By Thomas Williamson
3131 S. Archer Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60608
I feel that I have a responsibility to address, in this
publication, the issues that are of current and deep concern in
evangelical Christianity. Global warming is now a hot issue (no
pun intended) among Christians, so the time has come for me to
deal with it.
A recent news article by ABC News states that evangelical Christians
are losing interest in such issues as fighting abortion and homosexuality,
and are turning to new, more popular causes such as the battle
against global warming.
The ABC News article, while not completely accurate in describing
the attitudes of modern evangelicals, has a certain amount of
truth to it, as shown by the large numbers of prominent, respected
evangelical Christian leaders who are publicly calling for Christians
to join the crusade to fight global warming.
This raises such questions as, just how does one fight global
warming? How do we know that the things we do to fight global
warming do not have the effect of inadvertently making global
warming even worse? How can we be sure that global warming is
happening at all? Assuming that global warming really is taking
place, is it something that mankind can control or is it beyond
our control?
President Bush has been heavily criticized for not submitting
the Kyoto Treaty to combat global warming to the U.S. Senate for
ratification. However, President Clinton, who supported the Kyoto
Treaty, never submitted it to the Senate, because the Senate voted
95-0 against the ratification of such a treaty.
The Kyoto Treaty would force America and other industrialized
Western nations to cut down on their carbon emissions, while allowing
Third World nations to continue uncontrolled manufacturing and
other forms of carbon emissions. This would have the effect of
shutting down industries in America and relocating them to such
places as Mexico, China and India where they would continue to
emit the same amounts of carbon dioxide, only from different locations.
How does this help to stop global warming?
The late Jerry Falwell, writing "The Great Myth of Global
Warming" in the April, 2007 National Liberty Journal, warned
that the Kyoto Treaty would inflict major economic damage to America,
costing a minimum of $352 billion almost immediately.
Falwell quoted from a report issued by the Interfaith Stewardship
Alliance, stating that "1. These climate changes are well
within the bounds of natural variability, in which the earth's
climate has warmed and cooled cyclically throughout its history;
2. These changes are largely natural in origin; 3. These changes
are unlikely to be catastrophic to humanity or the rest of the
biosphere; 4. These changes are not susceptible to significant
reduction by any actions we take; and 5. These changes are far
from the most serious threat to humanity and the rest of our environment."
Newsweek, April 28, 1975, had an article entitled "The Cooling
World" reporting on massively accumulating evidence that
the world is cooling down. Global cooling was blamed for tornadoes
in America, shorter growing seasons in England, and declining
ground temperatures and increased snow cover all over North America.
Scientists predicted massive famines, droughts, floods and long
freezes as a result of global cooling, and called for politicians
to take immediate and urgent action to save the planet from global
cooling. Now the scientists (not all of them, just the politically
correct ones) are sounding the alarm about global warming instead.
Some scientists even today believe we are still entering a period
of global cooling. Russian scientist Khabibullo Abdusamatov and
his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences are predicting,
based on measurement of solar emissions, that we are entering
a period of global cooling that will reach its peak between 2055
and 2060. He says, "The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet
from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times."
When Kyoto Treaty supporters warn about "greenhouse gases,"
this has a menacing, sinister sound to it, but all they are really
referring to is carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gaseous
compound that is beneficial to plant growth and whose concentration
has fluctuated for ages, long before the beginning of the Industrial
Age. There is no scientific evidence that carbon emissions, which
would be regulated at extravagant cost by the Kyoto Treaty, have
any relation to average global temperatures. Average global temperatures
declined slightly from 1950 to 1970, precisely when man-made carbon
dioxide emissions were dramatically increasing.
Timothy Ball, Canadian climatologist with a Ph.D in the field,
says that carbon dioxide emissions, and the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, have nothing to do with global warming
or cooling. His study of the Little Ice Age of the 17th Century
indicates that it had no relation with carbon dioxide concentrations,
and much to do with sunspot activity at that time.
Ball, an opponent of the global warming hysteria, believes that
the concern about global warming is based on "Uniformitarianism.
This is the idea that change is gradual over long periods of time.
It was basically established out of Darwin's view, which had to
overcome the church and accommodate his evolutionary theory. So
what it means is that we are all educated to see change as gradual
over long periods of time. So any sudden or dramatic change is
seen as either wrong or unnatural. Of course, that plays into
the hands of the environmentalists, because it means all of this
is not natural, it is something that humans are doing, when in
fact nature varies tremendously all the time."
Left-wing, anti-Bush author Alexander Cockburn, in a May 12, 2007
article, "Hot Air, Cold Cash - Who are the Merchants of Fear?"
on his CounterPunch web site, debunks the global warming myth,
saying, "The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified,
crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful
contribution.
"The world's best known hysteric and self promoter on the
topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming
is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons
from the first day he stepped into Congress. . . . All Gore has
ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to
promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come
a rainy summer (95), a perfectly routine El Nino (97),
or forest fire in Florida (98) and Gore was there for the
photo op, the uplifted finger warning of worse global warming
to come. 97 also found Gore in Glacier National Park, pointing
at Grinnell Glacier and telling the press gravely that it was
melting, which indeed it has been since the end of the Little
Ice Age, 1450 to 1800. Mid-latitude glaciers expanded then, just
as they contracted in the Medieval Warming Period, hotter than
today and thus so vexing to climate alarmists . . . that they
had wiped it off their historical temperature graphs."
Global warming theorists have no explanation for the Medieval
Warm Period, during which Vikings farmed in Greenland. The Vikings
were not driving SUVs, and the modern Industrial Age did not begin
until about 1750. Around the year 1200, temperatures in Europe
were much higher than the average today, and there is no explanation
for this based on human activity or concentrations of carbon dioxide
in the air.
A report in the Asheville, North Carolina Tribune dated March
29, 2007 notes that average temperatures appear to be going up
as measured in large metropolitan areas, caused by the "urban
heat island" effect. However, satellite temperature readings
of the atmosphere, where readings are not affected by urban heating,
show no increase in average temperatures and no global warming.
This report notes that Antarctica has gained ice mass in the last
30 years, reversing a 6000-year melting trend. Meanwhile, astronomers
have determined that global warming is now taking place on the
planet Mars. What is causing that - Martians in SUVs?
Some regions of the Arctic, including Alaska, appear to be warming,
while other Arctic regions are stable or cooling. Some glaciers
worldwide are melting, others are growing. No firm conclusions
can be based on what is going on in just one region.
All glaciers flow and are in constant movement - if they are near
the ocean, there will always be icebergs breaking off in a dramatic
manner, which in no way indicates that the glacier is shrinking
or disappearing, any more than a river discharging water into
the ocean is in danger of drying up.
It is believed that the melting of the Kilimanjaro glacier in
Africa is caused by deforestation of the lower slopes of that
mountain, not by global warming. Satellite measurements of temperatures
in the atmosphere over Kilimanjaro show no warming since 1979.
In my judgment, there is insufficient scientific evidence to show
that we need to shut down our industries, transportation and other
trappings of modern civilization, in order to fight global warming.
This current fad is one bandwagon that Christians need not and
should not get caught up in.