Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just recently, I was asked if I would give a talk at a church, to a church community on global warming. And so I agreed to do this. And it meant that I had to do some research on the topic of global warming.
I had written in this area many years ago in a book that was published in 1998, I think round about there. It was called The Perils of Progress. It was published by the University of New South Wales Press, but it was also used as a textbook around the world, was published by the University of Cape Town Press, Fernley Press in Canada, St Martin's Press in the US, and Zed books in the UK.
And I looked at the side increases in carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere at that time that was occurring. And of course, that's over 20 years ago. And so I was interested to look at the update of what was happening in this area. And when we look at the current data in this current claim of global warming and whether it's actually occurring, I noticed that it seemed to be that the latest temperatureized data that I could see gave, that since about 1900's, that's over the past 120 years or so, the temperature had risen by about just over one degree. I think it was about 1.1 degree.
Now, this is interesting because there's a lot of aspects to global warming, and one of the aspects is, well, the oceans are not rising that much. I think the temperature from memory for the global rising of the oceans was about 0.7 or 0.8 of a degree, I think maybe 0.7 of a degree. The land mass had, on average, increased by about one and a half degrees.
So as we can see, global warming is quite a complex feature, but it's not a real lot. Now, one of the real concerns is about the alarmist attitude that is being promulgated. And just recently, of course, some high school students, I think they were, have taken the prime minister of Australia to court, saying that he's not doing enough to protect the environment.
And I think global warming was one of the big issues that they're focusing the data on. So it's a matter that's certainly alarming a lot of people. One of the things that really concerns me as well as this alarmist attitude, is that we have to understand that some of the interpretation that's being placed on this has been on the basis of long age evolutionary models and not in respect to a creation model, which really fits the data much better, as I've explained many times.
And so we need to understand that a lot of this belief that is being raised is in an educational environment which assumes evolution and massive long ages, denies the global flood and all these sort of things. Noah's flood and denies all these sort of things. So really, they're not based on the best evidence, because we know that evolution didn't happen.
It's absolutely scientifically impossible. We know when we do the radiometric dating, we get absolutely crazy dates for rocks. We know the age of.
We know rocks that are only hundreds of years old, less even can date it millions of years. So we're on very shaky ground in this regard. And what concerns me also is that back in February 2010, the Israeli education ministry chief scientist, Dr. Gavriel Avital, sparked a furor among local university academics when the newspaper Haaretz, which is an Israeli newspaper, reported him encouraging students to critically examine the evolutionary teaching that was imposed upon them. He went on to express views and massive doubt about the emergency of global warming as well. And he was quoted by.
As saying, another scientific field that is problematic is biology or life and the environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwins of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations. This was led to an article that was published in Haaretz February 21, 2010.
And the title of the article was education ministry chief scientist. Dismissive remarks on fundamental tenets of science spark calls for his outstur, and he was actually forced to resign. Now, the interesting thing is, and he pointed that out, too, that at the present time, the reason why they got rid of him and was forced to resign was on the basis of what we call consensus.
So, in other words, there are a number of scientists that disagreed with him, but it wasn't on the basis of science. These scientists couldn't produce necessarily evidence. It was just on the basis, whoa, we disagree with him.
And this is becoming very problematic in our society. In other words, there's a growing intolerance. If somebody has a view, a different view, then they can't talk about it.
And particularly if it's in a view, like, related to creation or related to global warming, related to certain sexuality issues. You can't have an alternative view or you can't voice it. You might be able to hold in private, but you can't really develop arguments that oppose this current supposedly consensus view.
And this is very, very concerning, because what's happening is, in effect, it is stifling the truth. It's stifling logic. So Dr. Gavriel Avital, as I said, was forced to resign. And one of the issues he had contentions with as well, as evolution was global warming. So let's have a look at this.
So, as I said, when we look at this global warming data, over the 120 years or so, the temperature has risen about just over one degree, 1.1 degrees, something like that. I think I saw the latest data was. But we also have evidence from the past that, for example, during the roman period, so the first three centuries AD, the temperature in Europe was about two degrees warmer than the current temperature. In other words, it was warmer again than it is now. And it's known historically as the roman warm period.
The temperatures were about two degrees above the current temperatures for that region on Earth. There was also another warm period known as the mediaeval warm period from ad 950 to about 1300. And it's also known as, if you look it up, the mediaeval climate anomaly MCA, which was also warmer than now.
Also, of course, there was a period from 1300 to 1870 that was known as the Little Ice age. And this was a significant period of cold with shorter crop growing seasons who'd caused famines, plagues and widespread poverty. As a matter of fact, when I gave my talk just recently, a person came up to me and spoke afterwards and said, studied history.
That this particular coal period is one of the factors behind, for example, the French Revolution, because people couldn't grow enough crops and this sort of thing. And also I can remember reading history and I just can't remember the guy's name, but he was from the area of Turkey and it was around the 13 hundreds. And he was a warrior that was very successful, had conquered part of Europe and those countries through India, and he was marching his army across to attack China.
And there was a snap freeze and his army froze to death in the middle of the night. And so China was spared from the invasion of this very successful warrior when the one three hundreds from the Turkey area, I just can't remember his name. I think it began with T. But some listeners also may be interested in the references to these warm periods back in the roman period. So, for example, there was a paper published in Nature Science Reports, and the reference is volume ten, number 1431, published in 2020. So it's quite recent, Nature Science Reports. And the title of the article was persistent warm mediterranean surface waters during the Roman period, Maratelli G and others. And there was another period, as I said, the reference for the warm period during the Middle Ages there actually, that's a little bit, but you can. More difficult reference to say over the radio here, but these references can also be found in a very interesting article by Dr. Don Batten entitled Anthropogenic Global Warming, biblical and scientific approach to climate change. And this article can be found on creation.com. So if you just go into the creation.com website and enter in the search engine global warming, his article will come up. Now, his article again was published quite recently in November 2020. And as I said, that other report was in Nature Scientific reports.
Ten, four, three, one in 2020, titled persistent warm mediterranean surface waters during the roman period. So I think we can see here that this, quite obviously, the world can be warmer, and it doesn't lead necessarily to devastating effects. One of the fascinating things too, is that a book was published, maps of the ancient sea kings, and it was by an academic at one of the American universities.
And his comment is on some ancient maps that were used by seafarers, Indian seafarers, and I think Chinese seafarers in the 1500’s. And these were essentially copies of much older maps. And these maps show the outline of the land masses of Antarctica quite accurately, and also of South America.
Now, they don't show Australia, but they show South America and Antarctica in quite detail. And so this, again would suggest that there was much less ice during a period when explorers were able to travel. And maybe it corresponds to the roman period at that particular time, when it was two degrees warmer than the current temperature.
So that means roughly three degrees warmer than it was at 1900. Around 1900. But again, we remember that we had sort of a little mini ice age at that time.
Now, all these fluctuations actually essentially fit with the biblical creation model for the flood. Massive amounts of warm water being released into the environment and then subsequent massive evaporation, a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of cooling. And the flood model, from what I've read, is the best explanation for the ice age that we know that occurred.
And of course, the ice age is dated twelve or more thousand years ago and older ice ages. But really, when we look at the data, in actual fact, it fits a much younger and more recent time since the flood. The other thing that occurred to me too, was that if this roman period, remember, this is good data reported in Nature Science reports.
Nature is one that probably regards the top science journal in the world. And if it was much warmer during that roman period, when we look at the thickness, for example, of the Greenland ice sheets, and sometimes these are used as arguments for hundreds of thousands of years, the ice age. But I've done calculations based on when aircraft were downed, had to land on the ice sheet in Greenland because they'd run out of fuel during the Second World War.
So we know exact date when these aircraft went down. These aircraft have since been found and there's so many hundred metres under the ice. And when you look at the rate at which ice and snow has fallen since that time, I know I did a calculation that the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet would form in less than 2000 years.
And of course that would. So it again fits that if there was a warming period, all that ice could have formed since the roman warm period. So we're accumulating more data there when we look at temperature rise.
Now, one of the other claims, of course, is sea level rise. The data suggests that it's risen about 200 millimetres or about eight inches over the past 120 years or so. And that certainly has affected some areas.
But I've also seen some documentaries on television. When I mentioned to a few friends that I had to give this talk, they said, oh, have you seen such and such a documentary we must show too. And they gave me these links.
Matter of fact, I was visiting in one lot of folk and they said, oh, we'll put it up for you now. We'll look it up on the Internet and you show you the documentary. And I can see they were showing areas of flooding that had occurred in Maryland, in the US and so forth, and how 50 or 60 years ago, what was a playing field is sort of now underwater, these sort of things and areas of the town.
But in that particular case, though, my understanding is that the ground has been sinking. I mean, sea level has only risen eight inches, not enough to produce a metre of flooding in these areas. And so this is one of the other things that is taking place.
In some areas of the world, the surface there is sinking. In other areas of the world it's rising. When I gave my talk at the church, another person commented in the Question Time that research that was done at the University of Auckland in New Zealand showed that in some areas the land mass had increased by 17% because of the land had risen.
So there was more land had risen out of the water. And so the whole issue too of the carbon dioxide effect is very contentious. And of course this is blamed for the global warming.
But it's interesting, when I was looking up the data during the Cambrian period, which is supposedly 600 million years ago on the evolutionary scale, but of course this is the area at the lower part that we find fossils. And again, it would date back to the flood time about 4000 years ago, four and a bit thousand years ago. It was calculated at that time.
So it would have been the time of. Of the. Of the flood, that the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was about ten times the current level.
Now, they estimate that the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere around about 1900 was about 280 parts per million from memory, whereas now it's about 420 parts per million. So this is the basis for all this alarmist view, but during the Cambrian period, it was 4000 parts per million. And then they have data through other periods in Earth's history from other methods that they measure independently that it was 2000 parts per million, the carbon dioxide.
So that's five times the current level and much higher than the level was a few years ago. The other interesting thing is, of course, too, that another paper that I was reading recently was that if the carbon dioxide level with plants drops down to about 180 parts per million, then photosynthesis essentially stops in most plants. But for many plants, the higher carbon dioxide level means that they grow much more prolifically.
And this makes so much sense when we look again at the biblical flood model, it says that the earth was destroyed in this massive flood. And we see that in our coal deposits, the coal deposits have been laid down with the catastrophic destruction of forests and plant material and buried. Now, to have all that plant material growing so lushly and abundantly all over the world again fits in with the higher carbon dioxide levels in the past.
So, again, when we look at the data, all this alarmist material is very much unfounded. And sure, things are happening, but things are changing. We're burning more fossil fuels, but we also need to remember that a lot of that carbon dioxide goes into the ocean.
The ocean absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide. And so the whole system, and again, the fact that there was much more carbon dioxide around in the know underpins the massive carbonate deposits. Limestone deposits are around the world.
The White Cliffs of Dover, the Great Australian Bite, and the massive limestone deposits over there in. So, again, we need to look at what is happening in the world. And to me, rather than all this thing about burning fossil fuels and so forth, sure, there are other pollution aspects that associate with fossil fuels that we need to deal with, that we're perhaps not adequately dealing with.
But I think there's this alarmist view there. And to me, what is much more critical is the deforestation that is taking place around the world, the cutting down of forests. We know that huge amounts of Madagascar were cleared, and that's a huge forest.
We know that large amounts of the Amazon are currently being cleared. We know that in New guinea, vast forests are being cleared. And the problem is that a lot of illegal forestry is going on.
I have a friend who's an ornithologist and he was telling me that one of the nesting areas of one of the birds, that he is a world authority in nests up in Siberia, in Russia. And what's happening is illegal forest clearing is destroying huge swathes of forest and destroying the habitat, or the nesting habitat for this bird, which is now threatening sort of the viability of this particular bird that migrates there. And he said that from his sources.
Essentially what it is is that he told me that essentially what happened is they light a fire in an area, they burn, they send photos back that there was a massive fire in the area and forest has been destroyed, but in actual fact, they've lit the fire just in a small area and the rest they've cleared, and that this is being shipped into a neighbouring country. I think it was China just being shipped railroad. I think this is nothing that's underpinning.
We know there's illegal fishing going on, but one of the things that really concerns me is both the legal and illegal clearing of our forests and trees. They play a very important role in our oxygen carbon dioxide cycle. There's another very interesting documentary that listeners may be interested in watching, and that is kiss the earth.
And it talks about, too, how our agricultural practises increase carbon dioxide levels and how we need to preserve the carbon in the soil. There is also another very interesting book that was written some years ago called The Naked Communist, and this outlines a political agenda to essentially underpin the Christian west. That makes a very interesting reading, because a number of the agenda points that were pointed out, and I understand this book was written by a senior FBI advisor in the United States and also lectured in these particular areas at university.
And so essentially, it seems that there are many extreme views pushing a global agenda for global warm warning. And I think this should be quite a concern for christians. It's interesting that back in, well, I think it was actually only 2019, over 500 scientists who were experts in climate change wrote to the United Nations that there wasn't a climate emergency. Sure, the climate is changing, but it's not an emergency as it is painted. So I think there are some things happening behind the scenes, that global warming is just another political thing it's based on.
There's a consensus view of people that have been made to be alarmists and I think it's a very much political matter, not so much a science matter or not based on science, really good science and the evidence that supports the Bible picture and the biblical account of creation should be so much reassuring for us. Again, remember the article on global warming on the creation.com website is an excellent article that provides lots of references and data on global warming.
And remember, to listen to this programme, just 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
