Year 4, Month 11, Day 25: It Ain’t Necessarily So

The Christian Post gives column space to Pastor Darren Ferguson, who wants his flock to start facing the facts:

Whenever talking heads and political pundits start debating climate change, I honestly wish that I could turn the clock back one year and a few days to when Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast. Rush Limbaugh and other climate change deniers would likely be saying drastically different things if they had spent a few days here with us in Far Rockaway, NY. They would have trouble explaining the fact that in this New York City peninsula where I live and pastor a church, the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay had not met in over 50 years, but that is exactly what they did on October 29th, 2012.

I would invite them to read climatologist Dr. Kevin Trenberth’s article, Hurricane Sandy mixes super-storm conditions with climate change, in which he says that “the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change” is “the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.” I would invite them to listen as I advocate within my church and community for environmental stewardship, which, in my opinion, means that we have to be faithful with the earth that God has given us. Finally, I would invite them to walk through my “hood” to see homes still abandoned one year later, families still displaced one year later; a community devastated and families still fragmented one year later. These are the human and communal costs of our continued faithlessness – the effects of what Christians call sin – to our inattention to, and destruction of, our environment and planet.

I know it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be published in the Christian Post, but I didn’t mention my atheism in this letter. Let’s see. November 15:

Darren Ferguson’s plea for evangelical Christians to recognize the reality of global climate change is a welcome embrace of science-based public policy in the United States — something which communities of faith too often reject. Make no mistake: the accelerating greenhouse effect is a scientific fact — predicted over a hundred years ago, confirmed by experiment and observation, and strongly correlated with industrialized civilization’s CO2 emissions. By the way, the language of researchers is always measured and precise; phrases like “strongly correlated” are how scientists shout.

It bodes ill for our nation and the world that the undisciplined and vociferous voices of climate-change denial are still louder than the soft and careful words of the scientific community — and it reflects poorly on the faithful that those voices are overwhelmingly those of religious fundamentalists.

The “historian” David Barton, a prominent public face of evangelical Christianity, recently stated that global warming is real, but claimed it’s Divine punishment for abortions rather than the result of accumulated greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Such absurd assertions (does Mr. Barton really believe that if we outlawed abortion, God would re-freeze the Arctic?) do a grave disservice to the faith of people like Pastor Ferguson — a man who’s faced the climate crisis personally and is in no doubt about the dangers it poses.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 5, Day 2: A 50-Watt Bulb?

The faithful are opening their eyes. Or are they? The News Virginian reports — you decide:

In “The Global Warning Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change,” Dr. Bill McKibben presents “The Evangelical Climate Change Initiative,” a 2006 document signed by 86 American Christian evangelical leaders. Signers include: Rick Warren (“The Purpose Driven Life”); W. Todd Bassett, National Commander of the Salvation Army; Ron Sider, President of Evangelicals for Social Action; and advisors and columnists for Christianity Today magazine. “In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,” they said, “we urge all who read this declaration to join us in this effort” of teaching and acting on the following four claims.

1. “Human-Induced Climate Change is Real.” Among the evidence the signers studied was that collected by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose 1988-2002 chairman, John Houghton, is a committed Christian. They remembered that the science was settled enough for the Bush Administration to state in a 2004 report, and then at the 2005 G-8 summit, that humans were responsible for “at least some of it (climate change).” The IPCC, however, holds that human activities are responsible for “most of the warming,” according to the evangelical leaders.

2. “The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest.” The signers emphasized the impact of even the smallest increases in human-caused world-wide temperature upon people in poor countries: tropical diseases, hurricanes, flooding, reduction in food crops, famine, and the vulnerability of refugees to exploitation and violence, even internal and external military oppression. “Millions of people,” they wrote, “could die in this century because of climate change.” They also noted the destruction it could bring to “God’s other creatures.”

I’m not going to take this one on faith. Sent April 23:

The rejection of climate change has long been a shibboleth of political conservatives, who have a record of denying inconvenient facts and expertise that goes back at least fifty years. Why, then, are evangelicals — one of the most consistently conservative voting blocs in the country — beginning to accept the scientific reality of global warming? While some may be encouraged, I am less sanguine about the motivations behind the faithful’s abandonment of long-held denialist positions.

Environmentalists are interested in the long-term survival of the planet; talk to a “tree-hugger” and you’ll hear someone whose worries about humanity’s future in the year 3000 motivate them to conservation and the wise use of resources. By contrast, evangelicals eagerly anticipating the End Times may have little reason to practice sustainability. Is climate-change acceptance among conservative Christians accompanied by a growing conviction that industrialized humanity needs to change its ways to avoid catastrophe? Or are they cheering on the burgeoning greenhouse effect, assuming that the souls of the faithful will be providentially rescued from a disaster of Biblical proportions?

Warren Senders

Very Powerful…

I never had to go through much of this stuff. I was raised a freethinker by scientific parents, and I had almost no content with mainstream Xtianity when I was growing up. Nobody in our family or community circles ever asked about religion; open religious advocacy would have been considered bizarre.

I was bullied in school and hated every bit of it — but this is bullying of a whole different order. This kind of bullying starts at birth.

How appalling.