Christian climatologist: Global warming ‘threatens the concept that God is control’

By Brian Bethel
3 April 2012 In the Book of Revelation, Christian believers are promised, along with the return of Christ, a new heaven and a new earth. But Christian climatologist Katharine Hayhoe said in an interview Tuesday that until the promise is fulfilled believers in the here and now aren’t excused from tending the planetary garden granted them. “It may happen any day, but we don’t know when it is,” she said on the topic of Christ’s expected return. So in the meantime? “Make wise choices,” said Hayhoe. The associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University spoke to Hardin-Simmons University students and others Tuesday on climate change and her role as director of the Climate Science Center at Tech. To Hayhoe, the earth, being “God’s second-greatest gift” after Christ himself, is made up of resources given by the creator. But in return, she said, people have produced massive amounts of waste, resulting in an island of plastic garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as big as Texas, despoiled the habitats of millions of species and plants, and created air pollution from burning fossil fuels. Most insidious, she said, are heat-trapping gases — colorless and odorless, but to Hayhoe and other climatologists producing an obvious impact on the planet. “Every time we burn these gases they produce heat, and we know how much we’re been producing over the last 100 years because we keep good records of how much gas and oil we’ve been burning,” she said. There is a natural greenhouse effect, she said, created by earth’s atmosphere. As a blanket keeps one warm by trapping body heat, the atmosphere traps the earth’s heat and doesn’t let it escape into space, she said. “But we are taking something that is 100 percent natural and 100 percent good and increasing it just a little bit,” Hayhoe said. “… We’re taking something that is necessary for life, and we’re adding too much to it — more than God designed.” The impact is fairly clear, she said. Temperatures go up and down year to year, due to the weather, but over long-term climate time scales, 30 years or more, it is “definitely getting warmer.” “The 2000s were the warmest decade on record, 2010 tied as the warmest year on record, and 2011 was the warmest La Niña year ever recorded,” she said, a weather pattern that usually means cooling. […] The result is expected hotter summers, frequent heat waves, major increases in heavy rainfall events, and sea levels rising, all of which can have detrimental effects here at home and — more often — in areas far removed from U.S. shores. “We have, over the last 100 years or so, neglected what this (climate change) is doing to God’s gift to us — the planet,” Hayhoe said. Speaking after her first lecture Tuesday morning, Hayhoe said that in her opinion, much of Christian opposition to the idea of climate change is based on fear, not logic. “It’s such a huge problem that frankly, it’s easier to ignore it than the acknowledge the reality and feel like we have to do something about it,” she said. And from a purely selfish perspective, she said, there’s often little incentive to take action, she said. […] “I think we are really afraid that addressing this issue will threaten all that we hold dear,” she said. “For some, it even threatens the concept that God is control.” […]

Christian climatologist tackles God and global warming at Hardin-Simmons University