Climate Change ̶ The Religion of Hysteria

While most people dream of going to Hawaii, my wife and I fulfilled a longtime desire to go to the Arctic to see the Northern lights. The trip was a gracious gift from the good folk at Treasure Valley Baptist Church celebrating our 35 years of service there. We went to Churchill, Manitoba and saw the Northern lights, beluga whales, polar bears, etc. While there, the locals informed us that the bears were quite fat and healthy, as well as very numerous. We were also told that they have been able to get on the ice to hunt seals earlier than normal in November the past two years.

This is all very informative as the climate change fanatics hysterically warn us that the demise of the polar bear signals the end of life on earth as we know it. One lady on a tour bus, as we were watching a polar bear mother with her cubs, dramatically blurted out she would be “willing to die and take everyone in the bus with her, for the sake of these three bears.” I quickly informed the hysterical gal that my wife and I didn’t share her enthusiasm for polar bear inspired group suicide. Too bad this incident wasn’t an exceptional one, or without consequences. Look around and you’ll see the religious hysteria everywhere.

As the climate crisis wunderkind have been “striking” all over the world, led by the emotionally disturbed guru Greta Thunberg, we can’t help but think of the many other “crises” we’ve been warned about over the years that never panned out. Take Paul Ehrlich, for example. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. Published in 1969, it made shocking and foreboding pronouncements like, “The battle to feed humanity is over,” and “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” A 2018 article in Smithsonian magazine was sharply critical of Ehrlich and his book, which they described as having “fueled an anti-population crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world.”

Smithsonian described in detail the global impact of Ehrlich’s half-cocked hysteria: “The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”

By the way ̶ how many of us are old enough to remember the High School and College science lessons in the 70’s that assured us we would be in the middle of another ice-age by now? In their book Unstoppable Global Warming, climatologists S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery skillfully present their case for the existence of a solar- induced 1,500 year cycle that generates warming and cooling of the Earth’s temperature irrespective of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. In other words, climate change is cyclical and not man-made.

Now, back to religious hysteria. Led by 16 year old Greta Thunberg, striking kids around the world are powerful pawns. The catchphrase “for the children” has a seductive political and religious appeal. But, there’s a reason we don’t look to teenagers for guidance on fraught issues of public policy. They have nothing original to say to us. They just repeat back what they’ve been told (and in this case) by unscrupulous left-wing climate change adults, with less nuance and maturity. The anxiety this is causing among our youth is tragic. Could some of this have something to do with the increase in the suicide rate among teens in our country? According to National Geographic, “More than a few teens who began as fervent activists have dropped out, citing depression, anxiety and other fears that the world’s leaders will not act in time to prevent their lives ̶ and the lives of their children ̶ from being irretrievably altered by climate change.” This is crazy, and it’s the adult enablers who are ultimately responsible.

Picture students at New York’s Union Theological Seminary on September 17th this year, confessing their “environmental sins” to plants, trees, rocks and other inanimate objects! Did you leave the A.C. on too much this summer? Did you use too much gasoline on that vacation? It’s a Religion! The sad part of this is people are being conditioned toward collective guilt over things that are not sins, and away from their individual responsibility to receive Jesus Christ as Saviour from their real sins.

After the world-wide flood in Noah’s day, God promised a continuance of seasons and climate.

Genesis 8:22
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Christians are not to be concerned about the “stewardship of the earth” (God’s job), but our stewardship of the gospel of Jesus Christ (our job).

1 Corinthians 10:26
For the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.

II Corinthians 5:20,21
Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.
For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.