Are we living in End Times? We are according to the Pentecostal eschatology to which Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Minister Stuart Robert, and some other Coalition MPs apparently subscribe.
Religious End Times may not be the same as secular end times but they have in common the prospect that the end of human life on Earth may be imminent. So are we living in end times as well? According to leading climate scientists we are unless emergency action is taken to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
On 1 December 2020, Christiana Figueres, who was intimately involved in climate-change negotiations for several years leading up to and including the Paris Agreement of 2015, said the world was waiting patiently for Australia to end its “suicidal” climate wars. To this she added: “I have been pretty vocal about my frustration for so many years of the completely unstable, volatile, unpredictable stand and position on climate change in Australia”.
Figueres is only one of several distinguished overseas commentators currently fingering Australia as a pariah because of its denialism and inaction on global heating. To add insult to injury, Scott Morrison was blocked from speaking at the Climate Ambition Summit 2020 hosted by Britain, France, Chile, Italy and the UN on 12 December; Australia was internationally judged to have too little ambition!
Several of the factors behind Australia’s unenviable position are well documented. Over a period of two to three decades, a loose network of powerful and influential climate-change deniers and climate-science sceptics sought to stall any effective action on greenhouse gas emissions.
A thoroughly excellent account of the identity and activities of these influencers is given in Marion Wilkinson’s recent book The Carbon Club. Chief among the dramatis personae were Tony Abbott, Hugh Morgan, Ray Evans, Gina Rinehart, Nick Minchin, Andrew Robb, Maurice Newman, Ian Plimer, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones. Only three of these were Liberal MPs, the others were powerful outside influencers. Perhaps the most powerful of the outsiders was Hugh Morgan, for many years the CEO of Western Mining. Wilkinson describes him as “a doyen of the Melbourne Liberal Party establishment and the godfather of the Australian Right”. The Institute of Public Affairs and the Murdoch media also played important roles in preventing action on climate change.
Turning to currently serving MPs, climate-change and global-heating deniers, sceptics or action-minimisers include Matthew Canavan, George Christensen, Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce, Craig Kelly, Michael McCormack, Scott Morrison, Gerard Rennick, Malcolm Roberts and Angus Taylor. Taylor may be more of a minimiser than a denier but his utterances at the COP25 conference in Madrid in December 2019 caused international dismay. This, together with his advocacy of a “gas-led recovery”, cannot disguise that the inclusion of the words “Emissions Reduction” in his ministerial title is a rather perverse irony.
Morrison, if not a closet denier, is at least a minimiser of action on global heating. Early in his prime ministership he was reluctant to let the words “climate change” pass his lips. However, in the wake of the catastrophic bush fires of the 2019/20 summer, this abstinence became more difficult. In dealing with global heating, Morrison has a great, substantially hidden problem which most Australians fail to appreciate. As a result of this problem he has been forced for the sake of public appearances and political astuteness to say things that the inner-Morrison very probably doesn’t believe. Perhaps the wearing of two faces is not too difficult a burden for a marketing man!
The name of his problem and source of his climate-change conflict is Pentecostalism.
On 25 May 2019, exactly one week after Morrison won the federal election on 18 May, the following letter was published over my name in a national newspaper: – “Scott Morrison said on election night: ‘I have always believed in miracles’. That is precisely why he represents a danger to Australia’s future. Morrison regards his religion as a ‘private matter’ but happily allows the media to show him in church. He is an avowed adherent of Pentecostalism, some tenets of which many would regard as extreme, and, in the context of his lack of enthusiasm for effective action on climate change, highly dangerous if not sinister. Pentecostals believe in the existence of the Devil and Hell, and that the Bible is literally true and inerrant. Key elements of their eschatology are that we are living in End Times (nearing the end of history) and that the Second Coming is imminent. They envisage a continual tension between the forces of good and evil but Jesus will soon return bringing Rapture to Christian believers and consigning Satan (and non-believers) to Hell. What should be of great concern is that Morrison may well believe it is pointless to try and save the Earth as ‘The Lord’ has other plans. He may well consider there is no point in mere mortals like you and me campaigning for greenhouse gas abatement because the fate of the Earth and humanity will be determined by the interaction of such supernatural forces as the Devil and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. These are very disturbing thoughts and provide a good reason to ask: is our Prime Minister a closet doomsday cultist?”
As Morrison happy-claps and calls out in Sydney’s Hillsong Church on Sundays it is safe to assume that his mind is more on the anticipated pleasures of End-Time Rapture than emissions reduction.
What is climate science currently saying about the possibility that we humans could be living in end times? I have partially read Mark Lynas’ recent book Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency. This book has six chapters: the first labeled “One Degree” and the last “Six Degrees”. The reference is, of course, to increasing degrees Centigrade in the mean global surface temperature over the 1850-1900 level. We passed the 1.0 degree mark at around 2015, and with us currently standing at 1.2 degrees the evidence of global heating is almost everywhere to be found. I confess to not having read the whole of the book: I could see little point in continuing past the end of the Three Degrees chapter. In the words of Bill McKibben, the latter part of this book has a rather “pornographic” quality about it! I am happy to accept the statement on the back cover that: “at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.”
The two opening sentences of Lynas’ book read: “When I started writing this book I thought that we could probably survive climate change. Now I am not so sure.” One of his key paragraphs reads: “If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so. If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks — from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by the century’s end.” We may pass the 1.5 degrees crucial to the Paris Agreement as early as 2025. In The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben praises the Lynas book as “impeccably sourced” and notes that: “Two degrees will not be twice as bad as one, or three degrees three times as bad. The damage is certain to increase exponentially, not linearly, because the Earth will move past grave tipping points as we slide up this thermometer.”
As an octogenarian, Pentecostal End Times causes me no worry about my several grandchildren but possible climate-science end times does.
Ian A. E. Bayly holds the degree of Doctor of Science and Bayly Bay in the Vestfold Hills near Davis Station is named in recognition of his contribution to Antarctic science. He is a former Vice-President of ACF.
He is the recipient of the Australian Society for Limnology Medal. He is still publishing scientific papers, being co-author of a chapter in the book Plankton published by CSIRO in March 2019.
Comments
14 responses to “Living in End Times: Denialism, Pentecostalism and Climate Science”
Christiana Figueres should not be fingering “Australia”, but rather, she should be fingering the knuckle-dragging neanderthals that lurk within the ranks of the Liberal and National parties.
Sadly if Australia voted for a Neanderthal government, Christiana is quite entitled to finger us all as climate delinquents.
One theological point, Ian. Your letter referred to the end times bringing Rapture to Christians. I think you may have misunderstood the concept. It comes from Latin, rapio, caught up (the two meanings therefore are surely originally cognate – rapture is the experience of being carried away), and refers to the biblical belief that when Christ comes to judge the earth, Christians who are alive will be caught up to the heavens and the dead will be resurrected. Nothing to do with joy or pleasure, but physical lifting up.
I am, however, not trying to defend the Coalition’s climate policies, so please don’t misunderstand this post. I imagine no one other than me will be in the slightest concerned, but it is always better to be accurate.
Thank you Barney for your explanation, I can see how easy it is to misunderstand the concept. One thing puzzles me however, and that stems from what appears to be the common understanding among, for example American evangelicals, that Christ would reappear in the city of Jerusalem, hence the necessity to preserve and protect the State of Israel. From your knowledge of matters ecclesiastical, does the prophecy specifically refer to Jerusalem? Because if it does, I can easily imagine Christ introducing Himself to an orthodox Jew and being told: Oy vey, not you again! 🙂 🙂
Boom boom! as Basil Brush used to say. Very good Julian. 🙂
Yes, it remains a Jewish belief that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem. Jews don’t accept that the Messiah has come yet; Christians believe he has.
There are many reasons why Evangelicals support Israel – that Paul says in Romans that God has not finished with the Jews but will gather them in; that the initial covenants were with Israel; that God chose Israel in Deuteronomy and many more. But it is wrong – in my view – to confuse modern Israel, founded in 1948, with the biblical Israel, the people of God. The patriarch Jacob has his name changed to Israel after a spiritual encounter with God. The 10 lost tribes of Israel are dispersed in 721 BC when the Assyrians take what will become Samaria and indulge in some ethnic cleansing. Only Judah and Benjamin (tribes) retain their identity.
Sorry if that’s the long answer – believe me, longer ones are out there – but Christianity has held for 2000 years that the Second Coming will be a universal event; the whole globe will know and be involved. Jerusalem in that context is a spiritual concept.
I am obliged to you Barney, thank you.
I can see there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.
Hi Ian
Continental temperatures are already around or higher than +1.5C while Arctic temperatures higher than +2.3 C above pre-industrial levels. Mark Lynas’ modeled +6C rise within this century is uncertain since melting of the large ice sheets is releasing large volumes of cold ice melt into the surrounding oceans, slowing warming but increasing temperature gradients and therefore storminess. Similar developments pertain due to the weakening of the Arctic jet stream boundary, allowing penetration of cold air fronts from the polar regions and penetration of tropical air masses in the opposite direction, once again increasing storminess. The time tables for these developments in not clear.
For references look at http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/search/label/Andrew%20Glikson
For a good history of how these whacky religions came to dominate public discourse in the USA see Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland” where he documents the accumulation of strange religious refugees inot the USA over 400 years along with the schismatisms of those various sects.
I have assumed that the Pentacostal Rapture explains why Scumo doesnt care about anyone else…
“I’m alright Jack”
I wonder if his care includes his family or is it pure selfishness?
Thank you Ian for raising these issues. I’ll bet I am not the only one concerned about what lies beneath the veneer of Christianity that surrounds any number of persons in the present government. As an expression of christian kindness, it’s hard to beat the treatment handed out to the migrant family removed from their home in Biloela in 2018. This will be the third Christmas this family has been in immigration detention and their second on Christmas Island. I ask you: on what principle (apart from sheer bastardry) can this be justified?
I note that Mike Pence who is still vice president in the US is a Pentecostal of the same type as Morrison, and the latter just added two more right wing Christian evangelicals to his cabinet, Andrew Hastie and Amanda Stoker.
To put soldier boy Hastie in to the position of of assistant defence minister is asking for more utterly biased anti-China criticism in support of the USA, and more war mongering directed at China – a real chance to set off WWIII. Especially as the gormless Dan Tehan is now minister for trade. He seems capable of stuffing anything up.
Amanda Stoker as a right wing Christian and has been promoted to assistant minister to Christian Porter. I kid you not.
This is what Stoker says: “We know that our nation is stronger when people of faith are able to practise their beliefs, able to strengthen their families and contribute to their communities with the kind of warmth and generosity for which they are renowned,” she wrote for Eternity endorsing a vote for the coalition.
“warmth and generosity”…. The Coalition? More like take from the poor and give to the rich in the most callous way possible.
https://www.eternitynews.com.au/australia/scott-morrison-promotes-two-christians-to-the-frontbench/
Well argued piece. It is very difficult to understand the motivations of the religious right in the LNP. I have often wondered if Morrison and some of the others believe in the End Times (first found in Zoroastrianism 2500 years ago, or earlier), and that this motivates their wholly irresponsible lack of action on climate change? I don’t know how we can find this out empirically as none of them would ever say it out loud.
Even if this is so, it is difficult–if truly they hold to the ethics of Jesus as enunciated in the first four gospels–to allow their government to be so contaminated by sleaze and corruption and so blatantly to support the very wealthy, the cause of this sleaze and corruption. Is this too a decisive signal of the coming of the end times?
I cannot think what will make Morrison–such a powerful symbol of his party–change. The ‘quiet Australian’ might want something done about climate change but is too timid and compliant to make the right kind of noises politically. And, Morrison, no doubt, continues to receive confirmation bias from his own church and many of his own political colleagues.
I don’t see any action by this lot of mediocrities that needs pentecostalism as an explanation – political expedience and corruption (the carbon club), explains all their actions.
I’ve always seen it as a cover that messes with peoples minds in the way that gaslighting does. Their actions show nothing within the teachings of Jesus, and you don’t need to be a Christian or religious to ascertain that. It’s just like Trump using the Bible to make himself look like a Christian when he staged the Bible holding performance outside the White House during the BLM protests. As fake as every other fake thing he has done, but designed to appeal to the religious nutters that pervade America.