Exploiting religion to push political agendas is about as old as religion and politics – which means, about as old as mankind. The climate catastrophist movement has been doing it from its inception. But this year COP 28, the “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, has brought the role of religion and religious leaders to new heights.
Calling “Faith-based organizations … and religious leaders … an important presence at” COP 28, meeting in Dubai, the U.N. Environment Programme worked with religious leaders from around the world to arrange for a “Faith Pavilion,” where “faith leaders … share ideas” and offer “counseling services to any of the tens of thousands of attendees from nearly 200 nations,” reported Jenny Gross in the New York Times Dec. 5 in her article “Got Climate Angst? At the U.N. Summit, There’s a Quiet, Spiritual Place.”
Pope Francis and Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, inaugurated the Faith Pavilion, and Hindu, Buddhist and other religious leaders also took part.
I can’t help wondering whether Pope Francis or any other professedly Christian leader quoted these words from Jesus during the proceedings: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.” Or for that matter, even the most familiar expression of the Gospel, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” No, there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on the Gospel in that interfaith effort.
But there’s certainly the mixing of religion and – well, I guess we can call it “science,” allegedly factual claims about the allegedly existential threat of climate change, particularly when that can be mixed with compassion for the underdog, the most vulnerable, or what so many religious climate alarmists like to call them, “the least of these” (forgetting that when Jesus spoke of them, He had in mind “the least of these My brethren“).
Gross reported, “The Rev. James Bhagwan, the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, spoke on a panel … about how to comfort people in the Pacific islands who have been displaced from their ancestral and spiritual homelands because of rising sea levels and climate disasters.” Bhagwan cited from Psalm 137, “How do I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I guess that was supposed to lend divine authority to the reverend’s message.
What did the Rev. Bhagwan have in mind? “Parts of some low-lying island nations in the Pacific, like Tuvalu,” Gross wrote, “are already being swallowed by rising seas.”
Tuvalu, ah, Tuvalu. Such rhetorical value in Tuvalu! It not only has a mellifluous name, it’s also the poster child for tropical islands allegedly threatened by sea-level rise.
Now, Bhagwan is a minister and presumably not a scientist. Nonetheless, as a follower of Jesus, he might think of what Jesus said in John 8:32, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Truth is a pretty important thing in Christianity. Remember, Jesus did claim to be the Truth. Or, the Rev. Bhagwan might think of the Apostle Paul’s admonition to in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 to “test all things, hold fast what is good.” That’s what scientists are supposed to do – and it’s what professing Christians are supposed to do, too.
So, let’s put the reverend’s words to the test. Are Tuvalu and other low-lying Pacific islands drowning in the rising seas?
Four years ago two scientists, Albert Parker and Clifford Ollier, both sea-level specialists, in the peer-reviewed article “Pacific Sea Levels Rising Very Slowly and Not Accelerating,” in Quaestiones Geographicae reported:
“Over the past decades, detailed surveys of the Pacific Ocean atoll islands show no sign of drowning because of accelerated sea-level rise. Data reveal that no atoll lost land area, 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, and only 11.4% of islands contracted. The Pacific Atolls are not being inundated because the sea level is rising much less than was thought. The average relative rate of rise and acceleration of the 29 long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges of Japan, Oceania and West Coast of North America, are both negative” [by fractions of a millimeter per year – meaning relative sea level in those locations has actually been falling, not rising]. “Since the start of the 1900s,” they summarize, “the sea levels of the Pacific Ocean have been remarkably stable.”
Why isn’t rising global sea level drowning these islands?
We start by understanding that there’s a difference between global sea level and relative, that is, local sea level. Even as global sea level rises, sea level can fall or remain stable in some places for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is land uplift. Plate tectonics – the movement of plates of Earth’s crust – raises land in some places and lowers it in others. Two other ways land can rise are more relevant to tropical atolls. The first is accretion. Waves wash sand up onto beaches, and some of it stays there. The second is coral growth. As sea level rises, the coral that makes up these islands grows upward, so its upper reaches stay at depths sunlight, on which it depends for growth, can reach. That growth raises the level of the islands.
OK, but that research was published four years ago. What’s happened since then? Were these islands not drowning up to 2019 but have begun drowning since then?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report claims that global mean sea level rose about two-tenths of a meter, or 200 millimeters, or just under 8 inches, from 1901 through 2018. That would be an average of 1.7 millimeters per year, or two-thirds of an inch per decade. But the IPCC also says sea-level rise has accelerated since the late 1960s and averaged about 2.7 millimeters per year from 2006-2018. In the last four years, that would amount to just under half an inch – hardly enough to drown these islands.
Is it unfair to criticize the Rev. Bhagwan for his not having known these important details about sea-level rise and the fate of Pacific island nations? After all, he’s not a climate scientist, or an oceanographer.
Well, neither am I, but, applying the Apostle Paul’s instruction to “test all things,” I went to the trouble of doing the research necessary to learn these things.
But Bhagwan, a “minister of the Word,” as Christian ministers are sometimes called, might have drawn on some passages of Scripture that are a bit more relevant to the problem of sea-level rise than “How do I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
Take, for instance, these words, spoken by God after the great Flood of Noah’s day: “All flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11). Or these words of a psalmist reflecting on what God did after the Flood: “The waters were standing above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled, at the sound of Your thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to the place which You established for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass over, so that they will not return to cover the earth” (Psalm 104:6b–9).
This is an important theme in Scripture. The Prophet Isaiah quoted God as saying He had sworn “that the waters of Noah would not flood the earth again” (Isaiah 54:9).
A particularly relevant passage on this theme is Jeremiah 5:22, where God says, “Do you not fear Me? … Do you not tremble at My presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal decree, so it cannot cross over it. Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail; though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it.”
Now, I’m not going to claim that these passages mean sea level would never rise above what it was at the end of the Flood in Noah’s day. They clearly don’t.
But they do assure us of one thing: God is sovereign over the seas, including how high they will rise, and how low they will fall, and when they will do so. And there are two important implications from that.
Immediately after God proclaimed that the waves of the sea could not cross over the boundary He had set, He added this:
“But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and departed. They do not say in their heart, ‘Let us now fear the LORD our God, who gives rain in its season, both the autumn rain and the spring rain, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.’ Your iniquities have turned these [the autumn and spring rain, and the weeks of harvest] away, and your sins have withheld good from you.”
The first of the two important implications is that weather isn’t independent of God’s control. God teaches here, and elsewhere in Scripture, that He uses bad weather to chasten – and good weather to reward – nations in response to their disobedience or obedience to His laws.
The second is that if nations feared God – and consequently obeyed Him – they wouldn’t need to fear other things, like bad weather.
Here, too, I’m not saying that righteous people never suffer from extreme weather. They do. But those who have been reconciled to God through faith in His Son Jesus Christ know they need not fear even if a hurricane does destroy their home. Why? Because they can say, with the Apostle Paul, in Philippians 1:21, “… to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain,” and again, in 2 Corinthians 5:4–8, “… while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord – for we walk by faith, not by sight – we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”
Christian leaders who want to speak about climate change owe it to the public to test the science and hold fast what is good. Even more, they owe the public the faithful presentation of what God says in Scripture.
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