Apathy is not an option

"No one who believes in a God that loves all people should be able to sit by as the wealthy harm the poor on a massive scale."

- John Torrey, Why Religious People Must Speak Up About Climate Change,
Huffington Post, 21st March 2012.

This piece clearly articulates one of the key ethical drives behind caring about climate change. Given that it is the wealthy who are by and large responsible and the poor who are most vulnerable, it represents a form of global injustice. We could add to this that it represents intergeneration injustice, another way in which those who have done little or nothing to contribute to the problem are left with facing the worst consequences.

Beyond injustice, we can also speak of respect for the Creator in respecting creation, our delight in the created order, our debts to and dependence upon the rest of the community of creation, love for our neighbour, prudence in the face of catastrophic harms and the rejection of idolatrous consumerism. There are many avenues into considering why Christians ought to care about our climate crisis (and ecological crises more generally). This Catholic article argues that it is part of a consistent ethic of life. With the potential for conflicts widely acknowledged to be exacerbated by climate change, then those who wish to be blessed as peacemakers should care too. Even those who believe that careful stewardship of economic resources is a high priority must acknowledge that credible climate damages outstrip many of the suggested mitigation strategies.

In short, if the earth is indeed warming, if our actions are the primary driver and if severe negative consequences are likely to continue to mount, then Christian discipleship does not leave room for climate apathy. Each of these claims is well established and the burden of proof lies with those who dissent from them. Christian discipleship also entails intellectual honesty. Honest scepticism is willing to update its beliefs in light of new evidence. If you do find yourself outside the scientific mainstream on this matter, then it may be worth being extra careful in reflecting on why and whether you choose to remain there.

There is more to climate change than these ethical considerations. Theological ethics does not specify in advance the best path of response for our policy, infrastructure or behaviour (though it may give us principles in evaluating proposals, such as being suspicious of the lures of wealth, paying extra attention to the plight of the most vulnerable and so on). For those already concerned, then becoming better educated on this very complex topic is an important next step. But apathy or indifference are not faithful options.

Skeptical about climate change?

"There’s not just a consensus of scientists - there’s a consensus of evidence."

This is an excellent resource for those unsure, confused or hostile to the idea that human activities are dangerously disrupting the climate. John Cook, with the help of a number of climate scientists and other helpers, has put together a free document titled, The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism (pdf here). It is well illustrated, clearly written, brief and to the point, addressing some of the most common queries and misunderstandings.

If your question isn't covered by the guide, the rest of John's site, Skeptical Science, has responses to more than one hundred common arguments concerning climate change (with plenty of links to published peer-reviewed scientific papers, or just short simple answers for beginners). I have recommended this excellent and highly informative website before, but let me do so again.

The big picture on climate change

Skeptical science, an excellent website run by Australian Christian John Cook that gives very readable and well referenced answers to common sceptic talking points about climate change, has just posted an excellent summary of the big picture on climate change. It expresses very succinctly where the uncertainties do and don't currently lie, with plenty of links for those who want to read more. If you're feeling like you'd rather let the whole climate thing pass you by, or feel confused about where to begin, or just want to get your bearings after reading too many newspaper articles, this post is the one to read.

The site is called Skeptical Science because true science is indeed sceptical, and so John applies this to common "scepticism" about climate change, in order to see where the balance of evidence from the best research lies (see here for a good intro to the idea behind the site). If you have specific arguments that you've come across that seem to "disprove" climate science, here are 122 common sceptic talking points each answered in a single sentence (with links to longer answers). If you are yourself sceptical of the science of climate change, then make sure you read through the list and see if your reasons are already answered in the scientific literature. If you come across people putting forward arguments on other websites, bookmark this page and point people towards it.

Each answer refers to relevant scientific literature for those who want to take the discussion further. John is in the process of turning all his answers into three levels of readership: beginner, intermediate and advanced. The website is also being translated into numerous languages. All this work is done by volunteers, who have come across the site, found it a very useful resource and want to make it even more useful. Neither John nor any of his contributers are paid for what they do (apart from the odd PayPal donation); the site is a true labour of love.

Indeed, John has been quite open about the fact that he is concerned about climate change out of Christian love for his neighbours (especially the poor and future generations). He is doing an excellent job co-ordinating an increasingly popular, complex and useful website (which is now also a free iPhone and Android app) and he does it for love, not money. Praise God for John Cook!

Politicians make incorrect estimates

Yes, there is nothing new under the sun.

Australian politicians overestimate the electorate's scepticism about anthropogenic climate change. But the mistake is not equally distributed amongst the parties.

101 little boxes

I have just received my postal vote for the 2010 Australian Federal election (just in time! I need to have it in the post by 5 pm Friday for it to count). I have seven candidates to rank for my electorate in the House of Representatives and ninety-four to rank for my state in the Senate (of course I am going to vote below the line).
For those readers unfamiliar with a preferential voting system, you can read about how it works in the Australian House of Represenatives and the Senate. It is a superior to the commonly-used first past the post system, though it does mean we vote on a ballot paper the size of a tablecloth (pictured).

I would love to hear thoughts on what I ought to do. While being unwilling to align myself straightforwardly with either the left or right, I do have a variety of opinions on these matters (for instance, regular readers may be able to guess that I'm unlikely to give The Climate Sceptics party a high preference), but am always open to hearing good arguments. In other words, I have decided the basic shape of my preferences, but haven't yet filled in the boxes. So here's your chance to talk me out of it.

Jessica received her postal vote today as well, a lovely birthday present from the AEC.

Gillard's climate inaction and the Citizen's Assembly

As we "move forward" to an Australian federal election on 21st August, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just announced the ALP's climate change policies.

I'm a little underwhelmed.

Still aiming for endless economic growth, no price on carbon until after 2012, same tiny target (5% down from 2000 levels by 2020. Most of the rest of the world uses 1990 as a benchmark, as agreed at Kyoto. Australia doesn't, or our "reduction" would be revealed as an increase), slight increases on fairly lacklustre funding for alternative energies, more coal power stations (as long as they are "capture ready", which is a little like building a car with a third pedal but no braking system and calling it "breaking ready"), and in what is perhaps the most telling proposal, a Citizen's Assembly held over twelve months to build a bipartisan consensus on the issue that will last longer than an election cycle.

This last idea could be dismissed as a populist move aimed to give sceptics a chance to bury the hatchet or at least air their grievances and vent some steam, but there is more at stake. The perceived need for something like this is based on the observation that in Australia, some kind of legislation involving a price on carbon enjoyed bipartisan support for the last few years until this collapsed suddenly around the end of 2009 with the election of Tony Abbott to lead the Coalition, who has described climate change as "absolute crap" and whose policies even manage to make the ALP look green (which is all the ALP need, basically). Gillard's speech compares the need for such a consensus (which needn't include everyone) to support for Medicare (Australia's public health system), which began life as a partisan issue, but which gradually won widespread public support until it is now politically unthinkable for either side to abandon it.

The Citizen's Assembly will be accompanied by the creation of a Climate Change Commission "to explain the science of climate change and to report on progress in international action". If people think that the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Physics, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Socities, the Geological Society of Australia, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Australian Coral Reef Society, the Australian Medical Association and the Institution of Engineers Australia are all too political, part of a hoax, taken in by a fraud, in it for the money or whatever other argument people use to ignore the body of scientific opinion on climate change, then I am unsure what contribution another group set up by the government are going to make to building a community consensus.

Building a widespread understanding of the issue is important, and indeed, this was perhaps my largest disappointment with Kevin Rudd, that he abdicated his chance to lead the public debate on the issue, preferring to hang back and let the opposition shoot themselves in the foot over their internal squabbling on the issue.

It is also crucial to distinguish between the climate science (where expert opinion overwhelmingly acknowledges dangerous anthropogenic climate change) and climate policy (where expert opinion is more divided and where more deliberation on the goods of society is required) and to note that though we might agree (at least broadly) on the problem, proposed responses can vary widely for all kinds of legitimate reasons.

Exactly how the proposed Citizen's Assembly will work hasn't been spelled out in detail (or at least, I haven't seen where this has been done) and I can imagine a number of possible pitfalls to this approach. Nonetheless, I applaud Gillard and the ALP for trying something to raise the level of public debate on the ethics and policies of a good national response.

If it looks like a duck...

The duck: a fable. What happens when two scientists and a journalist come across something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and also, by chance, happens to quack like a duck?

UK 1; Australia 0: Monbiot vs Plimer on Lateline

A case study in the ancient art of avoiding the question
Yesterday, prominent Australian climate sceptic Ian Plimer debated UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot on ABC's Lateline. The result? UK 1; Australia 0. You can watch it for yourself here.

After some initial conversation about the hacked emails, the discussion turns to two of Plimer's best-known claims, that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than human activity and that global temperatures have declined since 1998. Time and again, Plimer sidesteps the questions of both Monbiot and the host Tony Jones when they point to published studies refuting his claims. It grows increasingly comic.

Eventually, Tony Jones asks this in apparent exasperation: "Is it reasonable for journalists to ask questions about something which you repeatedly claim in your book and to actually get answers to those questions?" Plimer's response was, unsurprisingly, to dodge this question about his question-dodging.

Note that Plimer has repeatedly challenged Monbiot to a public debate, but like his evasive answers on Lateline, when Monbiot accepted, Plimer didn't follow through. From yesterday's showing, perhaps we can get some idea why.

UPDATE: Monbiot's summary of the experience.

Scepticism and hedonism

"...just as scepticism overcomes itself by bringing the standpoint of doubting into doubt, so does hedonism overcome itself in that the redonistic reflection looks at itself and questions whether we really feel our best when we are concerned with nothing besides feeling good. The answer to this question is no."

- Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence (trans. Jeremiah Alberg, S.J.; University of Notre Dame, 2000 [1989]), 32.

Spaemann is a fan of both scepticism and hedonism. He is not out to win a quick knock-down victory through this self-refutation point. He wants both of them in a more sophisticated, self-critical form. Just before this, he has approvingly quoted Hegel's comment that true philosophy is "fully accomplished scepticism". Later (p. 39), he goes on to praise Epicurus for thinking through the consequences of friendship to their end, even at the expense of hedonism:

"The full enjoyment of friendship only comes to the one who is not fixated on the enjoyment. And Epicurus draws out the consequences without reservation. The saying that giving is more blessed than receiving, which we know from the Gospel, is found also in Epicurus. One could understand it in such a way that one must, in order to enjoy life, engage oneself to a certain degree, but always in such a way that the costs-benefits balance. Epicurus goes farther: 'Under certain circumstances the wise one will also die for a friend.' For, only under this condition is the friendship authentic. And only when it is authentic do we have from it what one can have from friendship, its full 'enjoyment'. The wise one chooses, according to Epicurus, the way of living which holds the greatest enjoyment. The dialectic of hedonism, its self-negation, cannot be more clearly articulated. The saying, 'The one who keeps his life will lose it' is valid for every selfish system."

Jesus and climate change (series links)

Here are all the posts in my Jesus and climate change series (originally a talk given at St John's, Ashfield) and slightly modified for the blog.

I. Scepticism: an introductory caveat
II. What's happening? What are the likely implications? What can be done?
III. Discussion questions
IV. Why God cares – it’s his world
V. Seeing "creation"
VI. Humanity and why matter matters
VII. Alternatives to "Creation": a brief tangent
VIII. But what’s the problem?
IX. Guilt and fear
IX(b). So what’s God doing about it?
X. Jesus’ life: God with us
XI. Jesus’ death: Liberation
XII. Jesus’ resurrection: Renovation
XIII. The renewal of all things
XIV. But what’s he doing now?
XV. Conclusion.

Jesus and climate change I

Why Jesus cares more about climate change than you do and what he's doing about it, or "What on earth is God doing on earth?"
Last week I mentioned that I was giving a seminar at St John's Ashfield on this wordy topic (another suggested title was Why Jesus cared about climate change before it was trendy). I thought I'd post at least some of my notes here.

Scepticism: an introductory caveat
I don’t really want to talk about scepticism here tonight. I believe the debate has moved on so I’m assuming you’re basically on board. Although various details continue to be adjusted in the light of new research,* the broad claim of alarming anthropogenic climate change is almost universally agreed upon by experts in the relevant fields. That is, the global climate pattern, which includes precipitation and extreme weather events, not just temperature, has begun to change rapidly in recent decades and will continue to do so. And these changes are anthropogenic, which means human activity has been a crucial part of the cause. And they are alarming in scope and implications. We face a world that is not simply getting a little warmer on average, but which, taken as a whole, is significantly less hospitable to human society and life in general as we know it. We’re not just talking about hotter days, or more heat waves, but also rising sea levels, increased erosion and flooding (particularly of densely populated areas such as the 60 million people in the low-lying country of Bangladesh), changing patterns of precipitation, with a significant net decline in global agricultural output, stronger and perhaps more frequent extreme weather events, broader distribution of deadly tropical disease, more environmental refugees, loss of unique ecosystems and significantly increased threat of species extinction. Climate change is much more than simply global warming.

So I’m assuming we’re all familiar with and broadly in agreement with the concept of alarming anthropogenic climate change. In fact, until recently, there was only one significant scientific body in the world that was officially sceptical about it, namely, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. But even they have now changed their position.
*Given the enormous volume of ongoing research and the complexity of technical detail, I make no promises about being entirely up to date and accurate on every point. I'm interested in these debates, but am not aiming to generate more of them here.
Five points for the city. Five more for each link to other images of the same city posted on this blog (I think there are thirteen apart from this one). No more than five points per person.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

Would Jesus vote green? V

Scepticism (cont)
And yet, scepticism alone is inadequate. There is a place for reserving judgment, but there is a point where to continue to do so in the face of overwhelming and pressing evidence is simply stubborn. How much scepticism is too much? There are such things as foolish gullibility and lazy conformism, but there also comes a time when stubborn scepticism tips into basic disconnection from reality.

I am fairly sure that of the statistics I quoted, some are probably inaccurate, and some may be based on faulty methodology, or outdated research. I am no expert and am quite happy to be corrected, yet it seems to me that it is now impossible to reasonably deny that human activity is indeed having a significant detrimental effect upon the living spaces of the planet. To do so is an exercise in wishful thinking. And this is no surprise to Christians, as we shall see.

For instance, while there is still dispute over details, to continue to suppose that human activity has not been a major cause of global climate change places you in disagreement with every major scientific organization in the world – except the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. As far as I am aware, for about the last ten years there has not been a single peer reviewed scientific publication disputing the human causation of recent global climate change (please link to examples if you know of any, I could be wrong, but this is what I've heard).

Yet there are still large numbers of people who continue to deny this claim in the face of almost unanimous consensus amongst the scientific community. At some point, it is right to become suspicious of such sustained denial, asking whether it mightn’t be a coping mechanism for dealing with hidden grief or guilt. Denial is a common part of responding to serious tragedy, but to properly grieve, we need to move beyond it. If you call yourself a skeptic,* I hope that in the following posts, you’ll discover reasons why it is safe to move beyond systematic denial.
*Not simply about climate change. I realise that this issue in particular has become highly politicised. At the moment, I am more interested in the broader claim about detrimental human effects on the environment considered more broadly. Nonetheless, here is a useful site answering 26 common myths about climate change. H/T OSO.
Thanks also to the Social Issues Briefing #63 for some of the thoughts in this post. Read it here. If you'd like to receive it regularly, sign up here.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII. Photo by Steve Chong.

Would Jesus vote green? IV

Scepticism
For some, the initial response to such claims is to question them. After all, 87% of all statistics are made up. Could this simply be the latest fad? Isn’t it perhaps a little arrogant to claim that our actions are really affecting the planet that much? Aren’t there some who dispute many of these claims?

There is much that is good in this response. Jesus was no fan of naïve credulity. He does not ask those who would follow him to check their critical faculties in at the door. We don’t need to jump onto every bandwagon that gathers momentum. The truth is more important than being popular. We are right to be a little suspicious about the endless parade of new disaster scenarios presented to us.

And at a deeper level, there is a foundational Christian truth that ought to make us pause before we accept every new prediction of doom. God made the world good, very good. It is filled with abundance and diversity, evidence of his creativity, blessing and generosity. And so we are right to assume that we live on a good and abundant world. Therefore, we ought to have a healthy initial scepticism towards doomsday predictions.(more on scepticism)
Eight points for the correct name of the building in the centre of the picture.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII.

Would Jesus vote green? III

There’s a whole range of possible emotional responses to these statistics: apathy, disbelief, curiosity, sorrow, fear, anger, suspicion, guilt, impotence, despair, grief, resolve, self-righteousness. And most of us probable feel some combination of these.

I wonder whether we mightn’t be able to broadly classify these responses into five groups under the following headings:

(a) Scepticism
(b) Sorrow
(c) Anger
(d) Guilt
(e) Fear

In each case, I think there is something fundamentally correct about the response, but also something mistaken. In the following posts, I will take these five common responses as launching pads for considering Jesus’ own attitudes towards the earth.
Eight points for guessing the Sydney suburb.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII.