Climate ‘crisis’? Really?

Recently the Environment Minister for Northern Ireland, Edwin Poots, got into a spot of bother for saying publicly that his department didn’t believe there is a climate crisis.

He later retracted his words and his chief civil servant had to apologise for giving the minister a misleading briefing. He really does think there’s a climate crisis, a view also shared by governments and many local councils across the country who have declared a ‘climate emergency’. So that’s all right then.

But many people, Christians included, genuinely wonder whether there really is a climate crisis. Is it just a case of scaremongering by radical greenies, or of virtue-signalling by politicians?

A crisis depends on two things: the existence of a threat which will have a significant and damaging effect on people’s lives, and a degree of urgency in responding to the threat. War, famine, and of course the coronavirus, are all clear examples.

Threats

Evidence of the impact of climate change is not hard to find. Over the last 100 years, the ten hottest years in the UK have all occurred since 2002. Polar bears, a bellwether for climate change, could become extinct by the end of the century at the current rate of sea ice loss. Rising sea levels across the world threaten the homes and lives of millions of people in coastal regions, from Bangladesh to Bermuda. There are widespread droughts in Africa, devastating wildfires in Australia, ferocious hurricanes in the Caribbean.

Now of course many of these threats are not new, and there are multiple factors behind them. But in the words of Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University, climate change acts as a ‘threat multiplier’, magnifying the risk to people and the planet. To take one example, if the climate gets hotter and drier, don’t be surprised if there are more wildfires, and that they are more devastating than ever.

Urgency

Clearly these are serious threats, which Christians ought to be concerned about. But what about the urgency? This partly comes from our scientific understanding of how greenhouse gases, largely released by our burning of fossil fuels, are stored in the atmosphere, land and oceans. Scientists have a good idea of the link between how much greenhouse gases are released and the rise in average global temperature. They can use this to construct annual carbon budgets, which work in a similar way to financial budgets. Instead of telling us how much money we can spend each year before we end up in debt, they tell us how much carbon we can use each year before we end up with unsafe levels of global temperature rise. This is generally considered to be no more than 1.5˚C above the pre-industrial average, and we’re already at 1˚C .

For more on this and many other questions that people ask about climate change, I recommend Hayhoe’s excellent ‘Global Weirding’ series of short talks, available on YouTube.

How should Christians approach a crisis? In the time of Nehemiah, when God’s people faced a serious threat to rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, they did two things: ‘we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat’ (Neh. 4:9). Prayer and practical action should go hand-in-hand. One practical thing we could do is to fly less, and when we have to fly we can offset our carbon, perhaps through a tree-planting scheme arranged by the Christian charity Climate Stewards.