Letter: Reminder that the planet is the temple of the body - Chico Enterprise-Record

Let’s explore Loretta Anne Torres’ recent letter in which she declares concern over human-influenced climate change is really much ado about nothing. She opines the planet will heal itself despite “silly activities” of humans. She states even though coral reefs are dying in some places they’re growing in others, and that though Arctic ice sheets are melting “glaciers in Greenland are growing at unheard-of historic rates.” Greenland’s largest, the Jakobshavn Glacier, in the past few years has actually grown slightly, reversing the glacier’s 20-year trend of thinning and retreating, which is understood to be secondary to climate-driven warm/cold temperature oscillations in Atlantic Ocean water flows which occur on roughly a 20-year cycle.

She didn’t mention the amount of growth pales in comparison to the sustained and grossly underestimated loss of ice in the Greenland land-fast ice mass: the January 21, 2019 study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warns Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than previously thought.

This is what happens when you mix faith with, presumably, Fox News: you get just enough science talk to help one remain comfortably in their La Belle Indifference. This is part and parcel of why the core tenets of evangelical Christianity, and its political arm, the Republican Party, are at complete odds with sustainability: the Earth was made for people — and that’s all that matters. We like to remind the faithful that while the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the planet is the temple of the body.

—Noel Phares, Paradise

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