Turn down the heat

As I write this, about 6,000 representatives from around the around have just begun meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to try to reach some agreement on how to slow down global climate change.

It's an issue that deserves the church's attention too. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane act like extra insulation in our atmosphere, trapping the sun's heat before it radiates into space. Carbon dioxide is the most important of these because there is more of it in the atmosphere than any other greenhouse gas, and so it has the largest overall effect on global temperatures.

The problem is that over the past 150 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, especially oil, like there is no tomorrow. We've pumped so many millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we're changing the way our God-given Earth was made. Our emissions of carbon dioxide are double what they were 30 years ago and the rate of increase is still accelerating, right along with our ever-increasing use of fossil fuels.

Our smoke and exhaust are changing the climate here in Canada and around the world. Average temperatures have increased about half a degree Celsius in the last 100 years. The 1990s were already the warmest decade in measured history. The UN's International Panel on Climate Change, the largest scientific investigation into the issue, predicts a global rise of between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100.

It isn't just rising temperatures. Warmer air can hold more water and so brings about more severe rainfalls. Warmer, wetter air leads to bigger storms. Ocean and wind currents change. Weather extremes are now more likely. We're changing an immensely complicated system that affects us in more ways than we can understand right now.

Ice caps and glaciers are disappearing, threatening to raise sea levels and flood coastal communities. Ice at the North Pole has shrunk by 30 percent since 1978. Greenland's melt rate is more than twice what it was in 1996. Besides sea levels, ice and snow caps provide fresh water supplies for many places around the world. In Canada, this is especially true for the Prairie provinces, which faced a drought in the past decade that was drier than the dustbowl days of the 1930s.

Climate change is predicted to bring about far-reaching changes across the country: worse forest fires; higher levels of insect infestations; more river flooding from runoff; a more acidic ocean hurting marine life; and a speedup of extinctions as animal and plant species die off, unable to adjust to the climate changes.

This is a global problem, but we in Canada are especialy responsible. Once you get rid of tiny countries and small island nations, Canada is the third-largest producer of carbon dioxide per person in the world, behind the U.S. and Australia. In Canada, Ontario Power is the single largest producer of greenhouse gasses in the country due to the huge coal-powered plants in Ontario. By province, Alberta is the biggest producer, largely due to its oil sands extraction.

Over the coming year, I'm going to be exploring why I think climate change and our energy use needs to matter so much to us as Christians and as a church. This is a deeply theological issue. I have come to feel that how we deal with climate change and with coming oil shortages will be two of the defining ethical issues for this generation.

-Tim Millior Dyck