Environmental Stewardship in a Christian Worldview:

Global Warming & Climate Change — Christian Views
 

 
I.O.U. — This page will be developed more fully later, maybe in mid-2014,
with summaries about energy topics, and links to:
• the best pages & audios/videos we can find on the internet, plus a few off-the-web books, films, etc;
• pages written by members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) for our website & journal & conferences.

It will offer information and links for these topics:
    causes — greenhouse effect and gases causing it
    effects — actual (now) and potential (later);  global (general) temperature increases and — because global warming isn't just a simple "warming" — localized (specific) weather patterns & events, in different places all over the world
    scientific consensus & political controversy — most scientists agree about most questions, but nonscientists disagree with each other;  economic effects of reducing greenhouse gas emission (or of not doing this), and resulting political policies
    also, global dimming due to air pollution (temporarily countering greenhouse warming, and camouflaging the actual magnitude of its effects?)

• For a quick introduction to a Christian perspective on climate change, The Evangelical Climate Initiative has a small website that's easy to explore, with a statement (Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action), FAQ, Resources (with Fact Sheets, a presentation by Sir John Houghton,…), and an Invitation to Take Action (things you can do).
• In January 2007, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) issued a press release and statement about global warming.
• In July 2006, before this bold move, Tamara Hardison criticized the NAE for its "do nothing" policy, and in the evangelical community there is still some opposition to a "do something" approach, as you can see in reports by CNN & Washington Post about the NAE meeting in March 2007.
• ASA does not take an official position on this issue, but I think most of our members agree with the prepared remarks of Randy Isaac (Executive Director of ASA) at the NAE press conference.
• In the past year, several good articles have been in the ASA journal, and links to these will be here soon.

• This page will contain a summary-overview for each topic above, plus links to selected web resources that range from introductory to comprehensive, and maybe there will be specialty pages for some topics.
 

 
      A REQUEST FOR HELP
      In order to find high-quality pages at each level for many topics, I (the editor of ASA's website for Whole-Person Education) will need help, and hopefully much of the creative work — in deciding what to do and how, and then finding and selecting high-quality resources — can be done by those who are more expert than myself, who know more about each topic-area, and also know "who is doing what" and who has written good pages about it.
      When searching for content-pages, the key is SELECTIVITY.  With a search engine and a few minutes, it's easy to find lots of pages.  It's much more difficult to find the best pages (at all levels, from introductory to in-depth) but this is the goal.  We want to recommend only high-quality pages, so users can learn quickly and well, and they won't be overwhelmed with too many choices.   {more about selectivity}   {if you have helpful ideas, please contact me, Craig Rusbult, craig@asa3.org}
      You can see a preliminary structure of topics in this links-page, and each of the others.  But each structure is tentative, and it will be modified during the process of developing the website.  If you want to see parts of the overall website that are more fully developed, check Thinking Skills or (on a larger scale) Creation Questions.
 

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