Green evangelicals? (April, 2006)

Jay introduces us to the Evangelical Climate Initiative and its Call to Action.

What I appreciated:

• "[The Call to Action] insists that love for God's creation and responsible stewardship should motivate Christians to care for the earth rather than participate in its destruction."


• "Evangelicals who are concerned about the health and life and future of their families--their children and grandchildren--must pay attention to the destruction of our environment. None of us should be indifferent to the potential death and suffering of millions--whether the cause is abortion, hunger, war, or environmental degradation."


• "We care for the earth today in anticipation of the new heavens and new earth--God's eternal kingdom."

*****

Jay writes:

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, some evangelical leaders argued that the science regarding global warming was inconclusive.

I stand unashamed with that camp.

One compelling graph should tell the story of global warming. Carbon dioxide creates a warming, green-house effect in the earth's atmosphere. Plant life consumes carbon dioxide. Burning fossil fuels produce it. Mankind has done plenty of both.

We should be able to tally how much fossil fuel we've burned, from automobiles to electricity, over the last 150+ years. We should be able to tally how much of the earth's plant life has been reduced over that same time. There should be a steady cumulative effect: the accumulation of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide. Plotting each of those along with the earth's temperature should tell a compelling story, and end all debate. It should be the first and main talking-point of global warming proponents. But no such graph exists.

In fact, one version of the graph I describe does exist: the "hockey stick." But it's being proven a hoax. Richard Muller, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, writes this in MIT's Technology Review:

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. ...

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

... Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

We are called to be stewards of the environment. We should debate what that means, and how we prioritize it. We must set aside the "political and activist frenzy."

It brings me back to one of my fundamental tenets: the environment is best served by the truth.

*****

More to digest:

• The Evangelical Climate Initiative's Climate Change: An Evangelical Call To Action (PDF format). Their web-site is www.christiansandclimate.org.


• Jennifer Biddison responds to the Call to Action:
  Evangelicals misled on climate change.
  
• Iain Murray responds to the Call To Action: "Sadly, these good men and women have allowed their itching ears to listen to fables. Their claims are based on half-truths and unsound logic."


• NASA's Goddard Institute's Common Sense Climate Index.


• Univ Alabama Huntsville: Climate's 27-year warming pattern not consistent with 'global warming'


• Bob Carter, UK's Telegraph: "There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998."
  
• Steven Milloy looks at the history of the infamous "hockey-stick" graph.


• Thomas Bray (Detroit News): 'What Jesus drives' crowd reignites a dubious cause.


• The National Association of Evangelicals' Call to Civic Responsibility (PDF format). See "We labor to protect God’s creation" on pages 11 - 12.


• The National Association of Evangelicals' Resolution on Environment and Ecology, 1971.


• Update, 4/12: Richard Lindzen: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence, Wall-Street Journal's OpinionJournal.