Three Stories about Climate Change

I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the time—after all, I am 67 and an official member of AARP. One of the things I was told by an elderly acquaintance in Florida was that the whole idea of global warming had come from an 8th grader’s term paper. And he believed it. I asked him if he ever watched NASA launch spacecraft to go to the space station—since we could see those launches from our trailer park. Yes, he said, he had and they were pretty amazing: the huge ball of fire hurling the spacecraft into the heavens and then in no time at all disappearing, only to return from outer space precisely on time two weeks later after having traveled hundreds of thousands of miles and then landing as neatly as you might pull your car into the garage. Amazing! The precision of it, the marvelous science.
Well, I said to him, do you realize that NASA, the same organization that put men on the moon and now sends them to the space station, is the organization that has been doing the cutting edge research on global warming for more than three decades. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been in the forefront of climate change research. And furthermore, the scientists at NASA believe that global warming has brought us to the brink of disaster. Yet you want to belittle the whole idea of global warming by reducing it to the significance of an 8th grader’s term paper. I just don’t get it.
I tell this story because it illustrates the illogical resistance to the idea of climate change and human involvement in it that exists—especially with my contemporaries, the old folks.
But it is not just the older generation that resists the idea of global warming; most people in my small corner of the world seem to think the idea of climate change is silly or irrelevant. I was told a few years ago that at an area Christian school it’s just better not to bring up the subject of climate change because it’s too controversial. Imagine that. One of the most significant issues of our time, an issue that cries out for a Christian response, and it couldn’t be talked about in a Christian school. I hope that’s not still the case.
At Dordt College there’s been a good deal of talk about climate change—at least in the Science Department. About a month ago I attended a lecture on climate change at Dordt given by a man who was both a preacher and a scientist. His central argument for caring for the creation, and specifically for being concerned about climate change, was this: We must care about the creation because we care about people. We must do what we can to slow down climate change because people are dying from the effects of climate change. In other words, the issue of global warming is a pro life issue.
For the next hour or so he gave us facts and statistics about the reality of climate change and the devastating effects it is already having on people all around the world. And these effects usually are in one of these areas: loss of food, inaccessibility of clean drinking water, health problems and war.
It was a stunning and disturbing litany of present and coming disaster. And challenged us to live in such a way that we diminish our personal consumption of CO2 producing energy. At the same time the entire presentation was permeated with the assurance that we need not worry or despair because God is in control.
When the speaker had completed his presentation, the floor was opened for questions and comments. (As is often the case, there were more comments than questions, and the comments were usually critical.) One of the questioners gently chided the speaker for arguing that we should care for creation because we care for humanity when the real reason we care for creation is because God commands us to. Someone else criticized the speaker for being too negative.
But then a young man who identified himself as a farmer made what was to me the most startling comment. It went something like this: You scientists are just trying to play God. You think that God needs you to take care of the world. Suppose you’re right and the world’s climate is getting warmer; God can take care of that if he wants to. It says in the Heidelberg Catechism that ‘not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my heavenly father.’ That shows that God’s in control and if he wants the temperature of the world to be cooler, he will simply change it.
The speaker seemed so surprised by this argument that he did not really offer a rebuttal. He respectfully told the commenter that he disagreed with him and moved on to another question. This left me frustrated and I raised my hand to respond but the meeting was adjourned before my response could be heard. So I’m taking this opportunity to say what I wish I could have said then:
One of the most inexplicable and mysterious things to me is why on earth God so often chooses to have his work done by humans. As Paul puts it, almost humorously, “It was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (I Corinthians 1:21). Eugene Peterson in The Message puts it even more emphatically: “God took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things.”
The point is that God in his wisdom uses humans to do much of his work in the world. And that’s not only true in the case of bringing the gospel to those who have not heard it; and it is also the case with caring for the earth. Already in the second chapter of Genesis God commissions humans to tend and care for the creation. And the theme continues throughout the scriptures, right into Revelations 11 where John hears the twenty-four elders invoke punishment for those who have violated that creation care mandate when they say: “the time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth.”
Would the questioner have made the same argument to a missionary who was challenging us to go into the world and make disciples of all nations? Would he assert that missionaries think God needs them when the doctrine of election should suffice to bring all those God had chosen to be saved into the kingdom? Would he chastise someone from his church who used the science of medicine to find a cure for her cancer? Would he say the doctors were playing God? Would he argue that since God in his providence could save the woman from cancer if it were his will—quite apart from medical science—she was being unfaithful by going to the doctors? I don’t think so. And I just don’t get it.
And, quickly, a third story. The Dordt faculty had been treated by the Board of Trustees to a banquet and afterward we heard a presentation on global warming from the science department. The presentation featured lots of graphs and charts, evidence of all kinds that validated the notion of human cause for global warming. One of the science profs tried valiantly to argue that humans were not responsible for the climate change that was occurring, but he could not produce much evidence and eventually admitted that. When it was over and we were standing outside in the fragrant spring air, one of the board members, a bright and articulate middle-aged pastor, turned to me and said, “There’s nothing to it. It’s all a lot of nonsense.”
No rebuttal, no evidence, just a categorical statement—as if it were biblical truth. I just don’t get it.
Three stories: an old guy in Florida, a much younger man in Iowa, and a middle-aged preacher, all three adamantly opposed to the idea that we ought to be the least bit concerned about global climate change.
Perhaps you are saying, well, Schelhaas, you have set up some convenient straw men to make the opposition look silly.
But I must ask, what are the arguments of merit against the acknowledgement that climate change is occurring around the globe and human activity is largely responsible for it? The climate experts at Dordt College (Dr. Douglas Allen and Dr. Robb De Haan in particular) would say there are none. Ninety-five percent of climate scientists around the world say the same thing. In the last election both major parties made strong statements about the dangers of global warming and the need to do something about it.
Yet so many Christians in the places I live scorn the very words global warming. I don’t get it, but I will try to understand by making a couple more Plumbline forays into the world of climate change in the weeks to come.