by Bill Nugent
Article #191
Global warming is in the news every day. The fact of global warming is undeniable. The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. The only controversy is over the cause of global warming. The Evangelical Climate Initiative is an effort by conservative Christians to address environmental issues related to global warming. Having studied this issue, I have come to the conclusion that human industrial output of carbon dioxide into the air is only a partial cause of global warming. The primary cause is the fact that the sun is increasing its energy output slightly. Astronomers have long known that the sun, like any star, varies in its energy output over time.
This shifts the whole debate into the realm of astronomy and stellar physics. Stellar physics is the study of the anatomy and energy source of stars. The evidence from stellar physics not only explains global warming but also gives much evidence for a young age of the universe. Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of stellar physics. When a star forms, its early stage of life cycle is called “main sequence” of stable output of light and energy with fluctuations of 3 or 4%. As a star ages it runs low on fuel (stars fuse hydrogen to form helium resulting in hydrogen bomb type energy output) and it eventually expands to become a “red giant.” A red giant then will either explode into a supernova or collapse to become a small hot “white dwarf.”
Astronomers studied and defined these stages by observing millions of stars in various stages of their life cycles. Perplexing evidence confronts those who believe in an old (multi-billion year) age of the universe. This evidence is the fact that many stars being observed are changing far more rapidly than the old-universe computer models assume should be the case. An example of this is the companion star of the star named Sirius which has gone from being a red giant to a white dwarf in just 1000 years. Other evidence shows that stars in their early main sequence routinely vary 3 or 4% in energy output. This is devastating to the old earth evolutionist view because if our sun varied by more than 1% it would superheat or chill the earth to such a degree that virtually all life would die. To say that the sun has been stable with less than 1% variation for the alleged 3.8 billion years that life supposedly evolved is wishful thinking in the extreme.
In an even more devastating development for old earth evolutionists, stellar physicists now maintain that a star in its main sequence not only fluctuates in energy output put gradually increases energy output over its young and mid-life. In other words stars fluctuate but trend upwards in energy output and brightness. Thus we come to another issue in astronomy called the“early faint sun paradox.” To understand this paradox let me explain a little of the sun’s energy usage.
Our sun atomically fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen to form 695 million tons of helium every second. The missing 5 million tons are pure energy. This is atomic fusion. Matter is changed into energy and the sun loses 5 million tons of matter every second. The sun is shrinking and the composition of its core changes over time. Old universe astronomers calculate that the sun increased in energy output by about 25% during the alleged first 3.8 billion years of earth’s existence. Old earth evolutionists must be tempted to slap their old universe astronomer colleagues across their faces because the early fossil record shows no evidence of a cold early earth! If anything the earth was warmer in its early days. So we have a contradiction between stellar physics and evolutionary paleontology.
Old earth evolutionists address the early faint sun paradox in a bizarre, complicated and unworkable fashion. They claim that the early earth atmosphere was composed of a high concentration of greenhouse gases and the greenhouse gases diminished at just the right percentage over billions of years to exactly compensate for the sun’s gradual brightening. It would have been a phenomenal balancing act over billions of years of coincidental, unguided unfolding of fortuitous events. It is truly an example of the lengths to which devout secularists will go to try to prove that life formed by accident over long ages without a Creator.
Young earth creationists such as myself maintain that God created the sun less than ten thousand years ago. There is no need to account for a 3.8 billion year period of wild variation in the sun’s output of energy. The fossils were deposited during times of global upheaval and catastrophe such as the flood that occurred in Noah’s day. The recent finds of blood and other soft tissue in dinosaur bones is proof that they are not 65 million years old but their actual age can be measured in thousands not millions of years. (See article: M. Schweitzer and I. Staedter, ‘The Real Jurassic Park’ in the Journal Earth, June 1997 pp. 55-57.)
Evolution can be called the theory of a trillion favorable coincidences. It is far more reasonable to believe in the miracle of creation than in trillions of unguided coincidences.
The present phenomenon of global warming is in all likelihood just a slight, temporary increase in the sun’s energy output. I know that answer seems a bit vague but there are scientists who agree with this view. Human activity, causing the release of carbon dioxide, contributes only a little to global warming. The whole scholarly discussion about global warming is rife with controversy and even the experts have difficulty formulating a precise explanation.