The recent COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow was hyped as one of the most important meetings in world history. World leaders huddled for another “high-stakes” United Nations’ climate summit, trying their hardest – in between posh lunches and photo ops – to set useless emissions-reduction targets. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson opened the summit by saying the world is strapped to a “doomsday device.”
President Biden spoke and said that this issue is the “collective challenge of our lifetime, the existential threat to our human existence.”
Former Vice President, Al Gore also spoke. He is considered by many as a climate change guru since his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” was released. The movie was considered global warming gospel at the time. The movie along with his ties to a multitude of corporations involved in climate change made Gore so rich that he is now referred to as “our first carbon billionaire.” The problem is that Gore was wrong on almost everything he warned about.
In 2006 the Washington Post said Gore “believes humanity may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.” If that had come true we would all have burned up six years ago. He predicted a massive rise in sea levels but then purchased a beautiful beachfront mansion. The South Sahara has not dried up, polar bears are not extinct but flourishing, the Arctic still has an abundance of ice and Mt Kilimanjaro has an abundance of snow all of which is the exact opposite of what Gore warned was going to happen.
But Gore is not alone in false predictions. Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster for decades. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates have come true. Here are just a few of the headlines from well known publications in the 1970’s.
“Scientists See Ice Age In the Future” (The Washington Post, 1970), “Ice Age Around the Corner” (Chicago Tribune, 1971),”B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon?” (The Chicago Tribune,1975), “The Cooling World” (Newsweek, 1975), “The Big Freeze” (Time Magazine, 1977), “Large Glacial Buildup Could Mean Ice Age” (Spokane Daily Chronicle, 1979)
But by the mid 1980’s the threat somehow had drastically changed from the world freezing to it burning up. Headlines in 1988: “ Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018” (they’re still not). In 1989: “Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000.” In 2000: “Children Won’t Know what Snow Is.” In 2005 : “Manhattan Underwater by 2015.” These are just a fraction of the failed warnings from the “experts.”
It’s quite a stretch to believe that the temperature of this planet of 260 billion cubic miles, a surface of 197 million square miles and a mass of 6.6 sextillion tons, spinning at about 1,000 mph (at the equator) while on its 584 million mile path around the sun, could undergo threats of both cold and hot temperatures of near cataclysmic proportions and that us little humans (and farting cows) could cause it.
The moral of the ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ story is that when someone constantly gives a false alarm, they lose the trust of others. But that does not seem to be happening in our world today.
Despite the many, many erroneous predictions over the years it seems that more and more Americans are drinking the Kool-Aid of the Climate Change cult. Many have made “Mother Earth” an idol. Romans 1: 25 warns us about people like this, “They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise.”
Their talking points create a shell empty of facts. Colossians 2:8 tells us, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”
Here is what we do know: We know that there was a *real* climate crisis in the 1930s, with record-setting heat – much hotter than today – that forced three and half million real climate refugees to flee parts of the Midwest and Great Plains, many of whom would migrate to California. We also know it was warmer during the Renaissance and during the time of Christ than it is today. And in those days, nary an SUV to be found.
Theoretical Physicist Dr. Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary of Energy during the Obama Administration says the weather record shows there is no climate emergency. “Heatwaves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900 and they haven’t gone up in 60 years,” Koonin said, “No global trends in drought or in floods. Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t melting any more rapidly now than it was 80 years ago. There’s no long-term trend in hurricanes over the last hundred years.” That is coming from an Obama appointee!
China, Russia and India, three of the world’s top carbon emitters, are “not playing the(COP26) game” and are moving full-steam ahead in expanding their industrial development with a reliance on fossil fuels. So no matter what the U.S. and Europe do they can have very little effect on the earth’s climate. Pursuing greater regulations and taxes will only prove economically crippling to our economies. The real doomsday device strapped to the Earth is the poverty-inducing climate agenda being forced upon us to fix a non-threatning problem.
And now there has been increasing talk of instituting climate lockdowns, modeled after COVID lockdowns, in which your right to drive a car, fly on a plane, eat a hamburger or own a big house could be suspended by the government in order to fight climate change.
Rising energy prices this winter could be only the beginning. A recent study in Nature, one the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journals, found that meeting Biden’s reduced carbon emission targets could cost more than $2 trillion annually – that’s more than $5,000 per American per year – with costs by the end of this century totaling $1 quadrillion dollars. And if the climate change fanatics have their way we will all be eating insects or 3D-printed fake meat and experiencing California style power blackouts on a regular basis.
The big question is if we don’t spend this outrageous amount of money, will our world actually come to an end in 10 years like AOC and the proponents of The Green New Deal have warned? Considering that climate change experts have been wrong so often in the past maybe we should look for our answers from another source…the One who created this world. His Word is never wrong!
And since God’s word tells us “the earth will wear out like a piece of clothing,” (Isaiah 51:6) it’s hard to get very excited about all the doomsday rhetoric.
Proverbs 8: 29 tells us, “He assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters would not transgress His command.” I’m certain that God’s not in panic mode because the oceans are rising the thickness of two nickels per year. Let’s not forget that the flood in Noah’s day rose more than 22 feet above the highest peaks (Genesis 7: 19). Mount Everest is 29,035 feet. Apparently, the earth is amazingly resilient. And God promised, “Never again will a flood destroy the earth” (Gen. 9: 11).
Some use scriptures like 2 Peter 3: 10-13 and Revelation 16: 8, which talk about the earth being burned up, to advance their global warming doctrine. But those scriptures refer to the end of the age when God’s judgement is poured out (which doesn’t negate Isaiah 51: 6). I don’t think when God’s judgement is poured out on the earth, it’s not going to make any difference whether you’re driving a brand-new electric Tesla or a big Chevy Silverado.
We all have a sacred responsibility to honor our Creator and His creation by making quality decisions to conserve energy and steward the earth’s resources wisely and unselfishly. We should all be engaged in a responsible way regarding legitimate environmental concerns. But we must resist the fear stoked by doomsayers who contradict God’s promise to maintain stability in seasons and oceans.
Let us pray for wisdom for ourselves and especially for those who have made ‘Climate Change’ their new religion.