When I got the inspiration for this article, I thought because there was an ice age on Earth and the great flood in the time of Noah, that climate change was certainly inevitable, as it has happened before. After doing my research, that thought still holds true, but the extent to which the climate has changed in the last two centuries and is changing now is unprecedented. In the past two weeks in South Africa, there were days of incredibly heavy rains in KwaZulu-Natal Province that resulted in massive flooding and more than 400 deaths.
As I am sure you know, an ice age is a period of very cold global temperatures, during which time glaciers cover large parts of the world. What you might not know is that an ice age is not uniformly cold. There are usually alternating colder and warmer epochs during the overall ice age period. The colder epochs are called glacial or stadials, and the warmer epochs are called interglacials or interstadials. The glacial epochs last longer than the interglacial epochs, and an ice age can last for hundreds of millions of years resulting in glacial expansion. We can thank biologist and geologist Jean Rodolphe Agassiz, and astronomer, civil engineer, climatologist, geophysicist, and mathematician Milutin Milanković for their work, which helped scientists to later determine that Earth’s changing orbit and shifting tectonic plates drive the ebb and flow of ice ages. There have been five ice ages in Earth’s history. They began approximately 2.4 million years ago and lasted until 11,500 years ago. Today, we are in a warm interglacial period.
One of the most famous stories from the Bible is found in the book of Genesis, and of course that is the story of Noah and the Ark, which some think is a myth. About 10 years ago, acclaimed underwater archaeologist, Robert Ballard found what he believes to be proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events. Ballard did a television interview in 2012 with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News. He talked about what he and his team found 400 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. According to abcnews.go.com, who reported on the interview, “He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice. The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world’s oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.” Ballard and his team proved that a catastrophic event of this nature did happen when they unearthed an ancient shoreline in the Black Sea, and carbon dated shells they found. The timeline they established for the cataclysmic flood was around 5,000 B.C., and some experts believe this was around the time when Noah’s great flood occurred.
Now, I am sure you can agree with my initial premise about the inevitability of climate change because it has happened not once, not twice, but many times in the past. However, the extent of change we are experiencing in our lifetimes is without comparison. A graph that I came across, which was published by The Guardian in an article entitled, “Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible – IPCC’s starkest warning yet”, shows the change in global surface temperature relative to 1850-1900 (just after the first industrial revolution). It uses the temperature during the timeframe mentioned as base zero, and it shows the temperature fluctuating above (0.5°C max.) and below (-0.25°C min.) the baseline for about 120 years. Then after 1970, the graph shoots up at nearly a 60-degree angle reaching a global surface temperature of approximately 1.2°C above the baseline in 2020 (+/- 50 years). While this increase seems minor when it comes to daily temperature changes, it is catastrophic when scaled at the level of the global climate. Some of the consequences include melting polar ice caps and glaciers, rise in sea levels, tropical storms, extreme heatwaves, wildfires, severe floods, mass human population displacement, withering droughts, decreased population of vertebrate animal species, reduction in fish/fishing in the seas, loss of coral reefs, loss of plants, loss of insects, and reduced crop outputs. This sharp increase in global warming is clearly due to human activity and more specifically the industrial revolutions, and excessive use and reliance on fossil fuels resulting in extremely high CO2 emissions.
On 12 December 2015 during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, which is a legally binding treaty on climate change at COP 21 (21st annual session of the Conference of the Parties) in Paris. The primary goal is to limit global warming to preferably 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels by mid-century, if not sooner. Last year, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres held a High-level Dialogue on Energy (HLDE), and the goal was to accelerate and scale up action to achieve universal access to clean, affordable energy by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was created by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988, has 195 members, and the main objective is to provide governments with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. It also generates regular reports assessing the science related to climate change. The 2022 Report on Climate Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability came out with six big findings: “1. Climate impacts are already more widespread and severe than expected. 2. We are locked into even worse impacts from climate change in the near-term. 3. Risks will escalate quickly with higher temperatures, often causing irreversible impacts of climate change. 4. Inequity, conflict and development challenges heighten vulnerability to climate risks. 5. Adaptation is crucial. Feasible solutions already exist, but more support must reach vulnerable communities. 6. But some impacts of climate change are already too severe to adapt to. The world needs urgent action now to address losses and damages.”
By its nature, the precise details and fallout of what is really a climate crisis cannot be fully predicted. However, we know enough for broad strokes. The long-term prognosis for human civilization is grim, but hopeful. The crises we will face do not generally pose an existential threat to human civilization on Earth. It cannot be denied that the risks of the current climate change, which includes a range of unpredictable nonlinear effects, could radically and quickly change the face of the Earth and our ability to sustain our contemporary civilization. Modern humans survived many rapid climatological upheavals in the millennia immediately leading up to the beginning of the Holocene, Younger Dryas, Meltwater Pulses 1A and 1B glacial conditions; not to mention the desertification of the once-green Sahara. All of which changed the face of the Earth in ways observable in a single human lifetime, and by the grace of God humankind continued to thrive.
