The God of the Whirlwind - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 175

challenges divine power, as if we are in the midst of wrenching the ability
to destroy the Earth out of God's hands. In his own way, Mr. Shimkus has
accurately identified the aspect of climate change that threatens to under-
cut one version of traditional belief.
We could object that climate change does not undo that covenant; we
are merely changing the climate, not destroying it. But if we take the fur-
ther details of the covenant seriously, we cannot sustain this position. In
fact, climate change will destroy “seedtime and harvest” in many places;
what we now recognize as winter is likely to retreat ever further toward
the poles, leaving more and more of us in a seasonal cycle quite unlike
what we knew before—in an oscillation not between “cold and heat,” but
between warmth and blistering heat. Furthermore, climate change will
increase the intensity of atmospheric systems, unleashing much more
powerful storms and making destructive floods far more likely. This is
not the world guaranteed by the covenant. However impossible it may
be to conceive, then, we have dispensed with the relatively kinder God of
the covenant and revived that earlier, dark God, opting for a less friendly,
more demented divinity—as if, in pagan terms, we have moved from the
Olympians back to the Titans. We have embraced a far more difficult fate.
Some might protest that climate change is merely a consequence of
human action, another example of how sin corrupts the creation, and
that it cannot alter God's power over us. But in the covenant, God takes
charge over the future health of the creation; he does not concede to us
any power to alter it through the sheer abundance of our sins. Others
may object that God is allowing global warming to happen as a judg-
ment on our actions; he promised to sustain the seasons “[w]hile the
earth remains,” so the warping of the seasons might mean that the earth
will not remain, that we are witnessing a slow-motion end of the world,
a strange but legitimate version of God's judgment on humankind. But
the Bible always atributes the timing and substance of the inal judgment
to God himself, never suggesting that human beings through their own
actions might force that judgment to take place. If God is allowing the
end of the world to unfold, he is a mere figurehead, for that judgment is
coming down upon us without his needing to do a thing.
These interpretations of the covenant, however, ultimately distract
us from how it is being used in the current debate. Mr. Shimkus quotes