Speaking of Babylon, through the prophet Jeremiah, God said:

“A drought on her waters, and they will be dried up! For it is a land of idols, And they are mad over fearsome idols.”

It’s interesting to juxtapose that against this long piece today (Bloomberg exclusive) about the water and hydro-electric power supplies for Las Vegas and Los Angeles, both of which draw upon the Colorado River by way of man-made Lake Mead:

They’re battling the worst 10-year drought in recorded history along the Colorado River, which feeds the 110-mile-long reservoir. Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped about 1 percent a year. By 2012, the lake’s surface could fall below the existing pipe that delivers 40 percent of the city’s water.

As regular readers of this blog know, 2012 seems more and more likely to be auspicious date in God’s timetable as well. Which is why I was both shocked and surprised to see, further down in the same article, a passing reference to ancient Babylon:

[Around 2,500 BC] King Urlama of Lagash diverted water in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley in a border dispute with nearby Umma. [hmm... any relation to 'Ummah'?!]

Had they delved further, they might have noticed that, not quite two millennia later, God spoke about Babylon and water, via the prophet Isaiah (e.g., 44:24-28 and 45:1-4), among others.

Isaiah records God saying over 150 years before the Persian take-over, exactly how they would accomplish this feat, and the name of the one who would do it. (Cyrus was stunned to learn, via Daniel, that his arrival had been long-anticipated by those watching closely — a dramatic encounter that radically changed Cyrus’ outlook and his policy towards the Jewish nation, enabling them to return to their homeland).

In short, while the Babylonian political leaders were partying, the Persian army, under Cyrus diverted the river that wound through the city’s protective moats, accomplishing a quiet, nearly-bloodless infiltration that became a fait accompli by the time the Babylonians’ hangovers wore off.

Draw your own conclusions. Here’s mine:

It is a well established scientific fact, (e.g., chemical, oceanographic, geological, paleontological, agricultural, botanical, archeological, glaciological, sociological- and economic-historical) that the climate of the earth, and of various regions within it, is, and always has been, changing and that these changes are more often dramatic than slow or subtle.

It is also a fact that cold periods have been antithetical to life (in part because of drought — yes, that is counter-intuitive, but nonetheless true) and that, with regional exceptions in both cases, warmer periods have been congruent with the flowering of human civilization across the globe.

Since God is sovereign over all of it, He can (and does) do with the climate just as He wills for His purposes, acting through human beings on a local level (as in the Isaiah and Daniel accounts) as well as on a much grander scale via other avenues — e.g., the sun, meteors, volcanoes, nature, etc. It is surely way, way more complicated and mysteriously unfathomable than the simplistic human-centric notion that God sends storms to hit bad people and sunny days to bless good people.

Whether you believe in the whole CO2 thing is less the issue than whether you believe in CO2 as a kind of personal ‘carbon-footprint’ holiness versus SUV-sin-and-destruction substitute for the way God looks at those things (i.e., holiness and sin).

What matters is whether you worry about (and thus, in effect, are beholden to worshipping) a molecule, e.g., CO2 or H2O and its effects, or whether you worship the One who created them, you and everything else. It’s your choice. It always is.