Download the old testament prophets and climate change denial

THE OLD TESTAMENT PROPHETS
AND CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL
Copyright © 2015 Mark Strecker
After the death of Solomon, the ancient kingdom of Israel split in
two. The more populous north kept the name Israel while the smaller one to
the south, which centered around Jerusalem, became known as Judah.
Throughout the two nations’ existence a number of prophets came and went,
the majority of whom warned the Hebrews that if they failed to heed God’s
laws and to worship Him exclusively, bad things would happen. When the
Assyrians conquered both nations, the northern prophets Amos and Hosea
told the people this was God’s punishment. When one of Israel’s kings,
Hoshea, failed to listen, the Assyrians wiped his kingdom off the face of the
earth.
In Judah, the prophet Isaiah gave one of that kingdom’s rulers,
Hezekiah, the same advice, telling him not to defy the Assyrians because
God had used them as part of His plan for Judah. God would reveal the time
for Assyria’s fall. Hezekiah listed for a while, ensuring Judah’s survival where
other mutinous client states fell, but when his patience ran out, he joined
with Egypt in rebellion and Assyria made short work of both nations. Before
Judah collapsed completely, Hezekiah heeded Isaiah’s advice to surrender,
sparing the kingdom from complete annihilation.
Roughly 117 years later, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II,
made Judah a client state of his empire. At the same time the prophet
Jeremiah warned that while the people of Judah kept strictly to the letter of
God’s laws, they failed to honor the spirit. They needed to mend their ways
or they would suffer God’s wrath. They ignored Jeremiah and soon enough
King Nebuchadnezzar came in force and conquered Jerusalem, installing his
own king to rule. He took back with him to Babylon Judah’s royal family as
well as a number of prominent citizens. This became known as the
Babylonian Captivity or Exile.
Jeremiah told the remaining people to accept this as God’s
punishment. A few years later Judah rebelled again, so once more the
Babylonians returned and lay siege to Jerusalem. Jeremiah warned
Zedekiah, Judah’s puppet king, to surrender or face destruction. The king
ignored the advice and the Babylonians destroyed the nation. The last
survivors of the Hebrew people, those living in Babylon, would only return
home a generation later when King Cyrus of Persia gave them permission to
do so.
These accounts, much of them verified by external historical and
archeological evidence, provide us today with a good lesson: listen to the
warnings of those in the know, or you will suffer the consequences. We
ignore at our peril the warning of the scientific community about what will
happen to the Earth if we continue to spew carbon dioxide and methane into
its atmosphere. Yet a significant number of Americans refuse to do so not
because of legitimate evidence to the contrary—which doesn’t exist—but
rather because to accept this involves sacrificing luxuries like fuel-guzzling
trucks and coal mines.
That humans can’t change the climate seems absurd considering we
can blow up the planet ten times over with atomic weapons. Indeed, no one
disputes that if seven or eight hydrogen bombs exploded simultaneously, a
nuclear winter would result. But we humans have other, less spectacular yet
equally destructive ways to altar the planet in profound ways.
Take the Dust Bowl as an example. Farmers caused this disaster when
they removed the deep-rooted Plains grasses, which held the soil in place,
then tilled the land. Had they not done this, the drought during the 1930s
would never have resulted in the mass of blowing soil that made its way to
the East Coast and beyond. Indeed, had the grasses remained, the drought
might not have lasted so long or been so severe. Other examples of humancreated ecological disasters include the “death” of Lake of Erie in the 1960s
and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (http://www.ibtimes.com/exxonvaldez-oil-spill-anniversary-effects-facts-pictures-captains-drinkingrumors-1856434) in Alaska from which this region still hasn’t fully
recovered.
Despite such clear historical precedents as this, when it comes to
human-caused climate change, mass denial is the order of the day. So far as
I’m concerned, this is akin to saying the Moon is made out of cheese, the
Earth is flat, the Sun rotates around the Earth, and water doesn’t freeze at
0° Celsius. Possibly this position comes from ignorance. The “logic” goes
something like this. We’ve had record cold winters for the last two years
here in Ohio, a resident might say, so therefore there is no global warming.
But weather and climate are two different things. Weather is what we
experience when we go outside. Climate is the big picture: the overall
environment in the long term. While Ohio did indeed have record cold during
the winter of 2014–2015, the United States nonetheless had its warmest
winter
on
record!
(http://www.weather.com/news/climate/news/warmest-wintercoldest-february-2015)So just because you find it exceptionally cold
where you live hardly means that other places aren’t experiencing
unseasonable warmth.
I will admit that I while I’ve never doubted that human activity causes
global warming, I had never believed that it could create sudden,
spectacular destruction such as one saw in the movie The Day After
Tomorrow. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262) Then Hurricane
Sandy occurred and I realized the folly of this conviction. While scientists
can’t claim climate change had anything to do with the creation of the
weather systems that came together to generate this superstorm, they can
definitively say that global warming made it much worse because higher
ocean levels caused by melting icecaps made the flooding much worse than
would
have
occurred
several
decades
earlier.
http://www.ibtimes.com/hurricane-sandy-anniversary-changingglobal-climate-means-more-superstorms-sandy-1714424)
Just as the Hebrews ignoring their prophets’ warnings caused the
destruction of their nations, if we don’t start listening the consensus of the
world’s scientists about climate change, we’re going to be in for our own
calamity. Moreover, the Old Testament gives us a story of what happens
when people did listen to one of God’s messengers. When the prophet Jonah
went to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and told its people to repent their
wickedness else face the wrath of God, they listened. As a result, God
spared their city.