). That's right, it's one half of one degree over decades. The pseudo-scientists are stumbling all over themselves to explain why it's so little.

From my blog posting "Politics vs Science" three years ago:

My host likes to talk, but he said (twice, as if for emphasis) "IF global warming is happening, and IF it is caused by carbon dioxide, and IF human activity is the cause of increased CO₂ [emphasis added], then the [right-wing] people who oppose doing something about it are idiots." I here emphasized those three "IF"s because my first reaction was that he is calling me an idiot, but he's not. I do not believe that long-term global warming is happening, and since it is not happening, CO₂ is not the cause of it, and the evidence I have seen suggests that the current cyclic warming phase is the cause of increased CO₂, not the other way around, and especially that it's not from human activity. So I don't meet any of his premises, let alone all three. But I don't think fast enough to make a coherent presentation of my position in real time. Maybe he doesn't either, but he's rehearsed this argument enough times, he has it down pat with no place for refutation (see my "Smarter Fridge?" and "No Global Warming" and other posts [see below]). I'm no expert in meteorology, but neither is he. I have not taken the time to review all the scientific facts on both sides, but I suspect neither has he. People of left-wing political persuasion seldom seek out opposing viewpoints and data, and neither do their opponents.

From my blog posting "Democracy, the Worst Possible Government" three years ago:

The reason "global warming" is so important today is because when Bush was President, they hated him for his religion, but they couldn't say that, so they had to find some other way to demonize him. They couldn't get him on education, he was to the left of the Dems on that. They couldn't get him on AIDS, he was to the left of the Dems on that too. They couldn't get him on the war, the whole country supported that. So they picked on climate change, which Bush was actually on the side of science but nobody knew that. Politics (read: money handouts) still overwhelms the science, but the "scientists" have their hand in the cookie jar, and the Dems support government funding of every stupid project they hear of, while the Reps try not to (but not very hard).

From my blog posting "Smarter Fridge" four years ago:

Then we had all these people who don't have a clue how things work, they just want to get rich off the poor people of the nation, so they invent this pseudo-science thing called "global warming" to beat up on the political party that does know what they are doing -- they couldn't fault Bush on education, he was to the left of the Dems; they couldn't fault him on  AIDS, ditto; they couldn't complain about the war, because the people supported him on that; they really didn't like his religion, but to say so would be (in their own thinking) unConstitutional; so they invented this thing that Bush happened to be on the correct side of good science, but who cares about truth in politics anyway? -- and all the lefties in academia saw a gravy train and jumped on (just like they did back when Reagan announced "Star Wars" which also couldn't work, but it scared the Ruskies to death and ended the cold war anyway).

From my blog posting "Global Warming, NOT" five years ago:

It took five hours for a Chinese helicopter to rescue their 52 scientists studying global warming (GW) in Antarctica, because they were stuck in the sea ice which has increased to record highs (instead of decreasing as the GW theory predicted). For those of you who believed the science and were not bamboozled by the GW politicking, it's another factoid to throw at the clowns. If you are one of those bozos who still think burning fossil fuel is the cause of global warming, Wake up!

It was a political thing (not science) from the get-go, as I pointed out here almost eight years ago. Carbon dioxide is not a bad thing, it makes the planet green. More CO₂ makes more trees Remember, all that carbon now in fossil fuels was once in vegetation, and before that it was in the atmosphere. It didn't kill people then, and it won't kill us now.

[That "More CO₂ makes more trees" link refers to a nature.com web page titled "Effects of Rising Atmospheric Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide on Plants" which has been removed from the internet (I wonder why? ;-) but Google does not know it yet (as of 2019 November 21) and still shows this significant quote: "Under elevated CO 2 most plant species show higher rates of photosynthesis, increased growth, decreased water use and lowered tissue concentrations of nitrogen and protein," but the links are broken.]

From my blog posting "Politics in Fiction" six years ago:

Author Christopher Fowler mostly blames the rain on global warming (GW), which he blamed on President Bush refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty. The guy is a writer, not a scientist, so he cannot be expected to understand why it is all bogus science, but it does not take a PhD in rocket science to see that GW is a partisan thing invented by the left-wing bigots to bash President Bush, who otherwise did pretty much everything they wanted except kill their babies. But you cannot expect a Brit to know that an American President is not permitted to ratify a treaty without Senate approval. Bush did not have that approval.

More significantly, the GW partisan predictions were not met in actual temperature rise [another deleted web page]. If Bush had Senate approval, and if he had signed the treaty, and if we had implemented the drastic measures it called for, the left-wing bigots would have claimed that Kyoto had performed as predicted. Now it's obvious (except to the left-wing bigots) that Kyoto was irrelevant and their alarmism unfounded. Furthermore, the right-wing bigots could have blamed the current economy on Kyoto, which would also be false. Or maybe it would be worse, but we don't know. The Bush/Obama deficits are certainly sufficient to damage the economy, and Obama has not learned anything.

From my blog posting "Environmental Politicking" seven years ago:

The left-wing bigots are starting to admit it. Despite all their inconsistent and hypocritical whining about how humans are supposedly destroying the environment, they cannot deny that God made the universe far more robust and self-sustaining than our puny and primitive science could even guess:

...there's growing evidence that nature is much more resilient than we have thought. -- Mar.12 TIME,p.85

This is in the same issue that proudly featured the guy who persuaded our President-Trainee to block the Canadian oil pipeline while brazenly consuming oil himself (drives a car, uses electricity, even wears synthetic fabric clothing).

I'm not advocating irresponsible waste. The earth is the LORD's, not ours. We are only stewards. But blocking the pipeline is the irresponsible action in this case. The better science seems to suggest that global warming causes a rise in CO₂, not the other way around. The whole noise was deemed a way to tear down a Republican President who happened to have friends in the oil industry. We need to get off our dependency on Arab oil, and the Canadians are better friends than the Arabs. When the oil is gone, it's gone, so it wouldn't hurt to start considering other energy sources, but corn is a joke. Coal and nuclear energy are also limited, but there's far more of them than there is oil.

I think there's a bigger picture here than most people are seeing. It's not that the eco-socialists care for the environment and the capitalist pigs hate it -- in fact it's always the socialists who are the worst polluters -- but we have different long-term views... The atheists know (by introspection, if not otherwise) what evil lurks in the heart of humans, and if this is all there is, we all are in deep doo-doo. And they are right! Just look at the countries where the atheists gain majority control, like the (former!) Soviet Union, and China today. Compare South Korea, which has a strong Christian presence, to North Korea, which persecutes Christians. North Korea is the only place in the world that is visibly dark as seen from space. Apart from who controls the country, the two places are the same. East and West Germany showed the same divide before unification. I was there, I've seen it.

From my blog posting "Religious Novels" nine years ago:

Ben Bova repeatedly calls "the greenhouse cliff," the supposition that man-made global warming will take off and suddenly flood the world and destroy crops causing mass starvation. Of course if global warming raises the sea level and makes current grain belts too hot to support those crops, then other areas presently too cold to grow the same crops will become productive. People can travel faster than rising seawater, so if a few hundred die because they choose to live below sea level in New Orleans or Holland, many more will stay alive by simply moving to the new shoreline -- or away from the coast entirely.

From my blog posting "Pseudo-Science" eleven years ago:

Pseudo-scientific ideas like evolution and global warming have an unique quality that distinguishes them from real science. The scientific method is based on the falsification of hypotheses...

Now global warming has acquired the same mystical zen. It explains all phenomena and is proved by all evidence, for or against, everything proves global warming. Summers too hot? Global warming. Winters too cold? By some fluke, that is also the result of global warming.

Not known for the caliber of their science reporting, WIRED magazine has jumped into the fray with an article praising artificial acid rain for halting global warming when Kyoto fails. At least they (indirectly) admit that Kyoto is useless. But acid rain? That was formerly thought to be associated with the cause of GW.

WIRED repeated the oft-quoted statistic that if all the ice in Greenland were to melt, it would raise the ocean water levels 20 feet. I did the calcs. There is that much water frozen into the Greenland icecap. But if it were all to melt as a result of global warming, then the earth's atmosphere would be warmer -- that's what warming means, isn't it? -- and the warm air would hold more evaporated water. So maybe the ocean levels might go down instead of up. Nobody knows.

But everybody has a jolly good time pretending to know and getting lots of government grant money to run their computer simulations. Simulations are like video games, where the programmers invent rules for the simulation to run by, and maybe those rules work the same as God's nature, and maybe not. Nobody knows.

From my blog posting "What Would Jesus Drive?" eleven years ago:

On page 200 Crichton ridiculed published Science articles, where "even though the authors gave lip service to the threat of GW, their data seemed to suggest the opposite of what they were saying in the text." Throughout the book -- especially after page 200, the novel is filled with footnotes to actual journal articles demolishing any supposed threat of GW. In his appendix, Crichton mentions another pseudo-science which suffered from the same group-think foolishness for a half-century as present-day GW: eugenics. Vast sums of money and prestigious scientists and leaders threw their support into it. Eventually the center of research moved from the USA to Germany and became the death camps we are so horrified over now. All without any serious scientific support.

Crighton could have said the same thing about Darwinism -- except that he happens to believe that piece of baloney.

Which brings me to the next observation, on page 247, where the hero of the story, the guy whose facts are always right and whose technical and combat skills make Indiana Jones look like a punk on crack, is arguing that a certain prediction of temperature increase made in 1988 was wrong by 300% (actual data), and therefore the whole notion of temperature prediction is bogus.

That may actually be true -- long-term readers of my blog know I am no friend of the GW hysterics -- but I tend to look at any strongly-held opinions with skepticism. The counter argument raised there in the book is that the actual Mars Rover landing time was within 25 minutes of the prediction given eight months earlier, less than 0.01% percent error. As I often say, "figures don't lie, but liars figure." These are different kinds of predictions, different categories of error: the one a guess about effects we acknowledge we don't understand, the other the result of careful "rocket science" physics which need that kind of precision to even get it there. Crichton acknowledges the weakness of his claim on the next page, but the damage is done.

I'm not particularly fond of conspiracy theories (see my essay "After-the-Fact Conspiracy Theories Are Always Wrong"), so I found the central theme of this story rather less credible than Jurassic Park. Crichton wants us to suspend disbelief in a vast well-funded conspiracy to trigger catastrophic weather events (with large-scale human casualties) in order to make the GW theory more marketable. That part is fiction, of course. But conspiracies sell books, and that is his income. He does it well.

The title of his novel, The State of Fear, refers to a substitute for the Cold War as a motivator for controlling the populace. When the Big Bad Commies were threatening nuclear holocaust, that was a perpetual cause for fear and alarm. That's now gone, so they need to fabricate other threats. GW is a crummy substitute.

From my blog postings "What, Me Worry?", "Christian Global Warming" and "No Global Warming" thirteen years ago:

TIME magazine this week invites us to "Be VERY Worried" about global warming. Why?

Millions of people will be inconvenienced, maybe even die from the effects of global warming. Darwinism, which TIME promotes at the expense of more credible alternatives, predicts -- even requires -- that unfit people and organisms will die out and be replaced by more evolved (and thus more fit) species.

Millions of people die from genocide in Sudan and starvation in Zimbabwe, but nobody has the political will to make it stop. Millions of people die from AIDS, but only one country in the whole world has the political will to reduce the incidence of new cases -- and TIME doesn't even have the integrity to report on the success in Uganda.

TIME runs out the usual litany of technical solutions to global warming, but if all of them were implemented immediately and all at once, it would hardly slow global warming down, let alone stop it -- and the worldwide economic cost of doing so would be worse than the effects of unmitigated warming. The Sahara desert was getting bigger long before there was such a thing as global warming, but parched ground makes nice scary pictures for readers who presumably don't know any better.

When water levels rise, people can move away from the seashore to higher ground. They have plenty of time to do so. There is no need to restore and maintain underwater cities like New Orleans. Technology solved the food problem in India, it can solve the drought problem in Africa. If people want to.

Worrying about global warming is foolish. There are things that can be stopped, like nuclear bombs in Iran and North Korea, like AIDS in Africa, the "brain drain" in the USA, but global warming isn't one of them. It just happens to be something TIME can use to berate the Bush administration over; solving those other problems takes more of what he is doing, not less.
 

The current issue of ChristianityToday has an interview with Sir John Houghton, the inventor of "global warming" and a committed Christian. He is the kind of person that puts the lie to the atheistic scientistic community propaganda in the USA (see previous blog entries, Logic of Religion and What God Was Thinking and War...)

Perhaps his interview took place some time ago, before the recent "tipping point" discoveries in global warming recently reported in TIME magazine, but in this interview Houghton seems to think that the effect can be stopped. The TIME cover story gave no such illusion, despite that they urged everyone -- including India and China, which the Kyoto treaty conveniently omits -- to try anyway.
 

Joshua Bohannon replied to my posting yesterday, not with evidence that we can actually stop global warming, but significant evidence that it has already stopped without our help -- or rather it never started. Check out these links:

       http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_muller101504.asp?p=1
       http://www.john-daly.com/cause/cause.htm

Although these items are a few years old, it begins to look like the evidence for global warming is not significantly better than the evidence for Darwinistic evolution -- in other words, there is none. I am thus inclined to repeat my suggestion that this is not a problem requiring massive scientific and political attention, and that the only reason it gets so much press coverage is that it is the one putative large-scale problem for which the present Bush administration is not responding in a way likely to mitigate whatever problem might exist. In other words, it is an opportunity to bash President Bush, which the left-wing bigots controlling the media are only too eager to do.

I consider it unfortunate that Christians have jumped on the bandwagon without giving adequate attention to the facts. Well, not all of them. There still are thinking Christians. Josh, for example.

Links

Also mentioned briefly in these blog posts:
California, the Granola State (2019 Mar 27) "The politicians are not helping the poor, and they are not doing anything to fix what used to be called GW."
Geeks In Fiction (2019 Feb 23) "Everybody has a religion, this guy not excepted: the most obvious component being the failed notion of GW -- but that's what religion is, isn't it? Believing what you know ain't so; you can do that in fiction, especially sci-fi..."
Preferring Lies Over Truth (2018 Aug 8) "[Leftist building managers] don't care about carbon any more than the right-wingers do, it's just a political excuse to tax and spend. Turning the heat up actually helps their deception."
Only in Oregon (2017 Aug 5) "WIRED lead editorial is a rant against Trump's promise to pull the USA out of global climate initiatives, which a small majority of the country agreed with, given they voted for him."
One Week Left (2017 Aug 3) "Weather forecast's predicted 106 was downgraded to 99 in the middle of the day when the prediction became obviously improbable. They blamed it on smoke rather than admitting it was GW bias."
Liars Lie (2016 Mar 8) "We already know that the left-wing politicians have been lying to us about global warming."
Politics in Fiction (2015 Apr 11) "George W. Bush, as you may recall, was more to the left than most Democrats on most
issues, so the only way anybody could attack him was with the made-up political fraud called GW."
Church Shopping (2014 Nov 22) "Last Sunday the weather turned cold (think: "global warming" ;-) and my car wouldn't start, so I walked to a church nearby."
Writing What They Don't Know (2014 Mar 11) "Biblical scholar Eric Meyers is more accurate in aligning his chosen specialty with global warming and against cancer research than he probably would want to admit. Everybody knows somebody who died or is dying from cancer, so we all know it's real. Nobody ever died from global warming, but a lot of people froze to death this last winter."
Technological Devolution (2014 Mar 3) "This flick started up by explaining how global warming had drowned all the coastal cities... Even when the movie was made global warming was a political crock of baloney, how much more so today with ice covering the ground?"
unChurch (2014 Jan 6) "The snow was maybe 4 inches deep and still falling. And it was cold (think 'global warming' ;-)"
Government Bungling (2013 Nov 29) "When the left-wing bigots tell you about "carbon footprint" they are lying through their teeth. Their government forces me to waste electricity on high-wattage heaters, because they took the low-power solution off the market."
Really Bad Politics (2013 Oct 28) "Ringo accurately demolishes the pseudo-science around global warming (his second catastrophe is global cooling, which the science he cites actually supports)."
A Cold Winter Morning (2013 Feb 22) "If you think creatively (that is, unconstrained by reality), you might suppose against all reason that the hard white stuff on the ground is the result of GW, and you probably also were among the minority of Americans who voted for the least competent President in my lifetime, the one who thinks that "global warming" can be solved by raising taxes on low-income people and giving huge government hand-outs to the rich, while telling the American people it's going to be the other way around."
I'm a Nobody (2012 Mar 13) "That hypocrite last week who persuaded our President-Trainee to cancel the oil pipeline from Canada. Even if burning oil did increase global warming (to which it is probably unrelated), all he succeeded in doing is sending that same oil to China, which is a far bigger polluter than the USA."
Religious Wars (2012 Mar 10) "Handprints (Not Footprints) is about reducing carbon consumption, on the mistaken supposition that burning carbon causes global warming. Like the Darwinists, the people making that claim are offering solidarity (majority vote), not scientific data."
One Second After (2010 Dec 4) "Forstchen points out the risk and the downside of EMP is far greater than so-called Global Warming. The remedy is also rather less harmful to the economy. But neither one has happened, so we don't know that for sure."
Illogical Atheists (2010 Nov 4) "Harris believes stopping climate change [is a] "good for everybody and bad for nobody" moral absolute. That was last year's news. This year the "science" of global warming is different, which is normal for politics as usual."
Confirmation (2008 Jul 9) "Michael Crichton thinks through the implications of his science. Global warming was one of those encounters where his novel supported a position I previously took."
Energy Diet (2008 Apr 25) "It's still not known that carbon dioxide is significantly responsible for GW, nor that the impact of GW cannot be adequately compensated by other technology. I think the so-called GW scare is political hooey."
Logic Loses (2007 Jul 5) "Scientists (especially those with no obvious profit incentive in "global warming") are beginning to dispute that particular political fairy tale this year."

GW in other essays:
The 9/11 Conspiracy Hoax (2007 June 25) "Last year the Bush-haters fabricated a GW crisis to beat up on Bush. They could have complained about the much more immediate HIV crisis, but Bush happens to be doing very good things in that arena. It turns out that the Bush policy on GW is also about the best that can be done, as the European Union is now discovering."

The Counterfeit Religion of Relationships (Rev.2011 December 19) "Because GW is said to cause both any particular weather condition and its opposite, the claim is tautologically true (by definition) regardless of whether the globe is warming or cooling, and regardless of whatever weather condition we are experiencing at any particular moment. Thus these claims are completely worthless and tell us nothing at all (about climate or weather, although they might tell us something about the mental state of the person making such claims)."