Uniquely Affecting the Climate
A Language of God reflection
One of the lines from today’s episode of Language of God has stuck with me since we first recorded it: of all creatures, only humans fail to live up to what God called them to do.
Usually when we look for ways that humans are unique or special compared to other animals, we emphasize positive characteristics: we have reason, moral responsibility, advanced tools, etc. In this episode, though, we looked at a couple of “special” aspects of our humanity that aren’t so cheery: racism and climate change. I’d like to explore racism further, particularly as it relates to athletic performance. But that is a highly charged topic, and one must proceed very carefully. So in today’s reflection I’ll do something much easier: talk about climate change.
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I’ve been slowly digesting the new climate report from the IPCC over the last week. And it’s giving me indigestion. One of the big takeaways is that no matter what we do — even if we stop all fossil fuel emissions today — the climate is going to get worse and worse for at least the next 30 years. We’ve already put enough CO2 into the atmosphere, which acts as a blanket around the earth, to warm it up more and more before that CO2 can be used up or otherwise absorbed. According to the actuarial tables, a guy of my age is not predicted to outlive that timeline.
That’s a sobering realization: for the rest of my life, the climate is going to get worse. So any advocacy I do for taking care of our environment will only benefit future generations. You can’t accuse me of thinking only for myself, as things are pretty much a lost cause for my term left on the planet. But I have kids, and a grandkid. I’d really like there to be something livable left for them, as well as for future humans who are not my descendants.
Furthermore, the people of my generation ought to take responsibility for this. We’ve been consuming fossil fuels at increasing rates, and we’ve been failing to do anything on a significant scale to combat climate change. Therefore we ought to work to help fix it, even if it’s not going to have an appreciable impact on our own lives.
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One response, though, is to question whether we really are responsible for climate change. This issue has been bundled into the culture wars, and so lots of people (to be clear, way more Republicans than Democrats) have a kind of knee-jerk response that denies responsibility.
So how do we know that humans are responsible? Very few people these days deny that the climate is changing, but they’ve been programmed to respond to this reality with a shrug of the shoulders saying, “the climate is always changing in natural cycles.” I always respond to them with, “how do you know that?” and the only available answer is that they have to rely on the data that has been produced by climate scientists who have done the painstaking work of investigating past climate changes. So then we have a clear case of cherry picking data that they like, while ignoring other less convenient data from the same source, because these are the same scientists who have produced the evidence that human activity is the main driver of the climate change happening right now.
Another of the findings of the IPCC report is that our climate science has gotten better and better. A lot more data has been collected from all over the world, and the computer models being used have been tested and calibrated for a longer time. There is no doubt that predicting weather is a complicated affair. Any specific event is still tricky to predict with much precision, but general patterns over longer stretches of time have become well understood.
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And the basic case for human-caused climate change is pretty straightforward, and can be summarized in these four claims:
The average temperature on Earth has increased.
There is more CO2 in the atmosphere.
These two are as certain as empirical data can be. Thermometers all over the planet return their results and are not difficult to interpret. The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been tracked in real time since 1958 at Muana Loa, and for dates before that we have easily accessible ice cores where CO2 levels are preserved. And when we plot these next to each other, we find that just as the CO2 levels have gone up, so has the average temperature. There is no dispute about this. The question is, “Is this just correlation -- the way ice cream consumption and homicides are related in NYC? Or is there an actual causal relationship?”
More CO2 in the atmosphere causes higher temperatures -- the greenhouse effect.
Scientists have known since the middle of the 19th century that CO2 can keep more of the sun’s heat within our atmosphere. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote did experiments about the heat-trapping abilities of CO2 and published them in the American Journal of Science.
So that leaves just:
Higher average temperatures lead to climate change and more extreme weather events.
This is what climate scientists have to come to understand better and better. Higher temperatures mean that more moisture evaporates. That leaves drier conditions in some places that are more prone to fires, and it means more moisture in the atmosphere so wet places will get wetter. And there are lots of other straightforward results of warmer temperatures on extreme weather events. A great website to explore all the questions about climate is Skeptical Science.
So the only conclusion is that we’re responsible for this grave circumstance facing the planet and its inhabitants. That means we have not lived up to what we’ve been called to do, to steward and care for the earth. That is one aspect of our human uniqueness. But we are also unique among creatures in that we can repent and do something different. In next week’s episode, we’ll hear someone claiming that might be the best way to think about us. See you then.