The only human behaviors that can affect the weather - known colloquially today as 'climate change' or 'global warming' - are offenses against the Creator when He has explicitly warned against them.
This essay will not discuss the so-called scientific evidence that usually reaches the conclusion its financiers favor; there simply is no settled science on the issue of weather patterns based on the causality of human behavior. The sample size of a couple hundred years is mathematically too small to consider, especially for those who believe the earth is billions of years old.
Theologically, there is one caretaker of the cosmos: almighty God, creator of heaven and earth. The traditional theology - never disproven - posits the governance of the universe by the agency of angels. These angels perfectly obey the Creator's every command, and as Sacred Scripture reveals, have power over the earth:
And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels: Go, and pour out the seven vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. [2] And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth, and there fell a sore and grievous wound upon men, who had the character of the beast; and upon them that adored the image thereof. [3] And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and there came blood as it were of a dead man; and every living soul died in the sea. [4] And the third poured out his vial upon the rivers and the fountains of waters; and there was made blood. [5] And I heard the angel of the waters saying: Thou art just, O Lord, who art, and who wast, the Holy One, because thou hast judged these things: [6] For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. (Apocalypse 16, 1-6)
The great interventions of the Old Testament show us the punishments that afflicted men were not the result of "abusing the environment" but of committing abominable acts that offended the Creator. The great Deluge came because of the universality of human wickedness, completely changing the 'environment' forever; the multiplication of languages at the Tower of Babel was the divine response to the secular humanism of the day; the scorching obliteration of the cities on the Plain of Zeboim - to this day the lowest elevation on earth - came in response to the foul crime of sodomy. The plagues visited upon the Egyptians came not because of wanton excavations of the earth to build the pyramids, but from defying the God of Israel's direct commandments.
The Biblical record is replete with divine chastisements of floods, earthquakes, droughts, famines, and plagues which came upon men not for offenses committed against the terra firma, but against the will of God.
Saint Thomas Aquinas treats the divine government in the Summa:
5. All things are subject to the divine government, since this is the divine goodness of God himself. The divine goodness is both the first effecting cause and the ultimate final cause (or ultimate goal) of everything. No positive being can exist without the divine goodness, and therefore everything, in particular and in singular as well as in general, is governed by the same divine goodness.
6. God alone designs the government of the universe, and this is his providence. The design is carried into execution or actual governing operation through use of secondary causes (creatures) as media or means of governing.
7. Since God is the first and universal cause, nothing in the universe can lie outside the order of his government. When something seems to evade divine government, the very cause of the seeming evasion will be found in the divine government itself. As we saw in our study of divine providence, nothing whatever is outside the divine rule.
What then do we reply to the apologists of the currently popular phrase that man has a stewardship over the earth? If this is so, it would be relatively easy to cite chapter and verse from the record of revelation that provides this explanation. But all we have is this:
And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. [18] Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. [19] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return. (Genesis 3, 17-19)
This work of tilling the soil was in fact, a disciplinary punishment for sin. The real justification for any stewardship of the earth comes to Adam and Eve to have dominion over the earth and subdue it:
And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. [27] And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. [28] And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. [29] And God said: Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat: [30] And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon. And it was so done. (Genesis 1, 26-30).
While some may suggest the phrases 'have dominion' and 'subdue it' imply a moral responsibility towards the terrain of the planet itself, this idea is never developed in Catholic theology until the 1970s under the rubric of the Malthusian theory of overpopulation which has yet to materialize.
The idea that the LORD God created a fragile earth that his creatures could destroy by 'abusing the environment' is unheard of in salvation history. The earth is astonishingly resilient without any interference from man as every volcanic eruption testifies. The same pagan conception of the earth's alleged impotence in providing for all the resources of a multiplying human population fuels the madness that men must galvanize geopolitical action in order to halt the rise of a mythical global warming trend. 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof" (Psalm 24, 1).
No, the traditional theology of ecology is that the entire enterprise belongs to God from beginning to end, and that He reserves the right to marshal the forces of nature to influence human activity. What we are being sold with unbridled hysteria is a purely pagan idea: that an exaggerated regard for the physical environment is the exclusive province of man, and that only man can save himself from being cooked alive by his rapacious treatment of the environment. The solutions proposed for this alleged crisis appear to threaten the environment far more extensively than the production and consumption of fossil fuels: to build a single 1,000 pound battery for a hybrid vehicle 250 tons of earth must be excavated to obtain the precious metals required. Then the problem of environmentally responsible disposal of tens of thousands of these batteries at the end of their shelf-life imposes another threat upon the ground we all depend upon for growing food and water.
Proof of this new paganism is in the complete and utter disregard for real moral outrages that have historically brought cataclysmic chastisements upon the human race, and yes, the topography: infanticide, promotion of unnatural sexual acts, defilement of temples, perversions of [human] nature, wanton violence, promotion of atheism, etc... These crimes escape the indignation of our climate prophets who see in them the progress of human evolution - another pagan conception - and focus rather on 'carbon credits' and other theoretical threats that our God has never mentioned, nor His prophets.
What is truly astonishing is how easily Catholics get carried away with this entire pagan superstructure of ecological fragility in the name of a biblical 'stewardship over the earth.' While it is true that the current Pope has promulgated an encyclical on the environment the theological underpinnings of its thesis are embarrassingly shallow. There is simply no centuries-long tradition of any moral imperative to take God's place as master over the cosmos. Even if one concedes that the biblical record may lend credibility to a stewardship over the natural resources of the earth, that interpretation could not possibly extend to the weather patterns, which is what the priests of the climate change hysteria are worried about most.
The real crisis we are facing is a crisis of antichristian gullibility. Without the universal acceptance of the natural law that the Creator wrote upon our hearts, men fall for the flimsiest substitutes and theories. Climate change theory is simply the latest in a long line of panhumanist causes that animates the minds of men that have either rejected the natural law (and by extension, the God of nature) or have been inoculated against it by malicious indoctrination. The menu of draconian solutions being proposed by the prophets of the environment comprise a list of self-inflicted disasters waiting to engulf us because we rejected the fear of the Lord.
Weather patterns which may certainly include natural disasters cannot be credibly attributed to human behaviors; they can with some supernatural interventions be recognized as supranatural applications of the divine prudence. God may punish men for their collective crimes by ecological signs; but He is off the record as ever having assigned the control of weather patterns to the sons of Adam.
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