Global Warming: The Threat and the Challenge
Comments By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale and Marion Erickson
April 17, 2005
Marion Erickson:
Last summer I was one of about 30 people from our congregation who attended The Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, better known as GA, in Long Beach , California . I didn’t go as a delegate because I wanted to attend as many workshops as possible rather than spending most of my time in plenary sessions, those sessions where the decision making takes place.
Each year at GA the delegates from the hundreds of UUA member churches make decisions that will affect all of us for years. One of those decisions each year is to vote on a study action to be pursued by all member congregations over the course of the next two years. There were several very worthwhile study actions proposed in 2004. One of them was global warming. For me, this was the critical, overriding issue. Since I wasn’t a delegate, all I could do was fervently hope that the delegates would choose this as our UU study action for 2004 to 2006. They did.
Why was I so invested in this decision? I first became aware of global warming in the late 1980s as a biology student. I was particularly concerned with the problem of species migration in a scenario of global warming. Species would need to migrate to higher latitudes or elevations as temperatures in their normal distributional area increased. How would they accomplish this, since much of the developed world contains very little in the way of migration corridors? Imagine a tree species in an area in the central United States that is dying out because its range has become too warm. Its only hope would be to migrate by disbursing its seeds northward. How could that possibly happen, I asked myself, if the vast majority of land in the area was covered by concrete in cities and vast monocultures of crops? I reserved personal judgment on whether global warming was really taking place. I knew about the evidence: that since the Industrial Revolution, both the mean global temperature and CO2 concentrations were rising and that they were related. But somehow I hoped that this was a temporary situation that could be solved. I was wrong.
Global warming – it has a rather benign ring to it. I prefer the term I first heard from Dorothy Jacobs last year: global climate crisis. And that’s what it is. While I was getting my introduction to global warming in biology classes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formed in 1988. It now consists of 2500 experts from 100 countries, with developing countries adding to their numbers as time, and concern, goes on. After several years of investigation, they concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.”
Yes, there is a climate crisis, and it’s one that has been brewing for more than 100 years, and according to some it’s already far beyond our ability to control it. When the amount of carbon dioxide, and some other gases, exceeds the earth’s ability to absorb them, those gases go into the atmosphere where they act like a blanket to trap heat that would normally radiate out into space - thus the term greenhouse gases. This is similar to the experience we have in the desert when water vapor after rain traps heat and keeps the nights warm, except that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is global, and constant, and increasing, and there is no end in sight.
Over the past 150 years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily due to the burning of fossils fuels. During that time mean global temperature has increased by 1 degree F. That may not sound like much, but it only took a reduction in mean global temperature of 8 degrees F to produce the last ice age. Climatologists aren’t able to pinpoint the precise expected increase in mean global temperature over the next century, but they agree that it will be in the range of 3 to 10 degrees. Some of the things that have already happened as a result of that one degree increase are: a decrease in snow cover in the northern hemisphere, a decrease in floating ice in the Arctic, the collapse of a 1200 square mile Antarctic ice shelf, melting of glaciers worldwide, migration of tropical disease vectors northward in the northern hemisphere, the death of a large proportion of the coral reefs, and a rise in sea level of from four to eight inches.
The Kyoto Protocol, ratified by 141 nations, went into effect on Feb.16 of this year. The United States , which has 5% of the world’s population and produces 25% of its greenhouse gases, has so far refused to be a part of it. Even though the Kyoto Protocol falls far short of the needed reduction in emissions, and deadlines for those reductions are still a few years away, it is better than nothing, and the act of ratifying it is at least a symbolic recognition of the problem.
The earth has experienced many catastrophic events during its 4 billion year history including the extinction of 95% of all species in one geologic period. It also has experienced normal climatic fluctuations which have led to parts of the northern hemisphere, including Arizona , to be undersea, and a large part of North America to be under a glacier. The last of many ice ages ended 10,000 years ago, and there will be more over the millennia to come. What I question now is the role we humans are playing in what is an artificial change in climate bought on by our own actions – our obsessive need for more and bigger and better things to make this planet conform to our personal needs without regard for the overall health of the planet. Our species has been here for what seems like an eternity to us, but using the geological timetable, which compares the history of the earth to a 24 hour clock, humans evolved at two minutes before midnight . Are those fateful two minutes going to determine the fate of Gaia, our mother, our earth, forever? I don’t believe so. The earth is resilient. She will survive, but I think that we are on a course to destroy our own species and take many of our fellow species with us.
As one example of the impact of global warming on humans, Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute says, “We are likely to see a politics of food scarcity beginning to emerge” in reference to data that suggest a 10% decrease in the yield of rice, the world’s most utilized food crop, with every 2 degree F increase in temperature during the growing season.
It’s normal for people to think of events and experiences in terms of their immediate lives. How important is this crisis I’ve been through today? I ask you to think in geological terms. How will what I do today affect our earth, our species, and other species for millennia beyond my lifetime? And I think that this is a time when we may be able to say, yes, my actions today just might affect the grand scheme.
I challenge us as a congregation to take some actions, and the first one is to adopt the UUA study action of global warming in our congregation. All it would take is a few of you to come forward and say you will take part in planning and executing this study action.
Consider the questions posed by the scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center :
And finally, consider the wisdom of the Kogi. Elizabeth Warren told me about them. They are an indigenous group living high in the mountains of Columbia. This is a quote from the website www.labyrintha.com/kogi.html set up in their behalf:
"In 1990 the Kogi decided they must speak out to the rest of the world. They had survived by keeping themselves isolated but they decided that it was time to send a message to the Younger Brother. They could see that something was wrong with their mountain, with the heart of the world. The snows had stopped falling and the rivers were not so full. If their mountain was ill then the whole world was in trouble."
May we be as wise as the Kogi.
Rev. Susan Manker-Seale:
My parents took us children camping every summer when I was growing up. One of our favorite campsites was Hanagan Meadow in the White Mountains. The meadow spread out between the pines and spruces, green grasses covered with wildflowers in reds and yellows and purples. My father would pay us 5 cents for every one we could name, so we learned they were purple asters and red Indian Paintbrush and yellow monkeyflowers and dandelions. We collected puffball mushrooms and sliced them carefully to make sure they really were puffball mushrooms before we threw them in the frying pan and ate them with scrambled eggs for breakfast. If we were there in August, we picked the raspberries that grew along the highway and made preserves to eat with the biscuits we cooked in the campfire. At night, the skunks might wander through the camp, and we had popcorn for them if they wanted it.
That was in the 1960’s, here in our own mountains of Arizona. I read an article in our paper in mid-February which told of the changes that might happen to our forests as the world warms. There was a map of our state showing the deserts and grasslands, the woodlands and forests, with the warning that, with just a small change in temperature overall, the vegetation could be severely affected in the jump up and over the Mogollon Rim. They think the massive fires and the bark beetles which have devastated our forests might be due to the changes in temperature that are already occurring in our state. (“Climate Change…,” Az Daily Star, 2-16-05)
There is a lot to learn about what is going on in the world which might be due to Global Climate Change. As we follow the UUA resolution on the “Threat of Global Warming” and engage in studying the issues, we also need to remember to celebrate and appreciate the nature that we do have surrounding us. We need to remember to get out in nature, to take our children into the forests and deserts, and build into them and ourselves a love of nature, a love strong enough to motivate us to want to take the time and effort to work for fighting the environmental bad habits we’re engaging in as a global community. When we have gotten down on our knees in a beautiful meadow and smelled the flowers and dangled our feet in the streams, then nature gets under our skin, so to speak, and our sense of home expands to include more than our city streets and neighborhood walks.
I’ve been a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council since, maybe, the early eighties, and supporting such an organization is a good way to help them help us make changes on the governmental and global level. Our trying not to drive SUV’s may be too hard, and recycling seems like such a small thing to do (especially when we learn that our efforts may very well be in vain when we find, as we did a few years ago, that our recycling materials are being dumped in the county landfill when there’s too much to recycle), but paying others to work the system is a way to make change together. I think NRDC became Environmental Defense, and that’s the group I support now, along with Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy and sometimes one or two of the many others. One of the things the Study Action proposes is having an office at the UUA devoted to combating global warming. There are ways to make changes for the better.
So, may we study what we can do, and try to make changes, but especially, get out and celebrate that nature which we love so much and are working so hard to protect. It really is our very life.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson