Laura Young's article referenced in Evangelical Alliance's November's newsletter sounded like a fulsome endorsement and blessing of the UN's approach to managing the planet. As we lift up COP29 in prayer, may we be encouraged to continue our climate justice work throughout the year, embodying Christ's love for all creation and committing to be faithful stewards of His world.
Is there anything wrong with this? In any topic how do we know what to think and what we venture to say God will endorse? A key aspect is our idea of what is true – we should want to know the factual truth as much as possible even if unpalatable. When we're converted, the Holy Spirit speaks truth to us about our fallenness and pride and God gives us grace to repent. On less fundamental matters we also should want to know the truth about a person or topic and to change direction if we got it wrong. So we have to at least account for alternative angles and on this topic there are definitely alternative angles!
Climate neutral
We've covered climate in some detail but to summarise: Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore observed: "We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years...The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people. It's not good for people and it's not good for the environment...In a warmer world we can produce more food." (Forbes) Also to US Congress in 2014. Many key scientists agree: World Climate Declaration.
We hear about greenhouse gases – but only the bad parts. In fact 0.7% of the atmosphere is taken up with greenhouse-effect gases. Of these 95% is H2O. Without our 'greenhouse' the temperature on earth would be 33°C lower! It's the lack of water vapour that makes clear nights in the UK or desert nights so cool. Of the 5% of CO2, human-related may be 0.25% - the rest being natural (ie 95% of the CO2 is natural). The greenhouse effect of CO2, a trace-gas, decreases with volume and is currently nearly at the maximum effect. Commercial greenhouse air is enriched with CO2 to promote vegetable growth. A good introduction to all this is Climate: The Movie.
So we all know that climate change is real and has been happening at least since the Fall, and God knows all about it. The Flood is a key macro example. Scientific records show that we are currently coming out of a mini ice-age following a period of greater warmth.
Dr John Clauser was invited to the White House to celebrate his 2022 Noble Prize for Physics. He was pointing out the unscientific nature of the President's climate policies, and Biden replied that Clauser's was 'right-wing science'! Why would the President say this? Given that Biden followed the UN's IPCC - what are their motives? See this summary, also touched on below.
Knowing what we know
Education
The big challenge of EA's article, and of our lives, is phenomenology - how we know what is true. We are all products of our environment – we absorb its values and truths. We want to be approved, to be 'good'. At school or college we work to give the answers in exams our teachers expect so we can get-on.
But these institutions are not neutral and struggle to be factually balanced, particularly in the soft-sciences. Non-scientists talk about 'settled science', a self-contradiction – science is about seeking. Maybe they are ignorant of how ignorant they sound, maybe they are not... Maybe their belief system dictates which facts are more equal than others... Do they recognise that they are accountable to God for what they teach? Why do we trust their values?
Even engineers are not immune, preferring to conjure up a computer model that reflects 'my ideas' of what's wrong rather than looking at the actual broken machine in the workshop!
Pre-medical student Isabel Brown comments of her 'conservative' US college: 'in my classes like anatomy or physiology or organic chemistry we were spending a lot more time arguing about my professor's political opinions than that pursuit of objective truth. It was incredibly disheartening for me - for example during a multiple choice exam in my eukaryotic cellular biology class (hardly controversial) that a wrong answer choice about the origins of the universe was that God could have created the universe.'
Great Harvard's president resigns over plagiarism and antisemitism.
Government and Social Media
The UK Government is trying to suppress University academic integrity, and indoctrinate our children even more than we were.
The State's online censorship: 'In a court case involving a lawsuit against Meta, Facebook lawyers admitted that the purpose of the "fact checking" was not actually to check facts, but rather to reinforce narratives.' Robert W Malone
Businessman Maurice Strong started the UN's eco project but as a result of a bribery scandal fled to China (Telegraph) - do we trust him or his motives?
What can we do?
Someone said that we spend our lives recovering from our childhood and it's certainly true that God continually challenges our false perceptions of Him and His world. He keeps calling us to reason with Him, that profound respect for Him is the beginning of wisdom, that we need to be open to His sovereignty, to recognise with humility the things we don't understand and probably never will on this earth.
So we need to seek to see things and people from His perspective, to look for the motives of people, their fruit, to study a variety of information sources over a long time and judge if they are reliable.
This is what the Lord says: 'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls' (
Whose justice?
Likewise I think we should be very careful linking our personal ideas of justice with God's. We indeed should be faithful stewards of His creation and part of that is making the best use of the resources at hand. We should not impute guilt to the countries who developed the God-given science, technology, economic patterns, work-ethics and generosity that have lifted billions out of poverty and disease.
The UN certainly needs a lot of prayer not least for the very minimal benefit its agencies have bought to the world in terms of peacekeeping, standing by killing (Rwanda, Kosovo) or even complicit in it (UNRWA). Its plans for Global Governance (with its WEF partner) and its accumulation of money and power, massively through the Climate issue, should be resisted at all costs.
God's handling of Babel shows us that centralising control is not the best way for mankind to be governed.
The UN (like the EU) endorses socialism which, like its fascism twin, is profoundly anti-God, so we should not automatically expect good things from that.
IPCC's Ottmar Edenhofer said 'one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy... One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.'
Dr Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out (including in his recent book 'Best Things First') that a lot of the money being spent on the UN's Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) is not what would really help the world's poorest. The UN's World Bank is also diverting normal development funds to climate-related spending rather than where it's actually required (see '12 Best Things').
Oxfam recently reported that, incredibly, 40% of climate funds used by the World Bank is unaccounted for – that's up to $41 billion of other people's money! Where has it gone? This is not an isolated case as a Fox News 2007 report pointed out "the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody…"
Official State corruption is a key barrier of Development but rarely discussed by Charities. Transparency International has a disquieting picture of this. There are vested interests in keeping one's people poor and uneducated.
So the article's endorsement of 'Loss and Damage Funding' from Western taxpayers is highly questionable – both in terms of guilt and in terms of actual benefit. We need to spend more time challenging corruption and making our support conditional on extensive social, economic and moral reform - not least an end to Christian persecution. While this requires courage and toughness, to do otherwise is to perpetuate it and dishearten those who are trying to reform.
Reality cheque
So what happened at COP29 in Baku to which the Government sent over 400 delegates? Actually very little. The 'developing' countries made extravagant demands, which were rejected, mostly because the 'rich' countries are actually so indebted their economies are on the verge of collapse and their people are protesting. China the biggest contributor to CO2, and one of the largest economies, refused to contribute anything claiming it will always be a 'developing country'. It is also no-doubt happy to see its competitors impoverished. A still huge sum was agreed but nothing will happen until China, the Gulf States and others contribute. The Global Warming Policy Foundation has a good summary.
We need to recognise that many Christian agencies need a radical rethink, a transforming of the mind. It's reported that Gen Z'ers are moving this way as they see the craziness of the recent past, something Christians have done little enough to confront. Jesus often shocked people at having a completely different perspective to everyone else – one that bought genuine truth and hope.
A recent Terry Virgo tweet in no particular context: The truth, accompanied by the gift of repentance, brings people into freedom. 2 Tim 2:25. Paul, captivated by a wrong passionate zeal for God, became captivated by Jesus & was set free from wrong religious zeal. Any passionate zeal you need to be freed from? There are a few around.
