D
DelsonJacobs
Guest
I don’t think it is “crazy talk” by Jehovah’s Witnesses or anyone for that matter to ask such a question. But as a scientist I don’t think the common public understands climate change and has gotten the wrong by the way it has been portrayed in the news media and made a subject of political debate.Many here are from the USA, and have been affected recently by all sorts of freak weather. Tornadoes, unprecedented rain and flooding. In recent years cyclones that have dwarfed what have come before.
And in the wider world we have seen tsunamis, droughts and other freak events that have broken records. The UK seems to have record flooding every year now. In my corner of the world New Zealand suffered a harsh drought last year and Australia has it’s bush-fire season getting earlier and earlier each year. The Philippines was ravaged by a record-breaking typhoon.
All pretty uncomfortable stuff (to say the least).
Ten years ago many claimed “climate change” was a fictitious hysterical invention and “weapons of mass destruction” were far more dangerous to the world.
Today sceptics of climate change are far harder to find.
When Jesus was asked about the sign of his return he mentioned Wars and earthquakes and pestilences and critical times hard to deal with. (Matthew 24, Luke 21 and 2 Tim 3.)
Is Climate change a sign of “the last days”
(or is that the kind of crazy talk we would expect of Jehovah’s Witnesses?)
As far back as my childhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s we learned about climate change. It’s actually normal for the earth to go through periods of extreme weather. One can actually dig through the earth and study the layers to see that the earth has gone through a cycle of ice ages and greenhouse eras. A wooly mammoth was discovered that died in a flash freeze caused by climate change. When thawed there was discovered to be green vegetation in its mouth, preserved like frozen vegetables. This is one of a plethora of examples of artifacts discovered in the earth that have helped scientists understand the cycles of temperature on our planet.
The subject of climate change is therefore not new. In the 1970s the popular theoretical model was that we were heading into a new ice age. Before the ice age the planet would experience a rise in temperature causing a greenhouse effect. The effect would cause the polar ice caps to melt and break apart, causing the polar vortexes to break away an wreck havoc by bringing colder weather to the planet. Many meteorologists still hold to this model.
What is new to the model is that humans may have added to the greenhouse effect by their use of fossil fuels. While the pollution may be responsible for a very slight rise in temperature, the so-called chaos or “butterfly effect” theory suggests it takes very little to cause havoc to our ecosystem.
The confusion this last part of the puzzle has had on others is that most people think humans are therefore responsible for the phenomenon of climate change itself. This is not what the data says.
We seem to be in a cycle already set for the next cooler era, and it may be coming more quickly or already upon us. We MAY have added to this effect, but as a recent national study has stated there is nothing that can be done at this point if this is true. Like that which occurs before a cold front, the temperatures rise before the setting in of colder weather. The model has always prepared us for this, but few knew about it until it became “pop” news and a popular debate subject.
The reason there are more “record” events on the planet is that scientific records only began to be used in the late 1800s. So we have a little over a hundred years to compare things to. To get other information on the weather and such we have to dig into the planet and study the soil and rock layers much like rings on a tree to get further data–and that isn’t practical to do everywhere. So many events are “record” events since we have no previous records to compare them to.
The Catholic Church teaches we entered the “last days” with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the Church in the first century. There has also been talk among Catholic theologians that the establishment of the State of Israel in the modern era may be the fulfillment of the end of the Gentile Times mentioned in Luke 21:24.
But the Church cautions others from jumping to conclusions that what we are seeing is definitively the end of the world. The Church points us to Jesus’ words recorded at Luke 21:8, 9:
Jesus said, “Watch out; don’t be fooled. Many men, claiming to speak for me, will come and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time has come!’ But don’t follow them. Don’t be afraid when you hear of wars and revolutions! Such things must happen first, but they do not mean that the end is near.”–Luke 21:8, 9.