Address climate change
Climate change has emerged as one of the most contentious and critical issues of our time, with far-reaching implications for the way the human race will live and develop, especially over this century. While sceptics continue to doubt the human contribution to the phenomenon, the majority of the scientific community has come to a clear conclusion regarding the reality of human-induced climate change. These studies, many of which are included in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), clearly show that human activities are the main reason for altered climate patterns in the last century.
The findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, indicate that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal. They also reveal several disturbing trends regarding levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, and changes in climate over the same period. According to the report, continued emissions would lead to further warming of 1.1°C to 6.4°C over the 21st century, depending on different scenarios of economic growth, population projections, technological change, energy demand, structure of energy use, and other factors.
A changing climate will imperil food, water, and energy security. It will affect human health, trade flows, and political stability. And the resulting pressures will check development, undo progress, and strain international relations. These risks will not be neatly divided. Different countries will face different challenges. Political solutions will become harder to broker; conflicts more likely. A world where climate change goes unanswered will be more unstable, more unequal, and more violent. The knock-on effects will not stop at our borders. Climate change will affect our way of life – and the way we order our society. It threatens to rip out the foundations on which our security rests.
Over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called “creation care”, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue. But while in the US a growing number of local and national nonprofit groups have formed to spread the “creation care” message, an increasingly fierce backlash against the mingling of Christianity and environmentalism has emerged from other quarters of the evangelical movement.
Leading the Christian counterargument on the environment is the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical nonprofit that strenuously opposes action on climate change and describes the environmental movement as a “false religion” that Christians must avoid at all costs. In December 2010, the group released a 12-part educational video series, “Resisting the Green Dragon”. The video series includes appearances by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery, senior vice president of Focus on the Family; and other conservative evangelical Christian leaders. The series takes direct aim at the “creation care” movement, citing a “well-funded effort to infiltrate churches” by groups with beliefs that are “deadly to the gospel of Jesus Christ”.
From “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” by the Cornwall Alliance: “We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”
The 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability took place in Stockholm between 16-19 May 2011 and gathered some 40 of the world’s most renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability. The Symposium concluded with the Stockholm Memorandum: Tipping the Scales towards Sustainability (pdf). In particular, the jury of Nobel Laureates concluded that humans are now the most significant driver of global change, and that our collective actions could have abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.
“We are the first generation with the insight of the new global risks facing humanity, that people and societies are the biggest drivers of global change. The basic analysis is not in question: we cannot continue on our current path and need to take action quickly. Science can guide us in identifying the pathway to global sustainability, provided that it also engages in an open dialogue with society,” says Professor Mario Molina, who acted as judge and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.
Some of the other key messages of the Stockholm Memorandum are:
- Environmental sustainability is a precondition for poverty eradication, economic development, and social justice.
- With almost a third of the world living on less than $2 per day, we must, as a priority, achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
- Develop new welfare indicators that address the shortcomings of GDP.
- Keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, implying a peak in global CO2 emissions no later than 2015 and carrying with it a very high risk of serious impacts and the need for major adaptation efforts.
- Foster a new agricultural revolution where more food is produced in a sustainable way on current agricultural land.
The Stockholm Memorandum and the conclusions of the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability appointed by the UN Secretary General will feed into the preparations for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio +20) and into the ongoing climate negotiations.
