The conventional wisdom is that the earth is warming, that it’s the fault of human activity, and that we need to make major changes to reduce CO2 emissions or we’re heading for disaster. Certainly, that’s the line pushed by the scientific and media establishments, and by much of the political establishment as well; as for the cultural elite, they showed their view of the matter when they gave Al Gore an Oscar for his film expounding that point of view, and then topped it off with the Nobel Peace Prize (in one of the stranger awards in the already strange history of the Nobel Prizes).
Which is a very good thing, if this is a real problem. But is it? Is the science really there? Maybe not. For all the worry about shrinking ice caps, for instance, the ice has come back under the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest winter in decades, which has given it its greatest snow cover in over 40 years. For all the concern about polar bears, their population is up. And for all the insistence that global warming is caused by human CO2 emissions, the temperature data and the CO2 data don’t correlate; that’s why 30 years ago, the alarmists were proclaiming that human CO2 emissions were driving a cooling trend that would send us into another ice age.
The fact of the matter is, we know beyond a doubt that the climate has been heating and cooling all through human history; around the turn of the 17th century, we had a “little ice age” that saw the Thames and the Hudson freeze, while earlier, during the Viking period, Greenland was pleasant enough to warrant the name they gave it. We know that the sun’s behavior varies, and it seems likely that fluctuations in solar activity is one of the major drivers in global temperature change; the fact that other planets of our solar system have also been experiencing “global warming” certainly suggests that this is the case. The driving force behind the global-warming argument appears to be not science, but the wisdom of Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”
That said, does it necessarily follow that we can ignore the question of CO2 emissions, or other forms of pollution? While I think it’s inappropriate of the establishment to smear dissenters as “in the pay of the oil companies,” there are certainly those who oppose the global-warming argument not because it’s bad science, but because they have their own agendas. As Christians, we should be very careful about that. Regardless of the scientific case one way or the other, we have powerful theological reasons to fight pollution; we know from Genesis that God has not given us this planet, but has rather entrusted it to our care as stewards under his authority, and we will most assuredly be called to account for how we have taken care of it. I believe the earth God has made is much more resilient than we often believe, and that our capacity to damage it permanently is quite a bit less impressive than we, in our twisted pride, tend to think—but that in no way frees us from our responsibility to enhance the earth by our labors rather than diminishing it. Will continuing to pump our pollutants into the air cause catastrophic warming that will kill billions of people? I rather doubt it; but if we continue to do so without doing everything we can to clean up our act (bearing in mind that today’s solutions often produce tomorrow’s problems), we’ll still pay for it in the end.
(Update: here’s an excellent column by Thomas Sowell on the subject of global warming.)
This sounds similar to my position when confronted by people who think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, or bad science, etc. All the things that we are recommending in light of global warming are things we should be doing anyway. Even if human carbon emissions don’t cause global warming, we know that rates of asthma and respiratory disease do correlate with carbon emissions. You can even track high incidences of these diseases to the neighborhoods near power plants that burn coal.
Ideally, I’d love a non-alarmist coalition to actually start, as societies, being responsible about resource use. We have never been so to date, externalizing the real costs of our way of life so that only the voiceless poor, or our grandchildren, have to bear them.
Yeah, I think we’re more or less in the same place on that; believe me, as a lifelong asthmatic with various allergies and sinus problems, the quality of life issues are very real for me. (There were churches I would have been interested in that I didn’t even talk to because I wouldn’t have been able to deal with the air quality.)
I think the sort of coalition you’re talking about would be a very good thing, especially if it were pitched positively instead of negatively. The problem with an alarmist approach is that it’s essentially negative, and that only works for a while (as I think Senator Obama is showing pretty well these days); pitched positively, along the lines of “we can do better than this,” I think it would be a lot easier to overcome people’s resistance. (Exhibit A: the Toyota Prius.)