Joe,

First of all, my own belief is that there is no exclusivity between science and theology. OTOH, I don't believe that God put us here to destroy the planet.

Since the first human figured out how to build his own fire, there's been global warming due to the activity of man. I wasn't there, but I suppose man first started out burning wood, leaves, grasses, etc, but of the heat that generated, some portion didn't leave the planet. Disregarding the greenhouse effect, not all the heat man generates leaves the planet.

When man started burning coal and, later, petroleum and natural gas, he started producing much more heat than would otherwise have been on the planet. After all, man didn't mitigate the other heating effects, did he?

I think those bits of info alone are sufficient to support, quite fully, the notion that man has increasingly had an upward influence on the global temperature. After all, every motor, heater, engine, or nearly any mechanical process, produces heat that wouldn't have been present if man weren't present. Lions, chimp's and grasshoppers don't burn things to create heat. Those "things" are among nature's way of sequestering carbon, which, when burned, produces heat, and, when burned, produces at leats one of several "greenhouse gasses."

It's true that bovines produce considerable quantitites of methane, another of the famous mix of greenhouse gasses. However, I doubt there were more flatulent bovines before man started raising them and essentially force-feeding them to fatten them in the shortest possible time. I also doubt that bovines, or any other creatures, occurring naturally would have started burning wood, coal, petroleum, or natural gas, thereby releasing all the sequestered carbon that those contain.

So, now you have two human-generated effects (1) the highly accellerated rate of increase in the greenhouse gases produced by man's activity, and (2) the vast increase in the heat added to the planetary environment by man's activities, none of which fails to release heat. If you've graduated from high school, you know that, while the earth might leak a bit of heat, a major bit, in fact, into the rest of space, it doesn't leak off all of its increased heat, though the rate of radiation does increase with temperature. However, the proportion of heat radiated out into space is mitigated by that increase in the greenhouse effect.

Keep in mind, that NOTHING that a human can or would do would in any sense be of benefit to the planet. The best one could hope is that the effect of man's activity would remain neutral. Clearly, it has not been neutral. You can debate, forever, the various effects and their consequences, but the fact remains, in a perfect world, man's activity would have no effect. We also know, however, that, and probably only because of the presence of man, it's not a perfect world.

I personally believe that it is part of the Almighty's plan that humanity, being so unenlightened as to continue to exacerbate the adverse effects of his own activity, will eliminate itself, thereby allowing, in time, for the planet to regain its health once the disease of mankind has expunged itself.

RE