They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator..Romans 1:25
When I was a young boy, I used to frequently roam both the Franklin and Guadalupe Mountains in far west Texas. The Franklin Mountains, ranging up to 7,000 feet, provide an all-weather pass into the Rockies, and the Guadalupe’s, 110 miles to the east and nearly 9,000 feet, guard the great Chihuahuan Desert.
Scrambling around these mountains was marvelous fun for a youngster, and provided my formative education on climate change.
That’s because you can hardly take a step in these mountains without finding arrowheads that give witness to the nomadic crisscrossing of the area for thousands of years by ancient people, and later by various American Indian tribes; and because of the abundant fossilized marine life and seashells that tell yet another, primordial story.
The “Trans-Pecos,” as the area is also known, was under a sea some 265 million years ago in the Permian Period, the final phase of the Paleozoic Era we’re told, and part of the Guadalupe Mountains are actually ancient reefs. Over the succeeding ages the Trans-Pecos was invaded again by advancing, then retreating waters.
It is still open to speculation exactly how all this happened; upheavals in the earth’s plates, the falling off, and then pushing up, of the Rio Grande rift. The climate changed. Dinosaurs came and went. An enormous asteroid opened up the Yucatan Peninsula at what is now Chicxulub, Mexico. Then again, in the same era there was a massive, earth-shaking, forty-year volcanic eruption in what is today India, known as the Deccan Traps. It left a two-mile thick deposit over an area roughly the size of California and ejected ten times the emissions as did the asteroid impact. Regardless, the climate changed.
Ice Ages came and went. The volcano’s in the Trans-Pecos itself, the cinders of which still dot the area erupted and died. The climate changed.
In fact, the current coastline of Texas and the Gulf States have only been as they are now for about 3,000 years or so. (Based on the geographic track record, is that reassuring?)
In the “modern” era we know the Trans-Pecos has never really stopped changing, even without the invading water. Based on the excavations of a granite outcrop that captured and held water named Hueco Tanks, about 30 miles east of Franklin Mountains, we know that the climate in the area changed – often. Only 800 years ago the area had a hot period that lasted approximately a century, followed by a relatively cool and wet period for several centuries, which was followed by drought. The tracks of the ancient people came and went, based on that prevailing climate change.
The area was on the outer edge of what was the North American Prairies and consisted of shortgrass, not desert when the first Europeans come through the pass. Depending on whom you trust, either Cabaza de Vaca in the 1530s or Don Juan de Onate in 1598, was the first European to come to the area and report on the extensive grasslands.
Now the desert blooms spectacularly, but unreliably.
None of this is unique to the southwestern U.S., of course. Humans have witnessed a Little Ice Age in recent recorded history, roughly between the 1350s and 1850’s – ending only a 150 odd years ago. If you were English, as an example, you could alternately ice skate on the Themes River at London (from 1607-1814 at least), or grow grapes, depending on when exactly your fourscore years on earth was spent.
Throw in a Medieval Warming Period, and you have – climate change.
What we reliably know about the earth’s climate is that it changes. The forces of nature, both climatic and geophysical are so dynamic and so beyond a knowable scale that predicting them is, well, it is a wee bit presumptuous.
All of which brings us to the incredible financial and political scam being perpetrated on the western world, henceforth known as the Great Climate Change Scam (GCCS). It is a brilliant swindle, the apex of idiocy, and a bit of human hubris that rivals the Tower of Babel, all wrapped up in one tight ball.
The GCCS is promulgated largely by Marxist “intellectuals” who seek what Marxist always seek – iron-fisted control over others; trans-national bureaucrats and global businesses who are licking their chops at the thought of idiot westerners – Americans mostly – willingly turning over hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth to them so that they can keep the gravy train of cronyism on track – and they don’t have to steal any of it!; and an assorted gaggle of religious leaders, both so-called evangelicals, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and some Catholics, including the Pope, that are never satisfied to pay attention to the Gospel Mandate, but always willing to careen off into the dead-end traps of the world.
Of course, there are well-meaning provocateurs of climate change that have simply been hornswoggled by the now-discredited science out of England and the University of East Anglia, and more recently the news that NASA finagled its climate change model with “adjusted” math.
Others, without checking the source, actually believe the illogicality that science can be “settled,” that “most” scientists believe in man-made climate change, and the claim with a straight face that the billions of dollars in worldwide taxpayer money being poured into climate study and university grants does not incentivize a group think that will not tolerate reasoned dissent. (It’s always about the money.)
But, these same well-intentioned souls seem blind to the plain reason that the earth itself provides. Could it be more historically obvious?
The religious folks? That is a more difficult question. Surely some are sincere only because in an emotionally driven age it is appealing and culturally relevant to be emotional rather than rational. But the Holy Scriptures are literally filled stem to stern with admonitions concerning human conceit (A tiny sample):
Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place. Job 38:12: Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth? Job 28:31-33.
Are we not to be wise agents in the care of the creation? Indeed, but that is not our primary spiritual duty – far from it. And, besides that, most of us in the U.S. at least, can look back and realize that the Free World has in fact made, because of the market place, enormous strides in improving our environment in a thousand different ways. The U.S. has already made giant strides in cleaning the air; China, India, and the third world generally – not so much.
The ecclesiastical concern in some quarters over climate change seems bizarre when compared to the billion or so people around the world without clean water, electricity, or safe medical care, for whom climate change, real or not, is an abstraction at best, a cruel joke at worst.
None of this is to say we can’t be diligent in using energy and continually looking for more cost-effective, cleaner alternatives. The market place can and will find them if they exist. But the truth is that abandoning petroleum is impractical for the foreseeable future, and beyond that, petroleum is one of the most plentiful, practical and useful naturally occurring compounds on earth (and we now know it is found throughout the observable universe). How many stomachs are feed, stoves heated, and houses warmed, how many medicines created – and the list goes on and on – because of petroleum?
To surmise on the standard that the earth is not today as it was yesterday, therefore it is bad, as though that it is even in our control, or that a hurricane did or did not happen because we use light bulbs instead of candles, is beyond irrational,
Perhaps, we humans are a menace in many ways. But mostly to ourselves. It seems to me that we are far more in need of Global Character Change Treaty than a Global Climate Change Treaty. And for that, we need to look beyond this world to the next.
