Oroville Dam, Global Warming, and The Bible
Being a third generation Californian, I track closely the weather in our state. My lifetime hobby has been that of mountain climbing in our Sierra Nevada, arguably one of the most beautiful ranges in the world; it follows that I am always interested in snow and weather conditions.
For the past six years the global warming advocates have proffered that the California drought is an illustration and a precursor of things to come. But then suddenly and unexpectedly California is experiencing an extremely wet year. All of our reservoirs are near full, and our largest ones are letting out water into the Pacific Ocean at such a voracious rate that the spillway of Oroville Dam has been seriously damaged. The latest headline in a San Francisco newspaper now reads, “Is California overdue for biblical, catastrophic flooding? History says it could be.”
I find such sudden, radical swings in climate theory to be both destructive to credibility and astonishingly amusing!
What seems to go largely unnoticed however is that the swing theories of the radical doomsday climate change folks contradict what God’s Word states in this regard. In terms of worldwide drought, God says, …He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45). Notice that God’s common grace promises rain even to the unrighteous! And in Genesis 9:11 God says to the flood theorists, I establish My covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth. In the Sermon on the Mount God promises to always send us rain and after the flood of Noah, God promises He’ll never do that again.
In the thousands of years of climate history since these words were recorded the veracity of God’s promises have proven to be reliable. So who then should we trust?
Other related passages of Scripture serve to counter the idea that man by himself can destroy his earthly habitat. For example Psalm 104:30 states, You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; And You renew the face of the ground. God says He will continually renew the face of the earth until He forms a “new heaven and a new earth” in the end times (Rev. 21:1). To think that man can alter the earth’s ecosystem — when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind — is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man. It follows that we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem.
What glorious truths God has given us! They run smack in the face of the secular fad theorists who try and scare us with global warming, or now, suddenly, flooding! Let us continue to place our faith in the promises of God as contained in His Word. Amen!
Ralph Drollinger
President & Founder
Capitol Ministries
Additional Reading:
Coming to Grips with the Religion of Environmentalism, a Capitol Ministries Bible Study.