Debunking SEBTS Speakers on Climate Change

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:03

Everyone, welcome once again to the

00:16

Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a special guest today that's going to help me discuss some recent developments, actually, they're really not that recent, but they've become controversial more recently at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where I went for my own

00:32

MDiv. And the person we have with us today though is Colin Reeves. Colin Reeves is a mathematician and a scientist.

00:38

He's a professor emeritus at Covenantry Seminary in England. University.

00:45

I'm sorry. I wrote down seminary. Yeah. I was wondering if they had mathematicians at seminary. So, um, what did you teach?

00:52

So you taught mathematics and you also taught just general science or. Uh, yeah, general, um, basic, basic epistemology in some, in some ways really for, uh, students doing research because I was mostly involved in research more than teaching.

01:11

Uh, we've had to do our ration, but, uh, my last, the latter half of my career was all research.

01:19

Now I know we've been emailing back and forth about climate change, and this has been one of the things you've been studying lately, is that because of the controversy surrounding it then?

01:30

Or was that part of your professional work? Uh, I suppose I first got interested in it because of the quite well known book, the hockey stick illusion.

01:42

I don't know if you've read that. I haven't read it, but I've heard about it. Yeah. And the point about that book was the egregious abuse of mathematics and statistics in it.

01:55

That's really got me, got me interested. Um, so that's 12, 12 or more years ago now.

02:01

I think, and I thought, well, if somebody has to abuse statistics so much, uh, to make his point, there must be something seriously wrong here.

02:14

And so I started reading into it in a more disciplined way. Yeah. Well, we're really grateful to have you and your knowledge on this.

02:23

I know you have a slideshow prepared that we're going to go over and this may be a long one, uh, just so everyone knows, because there's two videos from Southeastern Baptist theological seminary that I, and there was more by the way, but there's at least these two that I wanted to talk through.

02:40

And I may do a follow -up podcast and talk about a little bit, um, about the ethics professor

02:45

I had at Southeastern as well, because he's viewed as more of the conservative, but I don't consider him that on this climate change topic.

02:52

But, but two of these people were, were more radical. And just to give everyone a quick background before we jump into it, uh,

02:59

Catherine Hayhoe, some of you might remember a few months ago, there was at the world economic forum, there was this pagan shaman who was blessing all these different, uh,

03:08

I guess, speakers on a panel on climate change and Catherine Hayhoe is there and this shaman came up and blessed her and all this.

03:16

Well, Megan Basham caught that. Wait a minute. Is that the same Catherine Hayhoe who says she's a

03:21

Christian who spoke at the Southern Baptist university and other Christian universities. And sure enough, it is.

03:27

She didn't object to it. She allowed that to happen. And so this created, um, kind of a disturbance.

03:33

And, and I knew that these videos were there. I had watched the one that with Jonathan Mu, at least parts of it that we're going to discuss later, but I hadn't really listened to Catherine Hayhoe.

03:41

And so I went back and I listened to what the seminary had put out. And I just thought, wow, this is fascinating to me that this is a quote unquote, conservative seminary,

03:52

Bible believing training pastors, but they're. They're fine signaling a radical climate change agenda.

04:00

And their claim is that, uh, at the time, Ken Keithley apparently was telling Megan Basham that this was, was, uh, it was a balanced approach.

04:09

They had different views, but all the views that I can locate, including

04:14

Liederbach, who's one of the professors there seem to be tilting towards. We have a problem with climate change.

04:22

It's caused by man. This is, these are just assumptions and we need to do something about it. And, um, and so anyway, uh, so that created a controversy.

04:30

And then last week, Tom Buck, who's a prominent Southern Baptist pastor decided to go on Twitter and post a clip from Jonathan Mu's presentation, which we'll be looking at and the reactions to it were quite interesting.

04:42

Uh, I actually have one of them here. Um, a number of professors jumped in this thread.

04:48

If some people might be able to read that some can't, but, um, essentially he posted this clip saying that Christians should be in favor of carbon credits.

04:59

And one of the forthcoming, or I should say, uh, aspiring students, I'm not sure if they've been accepted or what, but there was a student that, uh, wanted to go to Southeastern and said, this concerns me, and then a number of professors,

05:12

Stephen, uh, McKinnon and Ryan Hutchinson, Todd Borger, and then someone who used to work for the seminary,

05:19

Griffin Goolidge, all jumped in to defend the seminary and their choice of having

05:25

Jonathan Mu and Tom Buck just kept asking him, like, do you reject the teaching in this video? And no one would reject it.

05:32

No one would reject the teaching. And so this is kind of now on them in a way. I mean, they, they hosted it at the seminary and, uh, and so I thought, you know what, we should really talk about this.

05:42

And so that's what we're going to do. And, um, so, uh, Dr. Reeves, I, I think we're going to start, it's a longer one, but we're going to start with, uh,

05:51

Catherine Hayhoe and listen to a number of what she thinks she has to say, which are not as, uh, she's not as nuts and bolts as Jonathan Mu, uh, and then maybe make a few comments and then we'll go to Jonathan Mu and once we get there, we're going to make some, you're, you have some actual facts to present to contradict what

06:14

Jonathan Mu is saying. So, um, with that sound good. Yep. Okay.

06:19

So with that, let's start with this presentation, uh, from Catherine Hayhoe. And this was,

06:25

I believe this was about a year and a half ago at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Idea of dispensationalism where all sort of our apocalyptic theology today comes from a lot of that can be placed squarely at the door of JN Darby and Mark Knowles classic, the scandal of the evangelical mind,

06:40

I think does a really good job of unpacking that connection. And it's almost sort of unintentionally humorous for me growing up in church to read the profound impact that it's had on American culture, far beyond,

06:51

I think what Darby would have ever imagined or intended and to the point where it's not even really recognizable as the route it came from.

06:57

And that actually relates to what I do with climate change because so many people think, Oh, well, you know, when the world gets bad enough, we'll just push the eject button, so to speak, and God will take us home and it doesn't matter what happens to the planet after we leave.

07:10

And so that kind of thinking feeds into, well, it doesn't matter. So, you know, so, you know, the majority of the species on the planet have already become extinct because of our actions.

07:19

So 8 million people die from air pollution every year, you know, so what? It's all going to end anyways. And so that actually feeds ironically into my work today.

07:26

Yeah. I I'm thinking of one author that I read who was, was, was expressing those sentiments in that he said, uh, if I don't like the wallpaper at a hotel

07:37

I'm staying in, I don't try to change it. I'm only going to be there that night. You know, I, I don't, I don't call the management demanding they change the wallpaper.

07:45

So that would be, you know, illustrating that, that mindset, I think very well.

07:51

If I could expand on that, I think you're right. And I would actually categorize that as a modern day form of Gnosticism because the

08:00

Gnostic philosophy, very broadly, there were many different aspects to it that you're more familiar with than I am, but very broadly, it was the idea that the physical didn't matter.

08:09

It was just the spiritual that mattered. And the apostle John wrote his letters to impart combat that philosophy very strongly.

08:16

And he said, you know, Jesus came in the flesh. We saw him, we touched him. He was fully human. And that carries through to our disregard for this incredible planet, which

08:23

God handcrafted for us. It is perfect for life. He gave it to us and gave us responsibility over every living thing on this planet in Genesis 1 .1.

08:33

And yet somehow today we have this modern form of Gnosticism where we don't think the physical matters, even though in the

08:39

Bible, it's very clear that it does from the smallest aspects of creation that God cares about, you know, that it talks about in the

08:45

Bible to the fact that Jesus actually became a physical human and walked on this physical earth. We believe that.

08:51

So how could this not matter to God? Tell us about. If I could just stop right there,

08:59

Dr. Reeves, Catherine Hayhoe accuses Christians of Gnosticism, which to me seems like a fairly serious charge because they don't care about the environment enough.

09:11

And this kind of bothers me. It just seems like a very heavy thing to accuse someone of.

09:19

Yeah, I mean, she doesn't really know what Gnosticism is, I think. She seems to think to confuse it with asceticism.

09:29

Gnosticism, you could really turn that back on her because Gnosticism is the idea that you can have some sort of special knowledge,

09:39

Gnosis. And that is precisely what the advocates of human caused climate change are saying, that they have some special knowledge and the rest of the world has got to just bow to that.

09:57

And that if you try and use. What we might call traditional approaches to knowledge, we will be making a mistake, we have to bow down to climate change as conceived by people like Catherine Hayhoe.

10:16

No, that's good. I didn't even think of that, that they're the ones that if you wanted to categorize Gnostics, they would be closer.

10:23

So, OK, well, let's see if I can pull it up. We'll keep going here. How your experiences in Colombia may have informed you about understanding the impact of climate change, how would living among those who are at the margins economically, how did that impact your thinking in this area?

10:48

When disaster strikes, it is devastating. I mean, it is orders of magnitude worse than it is here.

10:54

Something here that we might shrug off to there, it can be life threatening, life ending, you know, threatening your food supply, your family, your water, your economic stability.

11:04

It could mean the difference between having a house versus living on the street. The difference is just extraordinary.

11:10

Climate change is not only an environmental issue, so to speak, it's an everything issue.

11:15

Climate change affects people who are poor the most, people who are hungry the most, people who are vulnerable the most, people who are living in precarious situations, who don't have a home for their family, people who live on marginalized lands, like my friends who are building shanty, their houses in shanty towns on the side of a very steep mountain.

11:32

When the floods came, then they're the first to be swept down the mountain. And don't get me wrong, we've always had floods and droughts and heat waves and disasters, they've always happened.

11:41

But I learned that climate change is loading the weather dice against us. It's making these events more frequent, more damaging, or more severe.

11:49

And in fact, the U .S. military calls climate change a threat multiplier. Pause right there. Define, that's the term you used in your lecture at the conference.

11:59

Please define threat multiplier. I would be glad to. Thank you for asking. A threat multiplier is not something that creates a threat.

12:09

It takes a threat that already exists, a problem that already exists, and it makes it worse.

12:16

So climate change does not create poverty. It does not create inequality.

12:21

It does not create hunger, lack of access to clean water, disease, political instability, refugee crises.

12:28

It does not create these. These are unfortunately the product of our lack of management of the resources

12:35

God gave us. Here in North America, for just as an example, we throw out over 40 percent of the food we produce.

12:43

There is more than enough food to feed the world. There is no logistical reason in terms of how much food we produce that anybody should be hungry in this world.

12:51

I'm not saying everybody can be eating, you know, massive steaks every day, and it's not good for us either, but there is enough food to go around.

12:59

And the fact that there's hunger is a flaw in our human systems. So that's on us.

13:06

But where does climate change come in? Climate change is increasing the risk of the heat waves and the droughts, and it's disrupting the traditional rainfall patterns that they depend on in Africa, for example, where many people are subsistence farmers.

13:18

And so as a result, on average, since the 1980s, we've seen about $5 billion of crop losses every year on average because of climate change impacts loading the dice against us, and much of those losses are happening in the poorest parts of the world.

13:31

That's how climate change is taking an already existing problem and making it worse. But decade by decade by decade, we see the world getting warmer.

13:40

Okay, if I could just stop right here for one second, Professor Reeves.

13:47

So she makes a few claims, but she seems to indicate that our human actions are what have prevented third world countries from having access to food because they can't grow because of droughts and all these threat multiplier.

14:05

But somehow we in the first world countries are still able to produce enough food for the entire world, and the effects of climate change aren't damaging our crops.

14:14

Am I hearing that right? Yeah, her whole argument is actually based on a fallacy.

14:22

She says that disasters are getting more extreme, more frequent, more severe.

14:28

The data shows otherwise. The book that your listeners should read is the one by Stephen Koonin.

14:39

It's called Unsettled, with a question mark at the end. Koonin was a high official in Obama's government, undersecretary of state for science or something like that.

14:51

And he was asked to convene a meeting on climate change.

14:58

And he did so with a number, he's a physicist, with a number of people, and I think the auspices of the

15:05

American Physics Society. And they looked at the data.

15:15

And his book shows that, in fact, the data are not showing this increase that Catherine Hayhoe is talking about.

15:26

There are not more hurricanes or more energetic hurricanes. There are not more droughts or worse droughts.

15:33

There are not more wildfires. She says somewhere in that talk that the acreage is increased.

15:40

Well, Koonin shows that that is not the case. In fact, the acreage damaged by wildfires has actually gone down.

15:49

All these allegations that things are more extreme,

15:56

Koonin just debunks. That isn't the case. So her argument is hold right at the start, really.

16:04

As to whether it affects other issues, we'll come on to that with Jonathan Moo, I think, in a few minutes.

16:14

It just seems to pull on our heartstrings because you envision someone in the third world who's impoverished suffering because of actions that we're taking in the

16:23

West. But it doesn't add up that somehow our actions aren't at the source where we're the ones doing them.

16:30

It's not bothering our crops somehow. We have enough to feed the world. But it does bother theirs, even though we're the ones.

16:36

Yeah. I mean, there has been, in the last 50 years, there was an unprecedented rise in food crops.

16:48

And some scientists I know would say that was due to the increase in carbon dioxide.

16:56

And that is something that they just will not accept, you know. But that is something that should be taken into account.

17:08

Coonan talks about that a little in his book, but not very much. It's mostly based on debunking this idea that extremes are getting worse.

17:20

And incidentally, the data that he uses is all taken from the

17:25

IPCC's publications, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.

17:33

And so it's official data. It's contained in the science chapters of their reports.

17:41

But you would never think that from the way the press and the media report it. No, not even close.

17:49

But as we go year by year, we still have winter and summer. We've had record cold in Texas in 2011 and 1989.

17:56

And the power grid did not prepare for those. And so that's why they were unprepared now. But at the same time, what we experience where we live is not always warmer temperatures.

18:07

What we see is what I call global weirding, like I talked about before.

18:12

Things are getting weirder as climate change loads the dice against us. And in fact, I was picking up my son from Sunday school a couple of years ago.

18:20

And I was standing in line behind somebody who goes to our church. And he was just making conversation because they hadn't let the kids out yet.

18:27

And he turned to me and said, do you feel like the weather is getting weirder? You know, droughts getting longer, heat waves getting stronger, heavy rainfall getting more frequent.

18:35

And I said, yes, I study this and I have seen that it is getting weirder.

18:41

And he said, I knew it. I've lived here for 30 years. And I can just tell it's not the same as it used to be.

18:47

That's how we're seeing climate change affect us in the places where we live. Yeah, I mean, when

18:52

I was a boy growing up in the Ozarks of Missouri, we did not have armadillos. I know you do in Texas.

18:59

But I can remember the first time I saw an armadillo, you know, dead on the side of the road.

19:04

I thought, what in the world is that? And then when I realized what it was, what is it doing here?

19:09

Yes. And that's indicative of the kind of changes we're talking about.

19:15

You're exactly right. And we see it differently depending on where we live. So for example, in the

19:21

Gulf Coast, they're seeing not more frequent hurricanes, but they're seeing much stronger hurricanes. As somebody who went through Katrina, I know exactly what you're talking about.

19:29

Exactly. And then out in the West Coast, we're not seeing more frequent wildfires because most of them are just started by accidental human ignition.

19:37

But we're seeing that they're burning a lot greater area. Where I live in Texas, we never used to have fire ants.

19:43

Fire ants are an invasive species that were introduced to the United States. But they had been kept at bay by our cold winter temperatures in Lubbock.

19:50

Because we actually get pretty cold in the winter in Lubbock. But our winters have been warming faster than any other season in Texas.

19:58

And so a few years ago, one of our friend's grandmother who was in her 90s, still living on her own, very independent, dedicated gardener.

20:06

She was out gardening and she saw these ants running around. And she thought nothing of it because we had never had fire ants in this part of Texas.

20:14

Never. So unfortunately, she didn't have great circulation in her legs. So she was standing there gardening.

20:19

The fire ants went all over her. They bit her so badly that she ended up in intensive care in the hospital before she realized what was happening.

20:27

And that's an example of how our warmer winters are increasing our risks where we live. So you see armadillos.

20:32

We see fire ants in Texas. And where I grew up in Ontario, in Canada, we never had ticks. So Lyme disease and ticks, we didn't even know what that was.

20:42

In fact, one student who was working with me, she got Lyme disease through studying kudzu, through tramping through all of the woods in the

20:48

Southeast US. And when she went back to Canada, it took them forever to diagnose it because they'd never seen

20:53

Lyme disease. Well, fast forward 15 years. Ticks and Lyme disease are all over Southern Ontario.

20:59

Why? Because our woods. And so is kudzu. Kudzu is also in Southern Ontario. Because our cold winters are no longer cold enough to kill off these pests and invasives.

21:08

And on climate change, the people who care least about it and who are most... Okay, let's stop there.

21:15

So what do you say, Dr. Reeves, to armadillos in Missouri, fire ants in Texas, and ticks and kudzu in Ontario?

21:24

And I don't know if that's true or not. I don't live in these regions. But are these species invading areas that were once too cold, and now they're warming up because of human activity or what?

21:38

Well, climate does change. There's no doubt about that. And it's not unreasonable to find that different populations of different animals, insects, and so on will move around according to the climate that they're experiencing.

21:55

But to build this whole edifice of climate change and climate emergency, climate crisis, and all that, to build that on a few observations like that is going far too far.

22:13

I mean, I've lived long enough to have experienced one of the coldest winters ever in the

22:21

UK, which was 1963. And one of the hottest summers ever in 1976.

22:30

And nothing since then has been... No summer has been hotter. No winter has been colder.

22:37

So what do I make of that? That the weather is warming or the weather is cooling down?

22:43

Yeah, the climate, sorry. The climate is just accumulated weather, if you like. Do you think this plays on the short life, like the memories of people who only lived decades?

22:56

Like, so the example that I have is I live in New York, and there'll be old timers who will say, when

23:03

I was a kid, we used to go make fires on the ice, and we'd spend all day out on the lake and ice fish.

23:10

And you rarely get a summer, or a winter, I should say, that gets cold enough to do that kind of thing.

23:18

And in the mountains, you might have that, but we just had a very mild winter. And so you'll have guys who are older, they'll think back to, hey, the 1950s weren't like this.

23:27

But during that time, my understanding is we actually had a fairly cold spell in New York.

23:34

And so they're comparing it to memories of a child that their first memories were during a uniquely cold period.

23:42

And so we haven't been measuring temperature even that long, right? So I guess

23:49

I'm just wondering, like, over the long span, over centuries, wouldn't you need a longer view to make the case that we're indeed going through a crazy climate change?

23:59

Exactly, you're quite right. I mean, I think this will come up in discussing some of Jonathan Moo's arguments later as well.

24:07

But that is true. There is a very interesting website you can get called realclimatescience .com.

24:16

It's run by a guy called Tony Heller. He lives out in the southwest

24:21

USA somewhere, I think. And he specializes in getting newspaper reports of extreme weather in 1930, 1910, 1896, and things like this.

24:39

And you can look at that. And you can just see, well, had the climate change, human -caused climate change narrative been going then, you would have found all sorts of stories that people could have made up.

24:54

But it's just climate changes. You know, that's how it does. You can't tie it down to one single cause.

25:05

Right, OK. Yeah, let's see if we can get through this. I don't know. We have a few more minutes here.

25:11

And then we'll jump into Jonathan Moo's stuff. Local and attacking scientists are very sadly often people who self -identify as either white

25:19

Catholics or white evangelicals, either one. I mean, I can literally count on the fingers of my hands over 10 years how many people have specifically told me, well, you can't be a real scientist or I don't trust your science because you're a

25:34

Christian. But unfortunately, I need all my hands and all my toes, all my fingers and all my toes to count the number of Christians who tell me

25:41

I'm not a real Christian because I'm a scientist on a weekly basis. That is hard to hear.

25:47

That is really tough. And the fact that you are handling it so well, you seem to handle it so well.

25:55

It's quite remarkable. And that's a great question for us to close with, in that, you know,

26:02

Southeastern Seminary is a Southern Baptist institution. We are part of the

26:08

Southern Baptist Convention. And as Southern Baptists, we do understand how economic and socioeconomic and political issues can cloud the judgment of otherwise very good people.

26:24

You know, we as Southern Baptists have made some, I mean, the origin of our denomination is a very tragic story over the whole issue of slavery.

26:34

So these are so many of the people who are disagreeing with you. If you knew them on a daily basis, you'd see them in a

26:42

Sunday school class, they'd be just be wonderful. And yet on this issue or something to this, it's very distorted.

26:50

And that's hard to take. So how can we have a conversation that models the love of Christ?

26:58

How do we do that? Well, that is a very interesting link you just drew because there is an evangelical

27:04

Christian who's a historian. His name is Jean -Francois Mouhal. And he has studied the relationship between climate change and slavery.

27:13

And what he's found is he would read the letters to the editor and the comments that people would publish in the newspaper back in the pre -Civil

27:20

War era. And then he compared that to the letters to the editor and the comments that people would publish today in support of continuing a fossil fuel -based economy.

27:28

And what he found is in some of those letters, you could literally take out slavery and replace it with fossil fuels. The same economic arguments were being used to argue for both of them.

27:39

And of course, everyone wants a healthy economy. Of course, everyone wants people to have good jobs to be able to feed their families.

27:46

Of course, we all want this. But do we want it at the price of truth and justice? And I think the answer to that is we do not.

27:53

And in that answer, Christians have always led the way. They've led the way in the anti -slavery movement. They've led the way in civil rights.

28:00

They've led the way in championing the rights of, again, the poorest and most vulnerable in some of the most remote parts of the world.

28:06

We know that we are called to walk justly and to show love. And so when

28:11

I talk with people about climate change, I don't assume that they're motivated by bad reasons.

28:18

I assume they're motivated by good reasons. I assume that they want to be a good person.

28:23

I assume that if they're a Christian, they have a new heart. I assume that they have the Holy Spirit living in them.

28:29

I actually have some people on my list who I pray for along those exact lines who it's really been impossible to have a positive conversation with because they're so steeped in their political ideology.

28:38

Their ideological glasses, so to speak, are so thick they can't see past them. I talked in my presentation about how

28:44

I really see what I do is what it talks about in the book of James, where it's like, we're like the man who looked in the mirror and forgot what he looked like, went away and forgot what he looked like.

28:52

So I see myself as holding up the mirror and some people's glasses are so thick, they literally can't see who God has made them. But I still have people who

28:58

I pray for along those lines because I believe if they are Christians, we don't know, we can't see someone's heart.

29:04

But if they are, then God's spirit is speaking to them. It might be at a very faint whisper, but it's there, even in the back of their brain.

29:11

So starting with the idea that people wanna do the right thing, that they wanna be a good person is really important to a constructive conversation.

29:17

Because if somebody comes up to you wagging a bony finger of judgment, telling you that you're doing something wrong, especially if it's something you didn't think was wrong, we immediately, our human reaction is just say, oh yeah, well fine,

29:30

I'm gonna double down on that then. So starting from that place of mutual respect, of not making any negative assumptions, and then the next assumption

29:38

I make is, first of all, they're doing what they think is right. The second assumption I make is, if they're truly

29:44

Christians, they believe what the Bible says and we can have a conversation about what the Bible says. And I believe that if they really understand what the

29:51

Bible says, then they too would understand that they're the perfect person to care, not despite of who they are or not because they have to change who they are, but because of who they already are, because of who

30:01

God has already made them. So God has already made us perfect children of God. Our behavior isn't perfect, we all know that.

30:07

We have a lot of behavior improvement to work on as we are continually being renewed.

30:13

But God has created a, has conducted a heart surgery, so to speak, at our core, giving us that new heart, that new hardware, so to speak, that we need to truly understand who we are.

30:25

And if we approach conversations like that, not every conversation is gonna end well, because some people, you know, their ears are stopped, their eyes are closed, as Jesus talks about with the

30:34

Pharisees. Sometimes the most religious people are the hardest people to talk to, and Jesus saw this and talks about this.

30:39

But many others are able to look, to think, to ponder. And as one

30:46

Christian said to me, he said, he had been very skeptical before, and he followed me on social media very quietly, once in a while, asked a few questions.

30:53

Then finally, he said this to me, he said, you dragged my sorry denier's ass to the truth.

31:02

And he went on to say how as a Christian, he thought in truth was important. And so that's where he ended up.

31:07

And I just, that is my favorite line that I've ever received. That's a great story. Well, it's on that hopeful note, we wanna say thank you,

31:14

Dr. Hayhoe, for taking the time to have this conversation. And we're encouraged by the very exciting ministry that the

31:23

Lord has given you in the area of climate change. Thank you for joining us. Okay, well,

31:30

Dr. Reeves, I just heard, I don't even know what to say to that.

31:36

Like, how do you have a respectful conversation? Well, you have to realize that the people you're talking to are good people, even though they forgot who they were, like James says, they're against justice and truth.

31:49

And they might even be deploying pro -slavery arguments, but they're good people. That's what

31:54

I just heard. So I don't know if you have any comments on that. It's not even about climate change, but the tactic to kind of inject this into Christianity is just super odd to me.

32:05

Yeah, it seems unlikely that she has really thought theologically about climate change.

32:11

I think it seemed to be very superficial. And I'd like to assume all those nice things about her as well.

32:23

But on some level, I'm sure it's all true, but it's a lack of understanding, biblical understanding,

32:32

I think. Yeah, well, the music and everything, I guess this is just me at the end.

32:37

It almost sounded like we were leading up to an almost an altar call experience here that we're going to all give up our diesel trucks.

32:45

And anyway, all right. So that was, do you want me to show any slides on this specifically before we go to Jonathan Moo, or do you want to just jump into Jonathan Moo?

32:57

Well, I did prepare a few, but if you make them available.

33:04

We can do that. Yeah, we can. To your listeners online, that'll probably do it rather than go into long discussion now.

33:16

Okay, yeah. So all right, let's get into Jonathan Moo then. And we can display, you just let me know if you want to display a slide.

33:23

And I have them all here. So this is Jonathan Moo who actually was, both Catherine Hayhoe and Jonathan Moo were at Southeastern Seminary giving presentations.

33:35

And then Catherine Hayhoe also did this interview, which is what we just played clips from.

33:40

But I want to play for Jonathan Moo, his actual lecture that he gave. And remember, these are aspiring pastors.

33:48

These are people that will be in your pulpits. Some of them already are preaching to you.

33:54

And they went to seminary so that they could learn how to rightly divide the word of truth. And this is the kind of thing that the seminary thinks is useful for them to be exposed to and hear.

34:06

So here's Jonathan Moo. Faithful to the gospel, we must care well for God's creation.

34:12

It's not an option. It's not just something we might add on to lots of other programs we might do.

34:18

It's not even just a clever strategy for evangelism. Although I do consider it one of the ways in which faithful Christian witness must be lived out in our time.

34:26

And one that many people around us, many of my students are longing to see the church do more fully. And the reasons why this is absolutely vital, it should be woven into all that we do and proclaim, is first and foremost, because it is part of the gospel.

34:41

It is part of what it is to love God and neighbor. I'm ignoring all the advice of social media.

34:46

Can I just jump in? I know that was really short there, but I think I just heard heresy potentially, because he just said, loving

34:54

God and neighbor is part of the gospel. And this is fighting climate change, which is the rest of his presentation and environmental issues and so forth.

35:04

That if you're not on board with this, that you're somehow not being faithful to the gospel, which that's scary to me.

35:10

How do you even get there? But he's merging his version of the law with the grace of Christ.

35:16

And I just need to make that theological point before we get into the science. I don't know if you have anything on that, but that's my opinion though.

35:25

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, all right. Social scientists, and even of someone who

35:31

I respect deeply, like Catherine Hayhoe, who says giving people lots of data is pointless.

35:37

It just goes over the heads, kind of we don't pay attention to it. All we should have is stories and that sort of thing.

35:43

Many people in the world starve and are still starving right now, but there's enough food on earth.

35:49

It's because of the inequity in how food is distributed, because of the injustices built into our system that people starve.

35:56

The topsoil upon which we depend is being lost at rates 10 to 40 times the rate it can be as fast as it can be replenished.

36:04

Okay, so I wanna stop with some of these claims that he makes that are very detailed. He just talked about the topsoil rates and right after talking about how we have enough food, but we have injustice, and injustice is keeping the food from getting out there.

36:19

But then he turns around and makes this claim that actually, maybe it's not the injustice so much. Our topsoil, 40 % of it's gone.

36:26

It's being eroded. So what's he talking about? I didn't even know what he was talking about when I heard that. I've never heard that before.

36:33

I don't know if there was any paper, written paper with citations or anything on it.

36:41

I just heard that and I thought, well, where does that come from? Okay, you had the same thought

36:47

I did then. So we don't have anything in your slides about that particular claim. He has got some slides in a minute.

36:54

Within my lifetime, we just live on an earth that has 68 % fewer wild vertebrates than it did then.

37:02

Okay, so I don't know. I'm gonna just stop every time he makes a claim. So 68 % less wild vertebrates.

37:08

Anything on that? It may be true. I don't know.

37:15

Okay. I noticed he doesn't know that the noun from the verb diminish is diminution.

37:24

It would take someone from Great Britain to correct our English on that. Yeah, I mean, it's just, that's crazy though.

37:31

Like extinction rate 100 to 1000 times natural background rate, 25 % of species risk of being lost, many within a few decades and then 68 % fewer wild vertebrates than in 1970.

37:45

So in a period of 50 years, he's saying that we've had 68 fewer wild vertebrates, which

37:51

I don't know exactly what he's talking about, but maybe that's like, are we talking about like the

37:57

Amazon rainforest being some of that being converted into farms and stuff? And I don't know.

38:03

But anyway. Well, I mean, a lot of that could be due to things like poaching, for example.

38:10

So it's due to humans, but it may not be anything to do with changing climate. Well, if you think about just the age of exploration and coming,

38:19

Europeans coming to South America and North America, and I know his scope is 1970, but they're coming into a wilderness area that obviously there's some humans living here, but they're bringing a civilization that's gonna bring more domesticated animals and there's gonna be fewer wild animals.

38:39

And I mean, I'm seeing that where I live right now with New York City is moving up into my area because of COVID and they didn't like what happened.

38:45

So there's a population, there's houses going up everywhere and we have people like animals, like wild bears coming into my area now because they're being pushed out of other areas.

38:56

And so anyway. There is a sort of worship of wildness in the environmental movement.

39:05

And there's this cult of rewilding, for example, introducing dangerous animals into public spaces where people live.

39:18

I don't know how I feel about that. I may say something about that later on, but.

39:24

Okay, I'll keep going then. Fewer wild vertebrates than it did then. Climate change becomes the thing that multiplies all the other threats that we're facing.

39:35

It affects everything else. And so we can't miss it. We can't not deal with it. Last seven years have been the last, the hottest seven years that have been recorded.

39:45

Okay, I gotta stop there. The last seven years. And he's saying this, I think in the beginning of, if I'm not mistaken, 2023.

39:54

So is that the truth? Is that starting in, I guess, 2014 approximately that we've had, it's been really hot?

40:04

I think there is some evidence for that. There's John Christie at University of Alabama, Huntsville, who is a

40:16

Christian, has been tracking these temperatures for a long time.

40:22

And he is not by any means one of these gung -ho climate change activists.

40:33

He's a solid citizen. And I have seen his website where he says that those sorts of temperatures have been seen in the last seven or eight years.

40:49

But they fluctuate. It's not a huge amount.

40:56

It's not that they're increasing by 10 degrees or something. It's a fairly modest rise.

41:04

So starting in - John Christie is, well, his website's worth looking up. Okay, so around 2015, we do have an increase then in the temperature.

41:15

As this graph shows. But I sometimes wonder just what if those influential corporations that lie behind that institute had said, let's think right now, educate the public, and transition to different ways of creating energy.

41:29

We might be in a very different position than we are right now. But we haven't done that.

41:34

And so if we look at the last - Can I just say a word on the greenhouse effect? Yeah, please do. Yeah, I'll go back.

41:40

That is still controversial. And if you look at the work being done by Will Happer, for example, at Princeton, who is one of the most respected and long -lasting physicists in the world, he would argue that the greenhouse effect is much more modest than people think and isn't really very well understood at all.

42:09

And he is one of the few people in the world who does understand it, basically. We all learn that, though, in elementary school.

42:18

Yes, yes, yes, we do. Along with the water cycle. So you're telling me -

42:25

What you probably don't learn is that the greenhouse effect is, in fact, limited by the little windows where the radiation can be absorbed by the different gases.

42:43

And those are not limitless. So if you like, it is self -limiting in the end.

42:54

And Happer reckons you could double the amount of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, and it would still not be serious at all.

43:07

Where do the gases go, then? You're saying that there's windows where they go back,

43:12

I don't know, into space, or they are absorbed by things here on Earth? Well, mostly they exit to space, through the troposphere.

43:26

And the other thing to say about that, what was I going to say there?

43:33

About the greenhouse effect? About the greenhouse effect. There's another scientist who's done a lot of work on this.

43:41

Oh, yes, he's a Chinese guy, very interesting chap called Zhong.

43:47

And he has some papers in the atmospheric science journals. And he thinks that the whole basis for the greenhouse effect was based on an incorrect application of the

44:03

Stefan -Boltzmann law, which assumes that the

44:08

Earth is a black body, which it isn't. So there are scientists around, lots of scientists around, who would dispute the fact that we think we understand the greenhouse effect, but we really don't.

44:25

Fascinating. More efficient than we are right now. But we haven't done that.

44:30

And so if we look at the last 800 ,000 years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you see that we're way up here, outside of anything that has been experienced in human civilization.

44:42

So he connects this global temperature rise with like the rise in carbon dioxide is causing the global temperature rise.

44:50

Would you agree with that? Or do you think that he's off? What that graph is hiding a lot of variation.

45:01

I don't know if you can show my slide number nine. Sure. But there you are at a much, much longer scale.

45:13

So if you look, that's the last, what is it?

45:19

Last 11 ,000 years, rather than hundreds of thousands of years. And the top, the blue graph is showing you the change in temperature.

45:36

Okay. And the bottom one, the red one is showing you the amount of carbon dioxide.

45:43

Oh, wow. Now you can see that carbon dioxide has been increasing for the last few thousand years.

45:55

Long before there was any cars or transportation. That's right.

46:01

Yeah. Long before humans could. I mean, there were relatively few humans around. If you go back three and a half thousand years, you're roughly at the time of the flood.

46:12

Now, well, I have to ask this question because I know I'm going to get this question right. So you have a graph that's 11 ,000 years.

46:19

So there's some people that are going to, and I realize there's some young earthers who will extend it to like 12 ,000.

46:25

But there's going to be people who say, wait a minute, what's this based on? We didn't have temperatures.

46:32

How do you even know the earth is that old? So I'm just curious if you have any response for them.

46:39

Well, yes, you have an assumption that may be wrong, but you have an assumption of uniformitarianism.

46:47

That means that the processes we see now are as they used to be, always have been.

46:55

Nature is uniform. Of course, there is a huge discontinuity at the time of the flood.

47:02

So what you're seeing before the flood may not have any basis in reality at all, but you still see something and you're interpreting it on the assumption that the effects you see were based on a uniform process.

47:22

So these are ice core readings then, right? So these are mostly ice cores. Yeah, I think this one is ice cores.

47:28

There are other things, other paleoclimate indicators that people use as well.

47:36

Okay, so there's the assumptions about the range then are a period of, I guess, melting and freezing then is?

47:45

Yeah, but the interesting bits, okay, I understand you'll get people arguing about that, but the interesting bits are in the last few thousand years.

47:57

You can see the three green periods that are marked. Yes, I do see that.

48:03

Yeah, and those are the warm periods that have occurred over the course of history, not just, that doesn't go back beyond the flood or anything.

48:19

Those are actual warm periods that we know about. The Minoan period, the Roman, the medieval warm period.

48:26

And you can see that there is very little correlation between the numbers in blue and the numbers in red.

48:40

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't seem to affect the temperature, the carbon dioxide at least. Yeah, so that was all hidden in Jonathan Moo's graph because he was doing, what, 800 ,000 years or something?

48:56

So everything gets smeared out. Yeah, let's see here. Yeah, he's got, so from 1880 is his global temperature rise graph.

49:08

And then what is this? 800 ,000 years is carbon dioxide graph. So yeah, they're not to scale with each other at all.

49:15

So you can't compare them, but he just kind of, yeah, so he says carbon dioxide's rising over the last 800 ,000 years and then turns around and says, and the global temperature's also rising, but that scale is only from 1880.

49:32

Yeah. So yeah, that's interesting. I didn't notice that at first, but you're right.

49:39

Okay, do you want me to keep playing then? Or do you have anything more? That'll probably do for now, will it, on the graph situation?

49:45

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's good, that's good. Expect they might do. And the things we might expect associated with that,

49:52

Arctic sea ice declining, glaciers around the world, the ice cap on Greenland and Antarctic ice, all declining and the rate of that decline ramping up dramatically in recent decades.

50:03

Sea level rising, both because just warmer seas expand. So a lot of the sea level rise thus far has actually been just due to the expansion of water when it gets warmer.

50:11

But also, of course, increasingly now, and this is now the primary driver of it, it's actually the melting of those ice caps on land, places like Greenland, leading to sea level rise.

50:19

This has been one of the biggest uncertainties in climate modeling in recent decades. It's getting a little bit more accurate.

50:24

And sadly, the rise in sea levels is perhaps more than we had expected.

50:32

Okay, can I ask you about this? Because this is something that's always intrigued me.

50:38

I don't understand it. I go out West for,

50:43

I'm from California originally. So we've driven out West a few times. We've gone through the Rocky Mountains. We've gone through areas where there's still remnants of glaciers.

50:50

But you can tell, they'll say like, hey, this whole valley was formed by a glacier. Well, where's the glacier now? It's gone, it melted.

50:56

Or it's, you know, there's a lake that, you know, that's the remains of whatever it was.

51:02

And this stuff happened years before Europeans ever arrived. These glaciers were melting.

51:09

And then they'll turn around and say, if a glacier in Alaska melts, or is decreasing in size, that must be due to our activity.

51:19

And it bothers me, because I don't understand how most of the West of the

51:24

United States, in the mountainous areas, once there were glaciers everywhere, it was under ice, and it's gone.

51:32

And they'll say that, but then they'll turn around and blame modern transportation for what's happening in Alaska.

51:39

I just don't understand why they say that. So maybe you can enlighten me.

51:47

Uh, it's a convenient excuse, I suppose. But yeah, you know, that graph we just looked at with the medieval warm period on it.

51:59

Uh, let me go back. The one that you had in yours, or? Yes, the, yeah, my slide nine.

52:06

There you go. Yeah, so you can see the temperature dropping quite a lot towards the end of these warm periods, the blue lines.

52:20

Right. And that would be when things are starting to get colder again.

52:26

And these are natural occurrences. The temperature does fluctuate quite radically over the course of centuries.

52:36

And we get glaciation and followed by melting.

52:46

Then we get glaciation again. And we happen to be, by the look of it, in another warm period at the moment.

52:55

But you can go back to, if you've ever been to Iceland. Now, you can, you can go to places there.

53:02

Because Iceland was founded, of course, when there was a warm period going on.

53:11

In fact, it was so warm that they called Greenland, Greenland. That would be the,

53:16

I guess, the last one there. And then a bit later on the, we came into a cold period again.

53:25

And we've had two or three of them since that time. And if you go there, you can see the glaciers are definitely retreating at the moment because we're in a warm period.

53:40

And they've gone back a long way. You know, you can go and visit the site of a glacier and, glacier, sorry,

53:49

British pronunciation here. You can go to the site of a glacier and there'll be this huge talus, spoil heap sort of thing, where all the detritus came down.

54:03

And you will see the glacier itself is miles away, you know, long, long way back.

54:10

But then you can also go to places there where they will tell you that the original farmstead founded by the first settlers in Iceland is still buried in the ice, many, many hundreds of yards further up the mountain.

54:30

So this has been a regular occurrence over the years. And it's just something that happens, you know.

54:37

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. And it makes me wonder about things

54:43

I've seen, like Ephesus. I thought the city of Ephesus was like a port city, or at least he was near to the

54:51

Mediterranean Sea. And I remember when I visited, it's miles inland, you know. And I don't know if over time, and that was, you know, whenever Ephesus was constructed,

55:01

I guess that's thousands of years ago. But if the sea level, because that's what he's working up to, is the sea levels rising.

55:09

Does the sea level fluctuate too with the temperature or? It does. It also, in places where the ice was, the huge weight of the glaciers depressed the land.

55:26

And so we're still rebounding, really, from the ice ages. And the land is rising where the ice was thickest, because the ice is now melting.

55:39

So you will get not sea levels rising there, but sea levels apparently falling.

55:47

I can remember when I visited the University of Vasa in Finland. And it's a port city.

55:54

And there are thousands of islands in an archipelago stretching across towards Sweden.

56:04

And you can go to the inland about two and a half miles to the old port, which was a port only 200 years ago.

56:15

And now it's several miles inland. That's the old Vasa. And the islands in the archipelago have risen over the centuries.

56:30

And eventually, they may well go all the way across, joined up with Sweden.

56:37

Wow. I have not heard that. That's interesting. So there are places where the land is rising and the places where the sea is rising.

56:47

That's fascinating. And there is also, there's a bit more on that as well, we might come to.

56:53

But there are cycles as well, not just secular trends up and down, but things that are periodically varying.

57:05

One of the most obvious ones that everybody has heard of is, of course, El Nino.

57:12

Yes. And La Nina. Yeah. But people probably don't realize that there is something like that in the

57:19

Atlantic going on over a period of something like 70 years, rising and falling.

57:26

The Atlantic multi -decadal oscillation, they call it. So some of the graphs you see of the sea rise for Atlantic coastal areas, they may have started 70 years ago.

57:43

So it looks as if the sea level is just rising and rising and rising. But if you go a bit further back in time, you would see that they have been falling.

57:52

And they're probably due to fall again. So you get cycles in these things that our lifetimes are probably not long enough in some cases to discern the difference between a trend and a cycle.

58:10

Well, you know, when I was young and I don't remember how old

58:15

I was, I was probably like early teenager, maybe when Inconvenient Truth came out,

58:21

Al Gore's documentary. And of course, that predicted that we're in the end times, basically.

58:27

Like we only have like a few decades and New York City is going to be underwater. And that hasn't happened at all.

58:34

There hasn't been any noticeable rise in New York Harbor. And at least nothing that's affected the commercial trades and everything else, transportation.

58:47

So yeah, it just like, I don't know. So it seems like younger people are the ones most ripe to hear this and get scared about it because they haven't, they don't have a long view.

59:00

And since they can only remember back maybe two decades, it's maybe the scientist who has letters by his name is telling us the truth.

59:09

And we only have 10 years or 20 years or 50 years. So anyway, let's keep playing this.

59:16

And as perhaps more than we had expected, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, that intensifies the whole hydrologic cycle.

59:26

And what that means is exactly what we're seeing. It means that you get stronger, more intense storms.

59:33

Now, I just want to say one thing, Dr. Reeves, because you already talked about this with Catherine Hayhoe, but he says 1980 to 2019.

59:40

He has a graph. And, you know, I don't know where he's getting all this information.

59:46

If I could zoom in here, I can't see it very well, but it looks like there's hydrological events, climatological events, meteorological events, geophysical events.

59:57

He's got these all. And they all look like, especially the, I guess, hydrological, it just looks like it's going up.

01:00:06

And this is, of course, only a 40 year period we're talking about here. But I know you said that that wasn't true, that we don't actually see an increase in these events.

01:00:19

Is he just cherry picking a 40 year period? And if he went back another 10 years, it would ruin his graph.

01:00:25

Or what do you think is going on? I'm not certain about that one. I don't know what its provenance is, but it could be an example that Stephen Koonin discusses in his book.

01:00:39

And that is the definition of extremes. How do we decide what is an extreme?

01:00:48

And if you've only started counting them relatively recently, it completely confuses the thing you should be plotting, basically.

01:01:05

I don't know if that's the answer for this one. OK, yeah, because he doesn't give a source here on the slide.

01:01:14

But all right. Climate scientists, when they put together all the factors that affect the climate they know about and try to model what's happened, they just can't make the models work unless they include that burning of fossil fuels driven by human activity.

01:01:28

It's become by far the greatest contributor to the warming climate. In fact, we'd be perhaps even or slightly declining if it wasn't for that.

01:01:37

Dr. Reeves, we hear a lot about climate models. Could you just explain for everyone what are we talking about?

01:01:44

Because he makes a big deal about this, that, hey, the climate models must take into account human activity or it doesn't work.

01:01:50

And we just trust that they crunch numbers into these machines. But what is he talking about?

01:01:56

What's a climate model? That's a long question. There's a long answer to that.

01:02:04

I would refer you perhaps to Kooning's book and also another one by Tim Ball, who was a meteorologist.

01:02:12

And he is, I think he died recently. But his book is very interesting,

01:02:20

The Corruption of Climate Science. And he has a lot of interesting comments to say there.

01:02:32

Kooning points out that there are many things in these models whose values we don't really know.

01:02:39

And we have to sort of guess, really. And sometimes it appears the guesses that we make are the ones that give us the results that we want.

01:02:54

I mean, have they been accurate as far as... They haven't been accurate. They haven't been.

01:02:59

OK. Now, if you look at John Christie's work, again, as I say, he has been at the forefront of actually measuring temperatures.

01:03:09

And he has some interesting graphs where all of the models failed to fit the actual pattern of temperature rise.

01:03:23

And it's an indictment of the models when that happens. It wasn't just that they are scattered around a lot.

01:03:29

I mean, in statistics, we talk about random error and variance.

01:03:36

And we also talk about bias. And it's far more serious to have a model with bias in it.

01:03:43

And there is a paper by Ross McKittrick, who's another very, very bright guy, an econometrician in Canada.

01:03:54

And he was one of those who debunked the hockey stick in the book that I mentioned earlier on.

01:04:01

And he was able to show, a couple of years ago, he was suspicious of what was going on with all these models and how they were calibrating them.

01:04:16

And so he dug into the work that had been done. And he found they were all making the assumption that the model estimates they made of the parameters in it were unbiased.

01:04:31

And they made this assumption on the basis of a statistical theorem called the

01:04:37

Gauss -Markov model, the Gauss -Markov theorem. And he showed that the conditions for that theorem to hold were never satisfied.

01:04:51

So they were not unbiased. And his work would show you why they were not unbiased.

01:04:57

There was a hidden bias because they made an assumption that they never checked and was found to be false.

01:05:05

Wasn't there about a decade ago, a scandal at, I think it was a university in the United Kingdom.

01:05:11

And I, maybe I'm wrong. I thought it was East Anglia where they had manipulated the models to...

01:05:18

That's right. Yes. It was climate gate, they called it, of course. Yeah, that was very interesting.

01:05:25

There were emails from people saying things like, because there was a pause in the rise in temperature around that time, 2010 plus or minus a few years.

01:05:40

And it seemed as if temperatures were no longer rising. And one of the most infamous emails,

01:05:51

I think said, one scientist saying to another one, we have to find a way to hide the decline in temperature and things like that.

01:06:02

And one, and on the subject of bias as well and statistics, another of those well -known scientists wrote in one of the emails to somebody else.

01:06:18

And he said, they will say that the rise is not statistically significant, but it's going up.

01:06:28

Well, not statistically significant means we cannot distinguish it from zero. Right, right.

01:06:34

So there were things like that going on in the background the whole time. Yeah, I don't, whenever someone starts talking about models,

01:06:41

I think that's why I implicitly don't trust it because I lived through that. I remember that. And I just thought, okay, well, none of this is true then.

01:06:49

All right, we'll keep going here. And just to remind ourselves of our inheritance, we in the

01:06:59

United States have benefited the most from the burning of fossil fuels. If we look at this historically, we've inherited a society in a country that is rich and prosperous in part because of that.

01:07:10

And so that might raise questions of justice and of policy for us if we are people who get involved in that sort of thing, about our responsibility for it, not to just point the fingers elsewhere, even at China, as much as we want to point the finger and rightly point the finger at China, but to recognize if we've inherited these blessings, perhaps there's a particular responsibility and sacrifice called upon us.

01:07:31

What caused the Syrian civil war that has led to one of the greatest mass movements of people in the history of the world?

01:07:38

Lots of young men went to the cities under a very corrupt dictatorial regime, had no work, had no money, had no food.

01:07:47

Our revolution begins, put down harshly, supported by Russia. All the things we might say lead to this devastation of the land and of people's lives.

01:07:55

But behind it is also a drought of unprecedented proportions, which is why these young men went to the cities, because they can no longer grow food where they were.

01:08:04

A drought that we now are fairly confident would not have been possible in a world without climate change.

01:08:09

Some of these things lead some of my colleagues who are environmentalists to despair. Some of my students to climate anxiety, and perhaps you've just begun with Christ as.

01:08:19

Okay, I'm just going to stop there because these are clips, but so he seems to engage in some guilt manipulation.

01:08:26

That's my phrase I'm using, but I'm not saying you're representing him that way, but he is telling the students, these aspiring pastors really, that they've inherited this fossil fuel economy that has led to things like the

01:08:41

Syrian Civil War. We should take ownership and recognize our culpability in things like the

01:08:47

Syrian Civil War. And I remember hearing this when the Syrian Civil War was happening, that a lot of leftists were saying it was climate change, which

01:08:55

I just thought was the weirdest thing. I just heard talk radio hosts make fun of it, but I never knew exactly why they were claiming that.

01:09:02

I just thought it was silly. But I guess it's because there was a drought, and I mean,

01:09:07

I still don't quite understand it, but maybe you can shed some light on this for us. Well, if you've got my slide number 11 up.

01:09:16

All right. That's the one. Okay. That claim has been debunked.

01:09:26

Some Swedish scientists had a look at it. Eklund, I think, was one of the names.

01:09:35

So the rainfall did not change significantly. Yeah. So they looked at the rainfall. Okay. Was there a drought?

01:09:42

Well, the drought is manifest in four places, those red lines, where the rainfall in that year was less than 80 % of the average.

01:09:58

So it wasn't completely dry and nothing at all falling, no rain at all.

01:10:03

The precipitation was still there, but it was less than normal. But you can see that it's happened when it happened in two years in a row, back in the late 80s.

01:10:18

And it happened again in 1999. And there didn't seem to be any civil war occurring at that point.

01:10:31

So to make this claim that just one of those occurrences was the catalyst for the

01:10:41

Syrian civil war seems to be going over the top somewhat.

01:10:47

You would think 1989 to 1991, two years at least, or three years in a row.

01:10:53

Maybe that's a four -year period. I'm not sure. But that's a longer, more significant drought.

01:11:00

And then I guess you'd have to say from 2009 to whatever, 2017, they must have corrected climate change because things look a lot better.

01:11:11

The civil war was still going on, of course. Yeah, they didn't. Wow. No, that's riveting.

01:11:17

To me, I don't have to hear anything else. Like that, to me, it shows a carelessness when it comes to this data.

01:11:27

Absolute carelessness. It's so easy to... I just Googled it, literally.

01:11:33

I just Googled Syrian civil war claim true or false. And even

01:11:40

Google said, yeah, not so much. Yes. In doing this,

01:11:46

I found a lot of times Google was trying to stop me getting to where I wanted to go. But not on this one.

01:11:52

I didn't stop that one. All right. Well, all right. We'll just say that one is totally false. Your book,

01:11:58

Dr. Liederbach and Dr. Bible's book, which you may be familiar with. Because we look to Jesus Christ, what do we see?

01:12:05

We actually see a God who enters into the very material stuff of this creation. Well, at least let us not simply excuse ourselves, but acknowledge the cost by paying for it with carbon credits.

01:12:18

There's a great organization, Climate Stewards, linked to the Arasha, it's a Christian organization that is doing fantastic projects in the majority world that qualify for offsets, for carbon offsets.

01:12:29

So at least acknowledge more the cost of the things that we do, the life that we're a part of. One of the most important things here is actually activism.

01:12:36

And some of you are going to be nervous about that because you may be like me, don't like going out and protest or being on the front lines.

01:12:42

But that's not the only kind of activism, is it? In fact, I don't know if that's necessarily the most effective sort of activism.

01:12:48

What I mean maybe is, first of all, just talking about these things, talking about these things, even when it's uncomfortable with your family, with your friends, in your church above all.

01:12:58

What if our churches became instantiations of the new creation that pointed the world to God's purpose of reconciliation of all people and all the earth to God in Christ in small and big ways.

01:13:10

The churches, our mission organizations being places that reflect that. So activism might be most effective actually at that level.

01:13:18

And of course, when it comes to voting, when it comes to politics, being someone who writes, who votes, of course, thinking about these things, but who writes to your representatives helps them see why these things matter to you.

01:13:28

And don't just matter to you because you're a human being or a Christian, sorry, a citizen, but because you're a

01:13:33

Christian. Our biblical Christian convictions transcend and challenge every political party, every political ideology.

01:13:42

It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean we don't get involved in different parties and things and support different movements and think economically about this stuff, but we need to be counter -cultural in that way first.

01:13:52

But support the Democrats. I'm just kidding. So, well, here's the thing. He talks about students being in despair, which, yeah, if I was listening to him,

01:14:02

I would feel that way. Jesus gives us a way to help, and the way to help then, though, is to be an activist in your church and support carbon credits.

01:14:11

So these pastors, it's important to remember the context of this, I think, for everyone listening. The pastors who are going to go into your churches are being told these kinds of things sometimes, that their job now is to make sure the church functions to support this left -wing activism.

01:14:27

And I think that's where this was all leading up to in the end, was to just try to make the pastors more like community organizers than anything else.

01:14:37

But what are your thoughts on that, Dr. Reeves? Well, even if you buy the carbon dioxide argument and what it might be doing to temperatures, it's not a zero -sum game.

01:14:57

As well as costs, there are benefits. Carbon dioxide is good for us.

01:15:04

Without carbon dioxide, there would be no photosynthesis. And without photosynthesis, there wouldn't be any life.

01:15:13

And the density of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 430 parts per million, something like that at the moment.

01:15:23

I mean, it's tiny, really. It really is tiny. I remember seeing a clip I think it was an

01:15:30

American Senate hearing, and they were asking all these various people how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere.

01:15:41

They were guessing wild, large values, and they couldn't believe that it was so small.

01:15:47

But 440 parts per million, something like that now. If it went below 150, life would cease.

01:15:56

In the cold period, in the Little Ice Age, back in the 1600s and 1700s, it was about 250 parts per million.

01:16:09

And people really were dying of starvation because the food wasn't growing. So carbon dioxide is actually very good for us.

01:16:18

And there's a good scientific reason why it does that as well, because plants have little holes on their leaves.

01:16:26

They call them stomata. And each stoma opens up to let the carbon dioxide in and the oxygen out.

01:16:36

And at the same time as the oxygen is coming out, of course, the water can be coming out.

01:16:42

And that isn't a good thing because the plant wants to keep as much moisture in it as possible. If you have a higher pressure of carbon dioxide, then each little stoma doesn't need to open so far, so it loses less moisture.

01:16:58

And this is well known. That's why there are huge, if you go to Holland, there are huge greenhouses covering acres where they maintain a very high proportion of carbon dioxide inside the greenhouse because it makes things grow faster and grow better.

01:17:18

And that's why, as I said earlier on, there are many scientists who think that the increase in carbon dioxide in the last 80 years is the reason, above all others, why we were able to feed everybody and why the global population could rise to seven, getting on for eight billion.

01:17:41

And that would never have been possible had we had the levels of carbon dioxide that we had 200 years ago.

01:17:48

So carbon dioxide is good for us. So it's not this evil gas that we keep hearing that it'll kill us.

01:17:56

NASA has been surveying this for the last 35 years and has found that the

01:18:03

Earth is significantly more green than it was when they started. Really?

01:18:10

Yes, yeah. Vegetation has grown in nearly all of the, well, maybe not nearly all, but something like a half of the world's vegetated areas are now significantly more green than they were 35 years ago when they started measuring.

01:18:30

That's fascinating. Well, we did play all the clips, so I'll just give you the final word on whatever you'd like to share, if there's something we left out that you wanted to talk about.

01:18:41

But this has been very helpful, I think, to everyone to just go through these and hear someone who's knowledgeable on this subject refute and explain what's being said.

01:18:53

I think I'd like to say two things, really. I feel sorry for people like Catherine Hayhoe and Jonathan Moo because they only look at one side of the story, the story that they're allowed to hear, really.

01:19:15

Because let's face it, you've got governments, you've got media, you've got super government international organizations, big corporations, all against you if you want to look into the other side of things.

01:19:30

And as I just hinted a few minutes ago, you've got Google trying to stop you finding out these stories that don't fit the narrative.

01:19:40

But when they sort of make a holier -than -thou sort of argument, you know, we must do this because we're

01:19:51

Christians and because we must care for the planet, we must look after the poor, we must have concern for the gospel and so on.

01:20:05

I find it unsettling, really, that they would say things like that without having looked into the question fully.

01:20:19

So I'm rather sort of upset in some ways about the way they do this.

01:20:26

And also there is this strange disconnect between what they say they believe and what they actually do.

01:20:38

They say that they're concerned about slavery, for example.

01:20:46

Ken Keithley was almost breaking down about the

01:20:51

American penance that you have to do for the slave trade and so on.

01:20:59

Do they not realize that many of the remedies that they seek for so -called climate change are actually making things really, really bad for people in the third world?

01:21:16

I don't know if you've read the book Cobalt Red. No. You know it? No. It's written by an

01:21:22

American called Siddhartha Kara and he went to the

01:21:27

Congo, which is where the huge majority of the world's rare earth metals are mined.

01:21:36

And without rare earth metals, none of these so -called renewable and sustainable sources of energy that Jonathan Moo was keen on, none of them could actually work at all.

01:21:50

Lithium, cobalt, neodymium and all these others that have to be mined there.

01:21:56

And what they're doing is basically enslaving the population of the

01:22:03

Congo. You should read Cobalt Red. Everybody who's listening to this should read

01:22:09

Cobalt Red, really. Or if you can't find time to read it, there's a very good speech that Kara made to the

01:22:19

Foreign Policy Association, I think. Something like that. It's on YouTube. And these people who go around wringing their hands about the poor do not seem to realize that the remedies they propose, the idea that they have to make us get to net zero is having a huge and disproportionate effect on people who are really poor.

01:22:46

That's a good point. You know, that is shocking, it seems to me. Yes. The other thing

01:22:53

I'd like to say, I think, is I talked about just finding my slide on this.

01:23:08

Yeah. I mentioned when we were discussing Catherine Hayhoe that she didn't seem to have thought about this biblically.

01:23:16

And I think a lot of Christians haven't. And I can see why some of them wouldn't.

01:23:26

The biblical framework in which we should be discussing this would be the creation, the flood, and the future judgment and the final restoration.

01:23:39

Now, many people won't talk about this because it involves the flood. Jonathan Moo, for example, is a biologos scholar.

01:23:54

Right. And they have said with no hesitation, the flood never happened.

01:24:04

There is no, there was no flood. It was a local event, maybe, or something. Just a little local difficulty. And if you haven't got a flood, then that destroys your view of what can happen in the natural world.

01:24:22

In Genesis 8, after the flood, God says, he speaks to himself, he says,

01:24:29

I will never do this again. I will never destroy the earth again. That sea time and harvest day and night and so on will continue.

01:24:41

God has promised us that that's the case. So if people are fearful that climate change is going to destroy the earth, well, remember

01:24:52

God's promise. He even not only just said that to himself, he cemented that with the covenant with Noah and gave us the rainbow as a sign of it.

01:25:02

Every time we see the rainbow, we should be reminded that God's in charge of this earth. And he's promised that he'll never bring such a destruction on the earth again while the earth remains.

01:25:15

Of course, the earth will not always remain because there will be a final judgment. And many people just don't seem to see that this has an implication for what we think about climate change, global warming, whatever you like to call it.

01:25:35

So that's that's my little if you like.

01:25:41

That's excellent. Thank you for that and for your compassion and just, I get frustrated listening to this kind of thing, and I'm sure you do too, but it is good to just realize that there are deceived people who are deceiving others.

01:25:58

And it's a serious thing for me that these are aspiring pastors.

01:26:04

They're going to be in your churches. They're going to be some of them possibly taking to heart what they've just heard.

01:26:11

And so watch out. If you're in a congregation like that, you have pastors coming from places like Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, just be aware that that is a possibility.

01:26:20

So with that, you know, Dr. Reeves, I know you've given a lot of your time to review this and to come up with a slide show and think through it.

01:26:28

And for that, we're all thankful. And if people would like to communicate with you, is there anywhere that I can send them?

01:26:36

You can give them my email address if you like. Yeah. So they can communicate with me and then I'll give them your email.

01:26:42

Okay. Sounds good. All right. Well, God bless. And, you know, if we have something like this come up again,

01:26:48

I'll be sure to reach out to you. Well, it was a pleasure talking to you. And I've been following your podcast for four or five years,

01:26:58

I think now. Wow. And the very first one I came across, when

01:27:04

I came across you was an infamous sermon on homosexuality.

01:27:12

Oh. You dissected it beautifully. Yes. The J .D. Greer one. J .D. Greer, yeah.

01:27:17

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That was early. That was 2019, I believe. And now that's been kind of in people's minds as kind of a significant sermon, but it wasn't at the time.

01:27:28

But anyway, I appreciate your support, Dr. Reeves. And if you're ever in New York or come to the

01:27:35

States, you know, let me know. Well, yes, we do come to the States. New Hampshire, quite.

01:27:42

Oh, that's not that far. Yeah. You'll have to let me know the next time. So we have relatives there.

01:27:50

That's it. Very nice. Yeah. And likewise, if you're ever coming to the UK, then drop me a note.

01:27:56

Thank you very much. And show you the beauties of the English Cotswolds. I would love that. I would absolutely.

01:28:01

We're 10 miles away from Stratford, so you can see a Shakespeare play. Oh, I would love that.

01:28:07

And I know this is a very quick aside, but two years ago, I went to see at the Shakespeare Playhouse, which is in Virginia.

01:28:14

And they did what they call a steampunk version of Henry V. And it was horrible.

01:28:22

So I wanted to see a proper. Some of them are. Oh, are they?

01:28:28

Well, on that note, God bless. And we'll talk more. Thank you very much,