This week, my six-year old daughter Annie Sky labored over 20 pieces of pink construction paper, folding each piece in half, cutting the profile of a heart, and writing her double name in red marker to create cards for each child in her kindergarten class. "Everybody gets a Valentine," she said, "because if they don't, it's not FAIR."
During this season of undying love and cut-throat elections, we seem to have lost our sense of fair play as a country. The principles of fairness and justice are especially lacking in the discourse (or lack thereof) about global climate change. The impacts of global warming include food insecurity, rising sea levels, erratic weather patterns, and public health threats.
As climate change has a disproportionate impact on the world's poor, one faith-based group, Interfaith Power & Light chose Valentine's Day weekend to highlight our moral mandate to protect the Earth and love our neighbor as ourselves. A coalition of 14,000 congregations from diverse religious traditions, Interfaith Power & Light hosted a National Preach-In on Global Warming, February 10-12.
In pulpits across the country, religious leaders integrated global warming into sermons, religious education, and advocacy, drawing from resources such as bulletin inserts about global warming, Valentine's postcards for legislators, and a Preaching for the Planet DVD. The Reverend Canon Sally Bingham, president of Interfaith Power & Light, says faith communities must "speak the truth" about climate change.
This truth -- the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change -- has been challenged this election season. Just last month, the Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., published a letter by 16 scientists who lacked expertise in climate science but who downplayed the seriousness of global warming. The publication sparked charges from bloggers about the "foxification" of the Wall Street Journal. (The paper finally published a rebuttal letter, despite initially refusing to publish the contrasting viewpoint from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences).
During the Republican primaries, voters have heard little about climate change from the candidates. Gingrich, a Catholic who has courted conservative evangelical voters, backtracked on an invitation to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe to write a chapter on climate science in the forthcoming sequel to his co-authored book A Contract with the Earth. A respected climate scientist at Texas Tech University and an evangelical, Hayhoe discovered through a reporter that Gingrich had dropped her chapter after Rush Limbaugh lambasted her on his radio show. Among her credentials, she wrote a book, A Climate of Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-based Decisions, with her husband, an evangelical pastor.
In a pointed response to the news, Hayhoe tweeted: "Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash. 100+ unpaid hrs I cd've spent playing w my baby." Of note, Hayhoe has gained national credibility for her ability to communicate the science of climate change to lay audiences and was a co-author on the Wall Street Journal rebuttal letter.
Certainly, those who profit from our addiction to fossil fuels, such as oil companies, have much to gain by perpetuating the stereotype of people who believe in God but not climate change. But in the long term, conservative candidates don't. That's because many of their constituents from faith communities are paying attention to the science. Both Republican and Democrats should consider the significant consequences of discounting religious voices informed about the science of global warming.
National organizations such as the Evangelical Environmental Network, GreenFaith, Earth Ministry, and Interfaith Power & Light collaborate daily with believers who understand the science of climate change and the religious values of love and justice for all. Putting faith into action, congregations have addressed climate change by creating church gardens, putting solar panels on the roofs of synagogues, decreasing energy consumption in religious facilities, and advocating for state legislation against coal-fired power plants. Preaching about global warming on Valentine's Day weekend is just another example of a sacred act.
As the Rev. Bingham often says, if we love our neighbor, we don't pollute our neighbor's earth, water, and air. Indeed, if all we ever needed to know, we learned in kindergarten, then every child deserves a Valentine and a future: it's only fair.
Public Health Threats. you mentioned this. Again, if there is a problem, and the recorded One degree rise in temperature is the fault, tell us all how many people (on recorded Doctor's records) have gotten sick because of this One degree rise. How many people (recorded) have died as the result of Global Warming.
Do you see how silly this looks to say there is this boogyman out there called Global Warming, and all this bad stuff is happening, yet nothing has happened.
AJSP
And the "predicted maybe". That’s preposterous. Come on now.
That hoax has been exposed, Although I don’t usually list links this one definitely deserves your attention.....
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/paper_540.pdf
To illustrate the problems with you people and your scare tactics, let me cite for you an example of the havoc it can cause.
In one Bay Area community, reacting to this sea level scare, the city council was about to invoke in a multi million dollar plan to basically move everything back from water’s edge to quote, “combat rising seas”. One city council member (the only one with a brain in her head), held out in the vote and the project was scraped.
In the State of CA, $10 billion or so in red ink, and no one knows how we're going to get out of this, and these people want to throw a few more million down the toilet.
Thank you Green Movement!
If you close your eyes will you not see what has happened. I think that is the key.
That current elevated CO2 correlates to the temperature increases and is almost certainly the major cause is also settled science.
So far, no models needed.
There are, of course, many aspects of climate science that aren't fully decided...climate sensitivity, how fast sea levels will rise, etc. But the basics of global warming/climate change are as well established as anything in science.
Well, when essentially every qualified expert agrees that it's happening, what are we supposed to call it?
And they're not experts either, I did a study into some of these so-called "experts" they almost always turn out to be Environmental Extremists.
No. 2.....the sea levels are lower today than they were 8 years ago.
No. 3.....the AGW scam is falling apart at the seams.
Man's concrete, bulldozers, chain saws, dead lumber, parking lots, dead shopping malls, and cities are as life creating and supporting as the tumble of rocks on Mars. What supports more life, a parking lot or a forested, oakland, grassland or a river ecosystem, in the eco-nomy of naturally regulating and moderating the climate as well as taking care of Earth's heat trapping gases and creating the very life zone of the Earth, the biosphere/ecosphere. Science refers to cities as heat islands as their climates are hotter, and bare soil is hotter than a natural, terrestrial ecosystem.
Ecosystems are life and man is creating a quite dead planet, entombed by hot cities, parking lots, banks, apartment buildings, more in common with the dead rocks on Mars as a living Earth or Earth's ecosystems and ecosystems' biodiversity of plants and animals. Ecosystems provide the nitrogen cycle, a circulatory system flowing between plants and animals. If this life-support system fails, it lights out for man! Can a city or concrete support plant and animal biodiversity or wild species?
Is Ted Kaczinski, still alive? Anyone know? Is he still in prison? And did he have any brothers?
Perhaps in a few years you like others will have to learn how to respect science instead of pretending to know more than professionals who made science their life's work.
No 1) Life is not fair but propaganda persists regardless
No 2) Using a sample of one year despite the history of 50+ years, anti-science at its best.
No 3) The science remains consistent and the anti-science group continues their propaganda
Also, in the last 20,000 years, sea level has risen by an average of 6mm per year. Any recent rise is merely a continuation of a 20,000 year pattern. No reason for alarm.