[The Ganges River Delta in India and Bangladesh (Source: NASA)]

On occasion, ‘Global Warming Politics’ will host a major Guest Essay, starting with today’s, which is by Dr. R. W. (Bob) Bradnock, former Head of Department of Geography at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and currently Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (KCL). Bob is a widely-respected world authority on the Indian sub-continent. He is also a committed Christian and a Liberal Democrat. This essay was first written for the church magazine of the Amersham Free Church, which is in membership with the Baptist Union and the United Reformed Church in the UK. I am most grateful to Bob for his kindness in allowing me to reproduce his fine essay on GWP.

A Christian Critique Of ‘Global Warming’

Dr. R. W. Bradnock

Listening to a report to Church Meeting of this year’s Baptist Assembly, I was reminded of an extremely angry question I was asked many years ago at the end of a Sixth Form Conference. I had been debating the issue of the relationship between population growth and poverty with a highly-respected colleague and authority on Africa. Using examples from South Asia, I had argued that a population growth of well over 2% per annum represented a huge additional burden in the struggle to banish poverty. Taking a directly opposite view, my colleague argued, on the basis of African experience, that the poor world needed more people to provide the effective human resources for development, just as Europe, he suggested, had needed a huge population increase through the 19th century to meet the demands for labour and markets which fueled the industrial revolution. At the end of the discussion, a sixth former came up to us both, and said: “I am quite disgusted! I came here to learn the answers to this question, and I find that two academics don’t agree. How is this possible?”

Report

The Baptist Assembly report bore a picture of Sir John Houghton, one of the leading figures for over a decade in persuading the world community to believe that climate change is caused by human activity, and that it uniquely threatens the world. It is a view which has become widely accepted by the UN and by individual governments, by aid agencies and non-governmental organisations, and by church Social Responsibility Committees. Since the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year, some of these now claim that the science is settled. Yet, there remain many academics from a wide range of fields who question the evidence, and who believe that the catalogue of woes directly attributed to ‘global warming’ cannot be reduced simply to an increase in the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 280 parts per million by volume to c.384 ppmv - the increase that has taken place as a result of the intensive use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Unfounded Claims

One of the problems with making informed judgments is that ‘global warming’ is an immensely complex and wide-ranging field, even in the meteorological sense. However, in my own narrow area of research, I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!

A Christian View?

But does it matter? Is there a specifically Christian view of climate change, and of our responsibility for it? After all, we believe that this is God’s world. We are now hearing the argument that before humans interfered with ‘natural climates’, the climate was stable and guaranteed a stable God-given environment in which we could all live with security, and with a future for our children and grandchildren. The planet, we are told, having been a secure and stable home for all these generations, has now become threatened, if not doomed - and it is all our fault.

It is a short step - and one that many are now taking - to argue that the burning of fossil fuels is itself a sign of human greed. Some argue that we in the North have plundered the world’s resources, and that the ‘global warming’ that will result is our moral responsibility. One implication is that we should compensate those, especially poor countries, for the damage we are causing, and have caused, them. The policies which stem from this view are evident in the latest publication on climate change from the Joint Issues team of the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and URC, in effect an uncritical endorsement of the policies of pressure groups. Arguing that the Government’s climate change bill does not go far enough, it is urging us, as Christians, to support the reduction of carbon emissions by 80%, to include the impact of sea- and air-travel, and to forego the buying of international carbon credits, reducing our own emissions instead.

Where do these policies lead? Already they have stimulated a dramatic diversion of agricultural land to the production of biofuels - now immediately denounced by the very same groups trying to “stop climate chaos” as “leading to an unsustainable loss of food producing land”. At the same time, belief in the urgent reality of climate change is leading others, including our own government, to open the door again to nuclear power - equally refuted by many pressure groups.

Instability Part Of God’s World

If we go down the route of cutting carbon emissions to less than 20% of current levels, irrespective of cost, we should be clear on some fundamental truths about God’s created world. There is not now, and never has been, a ‘stable environment’. Climate has changed, often far more dramatically than it is changing now, in very short periods of time - and quite unrelated to any human activity. These changes are very little understood, and we have no means of knowing where we are in the cycle of changing climates.

We have to ask: is there anything inherently Christian in a goal of “stopping climate change”, as if that represented a return to a God-given stability and security? Cheap energy has been absolutely central to the massive improvements in health and well-being which have so enormously lengthened and improved the quality of life for millions across the world during the last century. Are these changes truly sinful and a sign of greed? It is not surprising that governments in the developing world, and their people, rate such improvements so highly that, come what may, they will continue to increase their energy consumption to achieve them. China is already the world’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, and India is not far behind. Is it our Christian responsibility to tell them to stop?

One day - perhaps soon - that energy will have to come from sources other than fossil fuels. But let’s not pretend that when that day comes, whatever other benefits it may bring with it, we will have been freed from the shocks of dramatic and often unpredictable climate change. For, along with earthquakes and tsunami, the scientific record demonstrates that climate change - dramatic, sudden, unpredictable, and sometimes potentially catastrophic - is an integral part of God’s created world.

Does the non-use of the world’s resources get us off any hooks, whether environmental, economic, or theological? Or should we be seeking to use the earth’s resources as responsibly and productively as we can, while struggling to achieve fairness and justice in the opportunities that such development can bring?

Of course, as in the debate with my academic colleague, I could be wrong; but, is it not premature to assume that the scientific, economic, and theological debates are closed, and that all our Christian responsibility leads us to do now is to campaign in one direction?

Copyright: Dr. R. W. Bradnock, 2008