Too successful?

This past summer was hard on Europe.  Temperatures were high and the people miserable in an area in which air conditioning was not typical for most homes.  You certainly about it in the news.  It was actually worse than most of us probably imagined.  Of course, climate change was blamed.  It was all man's fault for polluting and disturbing the pristine balance of nature.  Everyone had come to believe that unless we figured out a way to clean up our act, the world was doomed.  Who thought it could have been otherwise?

Now even those who are on the climate change bandwagon are coming to a very interesting conclusion.  

“From 1980, Europe warmed around 1C more than the average of extratropical areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and around 1.5C more than the global average. . . . Most of this excess warming over Europe can be linked to the reduction of particle emissions,” Pedro Roldán‐Gómez, an associate researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, told The Telegraph.

The reduction in air pollution has caused an increase in temperatures that is particularly pronounced at the poles. When the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks, the jet stream grows stagnant, which results in weather systems, like the recent hot spells in Europe, persisting for longer periods.

Europe has warmed at twice the rate of the rest of the world since the 1980s, resulting in deadly heat waves that environmental activists and politicians have attributed to carbon emissions. But according to the study, the opposite is true: Much of the increase in temperature can be attributed to Europe’s recent success in reducing the amount of airborne particulate matter, since such pollution acts as a sunshade. 

In other words, the problems evident in Europe's heat wave were also of man's doing but not because he was being irresponsible and raping the good earth of God's creation but because they were trying to repair the wrongs done by those before.  Cleaning up the problem results in its own set of circumstances that become a new problem for us to deal with.  My point here is not to argue for or against climate change but to point out how deeply the problems of our world are established by sin and how it is impossible for us to fix our own problems.  We cannot save but need a Savior who can.  Only the God who created all things can come to our aid and repair what we have ruined.

While it might seem the responsible thing to pick up after our own mess and it is surely the right thing for us to do, that does not mean that we can repair the wrong and restore what we have broken.  It is a good and helpful thing for a parent to call a child to account for making a mess and for calling that child to pick up the mess and make right what he has made wrong even when the parent knows the child cannot possibly do it all on his or her own.  God watches us even when we are trying to do what is right and yet He understands what we do not.  We cannot fix it or make the mess go away.  That is how deeply sin is embedded into the fabric of creation and why it groans not for us as responsible adult people to take notice of and responsibility for what we  have screwed up but for the One to come who alone can answer this longing with real new birth and an everlasting creation.  Right here in climate change and the ecological work of those intending to repair the wrong is evidence that we need a God to do for us what we cannot do -- a God to fix the Fall and repair what sin has done not simply to the soul of man but to the whole of the world God made.