[asa] Creation Care

It's good to be back after a few weeks away and to find a continuing active dialog.

I'd like to share my own personal journey into environmental issues over the past year or so. This isn't my field of expertise so I hadn't studied it or formed any opinion on the issues such as global warming. The dialog on this list and other places was interesting but I had no vested interest or strong opinion either way.

But stewardship of God's creation is the fourth element of ASA's statement of faith and finally I had the opportunity and motivation about six months ago to learn more about this field. I read a number of articles in the scientific literature and had the privilege of meeting personally and talking with several experts. I also read as much of the criticism as I could.

The experts I was able to meet and talk with in person included: climatologist Jim Hanson; biologists Jim McCarthy (AAAS president-elect) and EO Wilson; botanist Peter Raven; forester Gus Speth; oceanographers Carl Safina and Nancy Knowlton; microbiologist Rita Colwell; physicians Eric Chivian and Paul Epstein; CDC epidemiologist Howie Frumkin; etc. Their publications were most helpful.

The critics that I read included Michael Crichton ("State of Fear" and various lectures and articles); Bjorn Lomborg (and the Copenhagen Consensus); Cal Beisner; links provided by Janice in this forum, etc.

Obviously, I'm far from being well-versed in the field, let alone an expert, but I feel that I understand the basic issues and at least know who the experts are and what the critics are saying. Rather than finding lots of uncertainty and fuzziness in this field, I found some issues to be clear and unambiguous. To my surprise, for example, the global warming issue is quite clear with no controversy in the community of scientific expertise in the field. I found that global warming is significant and is primarily due to anthropogenic sources. Impact of this warming is occurring already--no need to wait many decades. It's not too late to take action to reduce those causal factors and it does not seem prohibitively expensive or disruptive. Furthermore, there are numerous positive feedback loops that could soon be triggered that would further accelerate the warming trend. Negative feedback loops are more difficult to detect and may exist but don't seem to be in play as yet.

There seems to be no question but that our responsibility as stewards of God's Creation must include climate change as a major factor of a holistic approach.

Randy

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Received on Thu Jan 18 18:11:08 2007