The God of the Whirlwind - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 167

In this domain, as in all others, the near inevitability of severe climate
change alters everything. The religious reassurances that once shaped
many of the world's cultures no longer hold true—or at least not in the
same way as before. In fact, the discoveries of climatology over the past
two or three decades only sharpen what had already become a strong
sense of the vulnerability of the world.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, geologists learned that
Earth's history was immensely vaster than they previously suspected, that
ordinary physical processes, extended over many millions of years, had
given the planet's surface its present shape. Confronted with this “dark
abyss of time,” they could hardly encourage their audience to sustain a
familiar sense of humanity's place within the history of life. 140 Cataclysms
and mass extinctions, it turned out, were ordinary events; as I will discuss
below, the guarantees of the rainbow covenant, in which God promises
Noah never again to unleash a flood to destroy his creation, were put into
question. Furthermore, since so much of the geological record bore no
trace of humanity, it was no longer clear that the creation centered around
human beings. This sense of human vulnerability strengthened further
over the course of the nineteenth century, especially as Charles Darwin
and Alfred Russel Wallace found a core mechanism—natural selection—
that could drive the evolution of species and extended that mechanism to
human beings. The twentieth century added many new elements to this
emerging picture, notably when scientists proposed a theory of plate tec-
tonics according to which the continents had broken away from a single
primordial landmass and drifted to their present positions. The ground
beneath our feet, it turned out, also moved, floating on the molten heat
within the Earth.
But that is not all: in more recent decades, scientists have learned
how regularly the Earth's climate has flipped back and forth between rela-
tive cold and heat, creating the conditions for ice ages and for temper-
ate eras. At times, the Earth has been almost entirely covered in ice and
snow and at others has sustained warm temperatures from pole to pole.
The changes in the Earth's distance from the sun or in the tilt of its axis
have routinely generated alterations in the planet's dynamic systems, pro-
ducing positive feedback loops that over time cause a general warming
or cooling of the atmosphere. 141 As a result of all these waves of scientific