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Do Humans Control the Climate?
Mount St. Helens is a volcano in Washington state that captured headlines around the world in 1980 when it dramatically blew its top. It spewed vast amounts of dust and ash into the air and also released tons of trapped carbon dioxide.
Now, it’s popular today to believe that man-made CO2—carbon dioxide—emissions are causing dramatic climate change. But natural disasters like Mount St. Helens should remind us, we really don’t have control over the weather!
Although the estimates keep going up, in 2013 scientists estimated volcanos are slowly releasing six hundred million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. But that’s only from sampling a small number of volcanos and doesn’t include so-called dormant volcanos, which they now believe are also releasing carbon! So that figure will likely continue to go up as scientists do more research.
And if there’s an eruption—watch out! It causes a change in the climate, leading to a cooling trend from aerosols trapped for years in the atmosphere.
Now, the climate change debate is really about different views of the past. If you believe the earth is millions of years old, and the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica preserve a record of the climate stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, you’ll have a very different view on manmade climate change than someone with a different view of history.
You see, when we start with the Bible’s history, we know there was a perfect climate marred by sin, that there was a global Flood that radically changed the planet—including our climate. This Flood was accompanied by intense volcanism, which would’ve released vast amounts of CO2, as well as aerosols, into the atmosphere. Those trapped aerosols led to global cooling and, eventually, the Ice Age! There’s been radical climate change in the past and humans had everything to do with it because of our sin!
Two different views of the past, lead to two different views of the present. We need to start with the right foundation—God’s Word—to get the right perspective.
I’m David Rives…Truly, the heavens declare the glory of God.
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