Green evangelicals? (April, 2006)
Jay introduces us to the Evangelical Climate Initiative and its Call to Action.
What I appreciated:
Jay writes:
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:
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:
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.
By The Scrutinator, 4/10/2006
9 Comments:
Do some research, bonehead.
Hi Jim
Did you see the presentation by Sir John Houghton, a evangelical Christian scientist who served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was in charge of its scientific assessment of climate change (http://www.christiansandclimate.org/resources)
CT interviewed him here (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/004/16.77.html)
Houghton's not considered an activist, but a Christian who is a scientist who has studied climate change in depth and is pretty convicing
Your graph idea is seriously flawed because it fails to take into consideration a wide variety of factors that contribute to temperature regulation on the planet (i.e. carbon dioxide levels in the ocean). Its a cute idea, but the correlation between human-produced carbon dioxide and the amount of energy trapped in the Earth's atmosphere is significantly more complex than simply measuring the reduction in plant biomass against the consumption of fossil fuels. Like I said before, do some research.
Thank you both for your comments.
Bob: Thanks for the link. I read the CT interview and I agree with a lot of what he says philosophically. But where is the convincing evidence? I haven't seen it, and claims that "the scientific debate is essentially over" just raise my suspicions.
Anonymous: I appreciate your coming back with a more articulate response. I agree that there are "a wide variety of factors that contribute to temperature regulation." But that weakens the claim that we humans are doing it, particularly if we don't understand them. If we do understand them, why can't we clearly correct for them in the data?
It's legitimate to argue from theory, as Houghton seems to be doing. But theory needs confirmation, especially when alarmist (and case-closed) claims are made. And attempts to use science as a political trump card lead to its pollution by political and activist frenzy (as Richard Muller pointed out above), as well as bullying and other shenanigans.
I believe I've done some research. Perhaps now its your turn.
1. Do you defend the "hockey stick" graph? Why or why not?
2. What factors contribute more to temperature fluctuations than human activity? (Here's one.) How much more? How well do we understand them?
I'm not claiming that human activity has zero effect, or that we shouldn't be good stewards of the environment. I'm just very, very suspicious of alarmist claims and the ends they're attempting to justify.
Happy Earth Day everyone!
Jim
I'm afraid I can't answer your question because I'm not a climatologist--and neither is Richard Muller. He's a electrical engineer, and so in commenting about global warming, he's completely out of his field. I've got no way to evaluate whether 1) a hockey stick appears, or 2) whether the kind of simple graph you're requesting would accurately describe the way that carbon-dioxide emission interact with the global climate.
My point was this. Houghton has the scientific credentials and has served on the world's leading international panel on global warming, has done intensive work on this issue, and has analyzed the scientific data, and come to the conclusion that human activity has a profound impact on climate change. His opinion on this matter ought to carry more weight than Muller's. Muller may be a fine electrical engineer but that doesn't qualify him to comment about climate change.
We ought to remember that there is an element to subjectivity to any type of scientific research, but there are two things that lead me to take global warming theories seriously...
The first:
If science were democracy, the scientific community has voted 99 to 1 in favor of human contribution to climate change. That's a pretty big margin of victory.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly:
I appreciated a take on the debate that viewed Global warming through Pascal's wager. If you remember the philosopher asked, "if there is a God and you believe in him--faith will be rewarded, if there is no God and you believe in him--then nothing will come of it. If there is a God and you Basically he argues that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by faith, but you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by skepticism.
Can the same argument be applied to the issue of Global warming? If it is true that Humans are contributing to climate change, then enviornmental efforts can only do good. If its not, what have we lost? Even if the jury is still out on the science, enviornmental concerns cannot be ignored... its danger is too great, and the rewards of conservation are too many.
Bob and Matt: I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Bob: I don't mean to make light of Houghton's credentials. I believe he may have made important contributions to his field. But I may have problems with his methods, as I'll explain.
Matt: The environment-science community has voted as you say. But science isn't a democracy, and for good reason. Until medicine found better methods than democracy, it made little progress.
I agree with Pascal's wager, but I don't think it fits. I think the parable of the talents is a better analogy: if false fears keep us from doing good, God isn't pleased. The progress that developed nations have made against poverty and disease is astounding: do we deny others (and our descendants) those gains? I believe God has an opinion on that.
My problem with environmental scientists is that they know they're studying the environment. "Observer bias" is very prevalent and difficult to overcome: real science goes to very, very great lengths to combat it.
I want to see the raw data presented to scientists (of every stripe) who don't know that it's the environment that they're analyzing. If there are correlations, the data should show it, and they should be able to show it to us. Best I can tell, this isn't being seriously attempted. It's a fatal flaw.
Please know that I endorse energy conservation and wise stewardship, and I think our foolish nation has a long way to go. Bad science, though, isn't the path.
Jim
Could you explain your comments about observer bias a little more? From your comment, it appears you're saying that context and expertise don't matter when it come to interpreting scientific data. How would it be possible for a scientist to analyze and draw conclusions from data without that context? Any scientist who looks at data is going to draw conclusions based on their experience and understanding-- but if they don't have the experience or understanding of the context, their analysis is suspect.
A lay person looking at the raw data will have the same problem. Unless we understand how the raw data relates to its context--and for that we rely on expert--we can't interpret it correctly.
Here's an analogy. I can look at the raw data of the New Testament--the Greek words it was composed in. i might even have a concordance that tell me what each word means. That doesn't mean I can accurately translate the NT and understand what it means. To do that, I'd need to do a great deal of research and study--about language, and culture, and grammer, etc.
The same principle applies here. You or I or an electrical engineer can look at the raw data. But unless we understand what the data means in its context, we can't properly interpret it. We can't understand what that data means in the real world.
Bob: I think context and expertise could make a big difference in many situations--perhaps many that climatologists like Houghton face often. I don't think their expertise is worthless.
But we're seeking the answer to a very specific question: Is the burning of fossil fuels causing a global warming effect?
If so, that effect is taking place even if no one were thinking about it, just as the law of gravity works exactly the same regardless of who (if anyone) is paying attention.
In medicine, an equivalent question might be: does this drug or treatment really work, or is it no better than a placebo? I appreciate medical researchers' expertise and experience, but to that specific question I consider only a few answers legitimate, including: "the data clearly shows yes/no" or "we can't tell." Answers I don't consider legitimate include: "trust me ..." or "you have to be a medical researcher to figure it out..."
In medicine, researchers use the highest level of rigor they can achieve, every step of the way, to fight their own biases. They've found that it's necessary. Without it, results can be trusted less and less.
I agree that translating the New Testament does require tremendous research and study (and checks and balances). But I'd be suspicious of New Testament scholars who would rely primarily on claims that only a like-minded scholar can see what they see. (Think Jehovah's Witness or Mormon.)
Though I want to respect experience, judgment, the "trained eye," etc., I reject the mind-set that only the expert can hope to understand something. That elevates the expert to high priest (or witch-doctor), reserving knowledge to only the initiated.
Thanks for taking time to challenge my thinking. I hope I'm explaining myself adequately.
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