irish Churches Blog Post: The Arctic is on fire and it’s about to be hit by a heatwave.
This blog post first appeared on the Irish Council of Churches blog on 20 August 2019 The Arctic is on fire and it’s about to be hit by a heatwave. This is a headline as I write at the beginning of August 2019. The number of arctic fires in 2019 is ‘unprecedented’ according to the World Meteorological Organisation. Hundreds of fires burn in Alaska, Greenland and Siberia, some of them are 100,000 times larger than a football pitch. In July the average temperatures in Siberia were almost 6 degrees Celsius above average. That headline seems to foreshadow the Biblical passages that explain how the earth will be destroyed. For example, 2 Peter 3:10–11 ‘The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? ‘ The last line in that verse echoed in my mind, ‘What kind of people out you to be?’ In an age of