The Center for Climate Change Communication, a joint project of Yale and George Mason Universities, released last month its most recent national survey of American’s beliefs about climate change. It turns out that in this sample that scientifically represents the nation, 70% of Americans now recognize that climate change is happening and more than half understand that it is caused mostly by human activity. Four in ten believe it is harming people around the globe right now and 36% believe that it is harming people in the United States. We are developing a critical number of people who understand the predicament we have created for ourselves and want to do something about it. As people of faith, we can lead the way to a transformed and better future if we begin now.
North Carolina Interfaith Power & Light is dedicated to helping congregations find ways to address climate change in practical and hope-filled ways, both through reducing congregational greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation), and through spiritual practice that supports care of creation (adaptation). We continue to offer congregational energy audits at no charge to congregations through our emPOWERed program, disseminate resources on how to create a low-greenhouse gas Sacred Foodscape, and support Earth Sabbath Celebrations whereever they are needed. Contact us at info@ncipl.org for more information or to schedule a program or audit at your congregation.
Love God, Heal Earth.
–Dr. Kathy Shea, NCIPL Co-Director
Dr Shea,
Certainly the public is conflicted on this issue. As part of the public who does not believe that humans are causing climate change, I would like to offer an opposing view. For me it has been a process. I remember when the Al Gore film came out it made some alarming predictions on sea levels and catastrophes for the earth. As one who believes in protecting the environment and treasuring this beautiful world that God has given us, I took an immediate interest. Being an engineer by profession, questioning assumptions is part of my DNA.
The first thing that I learned was that this was an unproven theory not a settled fact that mankind was influencing the climate. When I see people being ridiculed for holding opposing views, my antenna raised and began evaluating the theory myself. I remember from history how Galileo was ridiculed by the church for his views that the earth rotated around the sun instead of the earth being the center of the universe. I also recall how scientists were saying in the 60’s that we were going into another ice age. I looked at percentages. Of the greenhouse gases, water vapor comprises 95% with CO2, methane and others contributing 5%. Right off the bat it would seem water vapor is more significant than CO2. Of that CO2, about half is caused by human caused emissions. This caused my first skeptical alarm bell to go off.
Then I started delving deeper into the theory and discovered the following. There is the direct effect where a doubling of CO2 results in an increase in global temperature of 1.1 degree C. This effect can be verified in the laboratory, but the theory then goes further stating there is an amplification factor of 3 applied. The theory is with more heat there is more evaporation and this results in a positive feedback with more heat being trapped. This feedback is where there is much disagreement among climate scientists. The skeptical scientists say the feedbacks are negative and the heat is reduced by one half due to clouds reflecting the heat back into space and cools the earth.
I look at the actual data and see that the model that assumes the positive feedbacks does not match reality. Temperatures are not going up like they predicted. In fact I read recently that the land based temperatures have not risen for the past 16 years. The ocean temperatures measured are up and down and do not match the large increase that the climate models predict. The Arctic ice is melting but the Antarctic ice is growing. If you look at plots of the history of climate fluctuations, it doesn’t seem unusual what we are experiencing now.
The other alarm bell went off when I saw from Climategate emails how scientists were colluding with one another to prevent dissenting views. The peer reviews were actually pal reviews.
It appears to me that politics has intruded into science and the lavish government grants have resulted in corruption. I also see with dismay, how costly solar and wind energy are when compared to oil, gas, nuclear and coal fuels. Do we really want to impose these high costs on our consumers for an unproven theory? If we artificially limit our fossil fuels, the consumers will have their utility bills go up by a factor of 10. I also see with dismay all of the money we are spending on green energy only to see many of the companies fail.
I don’t see the need to rush pell mell into changing our entire energy infrastructure based on computer modeling with questionable assumptions. The data itself is not alarming. In my opinion, most of the increase in land based temperatures can be explained by considering the urban heat island effect, all of the hard surfaces; roads, sidewalks, buildings and roofs hold the heat and that causes temperatures to climb.