Going Green?
Issues of the environment....mmhmm, right. Well then....I've spoken boldly about pro-life matters, which are highly controversial and dangerous, so why not the environment as well right?
Well, to your relief (I hope), I'm not going to make any bold statements about Kyoto or global warming or anything of the like because that is not my area of expertise. I'll leave my one bold comment to be that we are all responsible for caring for God's creation and have a duty of determing how best to do that.
With that, I'll simply post some interesting pieces of evangelical thought considering this issue.
The first is Moyers on America which recently aired "Is God Green?" on PBS. Link here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/index.html
The second is a response to him by Dr. Beisner of Knox Theological Seminary and spokesman of the Interfaith Stewerdship Alliance: www.interfaithstewardship.org. Moyers interviewed Beisner recently and they had an interesting debate - the full transcript of his interview with Beisner is available here:(http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/print/beisner_print.html).
Beisner had this to say after the interview:
"Contrary to the appearance Moyers created by selecting a few minutes out of more than two hours of on-camera interview, I appreciate a great deal about the evangelical environmental movement, as I wrote in my book Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Eerdmans/Acton Institute, 1997) If you were viewing with discernment, you will have noticed that Moyers carefully painted two pictures:
• one of people who embrace the popular notion of mainly manmade (as opposed to mainly natural) catastrophic (as opposed to moderate and mixed helpful and harmful) global warming that can be significantly reduced at a positive benefit/cost ratio are altruistic and independently thinking people who care for the earth,
• and those who reject that combined notion (because we think the scientific data better support the notion that current warming is largely natural and will be moderate and mixed helpful and harmful and we think the economic evidence indicates that the attempt to reduce future temperatures by mandatory carbon reductions will have a negative benefit/cost ratio) are selfish, their thinking determined by fossil fuel industry funding, and they don't care for the earth.
The bias of Moyers's program is not surprising. He forthrightly told me before our interviews that he, as a liberal Democrat, hoped to use this program to divide the evangelical vote and return control of Congress to the Democrats in November's elections. The timing of the program's release, therefore, is not surprising.
While Moyers mentioned that some think tanks that oppose the popular view receive some funding from fossil fuel industry sources (and, by the way, he did not mention that I received no compensation for my association with the Acton Institute or any other think tank--he just let the association of ideas do its job of making viewers think my views are bought off), he did not mention that the Evangelical Climate Initiative's initial funding was a $475,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation, which is a major supporter of abortion as a method of population control around the world, or the reasons why Hewlett links those concerns with global warming concerns.
You will also have noticed that Moyers very carefully avoided all discussion of the actual scientific evidence, asserting instead simply that a 2004 study of 928 scientific articles found unanimous consensus in favor of the manmade catastrophic warming hypothesis. What he didn't tell viewers was that an attempt to replicate that study discovered very significant methodological errors in it that improperly excluded over 90 percent of the relevant literature and that even within the articles the study did survey,
• only 1 percent explicitly endorsed what study author Naomi Oreskes called the "consensus view";
• 29 percent implicitly accepted it "but mainly focus[ed] on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change";
• 8 percent focused on "mitigation";
• 6 percent focused on methodological questions;
• 8 percent dealt "exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change";
• 3 percent "reject[ed] or doubt[ed] the view that human activities are the main drivers of the `the [sic] observed warming over the last 50 years'";
• 4 percent focused "on natural factors of global climate change"; and
• 42 percent did "not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change." {Benny J. Peiser, Letter to Science, January 4, 2005, submission ID: 56001.Science Associate Letters Editor Etta Kavanagh eventually decided against publishing the letter, or the shortened version of it provided at her request by Peiser, not because it was flawed but because "the basic points of your letter have already been widely dispersed over the internet" (e-mail from Etta Kavanagh to Benny Peiser, April 13, 2005). Peiser, a scientist at Liverpool John Moores University, replied: "As far as I am aware, neither the details nor the results of my analysis have been cited anywhere. In any case, don't you feel that SCIENCE has an obligation to your readers to correct manifest errors? After all, these errors continue to be employed by activists, journalists and science organizations . . . . Are you not aware that most observers know only too well that there is absolutely *no* consensus within the scientific community about global warming science?" He went on to cite a survey of "some 500 climatologists [that] found that `a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes," and other evidence. Peiser, e-mail to Kavanagh, April 14, 2005. The whole correspondence, including much more evidence of the lack of scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and refutation of some attempts to debunk Peiser's critique of Oreskes's study, is online at www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm.}
When you think the data are on your side, you argue the data. When you don't, you attack the person. That is what Moyers did, and that is what the supporters of the Evangelical Climate Initiative have done, consistently.
To learn what I actually think, not what Moyers portrayed me as thinking, I invite you to read "A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming," and the "Open Letter" that introduces and summarizes it and lists the nearly 120 evangelical climate, oceanographic, atmospheric, and geologic scientists, environmental and other economists, plus theologians, pastors, and other leaders who have endorsed it. Both are at www.interfaithstewardship.org.
You might also have noted Rich Cizik telling Moyers that the reason he trusted climatologist John Houghton's testimony is that Houghton is an evangelical. So are climatologist (and IPCC reviewer) Roy Spencer and environmental economist (and IPCC reviewer) Ross McKitrick, two of my three co-authors of the "Call to Truth." Neither, of course, did Moyers bother to interview such people, though he was told of them, for his program; he left the appearance that this lonely little professor of historical theology and social ethics holds this view, along with a handful of contrarian scientists, all bought off by industry money, when in fact, as we document in our "Call to Truth," the scientific community is quite divided on the issue."
There is also an open letter by sixty topic-qualified scientists to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, sent back in April. Perhaps it will suggest to you that the "consensus" isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. Link here: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605.
Well, to your relief (I hope), I'm not going to make any bold statements about Kyoto or global warming or anything of the like because that is not my area of expertise. I'll leave my one bold comment to be that we are all responsible for caring for God's creation and have a duty of determing how best to do that.
With that, I'll simply post some interesting pieces of evangelical thought considering this issue.
The first is Moyers on America which recently aired "Is God Green?" on PBS. Link here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/index.html
The second is a response to him by Dr. Beisner of Knox Theological Seminary and spokesman of the Interfaith Stewerdship Alliance: www.interfaithstewardship.org. Moyers interviewed Beisner recently and they had an interesting debate - the full transcript of his interview with Beisner is available here:(http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/print/beisner_print.html).
Beisner had this to say after the interview:
"Contrary to the appearance Moyers created by selecting a few minutes out of more than two hours of on-camera interview, I appreciate a great deal about the evangelical environmental movement, as I wrote in my book Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Eerdmans/Acton Institute, 1997) If you were viewing with discernment, you will have noticed that Moyers carefully painted two pictures:
• one of people who embrace the popular notion of mainly manmade (as opposed to mainly natural) catastrophic (as opposed to moderate and mixed helpful and harmful) global warming that can be significantly reduced at a positive benefit/cost ratio are altruistic and independently thinking people who care for the earth,
• and those who reject that combined notion (because we think the scientific data better support the notion that current warming is largely natural and will be moderate and mixed helpful and harmful and we think the economic evidence indicates that the attempt to reduce future temperatures by mandatory carbon reductions will have a negative benefit/cost ratio) are selfish, their thinking determined by fossil fuel industry funding, and they don't care for the earth.
The bias of Moyers's program is not surprising. He forthrightly told me before our interviews that he, as a liberal Democrat, hoped to use this program to divide the evangelical vote and return control of Congress to the Democrats in November's elections. The timing of the program's release, therefore, is not surprising.
While Moyers mentioned that some think tanks that oppose the popular view receive some funding from fossil fuel industry sources (and, by the way, he did not mention that I received no compensation for my association with the Acton Institute or any other think tank--he just let the association of ideas do its job of making viewers think my views are bought off), he did not mention that the Evangelical Climate Initiative's initial funding was a $475,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation, which is a major supporter of abortion as a method of population control around the world, or the reasons why Hewlett links those concerns with global warming concerns.
You will also have noticed that Moyers very carefully avoided all discussion of the actual scientific evidence, asserting instead simply that a 2004 study of 928 scientific articles found unanimous consensus in favor of the manmade catastrophic warming hypothesis. What he didn't tell viewers was that an attempt to replicate that study discovered very significant methodological errors in it that improperly excluded over 90 percent of the relevant literature and that even within the articles the study did survey,
• only 1 percent explicitly endorsed what study author Naomi Oreskes called the "consensus view";
• 29 percent implicitly accepted it "but mainly focus[ed] on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change";
• 8 percent focused on "mitigation";
• 6 percent focused on methodological questions;
• 8 percent dealt "exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change";
• 3 percent "reject[ed] or doubt[ed] the view that human activities are the main drivers of the `the [sic] observed warming over the last 50 years'";
• 4 percent focused "on natural factors of global climate change"; and
• 42 percent did "not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change." {Benny J. Peiser, Letter to Science, January 4, 2005, submission ID: 56001.Science Associate Letters Editor Etta Kavanagh eventually decided against publishing the letter, or the shortened version of it provided at her request by Peiser, not because it was flawed but because "the basic points of your letter have already been widely dispersed over the internet" (e-mail from Etta Kavanagh to Benny Peiser, April 13, 2005). Peiser, a scientist at Liverpool John Moores University, replied: "As far as I am aware, neither the details nor the results of my analysis have been cited anywhere. In any case, don't you feel that SCIENCE has an obligation to your readers to correct manifest errors? After all, these errors continue to be employed by activists, journalists and science organizations . . . . Are you not aware that most observers know only too well that there is absolutely *no* consensus within the scientific community about global warming science?" He went on to cite a survey of "some 500 climatologists [that] found that `a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes," and other evidence. Peiser, e-mail to Kavanagh, April 14, 2005. The whole correspondence, including much more evidence of the lack of scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and refutation of some attempts to debunk Peiser's critique of Oreskes's study, is online at www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm.}
When you think the data are on your side, you argue the data. When you don't, you attack the person. That is what Moyers did, and that is what the supporters of the Evangelical Climate Initiative have done, consistently.
To learn what I actually think, not what Moyers portrayed me as thinking, I invite you to read "A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming," and the "Open Letter" that introduces and summarizes it and lists the nearly 120 evangelical climate, oceanographic, atmospheric, and geologic scientists, environmental and other economists, plus theologians, pastors, and other leaders who have endorsed it. Both are at www.interfaithstewardship.org.
You might also have noted Rich Cizik telling Moyers that the reason he trusted climatologist John Houghton's testimony is that Houghton is an evangelical. So are climatologist (and IPCC reviewer) Roy Spencer and environmental economist (and IPCC reviewer) Ross McKitrick, two of my three co-authors of the "Call to Truth." Neither, of course, did Moyers bother to interview such people, though he was told of them, for his program; he left the appearance that this lonely little professor of historical theology and social ethics holds this view, along with a handful of contrarian scientists, all bought off by industry money, when in fact, as we document in our "Call to Truth," the scientific community is quite divided on the issue."
There is also an open letter by sixty topic-qualified scientists to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, sent back in April. Perhaps it will suggest to you that the "consensus" isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. Link here: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605.
posted by Speaking of Life... at 1:50 PM
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