Human-Instigated Climate Change

As meteorological phenomena occur without any human actions, the climate of Earth can change naturally.  The weather we perceive is not static.  Local and general environmental conditions can change with no direct causal input other than prior physical events, without humans contributing whatsoever.  It does not follow that there could be no such thing as human activities that worsen environmental conditions or create their own kind of destructive climate change.  I will emphasize yet again that scientific events are not the core of metaphysics (that would be the necessary truth of logic) or capable of providing absolute certainty (which can only be found in logical proof), and any experiences with such phenomena are on a human epistemological level nothing but subjective perceptions which could be illusions.  Even so, it is irrational to ignore legitimate experiential evidence, and correlations can be observed in the natural world.  The events that spring up in these correlations sometimes result in nature inflicting damage upon itself, yet people are more than able to harm the environment just as much or more.  Emissions of sulfur dioxide would be an empirical example.

The release of sulfur dioxide from natural events like volcanic eruptions and the decay of vegetation can trigger acid rain when the gas interacts with water in the atmosphere.  While this kind of acid rain is not the same as droplets that literally burn away skin on contact as featured in fiction, it can still harm the environment, such as by eliminating soil nutrients that trees rely on.  Humans can develop respiratory issues from breathing in miniscule particles from acid rain, so people would not escape direct consequences as well.  If humans perform activities which release unecessary or abnormal amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, though, they intentionally or unintentionally would become the reason there is more air pollution.  Some factors that propel sulfur dioxide to the clouds would be natural, yes, but the burning of coal for energy or industry can also produce sulfur dioxide.  This would be an example of human-instigated climate change, even if it only pertained to the climate of a limited area.  Actions like using a car emit further sulfur dioxide and other pollutants like nitrous oxide, which can also lead to acid rain--and nitrous oxide acts as a potent greenhouse gas.  When numerous people drive on a regular basis, even emissions that might not be problematic in smaller amounts would be greatly compounded.

Now, it must always be remembered that anyone who believes that almost anything they perceive through their senses is true by default is irrational, since whether most of the perceptions even correspond to anything outside of the mind is utterly unprovable, but it is still irrational to refuse to acknowledge sensory evidences or pretend like a scientific idea is demonstrably false when, although it is not true by default logical necessity, it seems to be true thanks to scientific evidences.  Still, political conservatives do not appear to understand any aspects of this truth, both assuming that various arbitrary scientific models are verifiably true (at most they could only be evidentially supported and not logically proven) and refusing to confront scientific correlations.  In their case, it is just that they often assume scientific phenomena that do not allow for human-triggered climate change must be true.  Not only is the nonexistence of human-made climate change not true by logical necessity, but it is not even the case that the lesser, fallible scientific evidence suggests that it is not present.  Conservatives might nonetheless believe that things like nitrous oxide or carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases even as they fail to even think about what would logically follow from this if human societies are indeed releasing large amounts into the atmosphere.

In America, this same kind of person who would criticize any sort of rationalistic or moralistic concern about the environment could also ironically be quite comfortable talking about acid rain or general air pollution in other parts of the world like China.  These conservatives who make assumptions about political philosophy based upon personal convenience, emotional appeal, and conscience and then pretend like politics is the foundation of logic and ethics instead of the other way around.  Perhaps because it is easier for them to not be alarmed by the thought of pollution and environmental destruction in distant regions, they might not object as harshly to environmentalist concern over something like China's coal-related acid rain, only to despise the idea of someone in America realizing the need for cleaner domestic energy.  Perhaps it is a desire to not be inconvenienced by dwelling on any lifestyle change that could soften the collective treatment of the planet.  Whatever motivates them, such a person also likely identifies as Christian despite being just as unaware of what Biblical theology truly is as the liberal counterparts they might hate, believing in and living for subjective persuasion, epistemological assumptions, and egoistic pragmatism.  If they took Biblical doctrines and their philosophical foundations and ramifications seriously, they would embrace the kind of environmentalism that perfectly aligns with the blatant, literal teachings of the Bible found as early as Genesis.

After all, on the Christian worldview, not only does the environment have objective value as a creation of the deity whose very nature grounds goodness, but it is something the humans made in God's image depend on for safety and comfort.  To disregard the environment would be to directly or indirectly harm the humans within that environment who have value far beyond some seemingly inanimate cosmic sphere.  In fact, since conscience has nothing to do with grounding or proving if morality exists, most environmentalists, neither being rationalists nor Christians, have nothing but subjective preference for a certain kind of environment to drive them to environmentalism.  The very first few chapters of Genesis, on the contrary, make it so that there is nothing Biblical about trivializing or opposing environmentalism itself as opposed to the misanthropic, emotionalistic, or otherwise irrationalistic versions of it.  This is a more practical kind of philosophical subject than the more important abstract topics at the heart of all metaphysics and epistemology, yes.  The logical possibility for humans to influence the climate (which is known through logic and not science, as everything that does not contradict logical axioms is possible) and the genuine evidence that humans are already doing so are not things rational, sincere Christians would deny.