"The Promise of unfailing 'Seedtime and Harvest' - a Problem for Climate Science or a Cover for 'Climate Complacency'?
This report is code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: emissions from fossil fuel burning… are putting billions of people at immediate risk.” (Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, 9th August 2021)
Mr Guterres was responding to the 6th Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published on that very day. The Report was based on more than 14,000 scientific papers and its summary was agreed to line-by-line by 195 governments, who thus agreed that its main thrust is “unequivocal” (i.e., undeniable).
Some believers seek to distance themselves from the ‘alarmism’ which they think statements such as that above involve. For example, James Mildred, of CARE, did just that in his article, “Christians & green politics”, in Evangelicals Now (EN) (December 2021), despite the fact that the Secretary General’s alarm almost invariably characterizes the assessments of most leading scientists in relation to the climate and wildlife ‘crises’. Another such example among many is as follows: “We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency and that the world's people face untold suffering due to the climate crisis unless there are major transformations to global society.” (Article in Bioscience endorsed by 11,000 scientists from 153 nations, 5th November 2019) However, such warnings have abounded for decades: "The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere... it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point the earth becomes unliveable." (Professor John Marburger, Science Advisor to President Bush (who was a climate change denier), and Director of the US Office of Science and Technology, Sept 2007)
Furthermore, although Greta Thunberg’s “I want you to panic”, is not consistent with Christian faith, that other, recent ‘prophet’, Billy Graham, was spot on when he said, “The growing possibility of destroying ourselves and the world with our own neglect and excess is tragic and very real. We cannot simply mourn the fate of the earth. We must do what we can.” It’s also worth noting that the Bible provides us with several examples when it is appropriate and necessary to “Sound an Alarm” (e.g., Joel 2.1; Jeremiah 4.5).
In my experience, the objection to the stark warnings about the climate crisis most frequently cited by believers involves God’s promise to Noah in Genesis 9 that, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, etc., will never cease." “But to a committed Christian, David, God’s Word should trump everything!” Well, no, not if a single verse has been ‘cherry picked’ to buttress complacency, ignoring the many others which qualify its application! We delude ourselves if we think we can take the promise of God’s faithfulness to infer that He will invariably shield us from harm if we flout his directives. Indeed, the Bible clearly teaches otherwise: “Her rich men are violent, her people are liars… Therefore you will plant but not harvest” (Micah, 6, 12-15; see also Isaiah 24, 4-6; Micah 7, 13; 1 Kings 17.1; 18.1). Similarly the warnings that our current projectory could render the earth “unliveable” (see above, i.e., uninhabitable) is by no means inconsistent with Scripture, since a time will come “for judging the dead… and for destroying those who destroy the earth". (Revelation 11.18) We must combine the promises of God’s Word with its warnings!
But how can these warnings from God’s ‘two books’ (i.e., Scripture and the facts of Nature) be reconciled with the apparently, and oft-claimed, “unconditional” promise to Noah? I admit I have often struggled with this (e.g., in my article in the Baptist Times in December 2009), but no, of course the promise isn’t absolutely unconditional! No godly farmer, ancient or modern, would think he could stay in bed till lunch time and spend every afternoon fishing – and still expect God to provide a bountiful harvest!
Zewdie Abayie’s eyes were swollen shut through malnutrition and her delicate skin was no longer able to mask the skeleton beneath. Brushing away flies from her face with a small twig, the little girl stood quietly as, in 2000, her father, Tamirat, explained how three years of crop failure in Ethiopia (probably due to climate change according to the Royal Society) had left his family facing starvation. Pitiably, she attempted a smile for the cameraman. (Text, courtesy Keith Ewing; Image, Jim Loring, Tearfund)
It ‘goes without saying’ that there can be no harvest unless we sow and reap, for example. This assumed condition reminds us that we’re required to play our part in the fulfilment of the God’s promise and - this is crucial – it’s a consequence of the commission to humanity through Adam, to “work the earth and take care of it.” (Genesis 2, 15) So no work, no harvest! But there’s also the requirement to “care” for the earth and this is also just common sense – no farmer would dream of thinking he could allow his fields to be used as a rubbish tip and still expect to reap a good harvest!
A dramatic illustration of a failure to care is provided by the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which covers about 1,000 square miles in Ukraine and whose radioactive contamination makes it off-limits to ‘seedtime and harvest’. Similarly, according to Tearfund, farmland in Bangladesh is being damaged by its contamination with salt linked to rising sea levels, resulting in turn from global heating caused by our pollution of the atmosphere by CO2. Unhappily, this is nothing new as the tragedy life of Zewdie illustrates, but it has now been magnified a thousand times: “The climate crisis is leaving two million people each week needing emergency aid.” (Report by the International Red Cross to the UN, Sept 2019) “This is intolerable!”, exclaimed Francesco Rocca, President of the IRC.
These examples cited above show how failure to care for creation can now have worldwide impacts, limiting the area available for cultivation and frustrating God’s intentions for human life in many other ways. Furthermore, in the future, global heating may reduce it by 20% or (God forbid!), much, much more, depending, humanly speaking, on the extent we allow emissions to continue unchecked. Whatever the case, the fault will lie not in any lack of faithfulness on the Lord’s part, but in the way humanity has wantonly pillaged his creation.
Anyone tempted to criticise what they consider to be the ‘alarmism’ of warnings about climate change should read the ‘Special Report’ of the IPCC on Climate Change in 2018. Truly shocking, it warned that, at that time, we had only 12 years to stem and reverse policies which are driving our descent into climate catastrophe. Professor Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of the Report’s Impact Group, stated, “It’s a line in the sand… we must act now…I hope it dents the mood of complacency.”
Even better, they should ponder the words of Surangel Whipps, the President of Palau, a nation of 340 islands in the Pacific, who, addressing a plenary session at COP26 (2nd November 2021), stated that, “Large emitters [of CO2, etc.] are threatening our very survival… there is no dignity to a slow and painful death: you might as well bomb our islands… leaders of the G20, we are drowning!”
This article is a revised version of one published in Evangelicals Now, February 2022:
David W. Golding CBE PhD DSc DCL
Whitstable, Kent; & formerly, Associate of the Institute of Sustainability, and Honorary Chaplain,
Newcastle University (1968-2021)
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