“Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level. The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”
Notably, Gore doesn’t cite the unprecedented heat waves coursing across Europe, Central Asia and the Southern Tier U.S. states. Gore’s noteworthy statement, “Every night on the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” should speak loudly to Christians in the United States of whom many continue to believe climate change to be “an act of God” rather than “acts of humankind.” Citing the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic last book in the New Testament, is in my mind an interesting word choice for Gore who comes from Tennessee, a Bible-belt state that’s history includes the infamous Scopes Trial back in the 1920s, and more recently legislation to make The Bible the official state book.
A Pew Research Center Report in 2022 examined how religion affects climate change perception. It found that 53% of Americans linked global warming to human activity. But it noted that a majority of evangelical Christians were climate change skeptics with only 32% linking the warming to human activity while 36% cited natural causes as an explanation for rising atmospheric temperatures. Compared to non-Christians, agnostics and atheists, the numbers were far different with the vast majority expressing a high level of concern about anthropogenic climate change.
The Pew report noted that views on climate change were “heavily influenced by politics” with evangelical Christians backing The U.S. Republican Party where climate change is viewed as less of a problem, with some even declaring “that God is in control of the climate.”
Other data points from the Pew research show that religious and political divides are in harmony citing these research results:
Evangelical Protestant links to the Republican Party today are more significant than at any time in the past. Donald Trump appealed to evangelical Christians in his two runs at the White House. And in places like Tennessee, evangelicals represent the majority of the population.
So Gore, as a son of Tennessee, is fighting a battle to turn apocalyptic weather news into an argument to make all of us including evangelicals and fellow Tennesseans recognize we are turbocharging climate change.
In the New York Times interview, Gore expresses hopefulness despite the current climate data telling the New York Times, “We know how to fix this.” He goes on:
“We can stop the temperatures going up worldwide with as little as a three-year time lag by reaching net zero. And if we stay at true net zero, we’ll see half of the human-caused CO2 coming out of the atmosphere in as little as 30 years.”
What will it take to achieve and stay at net zero?
Gore states that “the climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis” and notes the absurdity of holding the next international COP climate meeting in the United Arab Emirates, a country dominated by the fossil-fuel industry and having the president of the meeting be the head of that country’s state oil company.
If you need a reminder of why Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth should be driving our global climate change agenda, here are just some facts to ponder:
Not only has Trump’s administration rolled back federal efforts to combat global heating, but also has tried to quash the doing of real science among many government departments from NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and to the interagency reporting group responsible for the National Climate Assessment (NCA).
The most recent NCA report, the fourth of its kind and required every four years by an act of Congress, painted a very dire picture of the future and laid out specified costs in the hundreds of billions annually needed to mitigate and repair the planet from global heating. The next NCA report is due to come out in 2021 and Trump and his minions are ensuring that projections beyond 2040 will be excised from charts, graphs, and maps. One of the research scientists involved in the NCA describes the effort as similar to the anti-science policies conducted by the former Soviet Union.
Trump has appointed a Princeton physicist to head up his “impartial” climate review panel, William Happer, a man with no climate science background but physics bonafides has expressed a belief that increased carbon dioxide is a benefit to the planet.
Happer has been a shill for oil companies for a considerable time now, and his roll in Trump’s administration is the job of Solomon in what is forthcoming, a “red team,” “blue team” debate on the validity of climate science. Happer is loading the dice to make these two positions co-equal, which of course within the scientific community they are not.
The entire Trump regime is populated by anti-scientists from the current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to the President’s head of the National Security Council, John Bolton. Andrew Wheeler, the recently appointed head of the EPA, replacing Scott Pruitt, doesn’t believe it is his mandate to study climate trends unless he is specifically instructed by the U.S. Congress. Within the Trump administration, the only holdouts against his anti-climate science policy are NOAA and NASA.
The rest of the world is another story. With the exception of Australia whose electorate in the last two weeks voted back in a regime almost equal in its disdain for the validity of climate science, and Saudi Arabia, an oil giant, no one is on the same page as the United States federal regime.
What is particularly alarming to scientists around the world is the potential loss of the data on climate change that with few exceptions, only the United States has been able to collect using its vast global science infrastructure and reach.
The result has been other countries stepping up. The latest announcement comes from the European Union and its space agency which announced plans to launch a trio of satellites to monitor carbon emissions from every country on the planet.
The 94 cities of the C40 group, representing 12% of all humanity, are pushing ahead with a zero carbon strategy. Among these are cities like New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and San Francisco, all American, who describe their actions as “taking matters into our own hands.”
Then there are the 21 U.S. states and more pending to join in a formal climate alliance pledged to tackle the climate crisis while working together to develop shared policies, planning, data, tools, and reports.
Even U.S. business is spurning Trump’s anti-climate science agenda with 1,000 companies, almost 200 from the Fortune 500, joining together in a low-carbon initiative to meet science-derived targets.
So what can possibly explain the Trump position?
And why are so many of his appointees equally committed to his non-science nonsense?
Could it be the strong evangelical backing of the President that is the reason he withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement?
Do evangelicals believe that God will provide and we need to do nothing to prevent global heating?
Maybe that explains why Mike Pompeo, a devout evangelical, in a recent Arctic conference, extolled the virtues of the melting sea ice as a great economic opportunity for America.
Does Pompeo believe that what is happening to the planet is all part of God’s plan?
After all, if evangelicals believe God created the Earth and Universe in six days, worrying about a piddling issue like carbon emissions produced by us is nonsensical.
The evangelical view is a part of American cultural history as mucha as the Boston Tea Party, The Alamo, Iwo Jima, and the atomic bomb. Evangelical anti-science dates back to before the Scope Trial, and today is ongoing in school boards that try to take evolution out of science textbooks. For evangelicals, the Bible remains the sole source of scientific wisdom no matter what modern scientific experts learn. Hence worrying or doing anything about global heating doesn’t save souls and get you to heaven faster. So why bother.
But for a large majority of Americans, the position of the President and his evangelical supporters is just plain “nuts.” In a recent Gallup Poll, 66% of Americans believed global warming was caused by human activity, and 59% believed its effects were already occurring.
In the title of this posting, I asked if the President’s position could be construed as treasonous to humanity and the planet’s future. When you weigh the evidence and the origin of the anti-climate science perspective based on one particular religious point of view, you can easily draw that conclusion.
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