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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.