Book: Faith In A Changing Climate ― Chapter 1, Part 3
This post contains the third part of Chapter 1 of the book Faith in a Changing Climate. The Table of Contents is available here.
A .pdf version of this post is available here:
Wisdom and Cleverness
The opposite of one bad idea is usually another.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein
Human beings are clever, but rarely wise. We frequently observe this contrast when evaluating ‘green’ solutions to the predicaments that we face. Cleverness consists of a combination of intelligence and creativity. Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from judgment, compassion and ethics. It also understands systems complexity , and that there are rarely any easy answers.
The well-known literary critic Harold Bloom of Yale University once said,
Information is endlessly available to us; where then shall wisdom be found?
Bloom was writing in the early 1990s, before the rise of the internet, social media, blogs which drown us in information, but are usually lacking in wisdom.
Many of the responses to climate change and the other ills that avail us are clever, but not necessarily wise. For example, many of the ‘solutions’ to climate change are clever, particularly when it comes to futuristic technologies. But these ‘solutions’ are not necessarily wise when their long-term impact is considered.
Caution
I never make predictions, and I never will.
The purpose of what is written in this book is not to make specific predictions, either for the church or for society as a whole. Nevertheless, the material in this book does describe sweeping trends and changes. But it is important to be cautious.
We see a similar thought in the message of Paul of Tarsus when he said,
For now we see through a glass, darkly
1 Corinthians 13:12
When the Apostle Paul wrote the above words, he was acknowledging that, even he, in spite of his magnificent intellectual and spiritual gifts, could not see the future in detail. But that does not mean that he was blind, he could see an outline as to what the future may look like. (Scholars tell us that a better translation uses the word ‘mirror’ rather than ‘glass’ as in window pane. However, the lesson is the same — the future is blurry.)
So it is for us with climate change and the related issues. No one know exactly how it will play out in detail. But the general trajectory is clear — atmospheric temperatures are rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic, species are going extinct at an alarming rate and the forests are being destroyed. There is no way in which our current way of life can survive these changes unscathed. Nevertheless, if we are to develop a suitable response to climate change and other Age of Limits predicaments we have to attempt to forecast the future, at least in outline.
Consider the following image of a fogged-up window.
When we first look at the picture all that we see is a blur. But, on closer inspection, we see that there are buildings and possible trees in the distance. We cannot see the details but we can see an outline, and the harder we look the more we can see. So it is with our view of the future in an Age of Limits. We cannot predict what will happen in detail, and specific predictions are often wrong. But we have a general sense as where we may be heading.
An additional difficulty to do with predicting the future is selecting the time frame. Is ‘the future’ tomorrow, a week from now, five years away or a generation out? The further away it is, the less accurate our predictions will be. We can say with confidence that tomorrow will be much like today, and that the world five years from now will probably not be too different from what it is now. But beyond that the future looks increasingly hazy. After all, who would have predicted as little as ten years ago the impact that social media and mobile phones have already had on the lives of billions of people?
Therefore, although we must be cautious and modest about predictions, we still have a responsibility to think about what the future holds, and to have the courage to take action based on our understanding.
The need for caution is personal. My introduction to Age of Limits issues was not climate change but the concept of ‘Peak Oil’. The theory was simple ― there is only so much oil in the ground, and when it is gone, it is gone. However, as Art Berman has pointed out (Berman, Peak Oil: Requiem for a Failed Paradigm, 2025) the concept of Peak Oil has not withstood the test of time. He says,
. . . we were wrong about Peak Oil. Not the concept itself, but certainly the timing. I still believe Peak Oil will happen—but not the way we imagined.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been wrong, and it won’t be the last. But as a scientist, I believe in revisiting past ideas and challenging my own assumptions. Honest reflection is more important than sticking to outdated narratives.
Finally, it is important to understand that the topics we discuss in this book are very complex. There are many, many feedback loops ― most of which we do not fully understand, and many of which may not even have been identified. So, once more caution to do with making predictions is called for.
The event known as the ‘Younger Dryas’ illustrates this complexity, and the limits to our understanding. This event occurred roughly 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. It was characterized by a sudden and significant cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, essentially a brief return to near-glacial conditions after the last Ice Age was ending. (It takes its name from the cold-climate flower, dryas octopetala, that thrived during this time.) Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped significantly within a few decades.
The cooling was possibly triggered by a disruption in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) caused by a large influx of freshwater from melting glaciers into the North Atlantic. That event itself may have been caused by the impact of a comet or asteroid. There is evidence to suggest that the AMOC is, once again, slowing down due to human-caused climate change. If so, temperatures in western Europe will fall, even though the planet as a whole will become warmer.
I am not the only one whose predictions have been badly off target. For example, an early writer on these issues wrote the following in the year 2012.
Ordinary people are unlikely to be able to afford oil products AT ALL within 5 years.
15 years after her prediction, the traffic on our local roads is as bad as ever. (The article is based on the assumption that systemic deflation was about to occur. Yet, since 2012 we have experienced steady inflation.)
Another example of failing to predict the future occurred in the year 2019. Virtually no one anticipated that,
Within just three months the world would be engulfed in an uncontrollable pandemic that would infect millions and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
There would be no vaccine or other means of effectively containing the disease.
In the United States alone, tens of millions of people would find themselves suddenly without work, and thousands of small businesses would close.
Whole industries, such as commercial air flights, cruise vacations and shopping centers would experience dramatic, and often near-fatal, declines.
The shale oil industry would decline almost to a point of collapse.
Once more in the United States, Confederate statues that had stood for over a century would be summarily removed.
Yet every one of these events took place.
The basic lesson from all these examples is that climate change is an immensely complex subject ― our understanding as to what is going on is good, but far from perfect. Therefore, humility is called for.
