Good morning. And it does that too. Let's get started. Does everybody have a handout? This morning we're turning our attention to the topic of climatism. And I chose that word in particular because it helps reinforce what we've been saying through the course of the summer and that is whenever we bump into something that has an ism on the end of it, we're dealing with a worldview. So last week I was deliberate in my choice of Darwinism as the title for last week's lesson and likewise this week, climatism. So it helps us realize that when we're dealing with these kinds of ideas we're dealing with different worldviews and worldviews that as we have seen are incompatible with the Christian worldview. So therefore that helps us understand how we go about defending the Christian worldview. Okay, so there's two more there and we can make some more if we need. Thank you. So I wanted to talk about this topic in particular because there's hardly a day that goes by that we don't hear about it in the news. And I have some examples I'll share with you to reinforce that idea. Let's start with prayer. Father, thank you for the time you set aside each week for us to be engaged in the study of your Word and to be engaged in understanding our faith more clearly so that we know how to defend it and understanding competing worldviews so we know how to present the truth of your Word. Help us as we go about that process. And we pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. I'll give you some quick examples, although these are so numerous there's really no stopping point. From time to time I'll see a headline that catches my attention so I'll print it out. So here's one. In relation to the recent fires here in Colorado and elsewhere, You know, that becomes an opportunity for those who believe in this worldview to stand on rooftops and talk about how dire the situation is. So here's one that says, are western forests doomed to burn away? Of course, because of climate change. This U.S. summer is what global warming looks like. Is global warming fueling Colorado wildfires? So it's back to global warming, it's not climate change because now we're getting warm weather? Well, we're flexible. Yeah, if it's hot, if it's a really warm winter or a hot spring, then yeah, we're flexible with that. Here's one, global warming is shrinking plant leaves. This is a story from Australia. Oh, more U.S. convinced of climate change. Opinions on global warming shift with the weather. 9% of today's warming is caused by pre-industrial people. 9%, not 10 or 11, it's 9%. Robert, we're going to have to get you off Yahoo News. Sea rise, this is another one that's one of the alarmist's favorite topics. Sea rise faster on the east coast than the rest of the globe. I haven't figured that one out. Because if you put more water in the glass, I think it rises the same amount on both sides of the glass. Does new tree wing study put the chill on global warming? Of course the answer is no. US scientist says ocean acidity is a major threat to reefs. Will July become the hottest month ever recorded? Here's one to show you that there is a political connection here. Climate change deniers in the House of Representatives are targeted for defeat. We've got to get them out of there. And then here's a curious one. Ancient warming may have reunited polar bears and brown bears for a bit. And here's another recent one. Scientists find CO2 sucking funnels in Southern Ocean. It goes on and on. Those are not necessarily the most preposterous things that are out there. The point is that there's really not a day that goes by that we don't hear something about climate change or global warming or carbon dioxide. We're being constantly bombarded with these messages. So it's useful, I think, for us to take this time to specifically look at this subject and see if we can deconstruct it a little bit and see what is there to it. So we'll start by saying that climatism, and this is a relatively new term, and I didn't completely make up this definition, but this gives you the gist of it. Climatism is the belief that human activity is both significant and catastrophic in its effect on the global climate. That man's activity is literally changing the whole planet for the worse. So, we'll put that up front. Because just by articulating this idea, it almost refutes itself, doesn't it? It sounds a little bit absurd just on its face that what we are doing as the human race is going to destroy the planet. Certainly, if that's our claim, it seems to me like we would have a pretty high burden of proof to show that that is in fact the case. Next point. Predictions are so dire we must act now. Delay could make it impossible to reverse the trend to save the planet. That should set off some alarm bells right away. We don't have time to talk about this. We've got to do something now and we've got to do something drastic. Not just a small change, we're talking about drastic changes in the way that we are to live our lives. Now from an apologetic standpoint, we could ask a few questions. The first one might be, why should we care about saving the planet? I mean, seriously. If we operate out of an atheistic framework, if there is no God, there's no meaning, there's no purpose, there's no morality, why should we care about saving the planet? So there's part of the absurdity of these kinds of worldviews is that they're assuming a certain morality. But they can't defend that from their own worldview. Where do you get the idea that it's good or that it's right to take care of the planet? It's a form of argumentation. We're not taking that position. What we're trying to do is put ourselves into the competing worldview. We don't want to hurt Mother Earth. We don't want to hurt Mother Earth. Yeah, the Earth is our mother. Nature is our mother. Jerry, where are you going with this? By necessity they have to borrow from the Christian worldview without acknowledging it. In order to assign some value to the idea of saving the planet or preserving the planet, Where do you get that idea? Where do you get that value from? You don't get it from an atheistic worldview. Because nothing matters in an atheistic worldview. How would you get it out of that? Well, because the creation is God. God is in the creation. Yeah, maybe that's kind of where you end up. And like R.Y. says, this idea that the earth is our mother, and we kind of become earth worshippers. We try to make the earth or the universe one with everything, and try to derive some purpose from that. If that's the case, where do you get the idea that everything is one? That God is one with the universe, or indistinguishable from the universe? So in order to have some basis for conservation and for stewardship, where do we have to look? Where is the most reasonable place to look? Don't we have that in the Christian worldview? Another one, and we've touched on this before, is what is being assumed about the longevity of the planet? Is it controllable? That would be part of it, yeah, that it's controllable. That we can have some say over it. What are we told about the end of time? the end of the age. What's going to happen at the end of the age? Yeah, that's when the big bang is going to occur, right? Yeah, it's all going to be gone. So the idea that the Earth is, and last week somebody looked it up, I think Jeff looked it up last week, and said the Earth is 4.55 billion years old. And the assumption is that that's going to continue at least until what's going to happen, so they say, about 5 billion years from now. Yeah, the Sun's going to become a red supergiant and engulf the inner planets and that'll be the end of it at that point. But the assumption is that the Earth's going to be around for billions more years, right? Do we have any reason to believe that from a Christian worldview? Neither that it's been here for that long nor that it will be here for that long. but that God placed it here for us and it's got everything we need to sustain us until God decides that's the end. So a very different frame of reference. And that ties into the next question, what is it that's being assumed about the natural resources that we have here on the planet? Because this is where the argument goes, right? The argument goes, or it's going to take us to a point of saying, how are we using the Earth's natural resources? And basically that we have to stop using the Earth's natural resources in order to avoid this cataclysmic event. How do we view that from the standpoint of scripture? The fact that there's stuff like coal, and oil and gas, and that we can use these things to produce energy, and that we can use energy to raise the standard of living. He's put it there for us to use. That's how we would look at that. So if that's the case, why are we restricting ourselves from using it? There's a belief about how that's going to affect the long-term health of the planet that's driving that. And notice that the only viable solution that you hear about to this climate problem is to drastically reduce the use of carbon-based fuels. Occasionally you'll hear some alternative suggestions. Like painting the roofs of all of our buildings white. So we reflect more sun back out into the space. Or glass roofs. Yeah. Or, you know, seeding the atmosphere so that it produces more clouds. But it's pretty rare to hear any alternative other than what? We've got to stop burning coal, we've got to stop using oil, because the byproducts of combustion include carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is the demon. We'll question that assumption as we look at this subject today. I thought one of the premises that the environmentalists were doing is, okay, our fossil fuels are limited. There's nothing that reproduces renewable energy sources like the sun. I think that that view was more popular about 30 or 40 years ago and it was either back in the 50s or 60s when we had what was called the peak oil theory that came out. They basically said at some point, pretty soon, we're going to reach a point where our our oil production is going to start to decrease because we have passed that threshold. We're using it up. Again, what is the assumption? And notice that I did not use the expression fossil fuels. Where does that idea come from? The idea that all the oil and the gas and the coal that's in the ground is from dead plants and animals. For billions of years. Yeah, and it takes millions or billions of years to produce that by some geological conversion process. Right? Think about that assumption. What if that assumption is wrong? Now, we could probably make a good argument for coal being a source of fossil fuel. I think there's good evidence for that. If something is a fossil fuel, where would we expect to find it? On the Earth. Yes, but where? In the crust. Down deep? Pressure? Uh-uh. Just the opposite. Close to the surface. Because it was put there by burial. Right? And so we find coal veins close to the surface. Makes sense that coal would be a fossil fuel. What about oil and gas? Isn't it interesting that the deeper we dig, the more we find? Doesn't that seem to not support the theory that it's a fossil-based fuel? That there are some processes that take place within the crust of the Earth, geological processes, that produce hydrocarbons. And how is it that we can look at something like the moons of Jupiter and find methane on the moon of Jupiter, something like that, when there's no evidence that there was ever any life there. There's actually strong evidence that those kinds of things are produced by some natural geological process and not by the decomposition of some dead creature or plant. Now if that's the case, what does that do if, for example, if we wanted to use the peak oil theory to try to push us away from the use of oil towards some alternative sources of energy, if it turns out that the more we explore and the more we dig, the more oil we find, what happens to that theory? Suddenly it's not very useful for that, is it? As much oil as we use, we still have more known reserves of oil today than we've ever had. and we keep discovering more all the time. In your research on this, what do these people base their theory on that there's this much coal left based on the past of what we found and what they think may be out there, which is totally uncertain. How do we know how much is really there? But it's stated with such a certainty And that's part of the fallacy of what we're looking at, is that these authoritative claims really can't be supported by quote-unquote science, because science, as I pointed out, science never even knows what it doesn't know. That's the nature of science. Science never knows everything, and whatever it is we know now, we don't know what we don't know. If you look at where we are today versus where we were 100 years ago, we look back and think, man, we were pretty ignorant 100 years ago. Well, the fallacy is thinking that we actually know something today. 100 years from now, we'll look back at the early 21st century and say, man, we really didn't know very much back then. So that's part of the problem with that, is we don't really know how much is there. But if we have a Christian worldview, What is reasonable to assume? That we'll provide what we need for as long as this plan... That what we need will be there. Or that we'll figure out how to use something else, like developing oil from shale. So, there's a big difference in how we're going to view the source of energy and the use of energy from a non-Christian worldview versus a Christian worldview. On the other side of the coin, though, with the Christian worldview, it's not to use those resources lavishly to vastly improve our wealth status or whatever, or waste those resources, but rather to use them for good. share those resources with folks that are in need or whatever the case may be. Yeah. The term that captures that idea is stewardship. Right. That we are required to be good stewards of what God has provided. That doesn't mean we say, oh, we can't use that. But there's a balance between using it and not overusing it or using it wastefully. What ends up happening if we were to drastically curtail the use of carbon-based fuels, what's going to happen is that's going to have a significant negative impact on the standard of living. It's not hard to see. It's going to have a negative impact on the standard of living in the developed world, and it's going to hinder the development of the undeveloped world. So that gets into the question then of what is being assumed about the value of human life. Wait a minute, what was that blank before that? We must accept a lower standard of living in order to save the planet. What it assumes is that preservation of the earth supersedes man's existence. Right. that man is of lesser importance in terms of protecting and preserving man's life versus saving the planet, or saving the environment, or saving any particular creature in the environment. When you hear that song, like, save the trees and kill the children. It shows that our priorities are really upside down. It kind of reminds me of these toy collectors when they've got this thing that's worth a thousand bucks because it's never been taken out of the package or touched by a human. A child would. Well, it was made as a toy, but it was never used. So they want to set the earth on that shell. Don't use this. And in the end, it's basically a form of earth worship. And I don't know how to see it any other way. We're basically saying, oh, we have too much reverence for the Earth in order to do anything that might, quote, harm the Earth. J.R., it's a broader issue, though, than climatism. If you really look at environmentalism, because the Endangered Species Act costs us huge. If you want to talk about lowering your standard of living, how you use your property, all kinds of things, and so really, and within that framework of the endangered species fact and what that's brought about, then it's not only, you know, the human beings are just another element on the earth, and so the earthworm has... Just as much right to be here, yeah. Human life, or the mouse, or, you know, I mean, just take any... Yeah, the broader view is environmentalism, and here I'm narrowing it down to climatism, which I would see as a subset of that. But yeah, it's the same idea. Here's what's interesting about this article. Ancient warming may have reunited polar bears and brown bears for a bit. In other words, the article is saying that there is even evidence today in kind of the border regions between the northern climates and the southern climates where the habitat of the brown bears and the polar bears overlaps and they interbreed. What does that mean? It means they came from the same common ancestor. Polar bears are not a unique species if they can interbreed with other kinds of bears. So there's a bear kind and there are variations within that kind just like there's a Great Dane and there's a Chihuahua. But they are all bears. It was probably a very early kind or type of each of the animals like cats and dogs and bears and so forth. So we see and we talked about that a little bit last week I think about the incredible variation that is built into the DNA of the different kinds. And we see all kinds of variation. But it's a little bit fallacious to call those variations individual species. Because what is that implying? And back to what Diana was saying. If the polar bear is an endangered species, then we've got to completely change our way of life in order to protect the polar bear. Well, it's just a variation within the bear kind we might be inclined to say so what? And how do we know that even if the population of the polar bear declines today, that there's not an opportunity for it to come back later on because that variation, that variation of the type is built into the DNA of the bear. Alex. Is conservationist I don't know if there's a direct connection but they're certainly related and we'll talk about the consequences of climatism in terms of population. So there's, you know, There are ways in which these kind of different things are related. And your worldview is certainly going to affect how you view, for example, population. There have been cries going back as recently as the 60s and the 70s. I think it was either late 60s or early 70s when Paul Ehrlich published his book on the population bomb and saying, you know, we're going to see millions of people starving to death and it's just going to be mass chaos because we're not doing enough to slow the growth of the population. And yet if you look at what's been done in the last couple of generations in terms of population control, specifically birth control and abortion, and then you see how cultural values come into play. We talked about the fact that in the Eastern cultures they tend to value what? They tend to value the males over the females. So now we're seeing a huge disparity in the proportion of males and females, for example, in China. That's going to create huge social issues. And then you could look, for example, at the culture of Japan as a case study, because they tend to be a very homogeneous culture, and see what effect this population control mentality has had in Japan. You know, 20 years ago, we were talking about Japan basically taking over the world economically. And now where are they? And where are they going? Can we go back to the polar bear for a minute? I'm imagining myself talking to an environmentalist. I mean, I don't care about the polar bear, but I mean, I thought the idea was they were trying to preserve these species because if the polar bear goes this year, it could be the seal next year, and then the otters after that. So how do you come back that, you know, a prehistoric Arctic doesn't have any wildlife at all? Well, that's a very unlikely outcome. It may change the balance of the ecosystem, but that's always changing. That's what we've had other species go extinct before. We've had species go extinct, and look at what happens whenever we try to interfere with the natural balance in the population. Like the gray wolves being inserted in the Rocky Mountains? Yeah, that's one that I was thinking of. You know, by protecting the wolves, now we have an explosion in the wolf population and we're like, okay, now what are we going to do? Now it's become a problem. Well, we're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, aren't we? Or in evolution we should just shrug all the fittest. We're more fit than the other animals. Yeah, if we have an evolutionary worldview we should shrug and say, well, you know, the fittest will survive and we really don't have to worry about it. We don't have to try to protect one species. We don't have to try to control another species. Just let nature take its course. The fittest will survive. And that's how things get better. That's the idea anyway. That's how things advance, is by that process of natural selection. Yeah, so it must be logically consistent in their argument that that's the view they should be taking. Well, we're at the top of the food chain too, isn't it? Right. Yeah, so here again... The ranchers in Wyoming have a 3S philosophy. Shoot, shovel and shut up. That's in regard to the wolf. So even if we're consistent evolutionists we recognize that the human species is at the top of the food chain and if we have the ability to exercise dominance over every other species then we should do that because that's how things advance. I'm not saying that's what we should do, I'm just saying that's trying to live within the implications of your own worldview. So the question of human life, if there is no God, then human life is not any better or worse than any other form of life, whether human or animal. That creates a real problem for us in terms of How do we choose? What is the basis for morality if humans are no better than anything else? And there's no meaning to human life. It seems to me that that fails, too, if we bring it closer to home, that same type of assumption. If we bring it back to my house now, and I have a spider in my house that's about to give my baby, and it's a black widow, you know, and I have to... Hey, it's survival of the fittest. Right. So, everybody would say, if it's my baby or the black widow, I don't know anybody who would actually say, well, I'd save the black widow, but not my baby. Well, there are a few radicals, but I'm talking about the mainstream, you know, So the idea is that how do we judge in your own home, now you're judging morality and that the value of human life is more important. But in the grand scheme, we're saying, well, no, we can't make that judgment. How do they make that jump? Somehow or another, they manage to live with the inconsistency. And my point would be that as apologists, we should be pointing out those inconsistencies and saying, Why do you think that your child is more valuable than the black widow that wants to bite it and make it dinner? There's no way to live consistently in an unbelieving worldview. We're going to end up assigning value, and from the unbeliever's worldview, that just becomes arbitrary because there's no basis for it. In the Christian worldview, the basis is the sanctity of human life because man is created in God's image. What is the basis in any other worldview? You don't have that. Just an anecdote, Mark Malou is a MTW missionary. I remember when he was converted in the early 70s, he was a Buddhist on his way to Kathmandu and he had that philosophy, I'm no more important than anything else and he and Dr. Schaefer got into a discussion down at the chapel, and he was asserting, I'm no more important than a fly. He walked out and got stung by a bee. And that led to his conversion. He realized he could not live with the philosophy he was just espousing. He killed the bee and then was convicted. His life really was more valuable than the bees. Remember the commercial where the Buddhist monk uses an antibacterial Kleenex accidentally and he realizes he just killed all those germs? Well that's the thing about any environmental aesthetic conservationist is they can't live They can't practically live by their belief. They're wearing tennis shoes that have rubber. They're wearing a belt that's made out of leather. The clothes are, I mean, it's impractical. They can't look like that. They're eating something, right? Yeah, they're eating... Even if they're vegetarian, they're still eating plants. Yeah. Is that why it shifted more to this concept of, you know, credits, or, I'm doing a little bit better. So morality is, again, I'm doing a little bit better because I don't wear quite as much rubber as you. You know, so, you change, you're getting better. You know, so it's again trying to, oh, well, I'm doing a little bit better, so... That's sanctification. It comes back to the point that there's two ways to be saved. One is by faith and one is by works. And that's what most people are trying to do, is by some kind of works. Whether it's trying to save a tree or by trying to, you know, without offending anybody, by driving a hybrid car. That you're doing something, you know, to make a difference and that becomes a source of value and meaning for you. Alright, moving along. I do want to look at climatism in terms of its scientific value. Man-made climate change is not even a testable theory. Consequently, it cannot be falsified. And we talked about how in the scientific world, if we can't falsify a theory, then it's useless. It's not scientific if it can't be falsified. So science depends upon the ability to create or set up a hypothesis that can be falsified. And if we can't do that, then we're not really operating in the scientific realm at that point. As we look at this, it seems to me there are at least three huge leaps of inference that are being made. And I think they have to occur in this order. The first one is that man has a significant effect on the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's the first one. Yes. So stop breathing, Nancy. So that's the first one, that our being here, our existence and our use of things like carbon-based fuels has a significant impact on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's the first one. The second one is that that atmospheric carbon dioxide in turn is going to have a significant effect on the average global temperature. You have to make both of those leaps in order to get there. Are you one of those skeptics? Are you a denier Betsy? But that raises a good question. We'll look at questions like that. Because we're not even asking questions like is more carbon dioxide really a bad thing? Even if the Earth does get warmer, is that necessarily a bad thing? But scientifically speaking, I'm trying to set this up in terms of the scientific inferences that are involved. One is that man has an effect on carbon dioxide. The next is that carbon dioxide has an effect on temperature. And then the third, which is a more recent one, which kind of hedges our bets, is that that change in average temperature has an effect on what are referred to as extreme weather events. What were you going to say? I was just going to say that I found out some statistics. Like in 2010, I believe it was, there was like 30 heat-related deaths and like 3,000 cold-related deaths. So maybe global warming is not right. Well, that doesn't really support the theory, so we're not going to use it. Although, here's where the third one comes into play. And this is what's great about this next one. We keep hearing more and more about how climate change, whether it's warming or whatever it is, is going to result in more extreme weather events. when hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma all in one year. Yeah, so the thing that's great about that is no matter whether it's really, really cold or whether it's really, really hot, no matter whether it's really, really wet or really, really dry, any of those things are now used to support the idea that climate change is happening. That's a win-win because it's always been happening. There you go. You can't lose. Right, literally. So, and I think what prompted that third one, and we're hearing more about that in recent years, and notice the shift in terminology from global warming to climate change. They were kind of hedging our bets with that because there really hasn't been any measurable warming for at least the last 10 years and maybe closer to 15 years. 30, definitely. So, going back to about the mid to late 90s, there hasn't been any measurable change in temperature or it might have actually decreased a little bit. So what are you going to do if global warming just stops for a little while? Well, we'll just call it climate change. Okay, so the nested nature of the theory makes it even more difficult to support it from a scientific standpoint and there's no way to test these things empirically. There's no way to either by observation or by experimentation to set up a theory that we could falsify. How do we test the theory of man-made global warming? Well, the nice thing about computer modeling is it follows the garbage in, garbage out principle. Whatever assumptions you build into that model will determine the results you get out of it. But from an empirical standpoint, we'd have to have two Earths under identical circumstances where we could control every factor that could affect climate except for man's effect. Man being carbon dioxide. If we could set up an experiment like that, then we could test specifically the effect that man has on the environment. But short of that, we're making inferences. When scientists acknowledge natural causes for past climate variation, but then assign all current variation to man's activity, they're being arbitrary. Scientists may say, oh yeah, we had ice ages in the past, where it got really, really cold, and then it warmed up again, but that was a natural process. The tiny change that we see today is all man-made. Again, how in the world could you possibly prove that from a scientific standpoint? Yeah, and if that's the case, again, this is the inconsistency. How in your mind do you live with the inconsistency of recognizing that there have been much more drastic changes in climate in the past than what we're seeing today, that those changes were brought about by some natural causes that we may have only a slight understanding of, but that when we see a little bit of change occurring today, we naturally attribute all of it, or virtually all of it, to man's activity. That really doesn't wash. One of the most juvenile mistakes in science is to confuse correlation with causation. So I drew a picture for you on the board. Got two variables, one called x and one called y. We look at these two variables and see, by golly, when x goes up, y goes up. We've established a correlation between those two things. One could be carbon dioxide, the other could be temperature. Just because there's a correlation, though, doesn't mean that one is causing the other. There's a big difference between saying that there's a correlation between two things and that one is causing the other. And there's a much higher burden of proof required to prove causation. Now let's look at carbon dioxide. You hear so much about carbon dioxide and so many dire things about carbon dioxide, you figure that carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere must be like 20 or 30% and it's just getting bigger and we're all going to suffocate. Yeah, Alex is already having trouble breathing. I'm pointing this out because it shows, it kind of shows again that the idea of climatism is maybe a little bit absurd. Because the actual percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measured in terms of hundreds of a percent. For basis of comparison, there's 26 times more argon in the atmosphere than there is carbon dioxide. And even argon is considered to be a trace gas. Maybe argon is causing global warming. Yeah, it could be. But man is not producing argon, right? That's true, so it's not a convenient conclusion. A few years ago I came across an article, and I don't know if I still have it or not, but it was an article about global warming taking place on Mars. Hmm. And I got to thinking, if global warming is happening on Mars, and global warming is happening on Earth, maybe there's something outside of Earth and Mars that's causing both planets to get warmer. Maybe it's not something that's going on on the planet. Because there's no humans on Mars. Right. Does Mars have an atmosphere? What about Venus? Venus is like the perfect example of the greenhouse effect. And it's like 75% carbon dioxide. Were there humans on that planet? There used to be. Hmm. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's a nice subject. That's Yeah, that's another thing. You know, you don't hear much about chlorofluorocarbons anymore, but 30 or 40 years ago the rage was over destroying the ozone layer and we have to stop using, you know, aerosol hairspray and other kinds of aerosols. And what happened to that one? Well, that's because they, I mean, they abolished all of that, right? Largely. You can't get free on it anymore. You didn't hear the hairspray was a big thing? So first of all, notice that carbon dioxide is a very small fraction of the atmospheric gases. It's actually normally measured in parts per million. And also, as Betsy pointed out, wait a minute, we need carbon dioxide for plants to grow. Yeah, whoops. And if carbon dioxide is absorbed and utilized by plants, how come we're not talking about an alternative solution to this so-called problem of being to plant more trees? Wouldn't that solve the problem? Because trees absorb carbon dioxide and they store it. And then the nice thing is we can cut them down and make houses out of them. Or burn them? Well, we can't do that. But that, you know, Dennis's point raises the point that there's actually a carbon dioxide cycle. Are we thinking in these kinds of categories? That carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and then it's utilized and absorbed by the oceans, by the earth, by plants, And again, it's not necessarily a fixed quantity. Part of what goes on when we have this kind of discussion is that there's implicitly the idea that whatever the temperature is, it should stay that way. Or whatever the carbon dioxide level is, it should stay that way. If it's changing, that's bad. But it's never been a static amount. And then the question is, Do we really think we can control that? So the next point there is that carbon dioxide is very considerable in the past, somehow we managed to survive. Historically, carbon dioxide, and this is where that cause and effect thing comes into play, carbon dioxide appears to lag temperature by about 400 years. So in other words, when we see temperature go up, A few hundred years later we see carbon dioxide go up. When we see temperature go down, a few hundred years later we see carbon dioxide go down. Could it be the different cycle? You're starting with the temperature and then going to carbon dioxide. Why don't you start with carbon dioxide? I'm just looking at the data. Yeah, and if we're trying to assign causality to carbon dioxide in relationship to temperature, it creates a bit of a problem if carbon dioxide changes after temperature. How accurate is the data for 400 years? How are they getting the data? I think that the primary source for that kind of data is ice cores, by looking at the concentration of carbon dioxide in ice cores. And that's assuming uniformism of the Earth's age? So it's built on false assumptions. It still has assumptions built into it. The point is that there is data that's available to us that contradicts the theory that's being proposed. As well as the fact that the deeper you go, the more stuff is on top of it, more ice, and it pushes out all the air, so it's more dense down here, so there's less air. Yeah. I can't speak to the accuracy of the measurements, so I'm somewhat relying on... Right, but the point is it wasn't a sample captured in a laboratory 400 years ago that was measured. It remains a big assumption. Whereas temperature has been measured for how many years accurately, That's another good question. The temperature records, and again the question is how do you measure temperature? How do we go back 500 years or 1000 years or 100,000 years and say this is what was going on at that time, this is what the temperature was. That ends up being based on something called proxy data, meaning we don't have a direct measurement of it, so we're looking at something in the historical or the geological record that we know is related to temperature, and that's what we're using to answer that question. Tree ring data, for example. So, yeah, there are issues when it comes to how do we even measure temperature and how long have we been measuring temperature. Now notice this, that anyone who disagrees with the dogma of man-made climate change is labeled as a skeptic or a denier. And this is not a scientific rebuttal. What is this an attempt to do? Bullying. You are basically trying to shame someone who disagrees with you into not speaking. You are trying to stick a label on them that will make them basically shut up and just go along with what you want to say. They also say reputable science. Yeah, as opposed to the unreputable ones, right? So, let me take the opportunity to clarify a couple of things. When we oppose climatism, we're not denying any of the following. We're not denying that the climate changes over time. We're not denying that man has some effect on climate. That's somewhat axiomatic. It's just a question of how much of an effect do we have. We're not denying that CO2 levels are somehow related to global temperature, but it's a big leap to say that carbon dioxide is what is driving the global temperature change. Here are some questions that very rarely get asked. The first one might be, how do we know that we can even change the course of global climate? That's a scientific question. How do we know that anything that we do will change the Earth's climate? It's a pretty good weight to assume that. On a local level, or on a micro level, we definitely can not change the climate, but we can have an impact on the environment. Right, if a company starts dumping glutens into a river or a stream, you're going to see that effect right away. The issue, though, is this global type of change, this manner of change. Yeah, the comparison strikes me that that sounds very similar to what the evolutionists do. They look at variation within species or variation within kinds and then draw the conclusion that that variation leads to new species over time. Same kind of way we say, well, you know, acne company is, you know, polluting the atmosphere, polluting the river and you've got smog hanging over the city or, you know, sludge in the river because of what they're doing. It's a big leap to go from observing that local effect to saying that somehow that has an impact on the entire planet. That's a very questionable leap, I think. The moral question is, should we be willing to spend trillions of dollars to try to change things? Now, notice I'm... How many of us spend euros, not dollars? Notice I am differentiating here because remember we talked about the fact that science only tells us what is or what can be. It doesn't ever tell us anything about what we should do or should not do. Science is amoral. So there is a big difference between asking if we can affect climate and whether we should affect it. thing that the whole sort of being a cynic or whatever, you need a crisis in order to get money and power. So I think there's a lot of people that might not even really sincerely believe this stuff, but this is the way to get money and power over people. Dale's brother lives in California where they're going into bankruptcy and he was behind the fact that they're spending money by the millions that they don't have to address these kind of things. Well, and the impact that diverting water in the Central Valley of California in order to save the Delta smelt has had in terms of how it's decimated the economy of Central California. In order to save a fish that most of us have never even heard about. Well, I think it's only about that big. If it even exists. Recently, we went to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the covenant with Noah in Genesis 8, while earth remains, sea time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. God promises that he is going to provide. From our world view, believing what God said, it's not going to be cash. doesn't mean there won't be difficulties, that God has given us the resources, He's given us the intelligence and the creativity to address those kind of things. So again, there's a big difference between how we see things from a Christian worldview, where we have God's promise, and we use that same passage to support the idea of the uniformity of nature, that the way things happen today is going to be the way things happen tomorrow, and the day after, and so on. if we are purely scientific or naturalistic in our worldview, we have no basis for making that kind of an assumption. So we end up having to rely on those Christian presuppositions in order to be able to do what we do. So yes, God is... I mean, not to... I think, you know, we're sort of... looking at the inconsistencies and laughing at the things, but we have to look at ourselves too and at the Christian community and we don't live consistently with what we say and we use whatever we can to justify what we want to do as an individual or whatever. So we sort of have to say all this with some humility and look at ourselves and how am I Living inconsistently with what I say I believe and want to do as far as following Christ and bringing Him glory and all those kind of things. Yeah, this becomes an opportunity for us to look at ourselves as well. And the Bible admonishes us to do that. Some additional questions. We said, what should the temperature of the earth be? Have you ever heard a scientist come out and say, this is what it should be? 72 and sunny everywhere. Well, would that be good though? Does anybody know about what the average temperature of the earth is right now? Just out of curiosity. You mean on the surface? Yeah, surface temperature. Yeah, the sun is about 90,000 degrees. 68. A little bit lower than that. 57 and change about the average temperature. And we can argue about how we came up with that number. I'm not saying that that is the number because believe me there are issues in terms of how we measure things. But supposing that's the number, 57 degrees. Is that what it should be? Should it be a little higher or should it be a little lower? What should it be? And if we were to believe that the Earth is getting warmer, and by the way, if you look at going back to about 1980 to the mid-90s, so about 20 years of data or so, 20 or 30, the temperature change has been about half a degree. Could you even feel that? I mean, could you tell the difference of a half a degree over a period of 20 or 30 years? It would be an imperceptible change. That's another way, and I've made the point down here at the bottom that you can tell any story you want to with graphs and statistics. You can make it look really bad on a graph just by adjusting the scale. So if you look at these temperature changes, if you look at the vertical axis on these graphs, you see that they're incremented in fractions of a degree. So you're seeing what looks like a drastic temperature change, but in fact it's only a few tenths of a degree at most. For example, silverprice.org tracks the current price of silver, and it's got this little graph that shows it's going down. You zoom out on the graph, it's like... Yeah, you see what it looks like in a wider context. And that's part of what's missing, is we're looking at data over the last hundred years or so, and when we talk about temperature records, What about the 4.55 billion years? Yeah, what happened 3 billion years ago versus the last 100 years? Alright, let me try to race through this to wrap this up. Let me do touch on some of these other questions that are rarely asked because these are the kinds of things that we might use to raise in conversation. Can we control individual weather events? Can we control things like hurricanes and thunderstorms or snowstorms? What are the advantages of a warmer planet? More sun? Yeah, if the planet is warmer then we can grow more crops. Say that again? The guy in Canada would probably like it warmer than the guy in Alabama. But in either case, how much difference is a half a degree going to make? It moves a band of different things up and down on the Earth's surface somewhat. Yeah, very slightly in fact. Climatists don't like to talk about the medieval warm period. or the Little Ice Age. In fact, the warming trend that we're experiencing for the last 100 years or so is that we're coming out of what was called the Little Ice Age. Is that really such a bad thing? The temperature of the Earth has never been static. Maybe we should ask whether we should even attempt to interfere with natural climate variation. We mentioned that there are a number of other hysterical claims that are being made along with warming. average temperature. What about the implications of man-made global warming? If man is destroying the planet, then that means man is bad. And if man is bad, then the Earth would be better off without him. And there are actually people who say this. There was a guy down at the University of Texas a few years ago who made the claim that we should basically release the Ebola virus and wipe out 90% of the population. He thought that would be a good thing. I'm wondering if he includes himself in the 90% that get killed or whether he thinks he should be in the 10% that survive. Again, that would be the inconsistency of that worldview. If he really believes that, then why doesn't he just do himself in, right? What about the people that want to raise taxes but they won't start paying more? As long as somebody else is doing it, right? Notice how the trend has changed. And some of you have been around long enough to see these changes. Back in the 70s, the hue and the cry was, oh, we've got to brace for the next ice age. Because the temperature trend for about the last 20 or 30 years up to that point had been down. Then it started to go back up again, and when it started to go back up, then what? Global warming. And then for the last 10 or 15 years since it went flat, now what are we seeing? Climate change. We got it covered now. As long as we use climate change, that covers whatever happens. One of the problems we have is we tend to believe our current weather patterns are extreme because we have a very short memory. And think about how the media fuels this kind of thing by selecting what they report about. You know, a hundred years ago, if you lived in Colorado Springs, you had no idea what was going on anywhere else in the world. You know, whether they were having floods or droughts or whatever, somewhere else. But now it's all over the news. And it's also very misleading to use terminology like normal. You hear this on the news, you turn on the news and say, well, our normal high for today is 85 degrees. What does that mean? So does that mean if it's actually a little warmer than 85 that that's abnormal? No, normal is just an average. And it's average over some period of time. And it might be 50 years, it might be 100 years, but whatever it is, it's pretty short. You see that ad on TV where the woman and her children and two men is the new normal? That's the name of it, the new normal. So we should be aware of climatism and be prepared to refute some of this. And again, there's hardly a day that goes by that we don't hear something dire about the planet. So I don't want you to feel guilty about driving a nice car. But as Vera pointed out, we still should be good stewards of what God has given to us. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you for your provision. We thank you that you have promised us in your word that you will provide for us for as long as the earth endures, that you hold each and every day in your hands, that you have given us what we need to carry out your mandate. that we should continue to seek to glorify you and to glorify Christ in all we do. And we pray that you would assist us in this endeavor and assist us as we defend our faith against those who have an unbelieving worldview. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.