“Climate Change Through the Eyes of Hope”
Introduction
Politicians, scientists, and many in the public have known for 40 years that the world’s climate is changing. We started understanding what could go wrong with the weather in the early 19th century. Even that long ago physicists realized that carbon dioxide in the air could trap the Sun’s heat and cause warmer weather. This insight is known as the greenhouse effect.
By 1979, climatologists and geologists settled in on a disturbing forecast. Human generated CO2, and a few other greenhouse gases, were accumulating in the atmosphere. In turn, temperatures were rising, and such disruption had the potential to change life on earth. If unchecked the warming might even reduce the planet’s ability to support human life. Scientists even had an approximate timeline for the onset of dire consequences.
Time History of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, by CIRES & NOAA
That framework has not changed. In 1979, scientists from 50 countries met in Geneva and agreed that governments needed to take immediate action to avert the disastrous effect of warming temperatures.
And nothing much happened.
In the years that followed the Geneva meeting, there were more meetings, congressional hearings, and expert testimonies. Decades slipped away. And a large window of opportunity to avert disaster has been closing relentlessly.
All the while, humankind has released millions of additional tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. In turn, the earth has warmed to about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature rise a tad worse than projected.
Extinction
The issue of climate change entered an alarming new phase around 2014, the date of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. That was the point when historical geologists got into conversation. They pointed out that mass extinction events had happened before. Their time frame was hundreds of millions of years in scope. Even before dinosaurs, earthly life has collapsed when climactic conditions changed enough to disrupt the balance of life. Geologists see “extinction” as a dying off of something like 75% of living species. Alarmingly, spikes in atmospheric CO2 were usually at the heart of the change.
We’re now beginning to face the prospect that a warming planet will cease to support most forms of life. This includes human life. We are on track to follow the dinosaurs and coral reefs into extinction.
We’re doing it to ourselves. Previous mass extinction episodes have occurred without automobile assembly plants, jammed freeways, and a million chainsaws leveling primeval forests. Extinction has happened even without tons of greenhouse gasses gushing relentlessly into the atmosphere.
What is the time line for this disaster? One hundred years. And it should be no surprise that these final years of that century will be an unremitting struggle.
The guy standing on a street corner with a sign reading, “The end is near,” is a tired trope for jokes about nutty extremists. So when I write what I’ve just stated about climate change I feel like an alarmist. The world hasn’t come to an end yet. Humanity has gotten through plagues, depressions, and world wars. And the world has not ended. There has always been an escape. There has always been a tomorrow that might be a better day.
But this crisis is different.
I, for example, have brushed off climate change hysteria for decades. I’ve just assumed that warming weather would shift the hardiness zones to the north. Big deal! Maybe alligators and palm trees would migrate to Georgia. Or Ohio. I never focused attention on where humanity’s frenzied burning of fossil fuels was taking the whole planet. And I certainly never faced the prospect that my grandchildren might reach my age in a world that is aflame with drought, fires, plagues, and food riots.
Thoughtful people are confronting two awful truths.
- First, the carbon dioxide count together with average temperatures are edging up relentlessly.
- Second, the carbon content has gotten high like this in the earth’s past. During these spikes most life forms have not survived.
Our burning of prodigious amounts of fossil fuels are releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere that the buildup is beginning to look like the run-up to previous extinctions. In fact, it is probably accurate to say that our own extinction, the sixth big one for Mother Earth, is already in progress.
Very few people feel the desperation that would logically come with knowing that the human pageant is in its last act. The curtain is about to fall. Global warming is like a stage 5 cancer diagnosis for the whole world. It’s a disorienting discovery.
Many people are not paying attention. Their trusted leaders insist that global warming is nothing but a conspiracy. Others, like me, have long been in the “palm trees and alligators phase.” We see some weather-related changes, such as record-breaking summers, but we lump these inconveniences in with the numerous other problems confronting humanity.
More and more, however, people are facing the full horror of what is becoming of our planet. All of the current Democratic presidential candidates see global warming as America’s biggest threat. Some young women in childbearing age feel a fearful reluctance to bring another person into the world. Progressives with a hell-raising bent, like Extinction Rebellion, are sounding the alarm by blocking streets and super-gluing themselves to government buildings. Frightened school-age children are skipping morning class on Friday’s to hold up signs for passing cars to see. We should be ashamed that our children aren’t studying for college or hanging out with friends, but instead laying awake at night thinking that the second half of their lives will be a savage struggle.
The Bible and the Current Climate Crisis
Recent history in the United States is replete with solved problems. The country has gotten through world wars and economic downturns. We’ve walked on the moon and banished diseases. We’ve hardly solved all problems and some issues like racial injustice and corporate corruption have proven to be intractable. We work around these persistent problems by telling ourselves that we’re making progress. In our lazier moments we avert our eyes away from those whose suffering is difficult to look at. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans have a fundamentally optimistic outlook that expects all problems to be solved.
The world of the Bible is also optimistic, but in a different way. Biblical hope is based on God’s faithfulness. The expression “biblical proportions” is apt. Over and over, the Bible deals with daunting catastrophes, humanity’s stupidity and insistence on defying God, and total destruction of by ruthless marauders. .
Scripture’s pages bristle with tales like the Genesis Flood, which comes on the heals of the story of creation. The Flood story is surprisingly nuanced and rewards the careful reader with insight into how social injustice disrupts the ecological balance. The flood waters remind the reader of the primordial chaos that the Creator has just tamed in the first days of Creation. Now, humanity has run wild and chaos returns and wipes out all but a tiny group of people and animals. This story nourishes us today, worried about our own disruption of the intricate balance of chemicals in the air, which in turn threatens all life.
The Old Testament devotes much attention to the run-up to and ultimate annihilation of Israel at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. For an Israelite, being overrun by a brutal enemy and marched off into exile was emotionally the end of the world. The drama of the Exile shares with our current climate crisis an impressive set of common themes. In both, human behavior is linked with ecological well-being. Jesus, God in the flesh, gets murdered and buried. The Book of Revelation’s visionary depiction of history’s end is a picture of a restored creation and reunification of all people and God living among them.
These stories and the biblical understanding of what it means to be a person, the vocation of animals, the connection between human depravity and ecological upset, and the restoration of all things touches on the same themes that we find in our current climate emergency.
Both the Bible and climate change invite us to ponder the end of life as we know it. Americans and even Christians are unaccustomed to thinking of the ultimate destiny of the world or their lives. Facing the fact that humanity may be in the early stages of a climate-driven “extinction event” forces us to ponder how history ends and what humanity’s enduring purpose and legacy is
Facing the prospect that one path into the future will lead to extinction is more than sitting around and grieving the end of humanity. Reckoning with humanity’s ending also makes clear the intensity of effort necessary to prevent the worst cataclysm. We are in fact in a struggle for the lives of our grandchildren. It is not enough to opt for paper bags in the grocery check-out or skipping plastic straws. Changing our economy or lifestyles is not too drastic.
For me, to read David Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth and other sobering reports that dare look where we’re headed is to be carried back into the world and thought of both the Old and New Testaments.
Most importantly, biblical faith assures us that neither humanity nor God’s creation will be lost. Our problem right now is that we don’t see clearly how God will honor this promise. So Christians must act on faith, both to protect the world and the poor who bear the brunt of fires, storms, drought, and high water. The Bible also presses us to live with eyes open, make abrupt change, labor in hope, and be the friend to every person and living thing in the path of climate chaos.
The Class
The Goal:
This course will nurture each participants’ ability to face and live confidently in the midst of climate change’s terrible prospects because the Bible continues to shed a light of hope and a call to redemptive action even in the scariest of times.
Assumptions:
- that the current scientific consensus about the climate crisis, the reality of warming, and human responsibility for it is correct, and
- that the Old and New Testaments provide insight into and guidance for Christians even in the face of the unprecedented emergency that climate change will bring.
Theological Themes
The cluster of theological themes that the class will work with include
- the nature and purpose of Creation,
- the vocation of animals
- the calling of faithful persons,
- the prophetic consciousness,
- the connection of justice and ecology,
- and the restoration of all things.
Course Schedule
| Class | Date | Time | Room | Title | Link |
| 1 | January 12, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | Scott Sabin and Plant With Purpose | More Information |
| 2 | January 19, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “What is Climate Change and How Does it Affect Us?” | More Information |
| 3 | January 26, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “What Will Global Warming Bring?” | More Information |
| 4 | February 2, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “This is My Father’s World” | More Information |
| 5 | February 16, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “Climate Change through the Eyes of the Prophets” | More Information |
| 6 | March 1, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “On Earth as it is in Heaven” | More Information |
| 7 | March 8, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “The World-Changing Power of One Person” | More Information |
| 8 | March 15, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | More Information | |
| 9 | March 22, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “Population Growth, Poverty, War and the Environment” | More Information |
| 10 | March 29, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. | 223 | “The Resurrection of All Things” | More Information |
Resource List
The Future of Humanity
Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth
Kolbert, Elizabeth: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Klein, Naomi: This Changes Everything
Rich, Nathanial: Losing Earth: A Recent History
Hedges, Chris: The Last Act of the Human Comedy
Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Fransen, Jonathan: What If We Stopped Pretending?
Kirby, Alex: “The Paris Agreement Is Too Little, Too Late, Scientists Say“
Theological
Zaleha and Szasz: “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change”
Wright, N.T.: Surprised by Hope
Heschel, Abraham: The Prophets (Vol I and II)
NT Wright article on climate change
Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on the Care for our Common Home
Technical Information and Charts
John Cook, Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran et al: Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming (PDF)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Global Warming of 1.5oC (Summary for Policy Makers
IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate
IPCC “Climate Change and Land”
Ritchie and Roser: CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The Confidence Trap: Balancing the Proof Burden in the Climate Conversation
IPCC Chart Page: Resources for presentations and study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
James Hansen gives a basic 17 minute talk on the nature of climate change.
Pew Research Center: “How People Worldwide View Climate Change“
Pew Research Center: “How Americans See Climate Change in Five Charts”
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication: “Climate Change in the American Mind“
Web Sites
101 Top Resources on Climate Change This is a good place to kick start a survey of the web for quality material. This site includes a handful of climate skeptic sites.
Climate (Change) Denial
Oreskes and Conway: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. This is an excellent orientation on how corporations, mostly oil companies, financed a network of climate denying “experts” and media personalities to popularize the idea that scientists were in disagreement about global warming. This effort was basically to stall regulation of fossil fuels. An entertaining version of the same information is also available in a well-produced documentary by the same title.
Cornwall Alliance: Possibly the best religious climate denial website consisting of a group of conservative theologians and evangelical Christians. This site may be the go-to place for evangelical churches to buttress their insistence that climate change is a hoax. Critics allege that this site is funded by the oil industry.
Exxon 1982 Primer on CO2 Greenhouse Effect This remarkably well-studied and accurate document gives a good historical sense of how much oil companies were engaged in climate study from an early point.
