We Do Not Know What Cannot be Known – IOTW Report

We Do Not Know What Cannot be Known

Tuesday, 14 February 2017, 19:30 Claudia Uncategorized 13

Why Future Climate Change is Unknown

Critical Issues Commentary –

In 1987, a man published a booklet that presented 88 reasons why Christ would return in 1988. Though many thousands were sold, the book was doomed to be wrong. Christ himself said that no one knows when he will return. In Christian theology, what we can know is revealed in the Bible. When Christ will return cannot be known. When it comes to what cannot be known, multiple reasons, evidence or collaborating authorities are worthless. What by nature cannot be known remains unknown no matter what.

I was converted to Biblical Christianity in 1971 when I was a junior student at Iowa State University studying chemical engineering. One of my last classes there before I switched to studying theology was physical chemistry. There we used differential calculus to write equations to predict where electrons would be in their orbits. That use of such calculus strained the limits of what can be validly predicted using it. It still does.

One day on the way to a chemical engineering class in the middle of winter, there were students protesting air pollution they saw as white smoke blowing across campus from our power plant. When I got to class, the professor told us that those students were protesting water vapor. When we have a clean burn of hydrocarbons, besides the release of energy, the by-products are CO2 and water. CO2 is invisible so what they saw that provoked the protest was water vapor. Over 45 years later, people are still protesting water vapor as witnessed by pictures of power plant exhaust stacks taken in the middle of winter, spewing out white “smoke:” water vapor. The captions are about air pollution.

We must distinguish, whether in Christian theology or science, between what can and cannot be known. Let’s start with what can be known about the combustion of hydrocarbons. If there are no non hydrocarbons such as nitrogen or sulfur, and there is complete combustion to eliminate unburned hydrocarbons, the exhaust will be CO2 and water, usually in the form of vapor. Neither CO2 or water vapor is air pollution. Both CO2 and water vapor are normal and necessary components of earth’s atmosphere.

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I have been reading this man’s articles for years. In my opinion, he is one of the current theologians who is strictly Biblical based. He is not afraid to take on the recent churches and so-called leaders who have strayed from God’s truth. One of my favorite articles he penned: Providence and Promise – How God Rules His Universe for the Good of His People

13 Comments on We Do Not Know What Cannot be Known

  1. CO2 is definitely not a “pollutant”. It is a necessary medium of exchange between plants and people.
    Reduce the atmospheric CO2 (somehow), reduce the plants. Reduce the plants, reduce the people.
    Is that what the EnviroNazis want? (Rhetorical question, don’t answer).
    My standard answer to any EnviroNazi who wants to “discuss” (i.e., browbeat) reducing CO2, is, “Start with yourself. Hold your breath or find another way to save the Earth by committing suicide. Every little bit helps. You first”.

  3. ah, the blind leading the blind. and so many of them. it certainly is good that breathing is a motor function or they’d forget to do that as they protest. enjoy the show.

  5. Most of the ‘common folk’ pushing Globull Warming (i.e. not the AlGores who profit from it) do so because of personal insecurity. I had a friend badger me no end to acknowledge that I ‘believed’ in GW. I told him that there is only one thing I believe in. At some point in the weeks-long conversation I acknowledged that climate change exists, because it obviously has since the beginning. He immediately claimed that I said I believed in GW, despite my words being just above his response! Point being, he needed, emotionally needed me to say I believed in GW. If he was confident in his knowledge or belief he wouldn’t have worked me over – for weeks! – just to be able to say that I ‘believed.’ And I think most, well, most liberals are like that. They want to do the right thing, but mainly want people to agree with them.

  8. What cannot be known is how much CO2 in parts per million in the atmosphere would make the climate more stable than it is. If somehow the amount of CO2 magically became constant, climate would still change in unpredictable ways. When it comes to the question of human caused climate change, we can only guess or speculate. This cannot be known with certainty.

    Worth repeating.

  9. Thanks for posting the links Claudia. Like Meerkat, I bookmarked his page. It is becoming more and more difficult to find people that stick to the Bible in proper context the way it was written, rather than stray off into the many modern, cultural fallacies that some treat as “gospel”.

  11. As I recall, of all the “greenhouse gasses”, water vapor is the yugest. Its presence represents over 96% of all greenhouse gasses. Like all greenhouse gasses, life on earth cannot exist without them. Protesting CO2, methane, vaporized dihydrogen oxide or any other component of life is for the uninformed. Now, protesting China for burning coal unfiltered, releasing mercury into the environment, should be a thing we need to fight, but they make our smart phones, so they get a pass, right?

  12. I’m a retired submariner. I can tell you when CO2 is
    “excessive”, and it starts out with skull splitting headaches
    and blood shot eyes. When they start measuring it in whole
    numbers of Torr and not tenths or hundredths, I’ll worry.

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