Global Warming: Threat or Blessing?

SPEAKER 01 : 0:02

The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:17

I got a note recently from one of our listeners, and she asked me if I would comment on global warming, especially in the light of the greatness of God and the greatness of God as shown in the universe. Now, I wasn’t altogether sure what she was driving at with her question, but I thought about it, and I thought, well, maybe it’s worth looking into. So naturally, I went to the Internet, where you can find out everything about anything, or maybe it’s anything about everything. I never am sure what it is. And I came across a really fascinating review of the literature on climate change. Now, if you’re not familiar, a review of the literature is something that’s done in graduate school a lot by graduate students. And they go out and they collect all of the scientific literature. They read it carefully. They digest it. They pull it out. They give a kind of a review. Here’s what everybody is saying about this. It was really quite long. It was exhaustive and almost exhausting to read. But it was really fascinating. I’ll include the link to this in our program notes on our website. We’re beginning now when we put a radio program up on the website to include program notes that will include sources and so forth, so it makes it easier for you if you want to look up something that we’re talking about on the program. So this link will be in the program notes on the website. The report is a little too long for me to go into in any great detail. But what I’ll ask you to consider for the moment is the abstract of the report with which they begin. It says this. A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide… leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth rates. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like CO2 are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge. Okay. Well, here is the big challenge that goes on constantly back and forth in the news media and the politicians and what have you, which kind of tends to lead me to feel that it’s a political issue as much as a scientific issue. But these fellows, in really going through all the literature, pretty well made it very clear that the increased levels of CO2 that’s going on right now are not having any significant effect on climate temperature, and they are having a very large effect on plant growth. And it was that comment about markedly increased plant growth rates that caught my attention. It was consistent with something I had heard and been thinking about already. And all of us like to have our surmisings verified, don’t we? Now, can you get through high school these days without learning that plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen? Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why we have plants in our offices, because we sit in here breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide. And so we like a lot of plants in the office to kind of take care of that for us, at least in part. So plants do better with a lot of carbon dioxide. It’s like human beings doing better with plenty of oxygen. Now, we understand that. Therefore, it stands to reason that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would be really good for plants. So I fast-forwarded through the study to see if I can find some information on that. They had some really cool graphs in the report on plant growth. Figure 17. I know you can’t look it up now, but you can find it later if you want to. showed that long-lived pine trees, now you may not realize this, but there are some old pine trees that can live from 1,000 to 2,000 years. The bristlecone pines are some that I think about. They have shown through studies that these trees that live that long show a marked increase in needles, branches, and bowls with an increase in CO2 levels. Now, why in the world would that happen? Well, because they need carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is in effect a fertilizer for plants, and it makes them grow a lot better. It’s a result that really we should expect. Also, there’s another graph of inventories of standing hardwood and softwood timber in the United States that was compiled from forest statistics have gone up steadily over the past 50 years while CO2 has been going up steadily. More CO2 does that. Then there are the orange trees. A chart showing the relative growth in orange trees from two different levels of CO2 were shown. Raising CO2 levels from 400 to 700 parts per million resulted in some very positive things. The trunks and limbs of young orange trees increased by 171% with that increase in carbon dioxide. 100% would be doubling. They went up 171%. Trunks and limbs of mature orange trees. went up 107%. Fine roots of young trees went up 175%. And oranges. Now, here’s something that we’re really after. You increase the level of CO2 from 400 to 700 parts per million, and we got a 127% increase in the number of oranges on the tree. CO2 is good for oranges, and oranges are good for us. Now, all that was brought about by what? About a 75% increase in CO2. Okay, so what’s the point? Well… Global warming is good for trees. Well, so what? I’m not a tree. I’m a human being. Well, this pattern holds across all manner of food supplies, which means that we are much stronger positioned for the production of food with these higher levels of CO2. And then there is this from the report, and I’ll read this because I think it’s important. The human use of coal, oil, and natural gas has not measurably warmed the atmosphere, and the extrapolation of current trends shows that it will not significantly do so in the foreseeable future. What it does do, however, is to release carbon dioxide, which accelerates the growth rates of plants and also permits plants to grow in drier regions. Animal life, which depends upon plants, also flourishes. As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, and prosperity and productivity of all people. Human activities are believed to be responsible for the rise in CO2 level in the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an earth with far more plant and animal life as that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution. Now, I thought that was an absolutely astonishing conclusion. Now, are the authors of this fascinating study all wrong? Well, maybe they’re wrong in some places, but it can’t be all wrong, because the increase in plant life, including food crops, is a fact on the ground. And reforestation, something we work at all the time, has a cooling effect, a moderating effect on the climate. And it made me wonder, is it possible that the great Creator built into the earth a the counterweights to human development, to provide the resources that more human beings would need, and to balance out the effects of our indulgences, shall we say. Now, that report is titled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. It’s produced at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C., The actual links to these, as I said, will be on program notes on the Born to Win website. Stay with me through this short break, and we’ll take this question a little further.

SPEAKER 01 : 10:27

Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.

SPEAKER 02 : 10:54

Then there is this, and it’s the other side of the question my correspondent asked me. The earth was not made to last forever. It was only made for a time. Now, I knew that. I mean, all of us know that our sun one of these days will burn out. And if you’ve looked a little further into it, you know that what happens when the sun burns out is that it gets a whole lot bigger. And in fact, the size of the sun will actually reach beyond Earth’s orbit. So we’ve always known that the sun will eventually die and everything will be gone. But the Earth is getting warmer now because the sun is getting hotter. Now, I didn’t really know that. Not now. I thought the sun was kind of in a state of equilibrium, but apparently not. I happened to be watching recently a documentary titled Hyperspace. The production starred Sam Neill, and they had a fascinating set of segments in this documentary on the end of life on Earth. This was not a biblical apocalyptic thing. It was a graphic explanation of the facts of the solar system. The earth appears to rotate around the sun in a kind of green belt. They represented this with a graphic on the screen. That there’s a kind of a belt of area, distance from the sun, in which life, like ours, is possible. There is a band at a precise distance. And we are in it. We wobble back and forth a bit over long time periods, but we stay within a narrow range of that distance which allows us to have the climate we have. Everything in the solar system just about has to be the way it is for us to be able to survive here. And as I said, it’s a kind of green belt. But the sun is and has been for some time and will continue to be getting hotter and hotter. And they showed the graphic again that this little green belt will tend to move further and further away from the sun. But we won’t. And as a result, Earth will become hotter. The surface of the Earth will become so hot, in fact, when all life on Earth will be, pardon the expression, toast. The way that documentary presented it was the incredible, the surface of the earth, the fires and everything else that’s going on because everything is dried out and dead. The Greenbelt, well, it’s gone further out than we are. The documentary postulated then about what might happen to humankind. Would it mean the end of humankind? What might we do to survive? Well, it got a little bit far-fetched, I thought, but nevertheless, they thought, well, maybe we could migrate to Mars. After all, the Green Belt is going out further. It’ll eventually get out there, and Mars will be rotating around the sun in that Green Belt where life is possible. Now, we couldn’t live there now, but they think that if Mars missions over a few years were successful, we might be able to create a livable atmosphere on Mars. We could then migrate to Mars on some future fleet of spaceships and colonize the planet as the Green Belt arrives there. So humankind, well, no, we’d have to get there well before the Green Belt, I think, because Earth will be toast. Maybe perhaps we will live on Mars when it’s a little too cold. We’ll find a way. So there we are, colonizing a new planet, and humankind will survive for a while. But then the documentary went on to show us how the Green Belt will eventually pass Mars by, and all life would perish on Mars. The problem? Well, beyond Mars, there is no place to go. Now, if you’ve been watching Star Trek a lot, you may not realize that man may never be able to reach what they call warp speeds. The speed of light is a speed limit in the universe, and we’re not even going to get close to it. And the distances between stars is so great that no human could ever live long enough to make the journey. I’ve often postulated about the possibility of life in other places in the universe. Maybe God created a planet somewhere out in the middle of nowhere that there are real people living on it. We don’t know anything about them. But what God has succeeded in doing is quarantining us from one another by distances so great that even electronic signals take too long to go from one place to the other. Now I suppose we could imagine a kind of space ark, carrying life out into the darkness of space. But finding another world will not be like Columbus discovering America. Nothing at all. The chances are the whole colony would die in space, even if they escaped the end of the solar system. For you see, as the sun continues to expand and become hotter, it will become so large it reaches beyond Earth’s orbit, maybe to Mars. The Earth will be melted down, absorbed into the sun, and finally the sun will exhaust its fuel and explode. Unless our space arc started very early, we could not hope to escape the blast of a dying star. The reality is, and it is a reality, that humankind, like the Earth we live on, is a temporary aberration in space and time. And it is all going to go away. Now, watching the documentary on hyperspace with all these graphic portrayals of the Earth’s end, it brought a scripture to mind. I don’t know where this comes from exactly in Peter’s mind, but he talks about it. It’s in 2 Peter 3, verse 10. He said, The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are in therein shall be burned up, Now seeing that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in all holy conduct and godliness? Looking for and hasting to the coming of the day of God wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Now that’s real global warming. It seems that global warming will reach a kind of climax. The thing that’s kind of puzzling is, how did Peter know this? How on earth was this man, writing in the first century, able to see off into the future a time that now, with special effects and all that we were able to do, we can actually graphically show on the screen what is going to happen, and it matches what Peter said to a T. I’m amazed that Peter would know how the world would end. Now, I really should add to this that you and I have nothing to worry about. And I would say that if you’re ever going to watch hyperspace with your kids, you need to let them know for sure how far out in the future this is. It’s sort of like the guy who met one of his friends one day, and the friend says, Oh, I just saw this thing in the newspaper that said the world is going to blow up and come to an end in three billion years. and his partners was frightened he said what what what did you say i said it will blow up in three billion years he said all i’m so relieved i thought you said three million years well you know as far as you and i concerned there’s no material difference between three billion and three million but you see we have every reason to believe that god will wind up project earth long before that day comes. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you an address and a phone number and a free offer, and you may want to be able to find our website. So, pencil and paper. I’ll be right back.

SPEAKER 01 : 19:49

For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. and request the program titled Real Global Warming. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. The documentary Hyperspace…

SPEAKER 02 : 20:21

discusses so many ways that life could be destroyed here. It’s disturbing. And it’s strange how science is only now beginning to see things that the prophets saw a long time ago. They had a segment in this documentary about meteors striking the earth. And I guess it’s generally agreed by now that the extinction of the diamond dinosaurs in ages gone by was caused by a huge meteor strike that then put so much material in the air that it darkened the earth and destroyed plant life, and there was nothing for these critters to eat, and they all died. And we go into a new era. Well, the things of this nature have happened in the past, and the evidence of it is all over the place. But it’s going to happen again. And everybody knows it. Science knows it. They’re working hard right now trying to spot all the asteroids and the comets and things that could strike the Earth. But I think everyone knows that sooner or later we’re going to be hit. And we’re going to be hit by something very significant. Hyperspace discussed that, showed how it could happen. In fact, how it probably will happen. But then I thought about Revelation, chapter 6, verse 12. In Revelation, though, there is this scroll sealed with seven seals. And only the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, was found worthy to open these seals. And he began to open them. It gets all the way down to the sixth of the seals in Revelation 6. John said, There was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. Now, you know, this is absolutely consistent with the description of a major meteor strike. Everything would shake. A blast and those things kills everything within a certain radius. And way beyond it, you feel it. And then there is the blackness in the sky and the moon becoming like blood. The stars of the heaven fell to the earth like a fig tree casts her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind. You know, down here in Texas, that’s one of the ways they harvest pecan trees. They have this machine that goes out and grabs the trunk, and they shake the pecan tree, and pecans come plop, plop, plop down all around them on the ground. And he says, the stars of the heaven, meteors, of course. became falling to the earth like a fig tree dropping her untimely figs. And the heaven was blasted away like a scroll when it’s rolled up. Every mountain and island were moved out of their places. This is big. And the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men, the chief captains and the mighty men, every bondman and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath has come, and who will be able to stand? Oh, indeed. This is really a staggering description here. And I don’t know what people thought about it generations ago when they read it, but now that I read it, in the light of what I have seen presented in not only this documentary but others as well, it’s very sobering. These prophecies have become so much more real in the light of what we know has happened and what’s going to happen again, of a certainty. Isaiah spoke of something like this in chapter 34, verse 1. Come near, you nations, to hear. Listen, you people. Let the earth hear and everybody in it, the world and all things that come forth from it. For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and His fury upon all their armies. He has utterly destroyed them and delivered them to the slaughter. Their slain shall be cast out, their stink shall come up of their carcasses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood. And then the host of heaven shall be dissolved, the heavens rolled together like a scroll, and their host, that is the star, shall fall down like the leaf falls from the vine, like a falling fig from the fig tree. A time of terrible crisis at the time of the end, when the sky seems to be blown away, and we’re having meteors dropping on us like figs. It describes a meteor shower. Now, when you put all this together, and then go back to Peter’s letter, you begin to see what Peter is trying to get people to understand. He started off that 2 Peter 3 by saying this, This second epistle, beloved, I now write to you, in which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us his apostles. Know this, that there’s going to come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lusts and saying, Well, where’s the promise of his coming? Since the fathers fell asleep, everything continues as they were from the beginning of creation. And, you know, people are going to say that. They’re going to say, there’s nothing new. The earth is going to go on. Nothing terrible is going to happen. Peter says, for this they are willingly ignorant of, that it hasn’t always been this way. And he goes back talking about the great flood and how the earth was overflown with water. The heavens and the earth, which are now by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. Yeah, it was water before. It’ll be the fire next time. Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. I think to myself as I look at this, I think, well, a lot of the stuff that these men are describing is a long way off in the future. But for each of us as we live our lives day by day, it could come in a heartbeat. Not that we’re going to have a meteor fall out of the sky, but we’re going to have somebody’s SUV run us down in the street. That is something we live with. And what Peter is saying then, you see all these things are going to be dissolved. Everything that’s going to be in the world that you work for and hope for is going to be pointless. What kind of person should you be?

SPEAKER 01 : 27:23

You’ve been given a life. Live it well. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.