Climate Alarmism

No one dislikes alarmism more than I do.   Through my adult life “epidemics” have tumbled over each other like waves at the beach.  There were no weapons of mass destruction, the terror warning colors are no longer a daily thing to worry about.  The crack babies of the 1980’s are doing okay.  We’ve staved off nuclear catastrophe, both from bombs and power plant accidents.  We’re surviving even the “epidemic” epidemic.   

The climate crisis is different.  One big difference is that climate scientists are reluctant to spell out the whole awful truth.  Unlike medical people and social agencies who really want to jolt a unconcerned public into action, climate scientists don’t want to state baldly that the world is coming to an end.  That assignment has traditionally gone to the members of a doomsday cult or the bearded extremist standing on a street corner with a sign. 

Another factor is that professional climate deniers loudly criticize climate scientists as alarmists.  Media attacks on climate experts have placed a heavy hand of caution on people writing and speaking about the state of the climate. 

And of course, climate reports are complicated, like many scientific studies.  Scientists can state their conclusions in crisp, jargon-laden sentences and charts, without screaming, “We’re screwed!” 

Recently, another factor has popped up that has made the climate situation seem even more dire.   The public and policy-makers are realizing that there have been several extinction events in the earth’s distant past.  These serve as a road map to what is occurring now.  Recent-copyright books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s, The Sixth Extinction or Peter Brannon’s, The Ends of the World have altered the common idea that evolution has taken a straight unbroken path to today’s Homo sapiens. Actually, the earth has seen life arise and die out catastrophically five times over. Most of the extinctions have been driven by carbon buildup in the atmosphere.  All have wiped out so many plant and animal species that the entire planet has done an evolutionary reset.  The entire life system, with new kinds of plants and creatures, regenerated itself. 

Ironically, the climate skeptic is technically correctly when he scoffs at global warming with the words, “This is part of a natural cycle and we’ll return to normal after a while.”  Unfortunately, the time lag for a new normal is several hundred million years.

I read with great interest Yuval Noah Harari’s, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind.   In that book he speculates about the end of humanity.  He thought in that book that we’ve got a thousand years left .  As I read that, months before my awakening to climate crisis, I was emotionally jolted.  What a shame if he’s right. 

More recently in Harari’s follow-up book, Homo Deus, he shortens that time frame to 100 to 200 years.  And he isn’t talking about climate.  Stated simplistically, Harari thinks that we will cede control of all things to computers and machines, rendering human beings superfluous.  

True to form, the Christian Churches are slow to bring their considerable resources of persuasion and mobilization into the service of ameliorating the catastrophe that is developing.  First of all, climate denial is a pretty much a “White” problem.   And it is a Christian problem.  When evangelicals and Roman Catholics mostly sitting out the dance, and with the decline in academic theological publishing and college-level study of theology, there is precious little robust theological contribution to the conversation.

Here’s what I’m thinking as I write this.  I really do believe that without vigorous international cooperation and deep-running change, my three-year-old granddaughter’s life will be lived out amid global famine, social breakdown, and unremitting struggle. 

I also believe that this crisis touches a number of Christian theological themes that the church has neglected.   I’m including myself, a minister, as a culprit.

Here’s a list of areas of intersection between biblical faith and the dreadful future that looms before us:

1. The nature of humanity, which bears God’s image, is the crown of creation, and God’s partner in the administration of blessing to all peoples—in fact to the entire Cosmos.  These core affirmations about the nature of the human are in stark contradiction to the prospect of human extinction.  Christians need to find ways that both science and biblical faith may be held in tension.  Dropping either faith or science is a cop-out.
2. Human agency.  Often in the biblical story a faithful and hard-working human being has influence that we often attribute to providence.  Jesus was forever reminding people who were healed that they themselves in partnership with God had brought about their recovery.  Noah manages to build a gigantic boat, far beyond one person’s capacity.  Christians need to reconsider their own Spirit-driven power.
3. The connection between ecological breakdown and human sin.  The creation reverts to uncreated chaos when people sin.  I’m not talking about petty sensual sins or moodiness.  I’m talking about massive injustice which ruins whole peoples’ lives, makes them refugees, or takes years from them.  When such conditions obtained in the Old Testament, as before the Genesis Flood or when the Hebrew people were in Egypt, catastrophe ensued.  Notice that the catastrophe, often attributed to God’s judgment/justice had a distinctly ecological character.  The Egyptians enslaved an entire nation and the water became polluted and the frog population exploded.  People took the divinely-intended vocation of the creation in a wrong direction in Noah’s time and there was severe sea-level rise.  Creation itself is an important messenger and servant for the Creator.  Sin’s connection with the health of the creation needs to be brought into conversation with our present climate and justice crisis.
4. The prophets’ struggle and ultimate failure to elicit behavior change in their hearers, especially in the leadership class.  This biblical theme really speaks to the sluggishness the entire world is having changing course.
5. The scope of salvation.  This is a general Christian era issue and is addressed specifically in Christian end times images.  Are individual’s saved or is the scope of Jesus’ death and resurrection a cosmic matter.  I increasingly lean towards the latter, given the “new heaven and new earth” language in the Book of Revelation and other places.

So, as David Wallace-Well’s memorably says at the beginning of his book, Uninhabitable Earth, “It’s worse, it’s much worse, than you think.”  It is.  But until we face just what we’re up against or what’s up against us, we won’t have a chance to escape…I’ll dare to say it…the end.

Additional Resources:

“Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change”

IPCC Special Report: “Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C”

“What Climate Scientists Really Think”