Will the World Wake Up to the Climate Change Threat?

Despite all kinds of scientific evidence that climate change is real, many Republicans and that party's toxic base of support continue to deny climate change is real and that the world is facing an existential threat. With Australia literally in flames, polar ice melting at a rapid rate and record temperatures hitting large parts of the world, the question is whether or not the world and nations like the United States will at last make needed policy changes to lessen the coming climate disaster. A piece in New Yorker looks at evidence that ought to convince anyone sentient that something must be done.  Here are article highlights:

In a Dantean sort of way, Australia’s holiday-season infernos provided a fitting close to 2019, which has been called “the year the world woke up to the climate crisis.” In India this past summer, a heat wave killed more than a hundred people in the northeastern state of Bihar, and in Japan a month later a heat wave sent an estimated eighteen thousand to the hospital. All-time temperature records were set in France, where a high of a hundred and eight degrees was reached in the town of Vérargues on June 28th, and in Germany, where the mercury in the town of Lingen hit a hundred and seven degrees on July 25th.

In Australia, records were broken only to be rebroken. On December 17th, maximum temperatures across the entire country, which is roughly the size of the continental United States, averaged 105.6 degrees. Then, on December 18th, they climbed to 107.4 degrees. The “feeling when you open the oven door” is how one Australian described the heat to the BBC. “It’s like that, but just the whole time.” Globally, it was the second- or third-warmest year since accurate measurements began.

What will the twenty-twenties bring? In geophysical terms, this question is almost too easy to answer. Temperatures will continue to rise. It’s virtually guaranteed that the coming decade will be warmer than the twenty-tens, which were warmer than the two-thousands, which were warmer than the nineteen-nineties, which—you guessed it—were warmer than the nineteen-eighties.

And with still higher temperatures will come still greater damage. Droughts will grow more punishing. (Australia’s horrific wildfires are, in large part, the result of what Australians are calling a “big dry,” which is now in its third year and has forced many towns to truck in water.) Warmer air holds more moisture, so the flip side of drought is deluge. (Last week, as Australia was roasting, flooding in Indonesia killed at least forty people.) Meanwhile, the planet’s ice sheets will continue to melt, leading to ever-higher sea levels, as will the Arctic ice cap. It’s possible that by 2030 the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free at the end of the summer.

Which brings us to the question of what it means to “wake up.” If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didn’t act like it. In the past ten years, more CO₂ was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of J.F.K.

The Trump Administration, which has filed to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, and the Morrison government, which wanted to use an accounting trick to fulfill its Paris commitments, were explicitly blamed for the stalemate. Many commentators noted the irony of the situation. A headline in the Guardian put it this way: “AUSTRALIA TOOK A MATCH TO UN CLIMATE TALKS WHILE BACK HOME THE COUNTRY BURNED.”

[T]he twenty-twenties will be consequential in a more or less permanent way. Global CO₂ emissions are now so high—in 2019, they hit a new record of forty-three billion metric tons—that ten more years of the same will be nothing short of cataclysmic. Unless emissions are reduced, and radically, a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will be pretty much unavoidable by 2030. This will make the demise of the world’s coral reefs, the inundation of most low-lying island nations, incessant heat waves and fires and misery for millions—perhaps billions—of people equally unavoidable.

Really waking up, and not just dreaming to ourselves that things will be O.K., has become urgent—beyond urgent, in fact. To paraphrase Victoria’s fire authority: The world is in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive. 

Church-Based Hate: Apology Required

David P. Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, has written a review of Mitchell Gold's book, Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America, in The Christian Century. As some may recall, I discussed back in December 2008 after I meet Mitchell Gold at the LGBT Blogger Summit in Washington, D.C. In his review, Gushee looks at some of the stories recounted in the book and concludes his review with these words:

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Crisis recounts the sad stories of dozens of young people who, like the biblical Esau, cried for a blessing from their parents, friends and churches. All too often they have not received it. All too often they have been left broken, rejected as human beings—at the hands of Christians and in the name of the Bible. Obviously we must extend basic acceptance to gay youths such as these, as well as Christian love.Moreover, after reading these stories, I feel that Christians have something they need to request from God and from gays and lesbians, and that is forgiveness.

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Personally, I view what self-proclaimed "godly Christians" do to LGBT youth and adults alike as the equivalent of spiritual murder. It's hard to take even as an adult, but as an uncertain pre-teen or teen it is truly devastating. Instead of extending Christ's message of love as should be the case, the Gospel message with these false Christians becomes a message of hatred towards LGBT individuals. Here are some additional highlights from his review of Crisis which involve Matt Comer who I also met at the Blogger Summit and whose religious upbringing bears parallels with my own, albeit in a different denomination:

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Matt Comer, who came from a conservative Baptist family in North Carolina, began experiencing same-sex attraction in his preteen years. Matt's preacher said from the pulpit things like: "Put all the queers on a ship, cut a hole in the side and send it out to sea." The contrast between his sexuality and the beliefs of his church and family drove Matt to thoughts of suicide. But that same religious faith told him that suicide "would have sent me straight to the depths of hell, landing me in the same spot as being gay. So, I turned to begging and pleading."

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Lying on his bed at night, "crying and praying," Matt would ask God to spare him eternal damnation if he tried his very best not to feel attraction to males. But it didn't work. Finally Matt told the truth to his parents. "My mother said I was crazy and sick and told me I was going to hell." Eventually, however, his mother changed her views. "Today," Matt writes, "she is my strength and my most avid supporter, and I know that she loves me no matter what."

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Gushee also looks at some of the other fruits of church based anti-gay hate:

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What exactly do such young people go through? Gold and co-editor Mindy Drucker offer not just stories but summaries of some key data. They include the following:

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• Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds; for every young person who takes his or her own life, 20 more try.

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• Gay teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.

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• Forty-five percent of gay men and 20 percent of lesbians surveyed had been victims of verbal and physical assaults in secondary school specifically because of their sexual orientation.

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• Gay youth are at higher risk of being kicked out of their homes and turning to life on the streets for survival. They are more likely than their heterosexual peers to start using tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs at an earlier age.

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• Twenty-eight percent of gay students drop out of school—more than three times the national average.

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Indeed, there is much for which the Christianists and other homophobes need to pray for forgiveness.