THE PROPHETS AND OUR RESOURCES

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The posts in the series suggest that energy generation is not a zero-sum process, that somewhere in the process some non-renewable resources will always be used. The essay also suggests that the basic laws of thermodynamics prevent any process of energy generation from being one-hundred percent efficient. Therefore, no matter what process we use, resources will be used and not replaced. The posts then suggest a method of mitigating this by having everyone put something back into the system. Can you think of another way?
2. Our bodies are energy conversion machines as well: the body takes in food and then converts that food into energy. As with any energy conversion process, the energy produced is less than the energy taken in. Can we view our own bodies as wasteful of energy and thus deserving of opprobrium under energy conservation guidelines? Can you think of any way of making the energy conversion systems of our bodies more efficient?
3. Some energy conversion systems appear to rely on non-fossil energy, but are actually dangerous in other ways. For example, generators that use wind rely on wind, which is a non-fossil energy and thus appears to be desirable, but the wind generators are dangerous, and often lethal, to birds, including endangered species (remember, in Genesis 1:28, God entrusted all the animals to the care of man). Where is the balance? Another example is the lithium battery which is more efficient that carbon batteries, but is dangerous and requires special handling in transport which can be wasteful of energy used for the transport and special handling. Where is the balance?
4. Should we even be concerned with resource conservation? Science is continually coming up with new means of converting energy and there does not seem to be any end in sight.
5. The posts suggest that everyone should contribute to the overall world system something so that everyone puts in more than they take out. Do you think this is possible? The posts make suggestions for doing this, do you have others?
6. Where is the balance between protecting the entities God created in Genesis with man’s needs to feed and sustain himself?
7. With regard to the entities who we are charged with protecting, in sustaining himself, can the ends ever justify the means by which man goes about sustaining himself?
8. Does all non-human nature have intrinsic value or are some parts merely valuable in instrumental terms, for example, can humans use some non-human parts of nature for food? If so, how does one make the judgement as to which instruments can be sacrificed and which cannot? What is the standard? Do we save individual organisms or should we focus on groupings or entire ecosystems? Do we sacrifice species in the name of human progress, or human needs? Do we sacrifice rain forests (and hence unbalance nature’s CO₂ balancing mechanism) in the name of food production? What and how does the ascribing of value to non-human life reflect an individual’s ethics and morality and their view of their relationship to the non-human world?
9. Do you accept the proposition that there is Global Warming? If so, do you think that it is Solipsistic and Hubris of humans to believe that we are so important to the environment that it is our actions that cause this warming[1]? Or could it be something (natural) far greater than us, like sunspots (which have been shown to affect weather), volcanoes (one volcanic eruption dumps as much CO₂ into the atmosphere as years and years of human activity), or natural cycles of the earth (some scientists actually believe that the earth is in a mini-ice age with global temperatures reflecting this) that is causing the warming?

[1] From   Patrick Moore, Co-Founder of Greenpeace, for Prager University:

“The only constant… is change.

That’s true about life. And it’s true about the climate. The climate has been constantly changing since the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago.

For example, in just the past 2000 years, we have seen the Roman Warm Period, when it was warmer than today…Then came the cooler Dark Ages… Followed by the Medieval Warm period, when it was at least as warm as today… Then we had the Little Ice Age — that drove the Vikings out of Greenland. And, most recently, a gradual 300-year warming to the present day. That’s a lot of changes. And, of course, not one of them was caused by humans.

During the past 400,000 years there have been four major periods of glaciation — meaning that vast sheets of ice covered a good part of the globe — interrupted by brief interglacial periods. We are in one of those periods right now. This is all part of the Pleistocene Ice Age which began in earnest two and a half million years ago. It’s still going on, which means that we are still living in an ice age. That’s the reason there’s so much ice at the poles. Thirty million years ago the earth had no ice on it at all.  

So, then, what about carbon dioxide, the great villain of the Global Warming alarmists? Where does that fit in to this picture? Not as neatly as you might think.

Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels do not show a strong correlation. In fact, over very long time spans — periods of hundreds of millions of years — they are often completely out of sync with each other. 

Over and over again, within virtually any time frame, we find the climate changing — for reasons we do not fully understand. But we do know there are many more factors in play than simply the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere — factors such as the shape and size of the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, activity from the sun, and the amount of wobble or tilt in the earth’s axis, among many others. Even the relatively short 300-year period from the peak of the Little Ice Age to the present has not been steady. The latest trend has been a warming one, but it began nearly a century before there were significant carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. And, there has been no significant warming trend in the 21st century. Contrary to media headlines, the trend over the past couple of decades has been essentially flat. 

Meanwhile human-caused CO2 emissions are higher than ever. About 25 percent of all the CO2 emissions from human sources have occurred during this period of no net warming.

So, what are we in for next? Will the temperature resume an upward trend? Will it remain flat for a lengthy period? Or, will it begin to drop? No one knows. Not even the biggest, fastest computers. 

All the information I’ve presented — the increases, decreases and plateaus in temperature over the ages and into the last centuries — is available to anyone who wants to seek it out. Yet to state these simple facts is to risk being called a “climate change denier.” Not only is that absurd, it’s mean-spirited. It’s absurd because no one, not even the most fervent skeptic, denies that the climate is changing. And it’s mean-spirited because to call someone a climate change denier is to intentionally link them to people who deny the Holocaust. So, maybe it’s time to stop the name-calling. 

Predicting the climate, one of the most complex systems on earth with thousands of inputs, many of which we don’t understand, isn’t an exact science, or anything close to it. Maybe it’s just a tad arrogant to suggest that we can predict the weather or the climate or just about anything 60 years from now. 

The science is not “settled.” The debate is not over. The climate is always changing. It always has. And it always will. “