January 27, 2013
by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
1. In 1971 scientific opinion was evenly split between whether the world would cool due to rising particulate and sulfate emissions from burning coal or warm due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. World temperatures had been gradually declining since around 1940 and would only turn around to rise in an approximately straight line in the mid-1970s. By 1975 it had come to be realized by most scientists that indeed the heating effect of carbon dioxide would dominate the cooling effect from particulate aerosols and sulfates. The main reason for this is that carbon dioxide is slow to leave the atmosphere, whereas particulates and sulfates tend to leave with the rain. By 1978, there were no more articles in leading scientific journals arguing for global cooling. Symbolic of the shift between 1971 and 1975 are two papers by the late Stephen Schneider, one of the world’s leading climatologists, with the one in 1971 suggesting global temperature could go either up or down and the one in 1975 saying it was going to go up, which was an accurate but courageous forecast given that up until then global temperature had been going down for over 30 years.
Stephen H. Schneider and S. Rasool, 1971, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effect of Large Increases on Global Climate,†Science, vol. 173, pp. 138-141.
Stephen H. Schneider, 1975, “On the Carbon Dioxide Confusion,†Journal of Atmospheric Science, vol. 32, pp. 2060-2066.
2. While the most straightforward way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to drive less and use less electricity, in short, conservation, and much can be done by many on these fronts, for most of us there are limits in our current society to how much we can do. This moves us to seek alternatives to burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas, to allowing us to drive and use electricity. For automobiles, hybrid or electric engines are probably the most immediately available technologies, although others may be available in the future. While we are probably going to expand the use of natural gas in the near future for electricity production, which is cleaner than coal, other alternatives being used are wind and solar. Wind turbines have the problem of attracting endangered bats. However, the batteries in hybrid and electric cars, the magnets in wind turbines, and photovoltaic cells for solar power all share a problem: they all rely on the use of rare earth elements. The mining of these elements is highly polluting and most of them are located in China, which involves possible diplomatic and economic issues. We face serious choices if we wish to seriously expand the use of these technologies, although there is some hope that we may be able to develop photovoltaic cells that do not rely on the use of these elements.
Another option is nuclear power, which does not emit any greenhouse gases, but which many fear for many reasons. An alternative to uranium-based nuclear power is to rely on thorium. This does not produce bombs, the half-life of its wastes is much shorter than that for uranium wastes, the passive nature of plants using it means that they will not melt down, and while the mining of thorium is only slightly less polluting than the mining of uranium, it is widely available, particularly in the US. We carried out the first controlled thorium nuclear reaction in the 1950s in the US, but due to military pressure, the thorium option was not pursued. It is being pursued currently in India, and India and China are building a coal-fired power plant once every two weeks. If they were to develop thorium nuclear power as an alternative, making it available to us as well, the world would be much better off.
3. The main global policy for combating global warming was the passage and widespread adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s. However, while the US signed this, it was never ratified by the US Senate so that the US remains outside of it. In 1995, the US Senate by a 95-0 vote passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution that declared opposition to such ratification if it did not mandate reduced emissions of carbon dioxide by developing nations, particularly China and India. It did not do so. As it is, the Kyoto Protocol technically expired at the end of 2012, so there is no current global agreement on dealing with global warming. The Copenhagen summit of a few years ago to develop a successor to the Kyoto Protocol failed, largely due to disagreements between the two largest emitting nations: China and the US.
A complicating factor in this is that for both the US and China, in the near term, they gain on net economically from further global warming, at least for another degree or so of it on the global scale. This is because the gains from reduced winter heating costs outweigh losses from droughts, floods, hurricanes, declining winter sports, and beach erosion. However, eventually this will shift. But for now, this reality holds for both countries.
4. This brings us to the ethical question involved with the fact that the nations most hurt by global warming tend to be poor ones in the tropics while those that gain most are in the far north and higher income. Island nations may completely disappear from rising ocean levels. Of poor nations with large populations, Bangladesh may be the most endangered, being almost completely low lying. However, other such poor nations seriously threatened include India and Indonesia, respectively the second and fourth largest in the world in terms of population. There are clear issues regarding the second and sixth UU Principles involved here, with the powerless poor suffering at the hands of the powerful rich.
5. Which brings us to a theological issue underlying the ethical issue. It is not just a matter of relations between people, but also the relationship between humanity and other species, the global ecosphere and environment. This is a matter of the seventh UU Principle, the interdependent web of all existence. It can be argued that there are four main strands of Unitarian Universalist tradition: a monotheistic Judeao-Christian-Muslim one based on the emergence of Unitarianism and Universalism out of Protestant Christianity. This tradition emphasizes the dominion of humans over the natural world. The second is humanism, with its emphasis on rationality and science and concern for humans. Again, the central issue is how do things affect people. Now, one can argue that we should save the environment in order to save humanity, and maybe this is sufficient. But other branches of tradition may argue that other species and the environment may have their own divinity and moral standing beyond what directly affects people. So, such eastern religions as Hinduism and Buddhism see divinity in nature and other species, with this trend entering Unitarianism initially with the transcendentalist movement and Thoreau and Emerson’s invocation of the Oversoul. The final tradition is the neo-pagan one that even more strongly asserts the importance of the natural world and its moral and theological standing. These perspectives may even support a substantial reduction in world human population in order to save the rest of the environment. This sermon concludes by leaving open which of these perspectives we should heed more closely in dealing with the problem of global warming.