Dear Editor,
Thank you for publishing the helpful article, ‘Caring for God’s earth’ by Simon Marsh (en, January 2021). He referred to the injustice of our consumption of more than our fair share of the world’s resources, but we should also remember the terrible damage being done to the lives of the poor by climate change, right now, as a result of our combustion of fossil fuels. As Greta Thunberg put it, at the UN in September 2019: ‘People are suffering, people are dying. how dare you?’
And she is right – at the same time the International Red Cross reported that 2 million people each week need emergency assistance because of the climate crisis. ‘This is intolerable!’, said Francesco Rocca, its President. Similarly, Christiana Figueres, commenting on the massive, inter-agency report in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, in October 2017, concluded that, ‘Hundreds of millions of people are already suffering health impacts as a result of climate change’.
But we’ve known about this ever since the late Lord Robert May, then President of the Royal Society, Britain’s National Academy of Sciences, wrote to the G8 leaders on 29 November 2005, stating that: ‘Today, a scientific paper has been published by the Royal Society which concludes that climate change, largely caused by a rise in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, may already be responsible for … a rise in the risk of famine in eastern Africa, where millions are already at risk of hunger.’
On Christmas Day, 1776, at the lowest point for the Americans in their War of Independence, George Washington addressed his weary and frost-bitten troops with words penned by Thomas Paine: ‘Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’ Will it be told to the future world that the Christian church and people ‘came forth’, at long last, to meet the current, great ‘common danger’ of the environmental emergency? I hope and pray that it will be so.
Yours sincerely,
David W. Golding CBE PhD DSc DCL
Honorary Chaplain at Newcastle University and member of Whitley Bay Baptist Church
