Baby, It’s Cold Outside (And It May Be Getting Colder)

As global warming alarmists focus their angst on the freak seventy degree day we had here in Washington in January as proof positive of human-caused global warming, several studies have been published that ought to (but probably won’t) cool their heated rhetoric.

On February 26, blogger Michael Asher reported on Daily Tech that the most recent tracking of temperature data by the four major global temperature tracking groups indicate that “over the past year global temperatures have dropped precipitously.”  The total amount of cooling ranges between 0.65° C and 0.75° C.  This is “a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded in the past 100 years.”

Is global cooling a certainty? No. Truth be told, we simply don’t know what the climate will be like a hundred years from now. It’s a matter we have no choice but to leave in the hands of the almighty.

This new information, however, does not mean that Christians have no environmental task.  As Dr. E. Calvin Beisner writes in the IRD Mount Nebo Paper, Setting Priorities for Creation Care:  What Is the Most Important Environmental Task Facing American Christians Today?: 

The dominion mandate to Adam and Eve at the creation makes human responsibility for creation stewardship inescapable. Neither our fall into sin nor the redeeming work of Christ eliminates that responsibility. Rather, the fall complicates it, as the Earth too suffers the consequences of human sin.

Beisner then goes on to say that for Christians “redemption elevates environmental stewardship, making it part of the hope-filled task of the redeemed in spreading the kingdom of Christ.”

What can we do?  Rather than trying vainly to mitigate climate change, we can prepare for climate change.  Beisner concludes:

To put it briefly and simply: the greatest threat to the environment is poverty. It is also the greatest threat to human material well-being. Poverty drives high per-capita and per-unit-of-production pollution emission rates and low pollution-cleanup rates. These contribute to high rates of human disease and death, as well as the waste of resources, deforestation, and loss of habitat for other species. The implication is clear:  Economic development is the most important environmental task facing American Christians today.

The poor are always the people who are most vulnerable to the climate.  Heat or cold, drought or flood, blizzard or hurricane, the poor suffer the most.  And they suffer for two reasons.  First the poor often lack sufficient shelter for the elements and second, because the climate changes economic realities and the poor are the most vulnerable to the economic climate. 

People, as Becky Norton-Dunlop of the Heritage Foundation says, are our most important natural resource.  And whether the next hundred years is marked by warming or cooling, the poor will need our help to rise out of poverty and the accompanying environmental degradation.

I hope you’ll download and study the Mount Nebo Paper on Setting Priorities for Creation Care.  Come rain or come shine, come heat or come cold, there’s a world of good we can—and must—do together.

For More Information, Visit the Cornwall Alliance Website