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mordecai-pyre — Why are Christians so silent on climate change
Published: 2014-01-05 20:51:47 +0000 UTC; Views: 671; Favourites: 18; Downloads: 0
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Are Christians so (supposedly) occupied by eternal issues that temporal details have become secondary?For my own sake I want to lay out my difficulty with Christians remaining silent.
There are six arguments that I find most often put forward in an attempt to justify this silence:
More here: hdssh.weebly.com/1/post/2014/0…
UPDATE 1: This was not meant to be a proof of climate change, but mostly a consideration of a Christians thinking about our responsibility in the face of climate change. However, some comments seem to have sidetracked into the polarized debate on evidence. I still fail to understand why Christians are so defensive ... the evidence is stronger than "smoking causes cancer".
UPDATE 2: The moderator from Jesus-Loves-You group wisely suggested I add my conclusion from the blog - I agree, so here it is:
When all is said and done
My thinking will still mature, as I hope does yours. However, I've tried to lay out a case that does not start with eco-activism and is not mired in secondary interpretations of scientific evidence. How might I sum this up?
How about:
"Being a Christian is all about a personal relationship with Jesus. If my professed desire is to be like Jesus (be holy), then does the pattern of my life reflect this desire? For Jesus, being holy was manifest in compassion, service, simplicity, and doing the Father's will. Do my actions contribute to inequality and poverty? Is my comfort ahead of my service? Will I contribute to an age where future generations suffer?"
To be silent in voice or action on climate change is, I uncomfortably argue (because I know I fail too), giving lie to our / my professed faith.
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Comments: 23
In the past 10 years I have come to believe that Christ either never existed or if he did, was NOT God, did NOT say or do anything the gospels say he did, when crucified was not buried, did NOt rise from the dead, and will never return,
He said he was coming back in the lifetime of those who saw him ascend. WEll, it is now 1900+ years overdue , and every time we set a date for him to return , it is NOT kept. No explanation even.
Therefore I am NOT awaiting his return, or any rapture =and have little patience with these preachers .
No God runs things and all is chance, Whatever our afterwlife is, there is NO hell.
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So Christians must to take care of planet and they mustn´t be silent at a climage change. Thank you very much for sharing it. I´m a Christian and I care about nature. I try to care for it every time I can.
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woah! such a cool pic! 
It's beautiful!
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Outstanding photo!
I agree. I think we as a community should think about climate change more, because it is a big issue that needs to be helped for the sake of other lives.
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I hate to say this, but Christian silence about climate change seems to be somewhat politically motivated, at least that's from my own experience. The Republican party generally ignores the warnings about climate control (because they are controlled by the oil and natural gas companies in part). Since the Republicans nay say it, so do many church goers. I am an oceanographer and an instructor of oceanography and teach students about climate change. If I mention it in church circles they shrug and walk away. I see it as another sign that this is a sinful world and we are destined to destroy ourselves without God's intervention. Like everything else good that God has given us, humans pervert it. We were made caretakers of this planet but too many people are more like rapists. Greed will be our undoing. Climate change is another sign of the times but that doesn't mean we have to help it along with our ignorance. I could post a list of ways all of us can help make things better if you'd like.
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Thanks for this encouraging (to me) comment. I still struggle to comprehend why Christians are so reluctant to look at the evidence in the face when it comes to climate change - I would have thought we should be at the forefront of the debate. If I take a cynical view, this speaks volumes about contemporary western church culture. I live in a developing nation alongside tremendous poverty, and the climate impact touches these communities far harder than developed nation societies.
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In my case, I see that climate change is real, but it is not done by us. It's a natural event and it's something we shouldn't worry about, God has in it in control and there for a reason.
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Well, I am Christian and I have quite a bit to say about climate change kajm.deviantart.com/gallery/33…
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Pagan here.... Temperatures have only been recorded over the last 200 years, and climate change "science" has been falsified. They've put thermometers on dark roofs, with AC units right next to them, which makes the thermometer unreliable since it's measuring the temperature of the hot air blowing on it from the AC unit. Few thermometers they use to track their data are legit.
Additionally, their predictions have all been false. The climate change "scientists" published a journal late last year revising their predictions in light of the fact that the Earth's climate actually hasn't changed that much since 1970. Of course, they were quick to note that naysayers (including others in the scientific community) would cite it as proof that climate change is false.
There's also the fact that it -ISN'T- 99% of the scientific community agreeing on this. It's actually a much smaller subset. That number was pulled out of thin air by a journalist who was interviewing scientists who believed in climate change. 99% of those scientists agreed. He didn't poll the entire scientific community. There are quite a few legitimate scientists who are skeptical of their colleagues' data. Climatologists predicted that the hurricane season of 2013 would be the most devastating on record thanks to climate change. Yet... it wasn't. Climatology is as imprecise as meteorology. People get pissed at the weatherman and ridicule meteorology as the only science where you can be wrong 99% of the time and still keep your job. Yet they take climatology, which is just as imprecise, as gospel.
And if fellow scientists are skeptical of the data, why are so many non-scientific people lapping up the propaganda? Not a single "green" thing has actually done anything to fix this "problem", either. "Green" energy is cost-prohibitive in many cases. Solar only works if you live in the desert, wind only works if you're in a really windy region, geothermal is nice but really expensive to implement, electric cars aren't always reliable and it's hard to find places to plug it in. Solar panels are also a hazard to the fire department, contain toxic chemicals (which makes them -not- green but hey people don't actually care), and are difficult to dispose of when they cease to function correctly.
Then, just to cite a news case I find amusingly ironic, climatologists went to Antarctica, in the summertime, to prove that the Antarctic ice was melting. They promptly got stuck in the ice and had to be rescued. One of the ships that went to rescue them, the Chinese ship Xue Long or "Snow Dragon", is currently stuck in the ice, just like the Russian ship that originally got stuck. The Coast Guard is currently sending an icebreaker down there to break both ships out. Seems to me like Mother Nature either has a sense of humor, or the data on Antarctic ice is too limited to accurately predict what the ice is actually doing. It's probably both, given that we've only been tracking stuff in Antarctica for a century. When you're talking about the climate of something that's as old as the Earth, 200 years of data is insufficient to accurately predict anything.
Yet they regard skeptics as uneducated buffoons. Go figure, hm?
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Just check out satellite pictures of the poles. I am a scientist and oceanographer. There is plenty of legitimate proof that the planet is warming up and that we are the cause of it. There is a direct correlation between the rise of the average temperature on the planet and the start of the industrial revolution. Some of my information comes straight from other scientists and NOT from journalists.
How I see it is if the politicians keep sticking their heads in the sand (or someplace else that is anatomically impossible) because they are funded by the big corporate oil and energy companies. To admit that we are doing something to contribute to the problem would also mean that they would have to start seriously looking for alternative forms of energy. There is a lot of misinformation in the other direction because there are billions of fossil fuel energy dollars funding their own propaganda.
And by the way, the hurricane season was not devastating for the Atlantic but it WAS for the Pacific.
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And how do you know that isn't the natural pattern? How long have we had satellite data? Not long enough to create an accurate long-term model. That's why every year their predictions are wrong. They're just as accurate as meteorologists, yet people react to their information as though it's gospel. That's what I take issue with regarding climatology. There isn't enough data to say that it's natural. They're taking a wild guess based on temperature data from the late 1700s/early 1800s which is not fully accurate because they didn't have the instrumentation we do now. The Galileo thermometer is not anywhere near as accurate as the digital thermometers of today. If any other science did used that sort of data, they'd be laughed at. However, any other science would be able to replicate the data from that time period with current instrumentation. Call that legitimate proof if you want, but I call it idiocy.
-One- damn hurricane in a season that's devastating is... um... actually pretty -normal-. Andrew, Katrina, Ike... Hells, even 2-3 in a season are normal, ask Haiti and the other Carribean Islands. It sucks for the individuals living there, of course, but it's normal. These wingnuts were saying we'd see 5-6 devastating storms approaching Sandy levels in the ATLANTIC during the season. How many happened? None. I live on the Atlantic coast. Hurricanes are kind of a big deal to my region. They're something we have to pay attention to.
As for alternate forms of energy, nuclear's one of the safest forms. Of course, there's a metric shitton of misinformation out there about it so it won't be powering the grid. Idiots think that reactors are a bomb waiting to go off (they're not) and, thanks to Chernobyl and Fukushima (which were incorrectly built hence their problems), think that reactors are 1 step away from a heinous meltdown (they're not). Of course, hippies and "environmentalists" get their panties in a wad about it because they can't pull their collective head from their ass and understand that American reactors are built in such a way that Fukushima and Chernobyl could not possibly happen. (source: Naval nuclear mechanic spouse working on 50+ year old reactors)
I do agree that we need to get off fossil fuels, but that's only because gasoline is fucking expensive. However, where else would we derive all our plastics? A considerable number of plastics are derived from byproducts of gasoline production. Hells, even Vaseline is a byproduct! Hello, petroleum jelly? Switching to alternative forms of energy has repercussions elsewhere, a fact that very few people with a college education seem to understand. They're so specialized that they cannot see how things interconnect, which is a failing of the college system. I find so many scientists that are ignorant of the world as a whole that it's, frankly, off-putting. They all have an agenda and they're all after funding. They're no better than politicians. Even when they're discredited (Wakefield and his "vaccines cause autism bullshit", for an example), their falsified data is -still- taken as gospel by laymen, even though it was cooked up for a specific purpose.
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I WISH there was a way to fave comments! You nailed Everything!
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Thanks for the extensive comment. I can't agree with the implied conclusion because much of it highlights individual examples of failure which one would find in any organized activity of massive scales, or else conflates climate and weather. But it does make me think about how to better communicate the preponderance of evidence in the context of individual failures.
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As you'll note, I did state that climatology and meteorology are separate sciences.
You'll also note that climatologists use meteorological data to produce their predictions. Climatology would not exist without meteorology. Half their data would be missing.
Additionally, you'll note that my conclusion is that there is too little data for climatologists to produce their conclusions, and that their accuracy rate is about the same as meteorologists. However, this does not prevent people from pursuing climatologists' agendas with a near-religious fervor where they do not do so with meteorologists.
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I am a christian and i'm way more with you, Andvili , than the person claiming to be a christian above. A key point in being a christian is that we're destined to live in the kingdom of God for an eternity, and that we are to help others realise this. This means that while the body of Christ (the church as defined as its members and not as a building) is to be a positive force in the world, the world itself IS within Gods hands. As point #4 states, GOD is sovereign. It is He who made the world, He who saves it, and He who ends it. Climate Change is also a device of man in his vanity, and a christian is to follow the word of God, not the word of other men. Therefore, to directly answer the question stated in the title, it's a load.
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I think the saddest part of the response is the judgment "the person claiming to be a Christian above". Ah well.
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Alas, you'd get farther if you cited science instead of religious teachings. :/
I spoke my religion solely so Mordecai would understand that Christians aren't the only skeptics. Educated scientists are also skeptical.
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I thought it was okay. You gave a scientific viewpoint and he gave a religious viewpoint, both sides can go hand in hand at proving this point you two are trying to make. Either way, you BOTH deserve a reward for this 
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Thanks. I just don't think 200 years of recorded data with inaccurate instrumentation, or 70 years of pictures of the ice caps is enough data to say -we- are the reason and assume it's not natural. I'd love to be around 1k years in the future to see people laughing at climatologists of today, the way we laugh at medieval doctors and scientists who thought the body was comprised of four humors and the classical elements of fire, earth, air, and water.
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Same here man, I couldn't agree more. I honestly think the whole "climate change" thing is political propaganda
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I agree. I think it's being perpetuated by both parties to control us. You don't hear about Russia or China enacting draconian petroleum standards in response, and those countries are supposedly smarter than ours.
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Exactly! I hate to be the typical "it's a conspiracy maaannn" but it's because our government is trying to spread this global warming BS so that they can add more restricting laws
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