God and Global Warming
Christians are often suspicious about scientific information. I am often disappointed by the suspicion, disbelief and reactive attitude from many Christian people. One of the most prevalent is the attitude to climate change. As I move around the State people question me about predictions concerning climate change. Some denigrate the research, others suggest vast conspiracies, and others point to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as a political trick. Another group tell me that their father told them there have always been droughts, changing temperatures and floods on the farm and that everything will turn out well if your are patient.
The truth about global warming is that the scientists are right, the politicians are too ignorant to create such an international conspiracy, and that your father was right over the experience of his life-span, but wrong if you consider a time span of millions of years.
This week two excellent studies came to hand. The first is the 2007 Year Book of the World Book Encyclopaedia. I have purchased every yearbook since 1962 and many editions of the updated encyclopaedia, and every one has excellent articles on the most topical issue of the year. This year’s special report by Christine Johnson is on “The Great Meltdown”. It is about the impact of global warming of the great ice-caps on the north and south Poles. The ice caps cover 10% of the earth’s land mass, and consist of 15 % of the world’s sea water. Photographs of the great glaciers over a sixty year time span show how they are diminishing. Satellite photographs over two decades reveal the dramatic changes. You can no longer walk to the North Pole and the melting ice cannot support polar bears. Read the article. Your local library will have a copy.
The second was from NASA climatologist James Hansen who talks about the urgency of the climate crisis.
He writes: “There is a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by those who need to know and that is the public and policy makers.”
“We had in the last 30 years 1 degree F (= 0.5 degrees C) warming but there is another 1 degree F that’s in the pipeline due to gases already in the atmosphere just because it takes the climate system time to respond to the changes in the atmosphere. And there is another 1 F in the pipeline because of energy infrastructure which is in place for example power plants and vehicles which we are not going to take off the road even if we decide that we have to address this problem.”
“Even though the climate change so far is just beginning to be noticeable there is a lot more that’s in the pipeline and if we don’t get on a different course…..” “If we do follow that path [more and more CO2 each year], even for another 10 years, then it guarantees that we’ll have dramatic climate changes that produce what I call a different planet…no ice in the arctic …..eventually very large sea level rises…”
“Icesheets are not as immutable as we once thought. We now have this spectacular gravity satellite which measures the mass of the Greenland icesheet and it shows that it has been decreasing by 150 km3 per year over the last few years and of even greater concern is the Antarctic ice sheet has also been decreasing at about the same rate..” “The concern is that it is a very non linear process which could accelerate and the West Antarctic in particularly is very vulnerable and if it collapsed it could yield a sea level rise of 5-6 m possibly in a time scale as short as a century or two.”
“We cannot burn the coal or the unconventional fossil fuels unless we capture the CO2 and sequester it”.
God the Creator has a purpose in everything and He instructed us to take care of His creation. That includes water resources, land quality, and the atmosphere. This is a Christian concern and Christians should be the first to so live that we will not have an adverse impact upon our environment and the future of our world.
REV THE HON. DR GORDON MOYES, A.C., M.L.C..
