Q: Tell us about yourself?

A: I’m Rabbi Danny Eisenberg. I’m an Orthodox rabbi in Sydney, Australia. I spent a decade learning in yeshivas in Israel and I’ve been working in Torah education and computers for close to 20 years.

Q: How do you feel about people who are skeptical about climate change?

A: I can certainly relate to skepticism about climate change. I was also quite skeptical for a long time. There’s so much misinformation everywhere about the climate, it’s very difficult to know who or what to believe.

Q: In what ways were you skeptical?

A: Well, I never denied global warming was happening. But when people were starting to talk about it, around 15 to 20 years ago, you had a lot of people speaking in apocalyptic terms, as if the world was on the verge of destruction. And I thought that sounded a bit over the top.

It reminded me of the professor in the late ‘60s who claimed that overpopulation would threaten human survival. And others who predicted that humanity would destroy itself with weapons of mass destruction.

I thought this sounded like the same kind of panic. I assumed that if one believes in God, they believe that He has a plan for the world. So the idea that we have to save the world seemed to me a bit like trying to play God.

Q: What changed?

A: What changed? Well, in 2016, I got a job as a software engineer at the University of New South Wales in the Climate Change Research Centre writing software for climate researchers. So suddenly this gave me a bit of an insider view into the world of climate science.

I discovered a few things which were real game changers for how I related to the issue.

Q: What kind of game changers?

The first game changer was that the climate scientists I was working with weren’t, on the whole, warning about the end of the world or the end of civilization as we know it, the way some environmentalists do. They were talking about serious problems that global warming was creating, problems that could really affect the lives of many many millions of people.

For me this was a game changer, because I realised that addressing global warming is not about playing God and saving the world from apocalypse. Global warming is a here-and-now problem, just like many other here-and-now problems that we have to deal with, like trying to cure illnesses and trying to address poverty. Even though God runs the world, He doesn’t want us to leave the problem-solving to Him. As the Ramchal says in Mesilas Yesharim, Hashem has given us the capacity to solve problems and He expects us to use that capacity to make a Hishtadlus - a concerted effort - to look after ourselves and address these problems. And global warming should be no exception to that.

Q: What else did you learn?

A: Another thing I discovered is that climate scientists are not professional environmentalists and they are not political activists. And they don’t sit around all day talking about how to save the world. They are experts in cutting-edge physics of land, ocean and atmosphere, and that’s what they discuss and research as their profession all day every day, over decades. They work for organisations like NASA, and the top universities and nearly 200 peak scientific bodies around the world.

You can find among them political conservatives, like Professor Richard Alley in the US, who identifies as a Republican. And Professor Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian at Texas Tech University. So it’s not about political affiliation.

And among all of these climate scientists around the world there is a strong scientific consensus that global warming is happening and that human activity is almost certainly the primary cause.

So, this confirmed for me that this was not just environmentalist speculation and panic. It’s serious science with a strong consensus behind it. It isn’t the end of the world, but it is of great seriousness and deserves serious attention.