Chicken Little was hit by a falling acorn one day and began yelling, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling,” thus working the entire farmyard into a turmoil. And now the Climate Change movement is telling us the world will soon end, but will it?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #22 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
I’ve loved the outdoors as long as I can remember. It’s one reason my favorite color is green.
As a kid, I reveled in spending time in the woods and in the fields on my Grandpa Rogers’s farm and elsewhere. I read every issue of the monthly “Field and Stream,” “Outdoor Life,” and “Sports Afield” magazines that arrived at our house.
In 8th Grade, a classmate David Hammond and I won an award for our entry in the Science Fair. Our project illustrated ways to reinforce conservation.
I remember Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching on fire in 1969, sensationally making national news. When I was a freshman in college in 1970 President Nixon launched the Environmental Protection Agency. Then in 1979, there was a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
These early incidents stimulated the emerging environmental movement, eventually leading to global warming, then more recently, climate change. It’s a strange flipflop because in 1974, “Time” magazine’s cover proclaimed a “Coming Global Ice Age.” Not sure what happened to the Ice Age. Maybe it got melted away by global warming?
Now it seems as if we’re into an arms race to see how frightening climate alarmists can become:
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says we’ve got 12 years to correct our climate sins before the world as we know it becomes unlivable.
Former Vice President Al Gore speaks of an “inconvenient truth” at 10 years. Recently, the director of the film, “Don’t Look Up,” tweeted:
“We’ve got 6-8 years before the climate is so chaotic we [will] live in a permanent state of biblical catastrophe.”
Wow.
Consider this recent study:
“Angry, terrified, and in despair. These three words capture how many people are feeling because of climate change according to a recent… report "Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities, and Responses." A global study…found that nearly 6 in 10 people aged 16 to 25 were very or extremely worried about the fate of the planet, nearly half of them reported climate distress or anxiety affecting their daily lives, three-quarters agreed that "the future is frightening," and over half are convinced that "humanity is doomed."
The author’s remedy for all this is that we should look for ways to “take positive action,” go biking or walking. She said, “The key is to balance hope and worry…we must remain ‘stubbornly optimistic.’
So, the answer to the end of the world due to climate change is to remain stubbornly optimistic? But based upon what? No wonder young adults are experiencing anxiety.
This kind of climate change hyperbole is an example of what some have called “climate fear porn,” an ever-ratcheting-up hysteria.
Problem is, rather than people rallying to combat the epic effects of climate change, people are wearily succumbing to “Apocalypse fatigue.” And the screeching Greta Thunberg—who I think is being used by older adults—embarrassingly makes things worse.
But I don’t think climate change, and certainly not fear, are what God had in mind for us.
As I said, I love the Creation we learn about in Genesis. Scripture says, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters,’ (Ps. 24:1-2; 1 Cor. 10:26).
I believe God gave humanity a magnificent environment in which to flourish, and in what’s called the “Cultural Mandate” of Gen. 1:26-28, God gave humanity dominion over the earth, meaning we are responsible for exercising wise stewardship, developing and caring for creation and everything in it.
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I also believe human beings have at times made bad choices that negatively affected God’s beautiful Creation. Because of the Fall (Gen. 3), even Creation is laboring under the weight of sin. God talks about this in several places in the Bible, e.g., “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time,” (Rom. 8:22; Ps. 102:25-27; Heb. 1:11-12).
You don’t have to review the whole of human history to recognize this. Just consider our American experience.
Think, for example, of the tens of millions of American Bison that were brought to near extinction in 1870-1890, or the Passenger Pigeon that numbered in the billions before being hunted without thought of conservation, the last pigeon dying in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
We nearly lost the American Bald Eagle and the Timber Wolf, but these species, along with the buffalo, are an example of what can be done when proper animal husbandry is employed. All three species are thriving again.
Plowed under indigenous grasses, together with over-farming of the Prairie in the late 19th, early 20thCentury, were precipitating factors that, together with severe drought, resulted in the 1930s Dust Bowl eroding millions of cubic tons of topsoil.
Clearcut logging in the West denuded mountainsides and contributed to later mudslides.
Earlier, I recorded a podcast on littering. Surely this is a global example of human irresponsibility. Some 9 billion tons of litter ends up in the ocean annually, and 50% of all littered items are cigarette butts.
So, human beings can exercise a damaging impact upon the environment.
But many in the climate change movement claim that human beings are solely responsible for all current degradation to the world, so much so, that if we do not immediately cease using fossil fuels, we’re goners in the near term.
The problem with climate change activists’ claims, however, are several:
- Conclusions are based on biased computer modeling, not evidence.
- Climate is always changing so their thesis is untestable and unproven.
- The fact that humans contribute to global warming is demonstrable, but the effect is minimal, and zero use of fossil fuels immediately does not appreciably change this condition in the next hundred years.
- Climate change is far more complex than simplistic bromides calling for shutting down oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuel consumption.
- Calls for dramatic transitions from fossil fuels to other forms of energy like wind or solar are enormously expensive – so claims of “climate justice” on behalf of the poor are not deliverable.
- Climate activists’ passion for alternative energy oddly does not include the clean, safe source of nuclear energy.
- Embedded in the climate change movement are values that run counter to ether to a Christian worldview or to traditional American values, among them,
- Anti-humanity.
- God is irrelevant, unless the earth is the deity.
- Anti-truth or genuine science.
- Anti-free enterprise or anti-capitalism.
- Look to government as the source salvation and utopia.
Climate change enthusiasts demonstrate that what is going on here is a worldview battle: for many, climate change has become a secular religion.
Politicians, environmentalists, and media create a triad constantly promoting climate catastrophe. They do this because fear sells. It scares people to the point they support the triad with money and power.
Yes, climate change is happening. It’s always happening. Droughts, floods, hurricanes are not getting worse. Fires are decreasing. Even Antarctic Sea ice is not declining.
We know the earth is warming modestly, but climate change is not an existential threat.
We should remember what God told Noah after the Great Flood: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease,” (Gen. 8:22).
Well, we’ll see you again soon. For more Christian commentary, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, Discerning What Is Best, or check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2022
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