Sunday Morning Meds--What he said

 

“The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand. . .” Psalm 121

What he told the world is that since 1895, American news sources have alternated warnings about our changing climate. For almost forty years prior to the Great Depression, most opinion-makers touted the present danger of a returning ice age.

And that’s not all. What he said is that arch-political scientists and their friends in the news media have beating the drum about global warming for years now, when there is no such phenomena—or, if there is, it’s nothing more than a temporary shift, our climate and planet far more dynamic than some would think.

What he claimed has been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the so-called “hockey stick,” the heavily reported spike in climate temperatures throughout the 20th century after thousands of years of constancy, has been proven totally false by Canadian researchers who simply tore it apart. That spike is phony baloney.

What he told all of us is that the National Academy of Science has shown conclusively that humanity has suffered through minor climate changes before, that what is called “the Medieval Warm Period” (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) and “the Little Ice Age” (1500 to 1850) are bona fide proof of natural and sustainable climate variations—and that therefore the propaganda about “global warming” today is just hype and hooey.

What he said is that the Arctic isn’t warming but cooling. He’s reminded us all that sixty prominent Canadian scientists sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, saying that “'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

He claimed that restraining so-called greenhouse gases has real economic costs, stifling business activity and a bustling economy, and therefore hindering progress in dealing with world poor. He quoted this headline, "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output," called alarmist and dangerous, and then pointed out that it ran in the New York Times in 1975, almost fifty years ago.

He is a senator, and the speech he delivered, years ago already, is much longer, full of facts and documented anecdotes and references to studies.

I have neither the time nor the competence to study the issue of global warming thoroughly, and whether the Senator is even partially right, scientists themselves appear to disagree. So the nature of the question changes in my circumstance: it’s not “what do you believe about global warming?” Instead, it’s “who do you believe?”

And I choose not to believe the Senator. I choose to believe instead a list as long as my arm of people who radically disagree with his claims. I believe The Sixth Extinction, a book I happen to be reading right now. I believe something is happening after surviving three 100-year floods in two years. I can't help but believe that some new force is dangerously close to doing really awful things, worse than last week's hurricane or the forever fires in Oregon and California.

I may be wrong. I'm not all knowing. The senator believes he is.

But I also choose to believe the psalmist when he says—with nary a hint of global warming—that this God of his (who’s apparently at his right hand armed with a parasol) is watching over all of us—polar meltdown or coming ice age, and that this God, my God, is my shade from all kinds of heat. That truth is transcendent.

He is my only comfort—in both deathly cold January and the dog days of mid-July. He is my only comfort. That I know by faith.