Four Questions I Ask My Students About Climate Change

          The abandonment of the Christian worldview and a rejection of biblical truth has caused an outbreak of insanity in the Western world. From the radical pursuit of abortion on demand to the regendering of children without their parents’ knowledge, to the meltdown in our cities due to the collapse of the family and the defund the police movement, we see chaos all around us. But the greatest fears by far are caused by hysteria over global warming, or what has been rebranded as climate change.

A number of years ago I developed an analysis for my students: I instructed them to ask these four questions about climate change. Your answers will tell you how to handle this issue going forward. I ask these questions in ascending order of importance with number four being by far the most crucial.

Question #1: Is the earth really warming? It might be but it is also possible that it is warming very slowly or not at all. Even the apocalyptic warmers agree that during the last twenty years  there has been a hiatus of a dozen years when the earth didn’t get hotter. When the New York Times had a screaming headline (around 2015) that the past year was the warmest on record they neglected to tell their readers that the average temperature had only gone up one quarter of one degree, within the margin of error. Robert Tracinski said it was the only scientific article he had ever read  that did not contain a single number. But I will let this question slide, and for the sake of argument say, yes, the earth is warming. The next question is more important: 

Question #2: Are human beings causing the warming? Again, possibly, some of it. But if they are it is probably only a miniscule influence.   In a recent column Michael Landsbaum pointed out that “all greenhouse gases worldwide make up 2 percent of the atmosphere. Only 3.6 percent of that 2 percent is carbon dioxide. Only 3.4 percent of that 3.6 percent is man-made.” Landsbaum lives in southern California. He concluded that if California shut down every man-made CO2-emitting source the result would be atmospherically unnoticeable. But again, let’s concede that mankind is at least a partial cause of the warming, and move on to…

Question #3: Is warming a bad thing? Emphatically it is not. As a historian I can tell you that warm is good and cold is bad. At the end of the High Middle Ages Western Europe went into a downward spiral economically. The crash was brought on in part by the end of the Medieval Warm Period, a time when temperatures in the northern hemisphere were warmer than they are now.  Cold weather is hard on crops—ask the peach growers in my home state of Colorado. Cold weather is much deadlier than warm weather and kills far more people every year than warm weather. Some will say that climate change is causing more extreme weather events. That has not been scientifically established but let me give you one example. Recently the Manhattan Institute noted that in the last 20 years cold has killed 80 times more people than heat in the United Kingdom. Every year cooling is far more dangerous than warming.

In recent article, which I cite below, Roger Pielke, probably the chief authority on hurricanes in the entire world, asks three questions. Do we have more storms than we used to? No, we do not. Do we have fewer storms but of greater intensity and destructive power? No, we do not. Are storms more likely than they used to be to make landfall on America’s southeast coasts? No they are not. The hysteria you hear about extreme weather is just that—hysteria. It has no basis in fact.

I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. In Wyoming Global Warming is not a threat, it is an answer to prayer. 

But even if you were to concede that warming is bad we come to the most important question of all….

Question #4: What will be done about climate change? And the answer clearly is….nothing. We see this in all the various earth summits. Billionaire environmentalists fly in their private jets and gather to tell us lesser people that we need to sacrifice in order to save the earth. Sacrifices, by the way, they have no intention of making. Practically speaking, little or nothing is being done to save the planet.

Let me give just one example: China—the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases—emits more than twice the greenhouse gases as the U.S. and a hundred times more than California whose government tells us they plan to stop climate change. The Chinese plan to do nothing about global warming.  Last year they added 27 billion kilowatts of coal-powered electricity to their grid. India—which will pass China this summer as the world’s largest nation--added 3.5 billion. Both intend to continue building coal facilities as far into the future as far as we can see. Many other countries also added coal facilities. So all the recycling, and electric cars, and windmills, and solar panels, and everything else in western world will do absolutely nothing to reduce what the Greens say causes climate catastrophe. 

And for good reason. In his brilliant essay, Bound to Burn, the late economist Peter Huber asks a simple question. If the world’s poor had 40 trillion dollars’ worth of gold buried on their property would the rich nations be able to talk them out of digging it up? No. They will dig it up. I used to regularly lecture in an environmental studies class at the University of Colorado. I was brought in to provide an alternative viewpoint, something rarely done anymore in universities. I would tell the classes, if global warming really is going to cause climate catastrophe then prepare to die. Nothing is going to be done to meet your environmental goals. The simple reason is, you enjoy being rich. And the rest of the world wants to be rich, too. And they are going to get rich the same way we have—through the cheapest energy they can produce.

Let me say once more that the fundamental problem is religious. Environmentalists are plagued by bad theology. The Greens do not believe in the existence of God. In their view there is no divine power regulating the affairs of men and the motions of the universe. We are all alone. A cosmic accident in the process of incinerating ourselves. That there could be a God who would prevent all this does not enter their thinking. 

Let us resolve today to trust the God of Scripture who laughs in derision at the councils of men. And let’s trust Him, not only for our well-being on earth, but in eternity is well. God bless you all.

More: Warming is much better for humans than cold weather: https://web.stanford.edu/~moore/HealthBenefitsofWarmer.html#:~:text=Advocates%20of%20reducing%20greenhouse%20gases,and%20more%20researchers%20are%20finding.

Earth day is out of ideas:

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/04/20/earth_day_2023_utterly_bereft_of_ideas_894774.html

https://apnews.com/article/coal-retirement-climate-change-china-india-5ac4a2eeaf71b5e839b2a0e09ae8bd38

Warming better than colding: https://www.city-journal.org/article/chilled

Roger Pielke: Climate change is not causing extreme weather events: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/just-the-facts-on-global-hurricanes

The following is a humorous debate at Oxford, in England, and shows why climate change will never be seriously addressed: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/british-comedian-lays-waste-to-climate-activists-in-raucous-oxford-union-debate/