Sermon 28 April 2013 .... Revelation 13

Preached at Christ Church St. Kilda where I am 'locum' at the present

In this sermon I point out some common misconceptions (I grew up in a denomination that had some of these!) and look at what the 'beast from the sea' the 'beast from the land' the 'mark of the beast' and '666' meant for the first readers, readers down through history, and very briefly what it means for us.

DOWNLOAD sermon Revelation 13

Ooops ... many apologies but I forgot to take my recorder to church last Sunday 

.... so no podcast of the sermon "Revelation 7-12 : "Who does John see in heaven - All of us!"

Post 2

God is marvelous beyond description!

I ended my last post saying that he really vital news is that Jesus did die for us and God does forgive us our sins when we turn away from them and come back to him.

I need to amplify that in one more respect. The choice is all ours - that is true! The work is all God's – that is doubly true!

As I said Jesus died for us and rose again from the dead. Without that there would be no hope and no forgiveness. Our 'choice' even if we could make it would have as little effect as flicking a light switch after a storm had brought down the electricity wires!

There is yet another essential work that is totally God's. Just as Adam and Eve hid from God after that first disobedience, after so many generations of rebellion against God and after so many personal choices to go against him and all he stands for we humans are utterly incapable of doing a turn-around and choosing God. (the real God I mean – humans are very good at choosing and serving the 'gods' created by their own imagination - the very fact that we do invent 'gods' that we feel comfortable with proves the point that we cannot by ourselves face the real one!)

The second good news is that what we could never do, God again accomplished for us. God really wants to save us, and so gives us ample opportunity to choose. He will not force us to choose him, but he does everything necessary so that we CAN choose him.

OK I said God was marvellous beyond description – and here is one more instance of it!

So at the judgement we who chose God will know we did nothing to merit the joys of heaven which are before us. At the same time those who did not choose God will know with dread certainty that God made so many perfect opportunities for them to choose him that they are totally responsible for the awful fate that awaits them.

Let me say it again. God has done, does do, will do everything to save us - everything EXCEPT force us. He made us with free will and will not take it away from us. Of course he could: he just won’t. He wants us to choose to love him.

So the bottom line is that what I said about us having a choice is true. But I did need to add that we only have that choice because God has done everything else necessary. The fact that God has done all this to give us that choice leaves us totally without excuse if we don’t use it. As the Bible says in Hebrews 2.3 “³ how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?”

Back to the “do you here and now say ‘yes’ to the baptism questions”.

If you “generally” believe but have issues, read on: you might just have been brought down by a spiritual virus. A book like C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” which explains Christian certainties much better than I can may also help.

If you say “yes” then you are a child of God. You have been born again. Your sins have been forgiven. You have been delivered from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus, God’s dear son. You have been born again into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead: the sure and certain hope of resurrection from the dead and sharing Christ’s glory in heaven.

You may be, spiritually speaking a new-born baby in your faith in Jesus. That may have happened some time ago and you may now be on your journey growing to maturity in Christ. You may even be nearing the end of your travels with Christ in this life and be ready to say with Paul and countless others “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. ⁸ Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

This book is aimed at people in the first category: spiritual babies. Peter in his first letter says to his readers “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation,” But in the case of physical babies, the first thing they receive after their time growing in the womb is not milk but a fluid called “colostrum”. Once they are born they are at risk of attack from bacteria and viruses. The first thing they receive from their mother’s breast, even before the nourishing milk they will need is a fluid containing antibodies manufactured by their mother’s immune system. These antibodies will give them initial disease protection until their own immune system has become practised at making its own antibodies in response to virus attack.

Just as physical babies are at risk from all the viruses floating around, so spiritual babies are at risk from virus-like false teaching. New born Christians need spiritual colostrum from the start. As James said in his letter “ ³ Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. ⁴ For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about^[a] long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.”

This book is intended to be spiritual colostrum, immunising new Christians against the most common “viruses” until they have grown in their understanding of the Bible and their relationship with Jesus so that they can pick false and deceptive teachings for themselves

Why You Need Antibodies

You might as well ask why we need them in a physical sense – the answer is that that is just the way the world is. From the moment we are born there are viruses all around us that will attack our bodies – without an immune reaction we would die.

You might as well ask why we install anti-virus software on our computers. The answer is that there just are humans out there devising virus like programs to attack our computers.

As you read the pages of the Old Testament you will see that God’s people were continually being led astray by false teachers and importing bits from pagan religions and ending up deserting the real God altogether.

When you come to the New Testament, Paul’s letters make it plain that almost as soon as he had travelled through a region bringing people to faith in Jesus false teachers moved in and started destroying the faith of these new believers.

Even after all the time Paul spent back and forth visiting the Christian community at Ephesus, as he said good-bye to them knowing that he would probably be imprisoned and never see them again he warned: (Acts 19.29-31) “²⁹ I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. ³⁰ Even from your own number some will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. ³¹ So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.”

It is just how this world is. From the moment you put your trust in Jesus the devil will be trying every trick to stop you. Jesus said to his followers just before he was arrested (Luke 22.31,2)  ³¹ “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. ³² But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” In 1 Peter 5.8,9 we read “⁸ Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. ⁹ Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your fellow believers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”

One of the tricks the devil uses is seeding attractive but false ideas into people and churches to weaken people’s faith, stop them growing into mature Christians and stop them being effective in God’s work. You may well be joining a church that is already infected by one or more of these spiritual viruses. If you have the “antibodies” to protect you from succumbing yourself, that is one person rescued and as you become stronger in Christ you may be able to rescue others.

Paul was so exasperated that the people he had brought to faith in Jesus in the region of Galatia had been deceived by false teachers that he wrote (Galatians 1.6,7) “⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

And then in his concern for them wrote (Galatians 3.1-4) “ ¹ You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. ² I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? ³ Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort? ⁴Have you experienced^[a] so much in vain—if it really was in vain?”

Despite all these hazards, the person who honestly wants to stick with Christ will ultimately be kept safe. As Jesus said (John 10.27-29) “²⁷ My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸ I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹ My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all^[a]; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.³⁰ I and the Father are one.”

NEXT WEEK : “3 Things every Christian needs”

Morals & Manners … Pt.2 

Last blog on morals ended with the assertion that we are seeing a pincer movement attack on the 'old morals'. One arm of this pincer is tearing down the old to make way for the new (brave world?). I will have something to say about that later. The other pincer is undermining formerly accepted ways of behaving which through the normal process of socialisation became so ingrained that people had the comfort of easily determining the right thing to do. Now they are constantly stressed trying to work it out almost from first principles.

I am not saying there is any human conspiracy behind these, just that they are happening.

Humans do not seem designed to be working everything out from scratch all the time. With noise and hearing our brains work this for us. After a short time they filter out the steady background noises and only bring new or strange noises to our conscious mind. You can doubtless think of many more examples along the same line. We could not function without this facility.

In human enterprises we do not try to get people to work things out each time. Hence the deprecatory saying : “He's re-inventing the wheel”. In all common enterprises a system, or protocol or code is developed that covers the majority of cases and people work to that.

An example from my line of work – building is this: engineering a house. For the common cases there is a code, I don't have to calculate bearer, joist or beam sizes from engineering principles (even with the head start of having gained a masters degree in engineering in my youth I would find that an almost impossible burden!) No, I just follow the code. It contains tables where someone has laboriously worked out things like safe floor loadings, the wind pressures experienced by buildings, the strength of materials like timber joists and studs. All I have to do is look up the table and it tells me what size to use. (actually it is even easier now that someone has put it all into a simple computer program.) Only the hard cases that are not covered by the code have to be referred to an engineer to work out.

So our brains have evolved to simplify things like auditory input to make life liveable. Our collective human enterprises have developed things like codes because it possible for ordinary people to know what to do. And as I said last post, our brains have developed a phenomenal ability (called socialisation) to learn and internalise very complex rules of behaviour.

So why on earth are we allowing the teaching and internalisation of moral rules to be destroyed?

This is no advance. It is counter evolutionary. It is against all logic. It is making life more stressful for individuals. It is making our society less functional.

So my point in these two posts is let us stop this madness! Re-develop social and moral rules of behaviour, teach them to our children, reinforce them in our schools and colleges. Stop being afraid of enforcing them with social sanctions. Wear the pain until this re-socialisation takes hold across society. Then reap for generations the benefits – for they are great and well worth the pain!   

Exciting NEW series!

SPIRITUAL IMMUNIZATION FOR YOUNG CHRISTIANS

In this series, week by week I will be posting helpful information for new Christians.

In over 30 years of ministry I have had the joy of seeing lots of people – old and young – find new life in Jesus. I have also had the heartache of seeing many succumb to spiritual “illnesses” and spiritual fraudsters and lose their way (I learned the hard way how to protect young believes from these perils!). I have also had the pleasure of seeing new and older Christians grow into maturity in Christ.

I make no claim to being a theologian – but I am pretty good at spiritual infant welfare, and an effective spiritual kindergarten teacher!

So what I will be posting week by week will be sharing my very hard won practical experience. I pray you find it helpful.

Post 1

Are you a Christian?

If you don’t think you are a Christian, please find someone who can tell you about the Good News of Jesus Christ right away. Your eternal destiny – whether you end up in heaven with God or receive the default choice: hell, is at stake!

If you do think you are a Christian here is a little self-test test you can make.

The questions (I am using the wording from the 1662 Anglican service here but the gist is pretty universal I think) which candidates for baptism had to answer are:

Question

DOST thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?
    Answer. I renounce them all.

Question

DOST thou believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth?
    And in Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son our Lord? And that he was conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary; that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; and from thence shall come again at the end of the world, to judge the quick and the dead?
    And dost thou believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholick Church; the Communion of Saints; the Remission of sins; the Resurrection of the flesh; and everlasting life after death?
    Answer. All this I stedfastly believe.

Question

WILT thou be baptized in this faith?
    Answer. That is my desire.

Question

WILT thou then obediently keep God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life?
    Answer. I will endeavour so to do, God being my helper.

Permit me to make some explanatory remarks.

Question one is basically asking you to change sides in the war of the universe. It assumes you have at least in the role of a citizen of an occupied country (think maybe of a French person during the Nazi occupation) been on the Devil’s turf. Now you are being asked to disavow that and take up active allegiance to God instead.

In the world under the rule of the Devil, our lives are largely governed by a false (but very clever and appealing) world view maintained by the Devil – here called “ the vain pomp and glory of the world” and “the covetous desires of the same” and the flawed promptings and yearnings of our human nature called here “the carnal desires of the flesh” We have to decide to turn our back on these illusions and learn to say “No!” to our old human nature if we want to come over to God’s side.

Question two is “do you believe what all Christians through all history all over the world have said was their essential belief”, summed up here in what we call the Apostle’s Creed.

The phrase “holy catholick Church” can cause some confusion, so please let me explain: “catholic” just means “universal” and “church” in the New Testament is the Koine Greek word “ekklesia” which means “a gathering, assembly or crowd” so we are here affirming, not any denominational church (Roman Catholic or otherwise!) but something spine tinglingly wonderful - membership of “God’s Crowd” composed not only of people we can see now but of all the people who ever have or ever will belong to Jesus, from every tribe and nation, (and every “church”) – which will have its first full meeting when Jesus returns – that will be some meeting: some party!

Question three involves a declaration of obedience to God.

So what about you? Right here right now. Do you answer all those questions in the affirmative?

If you say “No” then this series is not designed to meet your present needs - but please do read the rest of this post because that may excite your interest in finding out more about Jesus.

Choosing God takes effort. Choosing God goes against our pride, because we have to admit to yourself that we can’t do it on our own – we need God.

Choosing God seems silly whilst we are caught up in the Devil’s lies and the world view he manages to hoodwink most people into believing is reality.

Choosing God means committing to a way of life going “against the tide” of what most people think. A way of life that the rest of the world may try to make uncomfortable and sometimes short!

Choosing God means committing a minute by minute, day by day struggle living God’s way not the way of our warped human nature. It is choosing a lifestyle that takes all the power and resources that God provides and at times all our strength and willpower to maintain.

Only after choosing God can we appreciate the benefits. We are now reconciled to God: no longer afraid of his judgement, but as a beloved child being in rapt wonder at his greatness and love.

No longer following human religion with its rules and rituals: but having in your innermost being the presence of God the Holy Spirit.

No longer afraid to the terrors life can throw up: but knowing that Jesus is standing shoulder to shoulder with us facing them and that the trials of this life will seem nothing compared to the rewards of heaven.

No longer living a life either in fear of death or hiding that fear only by myths of immortality: but with the real certainty of resurrection to eternal life in heaven with Christ.

There is a “default” choice: it is not (yet) choosing to take up God’s offer on amnesty in Christ.

This choice is really easy to make: you don’t have to think about it at all. That is why I called it the “default” choice.

Most people stick with the default choice. While you stick with it God will honour your choice and limit his involvement in your life (but he will still be there because he wants you to choose him after all) so you will probably make a series of bad choices in your life with bad consequences for you and others. You will maybe feel a nagging “God shaped hole” in your life which you will try to plug with other things – religion, money, drugs, sex, power and so on.

If you stick with the default choice till you die you will get the eternal consequences of your choice – total exclusion from God, heaven and all the people who chose God while they could and from everything that is good, lovely and desirable because all these things come from God – what you will be left with, forever, is called “hell”.

Your future: your choice!

Re-reading this section I can see that some of my fellow believers will think I have over-emphasised the “your choice” aspect. They are in theory right: Without the sheer abundance of God’s kindness, goodness and love that we call “grace” we would have no choice at all. We are all sinners, the bible makes that plain. God as judge of the entire world should send every last one of us to hell. God as a being who hates evil with a passion should have nothing to do with us humans who are as covered in evil as kids playing in a mud patch are covered with dirt.

That is part of the wonder of God. We can never plumb the depths of it. He hates sin but he loves us sinners. He went so far as to come to earth, born as a human baby, to deal with sin.

Jesus was simultaneously both God and human – in fact THE representative of the human race. When he suffered and died on the cross evil was disarmed.

Theologians have down the centuries have tried to make up some illustration for the people of their time. These illustrations have generally seemed a bit lame to the people of the next generation. So maybe it is safer to say: “It just IS”. Or to stick with the words of the bible, like these;

John 3.16 :

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Matthew 20.28

²⁸ just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Romans 3

²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ²⁵ God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,^[i] through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— ²⁶ he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

This concise statement in Romans is so important that I will paste in the “New Living Bible” translation of it as well:

²³ For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. ²⁴ Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. ²⁵For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past, ²⁶ for he was looking ahead and including them in what he would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness, for he himself is fair and just, and he declares sinners to be right in his sight when they believe in Jesus.

1 Peter 2.24

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”

That of course is only a tiny selection of bible verses, but enough for the present to make the point that Jesus dying on the cross was essential to God forgiving our sins.

The really vital news is that Jesus did die for us and God does forgive us and adopts us as his sons & daughters when we turn away from our sins and come back to him.

NEXT WEEK : Why we need spiritual immunizations

Sermon audio Revelation 4-6

This sunday's sermon on Revelation 4-6.
Download and enjoy.

Sermon Revelation 4-6.mp3

Manners  and  Morals

Thursday 11th April 2013

These are more closely linked than you might at first think. A baby growing up learns much from its surroundings and its interactions. One of the vital things it learns is the protocols for interactions in its family and beyond. Sociologists call this “socialisation”. It is vital in an evolutionary sense because an individual's chance of survival plummets if it is rejected by its family, or outcast from its social group. So it should come as no surprise that humans are very good at learning social mores and manners, in fact we have a significant part of our brains, the frontal lobe, specialising in this function. The recent film “Quartet” features as a sub-plot a sanitised version of a man with frontal lobe damage. The film manages to make it amusing that he has no social inhibitions. In real life I have seen for instance a wife throw her frontal-lobe-damaged husband out because she could not cope with his lack of social awareness. It is disastrous, not amusing.

The point of this rather long winded introduction is that humans have evolved with the ability to make fine judgements on appropriate behaviour.

Manners are both noticeable and subtle. A century or so ago what you did if you were in a social setting and another person entered the room was quite complicated, but people's brains produced the right behaviour without hesitation. It was complicated because it depended on many factors: your age, gender and social status. The other person's age, gender and social status, the degree of intimacy between you. (ie were you family, friends acquaintances or strangers) the formality of the setting, and say for an older gentleman standing when a young girl entered, a desire make the other person feel accepted perhaps even honoured.

Quite complex, but our frontal lobes are so well developed for this very task that while we had to be taught the particular customs of our society (socialised) the requisite calculations were performed so seamlessly that it seemed 'instinctive'.

I can remember as a boy, I never had to think (let alone agonise over the right action) if I was sitting in a crowded bus or train and a lady was standing. I got up and offered my seat. It was a 'no-brainer'.

By the time I was working once clear-cut social rules were being ignored. Then the train situation became a nightmare. What was I to do? My old social training told me to get up. The new mores were to stay seated unless the lady was clearly unwell or heavily pregnant. Now I had to decide what to do in every situation. Sometimes I got up – one time I remember a man standing nearby elbowed the lady out of the way and sat down himself! Sometimes I looked out the window pretending I could see no lady, but growing redder every minute with embarrassment.

Oh how much better it was to have clear rules of behaviour!

Some of you may now be anticipating the connection I am about to draw between manners and morals.

Just as the old manners were swept away in the 60's and 70's, so too the old morals are being eroded. In the case of morals it seems to be a pincer movement.

One pincer is tearing down the old in order to erect the new.

I can remember when “censorship” was being attacked as evil paternalism. I was a bit late for “lady Chatterley's Lover” although I remember my sister reading a smuggled copy of the banned work. I was in time to go to a rebel performance of a play which had just been banned for its lewdness. And I am embarrassed to say that when there was uproar over a TV (yes we had it back then!) show where the amorous young man put his hand up the girlfriend's skirt, I wrote to the newspaper pointing out how much more suggestive Shakespeare was in “King Lear” which was our English text that year.

Half a century or so on is censorship a thing of the past? Not likely! Oh the old censorship was pulled down, only to be replaced with the censorship of “Political Correctness”.

The punishments, interestingly are far more harsh under this new brand of censorship. You can be as lewd as you like in print or film. You can be as blasphemous as you like – as long as you only blaspheme the Christian God. But dare to transgress political correctness, say a comment, even light-heartedly in jest that is male chauvinist, racist, or against say same sex unions and you may face utter ruin. Public pillory (metaphorically– for now), loss of job, friends, career and all this with no possible expiation of your 'sin' or any hope of redemption.

I am not saying anyone ought to make such comments, just that the punishment does seem rather harsh.

The other arm of the pincer movement is the pulling down of the old morality as a guide to actions, not as with the example above to replace it with the “new morality” but to leave people without rules at all.

This is reminiscent of the ancient Israelites having to make bricks and find their own straw. People now face the prospect of having to work out “what is the right thing to do” for themselves as well as do it.

This of course is the point of comparison between manners and morals I was leading up to in telling my experiences of giving my seat to a lady on the train.

Come back next week for more discussion on this arm of the pincer

Sermon on Revelation 1-3: God says " I know where you live!"

Please download and open the below link.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/umk5v6nzrs7qujc/Sermon060413%20Revelation1-3.mp3

King Canute on Global Warming Part II

Hello,

Today's blog is a bit off topic. In Last Month's 'The Melbourne Anglican' there was an article on Christians and climate change. Thinking about the topic, it occurred to me that our efforts to "Save the Planet" may inadvertently condemn unimaginable numbers of humans to misery or even starvation.  So I wrote a letter to the TMA  which they kindly published in this issue. However due to word limits I could only make one point with a link to my elder son's blog on which I intended to put the rest. Now that I have started my own blog (with a lot of help from my elder daughter who is a keen blogger) I shall post it here ...

The remainder of my thoughts on Climate Change and CO2 reduction :-

“From about 1570 … Called in retrospect the Little Ice Age, this new era of climate continued for about 300 years.

Thousands of French, Swiss, Italian and Austrian farms on the foothills of the Alps were devastated by the colder seasons. Glaciers, most formidable around 1600, reached the houses of villages on the lower slopes and crushed them. The villagers had time to flee but many lost house, vegetable garden, barn, woodheap and grassy strip of pasture: they lost everything. In 1616 in a French-speaking village in the Chamonix Valley only 6 of its 21 houses remained. The glacier, crawling along, was an object of terror.

Small processions of villagers, led by a priest or even a bishop, went to the edge of the glacier and prayed that it might halt.”

(From Geoffrey Blainey “A Short History of the World” Penguin Australia 2000, p.417)

We do not have to go far back in history to find climate change affecting humans, in this case for worse. A little further back a warm patch affecting people favourably then a cold one brought hardship, again from Blainey, (p 265)

“A Warm period intervened during the middle ages, and the two centuries between 1000 and 1200 were perhaps as warm as the 1990's were to be in Northern Europe. Harvests were sythed on lands which once had been seen as not worth ploughing, so frail were the summers. Vineyards flourished beyond the present limit of grape growing. Even the far north of England made drinkable wine. In Scandinavia, large tracts which previously were covered with ice were grassed enough in the late spring and in summer for the feeding of livestock. … (p268) The warm seasons, after only a couple of centuries, began to alter. Even the Mediterranean island of Crete entered a colder phase in about the year 1150. In Germany and England the cold arrived nearly one century later, and most years between 1312 and 1320 were not only cold but unusually wet. Rain, falling at an unwanted time, could be as devastating as drought. … In the space of six months in 1316 maybe one in ten of the people in Ypres died of starvation or malnutrition. In 1330 began four successive years of famine in parts of France.”

If we go back through the time of the dinosaurs, the great ice ages, the time of lush forests and swamps when the world's coal deposits were laid down we see continual, often extreme climate change. If we go back far enough we find conditions on Earth so extreme that we could not even use the word 'climate' for them.

So natural climate change is something we should expect, even if we cannot yet determine how, why or how much. Man made climate change ...well I for one don't want to get onto that debate! As I pointed out in my letter in the April TMA, there is a much more fruitful line of inquiry.

We seem to have developed not just an industry but a whole raft of industries dependent on money being poured into reducing CO2 emissions on a world scale.

Scientific research bodies are the obvious ones. Very many careers, claims-to-fame, professorships, research grants and so forth are based on CO2 reduction research in all its forms.

NGO's and QANGO's follow with many an income and many a prestigious job tied to CO2 reduction lobbying.

Even down to community groups and churches there are many people whose sense of being movers and shakers is inextricably tied to their advocacy against carbon emissions.

Industry dependence is growing. The whole so-called renewable energy sector. Many of their products are known to be considerably more expensive than the conventional ones they aim to replace. So their only defence against being called “waste of money” is in putative CO2 reduction.

So we have a situation which may have tragic results for the world. The best interests of all these people are are in a way like the best interests of say the armaments industry. War is more profitable than peace. For the “war on CO2 emissions” lobby, their vested interest lies in the “war” continuing, rather than in “winning”.

As I pointed out in my TMA article they are clearly not winning. Even a cursory investigation of the fossil fuel mining industry current and projected growth shows they are not winning.

But the continued pouring of resources into the “war” will cripple our ability to confront and adapt to the very real climate change, whether natural or man made which will inevitably come upon us. The planet will survive (it has been through much worse)  but many humans may not.

PS In the TMA article I promised an explanation of the “Prisoner's Dilemma”. There are many real-life situations where it does not give the right answer. However I suspect that the behavior of  nations committing to drastic reduction of CO2 emissions may well follow this model.

Here is an extract from Wikipedia:

"The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name "prisoner's dilemma" (Poundstone, 1992), presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail.

In this classic version of the game, collaboration is dominated by betrayal; if the other prisoner chooses to stay silent, then betraying them gives a better reward (no sentence instead of one year), and if the other prisoner chooses to betray then betraying them also gives a better reward (two years instead of three). Because betrayal always rewards more than cooperation, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them both to betray each other. The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads the prisoners to both betray, but they would get a better reward if they both cooperated. In reality, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action.[1][2][3][4]

There is also an extended "iterative" version of the game, where the classic game is played over and over between the same prisoners, and consequently, both prisoners continuously have an opportunity to penalize the other for previous decisions. If the number of times the game will be played is known to the players, the finite aspect of the game means that (by backward induction) the two prisoners will betray each other repeatedly. Game theory does not claim, however, that real human players will actually betray each other continuously. In an infinite or unknown length game there is no fixed optimum strategy, and Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments have been held to compete and test algorithms.

In casual usage, the label "prisoner's dilemma" may be applied to situations not strictly matching the formal criteria of the classic or iterative games: for instance, those in which two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it merely difficult or expensive, not necessarily impossible, to coordinate their activities to achieve cooperation."

PS .... in answer to Comment #1 :  the word limit was set by the TMA editor. the link to the article now on my son's blog is:     
  http://davidgreentreejnr.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/king-canute-and-noah-on-global-warming_7.html

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