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Horizons — Climate change

Rosalind Banbury's sixth reflection on the 2024-2025 Presbyterian Women/Horizons Bible Study.

Image of Patricia Tull's Let Justice Roll Down, a Presbyterian Women's Horizons Bible Study

Patricia Tull’s Horizons Bible Study
Let Justice Roll Down: God’s call to care for neighbors and all creation

Lesson 6: Climate Change

What do you think a prophet is? Some imagine a fiery preacher calling us to shape up and get right with God. Prophets can be like that, especially when poor people are getting a raw deal. (Have you noticed that almost no politician ever talks about the economically disadvantaged these days?) Some folks think prophets foretell the times to come. Prophets do talk about the future but it is often about what will be the consequences of our injustice.

The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary defines a prophet as “a person who serves as a channel of communication between the human and divine worlds.” There are times when prophets bring words of comfort and hope. But, the majority of the time, prophets bring the word of God to lay bare how God sees our actions, and it isn’t pretty.

The prophetic voice can come from unexpected people, like scientists. In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist, tested various gases to see which ones trapped heat. She put thermometers in glass cylinders, filled the cylinders with different gases, capped them and exposed them to sunlight and shade. She discovered that the “cylinder with CO² and water vapor become hotter than regular air and retained its heat longer in the shade.” In her article in the 1856 edition of The American Journal of Science, Foote had “an eerily prophetic observation: What happened inside the CO² jar could also happen to our planet. An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature.” Being female, an amateur and an American meant that her work was not discussed by professional scientists. But only a few years later European scientists did similar experiments and also found that carbon dioxide causes heat to be held longer.

Few people saw the implications of a warming atmosphere until the 1970s. Early climate scientists could not imagine the huge increase of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels that we know today. People saw no immediate threat and sensed no urgency to change. Part of the reason that people have been slow to believe that the earth is in imminent danger or that oil and gas corporations have denied global warning from burning fossil fuels even when they knew differently. Oil and gas companies misled the public, which is resulting in “dozens of cities, counties, and states suing petroleum giants.”

As Tull notes, biblically we have been like the rich man in the parable in Luke 12:16-21, whose land produced abundantly. With no thought of the future or those in need, the rich man built bigger barns to store all he had and said to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years: relax, eat, drink and be merry.” In the parable, God calls the man a “fool” and lets him know that that night he will die. Jesus gives us the warning, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich towards God.”

We have been like the rich man in that we have given little thought for the future consuming as much as we can for as long as we can. We have deferred repairs to God’s good earth until the deferred maintenance is bringing the earth’s structures down. Scientists warn that we have until 2030 to reduce carbon emissions by 45% to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis.

What can we do?

  1. Learn as much as you can and see where you can change your lifestyle to be more energy efficient.
  2. Talk about the climate crisis at home and at church.
  3. Individually and as churches, we can sell our stock in oil companies that have refused to shift their business model to more sustainable energy. “In June 2022, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to divest from five fossil fuel companies that had persistently ignored,
    and even perpetuated, the climate crisis … Chevron, Exxon-Mobile, Marathon, Phillips 66, and Valero,” Tull writes. Fossil fuel divestment is now the largest divestment movement in history.
  4. We can write our representatives in the House and the Senate and advocate for effective climate policies.

For decades, prophetic scientists have warned us that the earth’s ice caps are melting at alarming rates, the seas are rising, coral reefs are dying as seas heat up, and droughts and destructive storms will become more intense.  We have not listened because we have not wanted to change. The crisis is upon us now. It is time to act.


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