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Climate Change Update by the Commission on Christian Action
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In its 1993 report to the General Synod the Commission on Christian Action called the church's attention to the issue of global warming and changes in climactic patterns likely to be caused by the increased atmospheric levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (MGS 1993, pp. 98-103). The report argued that the issue of climate change is one that calls for the church's response. We have a biblical mandate to tend and keep creation. Moreover, since the effects of climate change will fall disproportionately on the poor and on future generations, the issue is a matter of justice. We cannot love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, and ignore the potentially disastrous consequences that human-induced climate change may have on future generations, on the poor, and on all of creation.
The 1993 report called on the church to advocate for policies that promote energy efficiency and conservation through such measures as higher energy efficiency standards and economic incentives, including imposing additional taxes (such as a carbon tax) on products that contribute to global warming. The synod also called on congregations to address the issue, to improve the energy efficiency of church buildings, and to consider other actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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Scientific Evidence for Climate Change
Since the 1993 report there has been growing scientific evidence that climate change caused by human activity is already occurring. The decade of the 1980s was the warmest decade of record and the 1990s are well on the way to surpassing the record warmth of the '80s. The four warmest years on record were 1990, 1995, 1997, 1998. Global temperatures in 1998 were the warmest in the past 119 years, since reliable instrument records began. The previous record was set in 1997. The year 1998 was also the twentieth consecutive year with an annual global mean surface temperature that exceeded the long-term average.1 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of nearly 2,500 international scientists that has been researching climate change since 1988, reported in 1995 that “the observed warming trend is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin...the balance of evidence suggests that there is discernible human influence on global climate.”2 If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, the IPCC projects future temperature increases of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (six degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the next century, a faster rate of climate change than any experienced during the last 10,000 years. The difference in temperature from the depths of the last ice age to now is five to nine degrees Fahrenheit.
For the past thirty years climatologists have predicted that global warming would occur most rapidly at the poles. Recent evience suggests that such warming may have already begun. While global temperatures have, on average, warmed by one degree Fahrenheit over the last century, the Antarctic Peninsula has seen a jump of more than five degrees in the last fifty years. Huge sections of the ice shelf, including some pieces as large as the state of Delaware, have begun calving off its eastern shore. The southern half of the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest expanse of land-bound ice on earth, after Antarctica, has shrunk substantially in the last five years. If big ice sheets melt even partly, sea levels will rise around the world. Melting might also disrupt the ocean currents that modulate the earth's climate by distributing heat around the globe.
Although there is now substantial scientific consensus in support of IPCC conclusions, there are those who are working to undermine its case, seizing on remaining uncertainties in data or computer modeling to argue against the need to respond to the threat of climate change. The Global Climate Coalition, a leading oil industry public relations outlet and other organizations such as the National Coal Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Western Fuels Association have spent millions of dollars trying to downplay the threat of climate change and cast doubt on the scientific evidence.3 While there is a continuing need for further research and better computer modeling of the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions, these uncertainties should not be used as an argument for delaying action. We do not know everything there is to know about potential climate change. We do know enough to act now. Prudence requires reducing greenhouse gas emissions without waiting for every last scientific uncertainty to be resolved. The vast scale of the environmental and social damage that would be caused by climate change, and the long time scale it will take to reverse the effects call for taking preventive action. It will be easier to achieve reductions now, and at less cost to society, than to wait until the problem has grown worse.
Meanwhile atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses continue to rise. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide in 1860 were 280 parts per million (ppm); in 1993, 350 ppm; and in 1998, 363 ppm, the highest point in 160,000 years.4 Not only are atmospheric levels increasing, but the rate of emissions also continues to increase at about 1 percent per year. Even maintaining current levels of carbon dioxide emissions will raise concentrations to over 700 ppm by the year 2100. In 1992 the U.S. committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, and relied on volunteer efforts to do so. So far, such volunteer efforts have proven ineffective. A healthy economy, low fuel prices, the increasing popularity of larger, fuel-inefficient cars and sport utility vehicles, and our energy consumptive lifestyles have contributed to a 10.7 percent increase in emissions since 1990. The forecast is that emission levels will be at 13 percent above the 1990 level by the year 2000. The United States emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation, both in total and per capita. More than 98 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions can be traced to the consumption of fossil fuels.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has conservatively estimated that the atmosphere can sustain carbon emissions of no more than two billion tons per year without serious disruption of the climate. Spreading that quota evenly among the ten billion people projected to share the planet by 2100 yields a per-person quota of a pound a day. The U.S., Japan, and other industrialized nations are emitting carbon at a pace twelve to twenty-seven times this figureóand the rates continue to climb.5
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Effects of Climate Change
The climactic consequences of increased levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are likely to include the following:
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1. Weather patterns, particularly rainfall, are likely to change significantly and have a severe impact on water resources and water availability in many regions.
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2. Droughts, storms, and floods are likely to be more frequent and more severe than in the past, especially in subtropical regions where many developing countries will be particularly severely affected.
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3. The geographic distribution of vegetation types would be altered, leading to changes in habitat and further exacerbating the rate of species extinction (already occurring at the alarming rate of 75 to 100 species per day!).
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4. Atmospheric warming would increase the temperature of the oceans, leading to an expansion in the volume of water and a rise in sea levels. Sea level rise would be exacerbated by melting polar ice. Already the sea level has risen ten to twenty-five centimeters in the last century. The IPCC estimates that it will rise another fifty centimeters by the end of the twenty-first century. Such a rise would have severe consequences for people and ecosystems in such areas as the Pacific and Caribbean islands, countries with populations and agriculture on river deltas (Bangladesh; Egypt; Louisiana, U.S.), and many coastal regions.
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5. Insect- and rodent-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and encephalitis are likely to increase and spread into new areas.
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What Can Governments Do?
In 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, the industrialized nations adopted the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty in which they agreed to make specific emissions reductions within eleven to fifteen years (2008 to 2012). The treaty calls for industrialized countries to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by an average of about 5 percent below 1990 levels. The United States' reduction would be about 7 percent. The U.S. administration has signed the protocol, but it awaits ratification by the Senate. Prior to the Kyoto conference the U. S. Senate passed a resolution stating it would not ratify any agreement that might harm the U.S. economy or did not include participation by developing nations. Although the treaty does not call for binding limits on emissions by developing nations, these nations are not exempt from the stipulations of the agreement. All signatory nations must inventory emissions and create pilot programs to limit them. Moreover simple justice requires that the industrialized nations, and the U.S. in particular, take the first steps in reducing emissions. In seeking an appropriate balance between consumption and the equitable use of global resources, we need to make a distinction between the “luxury emissions” of the rich and the “survival emissions” of the poor. “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48).
The treaty agreed to at Kyoto must be adopted by over half the industrialized nations before it takes effect. U.S. ratification is crucial. Late last summer leaders of several mainline denominations (including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and the Church of the Brethren) signed letters to President Clintonand U.S. senators urging ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Convention.
Climate Change and Christian Witness
The threats to creation represented by global warming are a cause for concern for everyone on the planet, but for Christians the issue is more than a matter of self preservation; it is a matter of faithfulness.
Global climate change is an issue of justice. The industrialized nations, representing less than 20 percent of the world's population, are responsible for 75 to 80 percent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions. Yet those who live in poor and developing nations are the ones who will be most seriously effected by global warming. The North American suburbanite can afford to turn up the air conditioner and pay a little more for groceries. The peasant living in coastal Bangladesh would become an environmental refugee. Climate change is also an issue of intergenerational justice. The effects of global warming in our lifetimes may be minimal. It will not be so for our children and our children's children. Current North American energy-rich and overly consumptive lifestyles are being subsidized by the poor and by future generations.
Christians understand the threat of global climate change in the context of covenant. God has established a covenant “with every living creature” (Genesis 9:10ff.) and with the earth itself (Genesis 9:13). Humankind has been given a special place in this covenant relation. We are not merely one species among many but a species to whom God has given a unique and important responsibility. We are placed in the garden of creation “to till it and to keep it.” God has given us dominion over creation, not to do with it as we please but, in the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “for its profit, well-being, and enhancement...to see to it that the creation becomes fully the creation willed by God.”6
This means, among other things, that our relationship with God, with our fellow human beings and with the rest of creation are all of a piece. A break in any one part of the covenant relationship affects the others. We cannot love God and hate our neighbor. Neither can we love God and our neighbors while we degrade creation.
Our response to the threat of global climate change is a matter of Christian witness. We confess that in Jesus Christ God entered creation in order to heal and restore the relationships broken by human sinfulness. The early Christians sang of Jesus Christ as the one in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created and the one through whom God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven (Colossians 1: 15-20). This confession of a “cosmic Christ” has important implications for the church's ministry. The church is called to bear witness to the Christ who reconciles and restores all creation. “The church is not an elite body, separated from a doomed world,” writes New Testament scholar, J. Christiaan Beker, “but a community placed in the midst of the cosmic community of creation. Its task is not merely to win souls but to bear the burdens of a creation, to which it not only belongs but to which it must also bear witness.”7
Dealing with the threat of climate change will require changes in technology, in public policy, and in our ways of thinking and living. We should not expect that it will be easy, and we should try to find ways in which the burdens of change are shared. But the longer we wait to deal with global warming, the more harm will occur and the greater will be the human, environmental, and economic costs for our children and grandchildren.
1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate of 1998: Annual Review," available at URL http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/research/1998/ann/ann98.html, accessed February 12, 1999.
2. IPCC. Second Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC, 1995, p. 22.
3. Ross Gelbspan, “The Heat Is On,” Harper's Magazine, December 1995, pp. 31-37.
4. Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin, “A New Economy for a new Century.” State of the World 1999, Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 1999.
5. David Malin Roodman, “Building a Sustainable Society,” State of the World 1999, op. cit., p. 171.
6. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982, pp. 32-33.
7. J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980.
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Simple Steps to Reduce Global Warming
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1. Buy energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs for your most-used lights.
Carbon dioxide reduction: (by replacing one frequently used bulb) about 500 pounds a year.
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2. Wrap your water heater in an insulating jacket.
Carbon dioxide reduction: up to 1,000 pounds a year.
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3. Ask your utility company for a home energy audit to find out where your home is poorly insulated or energy-inefficient.
Carbon dioxide reduction: potentially, thousands of pounds a year.
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4. Whenever possible, walk, bike, carpool, or use mass transit.
Carbon dioxide reduction: 20 pounds for every gallon of gasoline saved.
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5. When you buy a car, choose one that gets good gas mileage.
Carbon dioxide reduction: about 2,500 pounds a year if your new car gets 10 mpg more than your old one.
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6. If your car has an air conditioner, make sure its coolant is recycled whenever you have it serviced.
Equivalent carbon dioxide reduction: thousands of pounds.
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7. If you need to replace your windows, install the best energy-saving models.
Carbon dioxide reduction: up to 10,000 pounds a year.
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8. Plant trees next to your home and paint your home a light color if you live in a warm climate, or a dark color in a cold climate.
Carbon dioxide reduction: about 5,000 pounds a year.
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9. As you replace home appliances, select the most energy-efficient models.
Carbon dioxide reduction: 3,000 pounds a year if you replace your old refrigerator with an efficient model.
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10. Be informed about environmental issues. Keep track of candidates' voting records and write or call to express concerns.
Carbon dioxide reduction: billions of pounds if we vote to raise U.S. auto fuel efficiency.
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