-- William Hazlitt
Reading: by environmentalist Bill McKibben from an article entitled “Resisting Climate Reality” (New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011)
We are at a dramatic moment in the story of global warming. We’ve known, as a society, about the climate change crisis for just over twenty years, from the day in June 1988 when the NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that the planet was heating up because we were burning so much fossil fuel and hence emitting so much carbon dioxide.
By 2010—the warmest year on record, according to most of the planet’s record-keepers—the earth was getting a taste of what global warming feels like in its early stages. Nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records, itself a record; in early summer Pakistan set the new all-time high for Asia at 128 degrees. That warmth accelerated the already rapid melt of the Greenland ice sheet; in some areas the melt season lasted fifty days longer than average. Meanwhile, record heat in central Russia triggered wildfires and drought, spooking the Kremlin enough that it suspended all grain exports to the rest of the world, which helped push the price of wheat sharply higher.
Most ominously, the pace of record-breaking deluge and flood surged. Because warm air holds more water vapor than cold (the atmosphere is about 4 percent moister than forty years ago), scientists have warned that we’re increasing the possibility of greater downpours; country after country found itself on the wrong side of those odds in 2010, Pakistan most desperately. (Six months after the summer flooding there, the Red Cross reported in January that four million people were still homeless.)
Reading: by the Australian ethicist Peter Singer from One World – The Ethics of Globalization (p. 32)
One advantage of being married to someone whose hair is a different color or length from your own is that, when a clump of hair blocks the bath outlet, it’s easy to tell whose hair it is. “Get your own hair out of the tub” is a fair and reasonable household rule. Can we, in the case of the atmosphere, trace back what share of responsibility for the blockage is due to which nations? It isn’t as easy as looking at hair color, but a few years ago researchers measured world carbon emissions from 1950 to 1986 and found that the United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population at that time, was responsible for 30 percent of the cumulative emissions, whereas India, with 17 percent of the world’s population, was responsible for less that 2 percent of the emissions. It is as if, in a village of 20 people all using the same bathtub, one person had shed 30 percent of the hair blocking the drain hole and three people had shed virtually no hair at all. (A more accurate model would show that many more than three had shed virtually no hair at all. Indeed, many developing nations have per capita emissions even lower than India’s.) In these circumstances, one basis of deciding who pays the bill for the plumber to clear out the drain would be to divide it up proportionately to the amount of hair from each person that has built up over the period that people have been using the tub, and has caused the present blockage.
Reading: by James Thurber a fable entitled “The Hen and the Heavens” (from Fables for Our Time)
Once upon a time a little red hen was picking up stones and worms and seeds in a barnyard when something fell on her head. “The heavens are falling down!” she shouted, and she began to run, still shouting, “The heavens are falling down!” All the hens that she met and all the roosters and turkeys and ducks laughed at her, smugly, the way you laugh at one who is terrified when you aren't. “What did you say?” they chortled. “The heavens are falling down!” cried the little red hen. Finally a very pompous rooster said to her, “Don't be silly, my dear, it was only a pea that fell on your head.” And he laughed and laughed and everybody else except the little red hen laughed. Then suddenly with an awful roar great chunks of crystalized cloud and huge blocks of icy blue sky began to drop on everybody from above, and everybody was killed, the laughing rooster and the little red hen and everybody else in the barnyard, for the heavens actually were falling down.
Moral: It wouldn't surprise me a bit if they did.
A Warmer World
A Sermon Delivered on October 14, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Did you hear the news? Global warming isn’t really a problem after all. Scientists themselves say so.
Last week there was an article in the News-Gazette that said the amount of ice at the South Pole is not decreasing, but increasing. The Associated Press reported: “Antarctic sea ice hit a record 7.51 million square miles in September… Climate change skeptics have seized on the Antarctic ice to argue that the globe isn’t warming and that scientists are ignoring the southern continent because it is not convenient.”
Ah yes, that is the question: What is convenient?
I remember watching the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Art Theater in downtown Champaign, when it was it was first released six years ago. Our kids were 10 and 12. I remember I was deeply shaken, especially by the photographs of glaciers taken over the course of decades, that show clearly how around the world the glaciers are growing smaller and smaller. They are melting. Droughts, hurricanes and floods are increasing in both number and intensity. If we don’t change our ways, the devastation will increase dramatically. I wondered, what kind of a world will it be that my children inherit?
And yet, as compelling as the movie was, I wonder, was it true? Are the dire predictions accurate? A year after Al Gore’s movie, another documentary was released called, “An Inconvenient Truth… Or Convenient Fiction.” The second movie makes the case that Al Gore’s warnings of global doom are overstated and misleading.
There are millions of Americans who want to believe that warnings about global warming are wrong. Even if we concede that the earth’s temperature is rising slightly - according to accepted studies, the world is 1.3 degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in year 1900 - is that really such a catastrophe?
If the temperature in this room increased by 1.3 degrees, we wouldn’t even notice. In the course of an average day in east central Illinois the temperature often rises and falls by twenty degrees or more.
It is hard to imagine that a temperature increase of 1.3 degrees over the course of a century is anything to be worried about. And heck, wouldn’t it be nice if our winters weren’t quite so bitterly cold?
Most of the scholars who are skeptical of climate change warnings don’t deny that some global warming is taking place. But they differ on the likely causes and projected consequences of current trends.
The earth’s climate changes. It has changed in the past, and it will continue to change in the future. In the course of this planet’s history, that stretches back billions of years, there have been times when it was warm enough at the North and South Poles, for palm trees to thrive. And during the earth’s cold spells, the present-day locations of the cities Chicago and Berlin were covered by a sheet of ice more than a half mile thick. Humans survived the ice age, so we can surely survive a heat wave. “No need to worry,” is what more and more Americans say.
Back in 2006, when Al Gore’s movie was released, 79% of Americans believed in the fact of global warming. By 2010 only 59% of American believed global warming is taking place. And when Americans were asked in 2011 to list their three most pressing environmental worries, global warming was low on the list. It was behind “overpopulation.” In 2011 global warming was a pressing worry for only 27% of respondents.
* * *
It is an odd and unsettling fact that the issue of global warming has been slipping further and further out of our national consciousness. Over the past two years, the number of news article on climate concerns has declined by 40%.
Part of the problem is that in this country global warming has become a matter of partisan politics. According to Pew Research report, 75% of staunch conservatives believe there is no solid evidence of global warming. And 75% of Democrats believe there is indeed strong evidence of climate change. Global warming has become a political hot potato no one wants to touch. Our elected leaders avoid talking about it.
Americans produce twice the amount of emission per capita than Europeans do. We like bigger houses, and like to drive bigger cars. We value personal freedom, and are skeptical of government regulation. So any kind of action to address global warming will confront deeply held beliefs and cherished life-style choices.
* * *
But even as our concern about global warming is declining, the temperatures themselves are rising. This past May was the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere. It was the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average. This past June 3,215 high-temperature records were either tied or broken in the U.S..
As environmentalist Bill McKibben writes, “Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.” (“Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012)
Significant changes have taken place in the course of the last century. The ice sheet covering the North Pole is shrinking, as is the ice surrounding Greenland. The earth’s sea level now is eight inches higher than it was in 1900.
It is true, that the coverage of sea ice in Antarctica, around the South Pole, reached a 33-year high last month. And as some climate skeptics like to point out, the “Antarctic ice is growing in leaps and bounds at exactly the moment the Arctic ice is shrinking.”
And yet this snap shot of ice increase and decline is misleading, since it happens in the depth of the southern winter, and the height of the northern summer.
If we look at annual averages, rather then seasonal fluctuations, we see the rate of ice increasing in the south is nowhere near the rate of ice melting in the north. Looking at the shifting ice patterns over a period of several years, we see that the ice in the north is melting 25 times as faster than it is increasing in the south. (New York Times Blog, Oct. 3, 2012, “Running the Numbers on Antarctic Sea Ice,” by Justin Gills)
* * *
It is hard imagine that our human actions could have such consequences. The simple facts of heating a home, driving a car, turning on a light switch - all of our daily routines that use fossil fuel – it is hard to imagine that they could change the climate of the planet.
And yet it makes sense. About 85% percent of the world’s energy production is from fossil fuels: oil, coal and natural gas. In burning these fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide, and other “greenhouse gases” into the air, which cause the sun’s heat to be captured in the atmosphere.
And we are using up these fossil fuels at a rate about a million times faster than nature saved them for us.
Because of human industrial development over the last two centuries, there are now more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere than at any time in the last half-million years. Within the last century the carbon dioxide level has increased by over 30%.
* * *
In this country we have a disproportionate amount of power to affect the future of the world’s climate. We are the world leaders in terms of burning fossil fuels. We are stragglers when it comes to altering our behavior. It is easy for us to look the other way, to deny that there is a problem. Or – perhaps on the liberal side of the political spectrum - it is easy to throw up our hands in despair.
But neither denial or despair are helpful responses. Both denial and despair keep us firmly on the track we are traveling today.
But we have other options. We can recognize the facts our best scientists have provided us. And we can change our energy production and consumption habits.
As geologist Richard Alley writes, “The amount of energy that Earth makes available, sustainably, dwarfs the amounts we now use, and dwarfs demand for the foreseeable future. Sunshine from just the desert floors of Arizona would power the United States, and from the Sahara could power the rest of the world’s people, with huge amounts left over. The technologies required are not science fiction – in fact, they already exist or soon will, and some of them are decades or centuries old.” (Earth – The Operator’s Manual, p. 5)
Bill McKibben offers Germany as an example of an industrialized nation that has taken significant steps towards embracing sustainable energy. He writes, “on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will.”
* * *
Global warming can seem like an overwhelming world-wide challenge. It seems because of errors and oversights that have accumulated over the last decades, we may have moved beyond the point of no return.
But the truth of the matter is, it is not too late. Our choices today have a significant impact on the course of our future.
We can reverse our current trend. Just as we have been steadily increasing the amount of greenhouse gases we release into the atmosphere over the last two centuries, we can turn that trend around.
We can cut back on our energy consumption and use of fossil fuels. Every time we choose to walk, or ride a bike, rather than drive a car around town. Every time we adjust our thermostats, to use a little less air-conditioning in the summer, setting up a fan instead, or turning down the heat in winter, putting on a sweater, or insulating drafty windows. Every time we use a little less hot water, doing the dishes or washing our clothes – we make a difference. Every time we turn of off a light, an electric appliance, or computer, we make a difference. Every time we eat an apple that was grown locally rather than shipped a thousand of miles, we make a difference.
We can make the issue of global warming a priority for our political leaders. We can work for legislation that will provide incentives for the oil industry and the auto industry to change their practices, and take responsibility for the global consequences of burning fossil fuel.
For several years now, a group of church members has been working to educate us and our children on how to be better stewards of the earth. This has been part of what we call the “Green Sanctuary” program. Our “Green UUs” have been helping us envision and create sustainable lifestyles, both as individuals and as a religious community.
* * *
When the little red hen cried out, “The heavens are falling down!” No one wanted to believe her. The sensible and skeptical animals chortled and laughed. Who would believe such a thing – the heavens falling down? The barnyard animals realized too late, that the little red hen was right.
Luckily, we don’t need to rely on the word of a little red hen. We have the world’s scientific community and a mountain of facts that tell us something is amiss. Luckily, we have all the information we need to prevent the kind of sad fate faced by the barnyard animals.
May we have the courage and the will to take the steps we know need to be taken,
May we dare to act on truths that may seem inconvenient,
And do our part to create a better world.
Amen.
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