WN: Of Jeff Goodell’s book mentioned below, we read:
New York Times best-selling journalist Jeff Goodell presents a “masterful, bracing” (David Wallace-Wells) examination of the impact that temperature rise will have on our lives and on our planet, offering a vital new perspective on where we are headed, how we can prepare, and what is at stake if we fail to act.
“When heat comes, it’s invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived…. The sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you.”
The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow. Stop burning fossil fuels in 50 years, and the temperature will keep rising for 50 years, making parts of our planet virtually uninhabitable. It’s up to us. The hotter it gets, the deeper and wider our fault lines will open.
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event— one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.
As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
It’s pretty obvious now why the following promise in fact needs fulfillment:
“Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21–see also Isaiah 65:17:
7 “See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind.)
Calvin Beisner is a big part of that campaign for climate inaction. He’s the head of an evangelical activist group called the Cornwall Alliance that is skeptical of catastrophic climate change and downplays humans’ role in rising temperatures. When Beisner was a toddler, his Methodist mother contracted a virus in Calcutta that paralyzed her. As the 61-year-old recalled to me, his father prayed, “God, you can take my son, just don’t take my wife.” Later, at a Billy Graham crusade in 1969, the budding fundamentalist realized that Christ had not “taken” him in death, but rather to a life in ministry.
He would grow up to be more radical than either of his parents, embracing a Calvinist/Reformed theology that also characterized the Puritans. Later, he would ping-pong between communities, ultimately landing in one that embraced the Southern Baptist Convention. Today, he’s he kind of guy who goes on Christian radio to denounce environmentalism as the “greatest threat to Western civilization.”
Beisner’s argument against environmentalism is a cost-benefit analysis. Although many have argued that poor people will be disproportionately affected by sea-level rise, he instead thinks that the costs of mitigating climate change will prolong and spread poverty.
For the uninitiated, it’s hard to see how those things have anything to do with scripture. But people like Beisner can point to a range of Bible passages, from the Genesis concept of man having “dominion” over the rest of God’s creatures to the idea of the apocalypse laid out in Revelation. He’s also influenced by some of the writing by Paul the apostle, who in spreading the gospel after Jesus’s death warned the Romans and the Greeks that the sufferings of present time weren’t even worth considering due to the fact that a judgment day would one day consume the heavens and the earth with fire.
“In the context of working in [Young Evangelicals for Climate Action], I’ve heard just about every argument against climate change from economic, to theological, political, to some hybrid combination of them all,” Lamb told me. “But for a lot of conservative Christians they think, ‘If God’s in control of everything, he’s not gonna make a mess of things,’ or ‘The world’s gonna burn up anyways, so maybe climate change is signifying the end is coming and we should just use it as a warning sign,’ or ‘What’s the point of going overboard to fix this.’ And their church pastor is not saying anything about it.”
“A lot of people tend to go where they find theology that matches their own opinions,” Reverend Hescox told me. “It’s much easier for people, rather than being challenged by the Bible, to find some version of the faith that matches what their pre-existing belief structure is.”
The “evidence” against climate change, as [E. Calvin] Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance’s network of scholars interpret it, indicates that whatever fluctuations are happening in the global climate are insignificant—that to whatever extent the climate is changing, the consequences of those changes are not catastrophic. “We think that an infinitely wise God designed, and an infinitely powerful God created, and an infinitely faithful God sustained the Earth and its various subsystems for the benefit of all the living creatures in the Earth,” Beisner told me.
“It could of course always be the case that the all-wise, all-powerful, all-faithful God has so designed the system as to react to abusive action in a manner that expresses God’s judgement on that abuse,” he said. “We abort millions of babies every year. Maybe God will express his judgement of that through the climate system. We have millions of people killed in unjustified wars. Maybe God expresses his judgement of that through the climate system. Or God doesn’t like our pulling coal and oil and natural gas out of the Earth, so he’s going to make the climate system react in a way that would not seem likely on our prior thinking basis.” Beisner added later: “One experimental way of trying to test that would be to end the abortions and see if the climate change ended.”1
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
But many said the climate fight must continue, however high global temperature rose, because every fraction of a degree avoided would reduce human suffering.
Peter Cox, at the University of Exeter, UK, said: “Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do.”
The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied, 380 of 843. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences. The results show that many of the most knowledgeable people on the planet expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades.
The climate crisis is already causing profound damage to lives and livelihoods across the world, with only 1.2C (2.16F) of global heating on average over the past four years. Jesse Keenan, at Tulane University in the US, said: “This is just the beginning: buckle up.”
Nathalie Hilmi, at the Monaco Scientific Centre, who expects a rise of 3C, agreed: “We cannot stay below 1.5C.”
“When will we ever Learn?“–Pete Seeger
Do we want to ever learn? When newspapers first began publishing a link between smoking and lung cancer, they lost a lot of subscribers. . .
For most of human history, concentrations have hovered around 280ppm, and the curve’s first measurement put them at 313. Sixty-five years later, C02 concentrations averaged 419.3 ppm in 2023, a level not seen since 4.3 million years ago when sea levels were around 75 feet higher and parts of today’s Arctic tundra were forests. As of Wednesday, the Keeling Curve reported a daily concentration of 426.72 ppm.
The record jump from March 2023 to March 2024 surpasses the last record jump of 4.1 ppm from June 2015 to June 2016.
“We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” Ralph Keeling, Charles’ son who now directs the Scripps CO2 Program, said. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.”
Abortion in the U.S. was ended by the Supreme Court. . . The climate crisis has not ended!. . . Fully the contrary! And what sick America-centric exceptionalism to think God is punishing all humanity for the sickness indeed of American society. . . [↩]
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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