It occurred to me in the process of thinking about the similarities between much of the rhetoric used by those screaming about anthropogenic climate change and “rapture watchers” that the very fact that their rhetoric is so simple is one reason that climate change arguments will remain unconvincing for most dispensationalist Evangelicals. It’s not so much that these Evangelicals are taking a “the world’s going to burn anyway, so who cares” approach. On the contrary, it’s that the arguments for anthropogenic climate change and the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions—an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters and ecological problems—are exactly the same arguments used as “signs of the times” by many Evangelicals.
What makes this even more ironic, however, is that (as we’ve already addressed) there is no evidence for increased frequency or intensity of natural disasters (at most, there are cyclical ebbs and flows), so the rhetoric on both sides cherry picks essentially the same anecdotal evidence to support opposing alarmist paradigms.