I was right and we’re all still doomed! Okay, we’re not doomed. Earlier, I’d said that I was a climate change skeptic. Not that I doubted something was going on but that I was skeptical of the reasons being offered for the change. I lacked evidence to back up my sneaking suspicion but I didn’t buy the notion that humanity was destroying the earth quite so easily nor was I impressed with the idea that nothing is going on and the scientific community was in cahoots to get grant money to study a non-existent problem.

I now have the scientific proof from none other than CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. According to a post at the Financial Post,

63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

What that means is that the current increase in global temperatures is more dictated by the current solar cycle than by my Saab 9-3 or the 1969 AMC Rambler I drove in high school. We are not the primary cause of global warming.

However, that doesn’t mean we can go back to pumping waste into our rivers and lakes and pollutants into our atmosphere like we did in the 1970s (or whenever we supposedly did that). God created the universe and it was very good when he was done. We started polluting it when Adam sinned and brought sin into the world (Romans 5). That didn’t erase the command to have dominion that God had given mankind at creation even though sin did mess us up in executing that command. We still have the responsibility to care for and cultivate this globe. A demonstration of how important it is to God that we care for the land is found in why He sent Israel into exile for 70 years. The reason for the exile was idolatry but the reason God chose to send them away for 70 years instead of 92 or 853 was explained in 2 Chronicles 36:21, “The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.”

You see, God had commanded Israel to let the land rest every seven years. Don’t plow it and don’t sow it. It was an act of faith to do that just like it was to not pick up manna on Saturday. Just like it is to not try to work for our salvation but to rest in Jesus. So what’s at stake is faith not shrubs but it is instructive that God told us to have dominion and that he metered Israel’s exile by their misuse of the land. A specific lack of faith that has to do with ecology. And so it is today. We may not be causing the polar ice caps to melt, though melting they be, but that doesn’t liberate us to use and abuse at will. We may not worship the earth as goddess nor may we faithlessly rip all the resources from it for our immediate consumption because we don’t think God will provide tomorrow.