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SPA Archive
June 2006
SPATalk
Science and Peace in Antarctica
Twin tracks to tackle climate challenge
Budget throws sensitivities into relief
News in Brief
Morality,theology and action on climate change
What are we going to do about the decline in chemistry students?
The psychology of terrorism
Science meets policy
Where did texting come from?
The self-sorting tendency
Physics in the City
Young people and gambling problems
Deaf people and linguistic research
Food labelling in Europe - We need information for the majority
Food labelling in Europe - We want nutrition labelling
Food labelling in Europe - It's a mess
Mobile phones and children - Voluntary Code
Mobile phones and children - Children face risks
Mobile phones and children-UK code of practice
And then there was one
Joys and duties of a scientist
Scientists in the pay of industry
Creationism reviving; science recruitment declining
All hail the new Science Supremo
Morality, theology and action on climate change
Tim Flannery on the moral dimension
Climate change is a moral issue because each and every one of us is responsible for the greenhouse gases that are warming our planet.
Climate change is a real, unfolding threat to everything we hold dear – from our children to our cities, our biodiversity and our wealth. No rational person would endanger all of that just so they could continue driving large cars and not thinking about where their electricity comes from.
Society needs community leadership on this issue. Our institutions and churches should be leading the way by taking visible stands on reducing their emissions. Sadly I don’t see a lot of solar panels on churches or public institutions anywhere. And business can be a powerful tool for change. Has your business had an energy audit done?
We also need political action. Britain has a proud history of leading the global community in the fight to stabilize our climate, and that commitment should not be allowed to flag. Indeed it needs to strengthen.
Warming up
A climatologist will tell you that climate is the sum of all weathers for a given time and place. But to an evolutionary biologist like myself, climate is the grand driver of evolution.
Changes in climate have often caused the extinctions that geologists use to divide up the geological time scale, so we know that climate change can be dangerous to life. Climate is always changing, but it’s the big, swift changes that are the most dangerous.
Modern climate change is an air pollution problem caused by the release of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat near the Earth’s surface – the source of global warming. And global warming can lead to climate change. Our atmosphere is a finite pollution dump: compress its gas into a liquid and you’d discover that it is only one 500th the mass of the oceans.
If we continue burning fossil fuels without restraint, by the end of the twenty-first century CO2 levels could double and Earth’s temperature increase by 3.5 degrees. There is of course uncertainty in these projections, but this is the average estimated temperature increase.
Earth’s climate system responds to warming in jerks, and the timing and scale of these rapid shifts are not predictable. Climatologists have identified two such shifts, in 1976 and 1998. Both brought changed weather patterns and rainfall.
How Earth might change
To predict how our world might change as a result of all of this, we can use three yardsticks: the geological record, the changes already occurring as a result of present warming, and computer models.
By the yardstick of the geological record, 3.5 degrees of warming in a century is a large scale and exceedingly swift change. By comparison, at the end of the last ice age Earth warmed 5 degrees in 7,000 years. In response, the seas rose over 100 metres and species migrated the length of continents to find suitable climates.
Scientists have already documented changed weather patterns, species extinctions and modest rises in sea level as a result of the 0.63 degree of warming that occurred last century, and computer models indicate that these changes are likely to amplify as the warming continues. Some projections of extinction rates suggest that between one fifth and one third of all species may become extinct as a result of 3.5 degrees of warming.
There is still uncertainty about how much sea levels will rise, but 115,000 years ago, when the Earth was just one degree warmer than today, the seas stood four metres higher than at present. Many scientists are concerned that the overall changes brought about by the projected warming will be sufficient to destabilize Earth’s ecosystem and our civilization.
Individual action
As stronger community leadership would show, there is a lot individuals can do. Energy efficiency can lead to large emissions reductions. Trading your large car for a smaller vehicle, or even a hybrid, can lead to reductions from personal transport of 70 per cent, which is the amount we need to reduce our emissions overall by 2050 if we hope to stabilize climate.
Dr Tim Flannery is Director of the South Australian Museum and author of The Weather Makers: The Past & Future Impact of Climate Change, Penguin, 2005
Flannery.Tim@saugov.sa.gov.au
Theology can point the way, says Claire Foster
‘Smoke is the incense burning on the altars of industry. It is beautiful to me. It shows that men are changing the merely potential forces of nature into articles of comfort for humanity.’
So said Chicago businessman WP Rend in 1892. Descartes had given the confident men of the Industrial Revolution to believe that they were masters and possessors of the universe – and Christian theology supported him. As Genesis had been read, human beings were placed on the Earth to dominate nature. It was God’s will, and therefore our duty, that we should bring nature under control and make it serve our purposes.
Bad theology
While there were not too many humans and the scope of our technology was relatively narrow and local, this did not matter too much. But as human inventiveness, productivity and the reach of industrialisation increased, so did their effects, till the twentieth century saw an unprecedented invasion by human activity in all the spheres of the Earth.
We heated up the atmosphere; we polluted the rivers and seas of the hydrosphere, and dammed them indiscriminately; we mined the lithosphere; we farmed the soils; and we emptied the biosphere. We became a rogue species, dominating all other species, who had to find a way of adapting to life with us or die out. Because we lived within a worldview that assured us we were special, we thought that didn’t matter.
Now the Earth is asserting itself against us and we are bound to take notice. Some prophets think we are heading for a new era of loneliness – the eremezoic era – in which humankind has to create artificial environments in which to survive because the environment of the natural world has become so toxic to us. Like a body’s immune system rejecting alien organisms, the Earth will reject us – because we have become so toxic to it.
A paradigm shift is needed. There are insights within the Christian tradition to live rightly with the Earth. The understanding of Genesis that led to human domination was simply bad theology.
Wise interdependence
The Hebrew word for divine creativity used in the Genesis story is bara and it shares a root with the word used for covenant: berith. The root conveys the sense of a binding web of relationship. Think of everything in the whole universe connected to everything else in a kind of spider’s web. The web is invisible; all we can see are the parts. If everything in the whole creation is joined in this way, and some cuts are made, everything is affected. If only a few cuts are made, the web can recover and the interrelationships can continue. If enough cuts are made, the whole thing can fall apart.
The word for that which joins everything together in this way is Wisdom – she who was with God at the beginning as the masterworker. For me, it provides a world view within which I can understand how it is that there is so much diversity and yet the world somehow holds together. When I read EO Wilson’s exquisite account of evolution, or James Lovelock’s tender account of Gaia, I think of Wisdom. When I read Tim Flannery’s graphic account of the ways in which the systems that hold our planet together are falling apart, I think of the abuse of Wisdom.
Now that we know we evolved along with all other creatures and things that make up this beautiful planet of ours, now that we know how profoundly interdependent everything is, that the very diversity of things is what sustains life, we have to shed our assumption of human dominance and specialness. Today’s worldview should be of wise interdependence.
It is the way we perceive the world and ourselves that determines how we behave. Change the perception, and everything follows. That is the meaning of the Greek word for repentance – metanoia – which means to change one’s mind. It will become obvious that treading lightly on the Earth is the way to live. Indiscriminate use of the Earth’s resources will be seen as profoundly wrong, just as we now see slavery as wrong. This change of perception is something for each and every one of us, right now, to address.
Claire Foster is Deputy Director of St Paul's Institute and Policy Advisor to the Church of England on environmental issues
claire.foster@c-of-e.org.uk