Spirit
of Life
Let us offer thanks and praise
As we pause in our service now,
The love of parents, and grandparents, siblings, children, and grandchildren,
And there are moments when it seems as if that gratitude ebbs.
This is a time to remember the big picture.
As fellow travelers on this tiny, dynamic blue-green world,
Spirit of Life
What a glorious delight to bring you into awareness.
While the weather outside is cold and threatening,
While animals rest secure in their burrows,
While tree buds wait patiently for the ice and snow to pass,
We gather within these sheltering walls
to affirm the Spirit of Life
that constantly moves within us.
For the privilege of enjoying this moment of self-consciousness;
The delight of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and touching;
The awareness of the relationships we enjoy and the ways they benefit
us.
Reflect on the many gifts of the Spirit of Life
That have brought us to this day.
The support of members of this congregation, friends, colleagues and
co-workers,
The many people in our lives who have brought us to this morning,
The good fortune we have enjoyed, the kindness of strangers,
There is limitless gratitude to be enjoyed.
A serious illness, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job or a
business reversal,
The loss of a relationship, persecution
by others, self-inflicted suffering,
Calamities as big as a tsunami,
or as small as a stubbed toe,
Can cause us to lose awareness
of the ocean of love around us.
The incredible abundance of life
on a very unusual planet hurtling in the vastness of space
The nearest planet with any life might be thousands of light years
away.
let us turn toward each other with appreciation and respect.
Let us not lose sight of what a gift it is to be awake and aware.
Let us be renewed by choosing to live rather than abandoning this gift.
Let us recognize the unlimited potential we each have
To bring more love, light and
life to the world.
Voice still and small moving in all,
May we be healed, find wholeness and unity,
And be filled with the energy and grace
To serve one another in love.
(Note
to the reader: This is the exact text I preached but I have since revised
some of my thinking on the topic that you will find at the end of the sermon.Dr.
Susan Trumbore, mentioned in the sermon, also has some correction at the
end as well.)
A
visitor to our congregation came up to me last Sunday, looking concerned,
asking if I was talking about hell fire and damnation this Sunday given
the title of my sermon.“No, not
exactly,” I responded, “But Unitarian Universalists have our own version
of that threat to put fear of annihilation into our hearts.”Listen
to the rationale used to influence the delegates of the last Unitarian
Universalist Association General Assembly to vote for Global Warming as
our Study Action Issue for this year:
Greenhouse
gases, particularly carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels, are
trapping heat in [the] earth’s atmosphere and raising temperatures. The
evidence is everywhere – retreating glaciers, thinning polar ice, and warming
oceans and lakes. Scientists have estimated that global warming could increase
worldwide average temperatures as much as eleven degrees Fahrenheit by
the year 2100. Predicted effects include extreme weather, spreading disease,
widespread species extinction, and large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable
because of rising sea levels or drought. Changes in plant and animal life
are well underway, including alterations in the range and distribution
of plants; dying coral reefs; shifting migration patterns of birds; declining
numbers of some species such as Arctic ringed seals; and a potentially
devastating impact on countless others, from polar bears to manatees and
from salmon to krill (the base of the Antarctic food chain). Increasing
acidity of the oceans from carbon dioxide absorption could eventually threaten
the survival of shelled marine animals and calcium-containing plankton.
Wildfires, which are difficult or impossible to control in earth’s northern
forests, will become more likely as the environment become drier. ... The
risk global warming poses to virtually all life is a greater potential
danger than any other we face today or perhaps ever have.
Sounds
pretty scary doesn’t it?If we don’t
do something about this issue, we could basically wreck the planet if this
rationale describes what is likely to happen.That
is the crucial question: what IS likely to happen as the amount of carbon
dioxide goes up in the atmosphere and what can we do about it?
Global
warming has been an issue that I’ve paid close attention to because my
sister is a professor of geochemistry teaching at UC Irvine.She
researches how soils act as a buffer absorbing carbon dioxide.We
have had many conversations about the increase of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and the effects it may or may not have on our ecosystem.We
know without doubt that the amount is increasing but what we don’t know
with any certainty is what the effects will be. To help you understand
why, let me give you a little background.
If
you’ve gotten into a car that has been sitting in the bright sun on a cold
day and noticed it is warmer inside than outside, you’ve experienced the
basic result of the greenhouse effect.The
sun continuously warms our planet but all that heat doesn’t stay here.Some
of the heat is reflected back into space.
Many
factors both impede that reflection as well as enhance it.One
of those factors is the so called greenhouse gases which absorb that heat
and prevent it from being reflected back into space.Primary
among them is carbon dioxide, composing about 84% of the greenhouse gases.There
are others.Methane, nitrous oxide
, florocarbons, and sulfur hexafloride are small but potent influences,
sometimes having up to tens of thousands of times the effect of carbon
dioxide.Over 85% of these chemicals
are introduced into the atmosphere by human activity.
What
is important to realize is that carbon dioxide doesn’t stay in the air.Plants
and plant life on sea and on land take it out.Huge
amounts of carbon dioxide is sequestered in trees, plants and soils and
dissolved into the sea or consumed by sea life.So
as we put carbon dioxide into the air, it gets taken out to feed the process
of life … up to a point.When the
amount we put into the air by burning fossil fuels and biomass exceeds
the amount the trees and oceans can take out, then it builds up in the
atmosphere and increases the greenhouse effect.
Calculating
just what that effect might be would seem to be straightforward – justcalculate
the increase of infra-red absorption by the additional carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, expecting a linear relation.Unfortunately,
things are a little more complicated than that.An
increase in temperature caused by more carbon dioxide may also increase
the average cloud cover on the earth.Clouds
work as infra-red reflectors making them decrease the effect of the added
carbon dioxide.Particulate matter
in the air has a similar effect.A
major volcanic eruption puts a lot of reflective dust in the air that inhibits
the sun’s ability to warm the earth thus decreasing the temperature.Human
activity also puts these reflective particles in the air.So
you see, multiple factors influence whether the planet gets warmer or cooler.
Another
complicating factor is asking the question, “What would happen without
human activity?”The average
global temperature goes up and down all the time.When
we have an ice age, it can get really, really cold.At
other times, there has been little ice on the surface of the planet.Even
in the last thousand years there have been times when the average temperature
dipped significantly or rose significantly.Unfortunately,
it is next to impossible to know what amount of the average temperature
of 2004 was contributed by human activity and what was contributed by natural
variability.
Just
because it is hard doesn’t mean people don’t try to figure it out.Today
we have one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever had to try to
analyze data and understand it: computers!The
technique programmers use to find answers to these questions is called
modeling.Scientists design a computer
model that takes into account as many factors as possible hypothesizing
about the relationships of all the variables, plugs in mountains of data
and looks to see if they can predict the outcome.If
we double the amount of carbon dioxide in the next 100 years, what will
be the average increase in temperature?
It
is important to recognize that the number will be an average.Some
places will get hotter but some places will actually get colder.Contrary
to popular belief, there are some places in the world right now, Greenland
for example, where glaciers are getting bigger not smaller.There
are places like the Baltic where sea level is dropping.There
is evidence that Antarctica is getting colder rather than warmer, even
with the massive icebergs we’ve heard about being calved down there.
Now
I’m rather conversant in computer programming and have a basic understanding
of what it would take to model all the influences that would be able to
have any chance of accurately predicting what small changes in greenhouse
gases would have.The changes we
are talking about are indeed small, hundreds of parts per million.Significant
to be sure, but also very small in comparison with some of the other influences
which determine the average temperature.Basically,
not only don’t we have the computing power to solve the problem accurately,
we don’t even understand the relationships well enough to write a good
program.We don’t know how many volcanos
will erupt in the next 100 years.We
don’t know the amount of light the sun will produce in the next 100 years
as solar radiation isn’t a constant.This
doesn’t mean we can’t build models and factor in these influences.It
only means you don’t want to bet the farm on the guesses the software produces.
Just
because we don’t know doesn’t mean people aren’t going to guess and make
those guesses sound like facts.Because
we know that the amount of carbon dioxide is already higher, any anomaly
spotted can be blamed on it.Notice
bleaching of corals?Global warming
could be the culprit.More hurricanes
– must be global warming.New tree
species in the Adirondacks – more evidence.
Over
the next 50 years, we may get some good answers to these questions.We
just don’t have enough data over a long enough period of time to really
be sure that we can hang all the problems the UUA resolution suggests on
global warming.The climate change
so far is just not that dramatic.
Not
knowing exactly what will happen as the result of increasing greenhouse
gases, the world community has decided that something must be done.The
Kyoto agreement is a first baby step toward reducing global warming by
asking developed nations to roll back their carbon emissions to the 1990
levels.With Russia signing the accord,
there are enough countries onboard to trigger the implementation of these
rollbacks to be completed by 2012.Unfortunately,
this Herculean effort will have a negligible effect on the amount of carbon
in the atmosphere and, perhaps worse, delay the development of less technically
advanced nations through the selling of carbon credits to developed nations.The
baseline reality is: we do not want to give up the lifestyle that large
carbon emissions has created for us.Alternative
energy sources cannot make up the difference without also generating lots
of carbon dioxide.
The
real crisis in this crisis is the way public policy gets made.Scientists
make discoveries and present them with many caveats admitting the limitations
of their findings.Non-governmental
organizations and the media sensationalize and distort what is being discovered
to create fear in the public mind and demand something be done.The
politicians then react to these pressures, pass laws and fund more research.This
fear generating engine turns out to feed money to both scientists for more
research, NGOs for donations, and media for our attention.It
is a positive feedback loop that creates more and more fear and demands
more and more government money and intervention.The
original observations that fueled global warming concerns are blown completely
out of proportion, disconnected from what we actually know, and become
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And
all we, the citizens, get out of all this is more fear.
An
extreme example of this fear cycle came from the recent earthquake and
tsunami.Two days after the tragedy,
the executive director of Greenpeace UK (search) told the British newspaper
The Independent, "No one can ignore the relentless increase in extreme
weather events and so-called natural disasters, which in reality are no
more natural than a plastic Christmas tree."
While
skillfully crafted PR, This statement is completely false and without merit.It
is an example of feeding the fear machine.People
who don’t know any better could think all those deaths were caused by global
warming. It is extremely ironic that this very example was part of Michael
Crichton’s recent novel, State of Fear, that talks about the lack
of evidence for global warming.
My
concern is that the Unitarian Universalist Association may become one more
NGO helping feed the fear machine.To
understand the potential effects of the increase of greenhouse gases, you
need a Phd in meteorology, geochemistry, computer modeling, and mathematics,
at least.My research so far has
shown me there are too many unanswered questions about what the long term
effects of increasing green house gases will be.It
is possible that increasing the global temperature might actually be beneficial
by moderating weather patterns, increasing the growing season, stimulating
plant growth and producing more rain for a thirsty world.As
a religious body, we are in no position to make a useful contribution to
the global warming debate.
The
irrational fear in the back of people’s minds and explicit in the UUA statement
is that the increase in greenhouse gases will trigger irreversible cataclysmic
events.It is the scientific version
of Armageddon.There just isn’t enough
good evidence for this.
Rather
than worrying about global warming, I think we should pay attention to
the things we can influence.There
are far more pressing ecological concerns we should be focusing on like
loss of wetlands, deforestation, pollution, and acid rain that are very
well understood and have solutions.
To
help us find more answers we need a whole lot more science and a whole
lot less rhetoric.Humans have evolved
to the point that we can have significant effects on our entire planet.The
best way for humanity to become good stewards of this planet is through
action directed by reason rather than fear.
Will
it all end in fire or ice … or will it end at all?
The
only thing I’m sure of is change,
And
our need to learn to move with its rhythms.
Whether
the end is near or far off,
The
Spirit of Life will never die.
It
will always await the right conditions,
To
begin again in love.
Factual
revisions:
While
there may be a few glaciers in Greenland that are getting bigger, the predominant
arctic trend is toward melting ice.
One
Greenpeace spokesperson may have said this inaccurate statement but overall
the Greenpeace websites on global warming are generally accurate.
I
doubt I’ve had as much reaction to a sermon as my January sermon on Global
Warming. Some of the strong negative reactions caused me to review my sources
and analysis. I also sent a copy of my sermon to my sister Dr. Susan Trumbore,
a professor of geochemistry at UC Irvine. We talked about it for an hour
late that Sunday night both opening my eyes and clarifying my vision.
She
pointed out to me that while some of what I said was factually true, my
words missed the big picture of the degree humanity’s interaction with
the environment. She explained that even though more clouds might reduce
global warming, a decrease in reflective ice in glaciers and the arctic
would increase global warming. Bill Batt pointed me toward web sites on
the “precautionary principle,” an ethic of how to approach problems that
are both dangerous and uncertain. Tom Mercer cautioned me to look at the
work of Dr. Wally Broecker (my sister’s Phd advisor) of Columbia University.
Dr. Broecker is concerned that melting ice in the artic will flood the
Atlantic with fresh water changing the properties of the Gulf Stream possibly
shutting it down and causing an abrupt change in climate which would freeze
Northern Europe. Ed Hancock emailed me an article warning that the thawing
of the frozen tundra in the arctic could “burp” an enormous amount of methane
into the air as frozen organic matter begins decaying. Methane is ten times
as absorptive as carbon dioxide.
All
this input made it clear to me I was out of my scientific depth on this
issue. My sister told me one of the sources that had influenced me was
a scientist that she knew personally and was shunned by the scientific
community. As all this input came toward me, I marveled at the challenge
for the average person to sort all this out. We as citizens are becoming
more and more dependent on experts to tell us what to do. Yet this concentrates
power in an elite, specialist class we must then trust a class that
may not have it all figured out themselves. Some of the discoveries mentioned
above are quite recent, thus they couldn’t have been factored into previous
analysis. We’ve only been able to conclusively detect Global Warming’s
effect on our climate in the last 25 years!
What
I’m most concerned about and wish to revise is the tone of my sermon. My
sister pointed out to me that Global Warming is a major stress on earth’s
ecosystems but it is not the only one. The dispersion of invasive species
from viruses to animal and plant life, changes in land use, water run off,
and heat islands around cities, are examples of other stresses that, when
added together, are having a dramatic effect on the quality of our ecosystems.
I saw this first hand in Florida living next to an undeveloped parcel of
land overgrown with the invasive exotic Brazilian Pepper. This shrub grows
so thickly that it kills anything growing below it.
We
can have disagreements about one or another influence, but when we look
at them together, we see that humanity is having a very negative influence
on our environment. My sister put it bluntly: it takes 50 years to grow
a forest and a day to burn it down. Ecosystems always adapt to change,
but there is a time lag. We haven’t figured out how to help ecosystems
adapt
quickly in a way that doesn’t decrease their diversity. What we at the
top of the food chain must realize and respond to is our dependence on
our environment and our need to protect it wisely from harm.
What
I continue to be grateful for is the collective wisdom within our congregation.
If I get derailed, your response helps me get back on track. There is much
more to be said about Global Warming. It is real and
there is uncertainty about how it will affect us. We as a community can
learn from each other and become better informed. If abrupt and destructive
climate change is likely and we can do something about it, we are morally
obligated to act and a UUA resolution on the subject is appropriate.
Let’s
learn more … together.
A
couple of comments on your column: I think getting information isn't the
problem, you don't need a PhD to learn this stuff. The problem is finding
reliable and unbiased information. I know which websites are scientifically
accurate, but Joe Public (and you) could be easily misled into thinking
a fringe opinion has more credibility than it actually does. Add to that
the fact that the web allows people with time (not often the scientists
doing the research) to pull all the tricks needed to game the web search
engines, and you can get a lot of biased information disseminated. This
is clearly a serious problem, if searching led you to Dick Lindzen's web
sites over and above those of more unbiased scientists (for every one complaining
about the IPCC process, there are roughly 1000 scientists involved who
didn't complain - but who didn't put their support for the document on
a web page that misled you).
Second
- it takes centuries to grow a forest (or in the case of the Amazon, maybe
500). That is the problem - in one human lifetime we can alter things and
if we don't like the results, we can reconstruct them. There is a lot of
this 'engineering' approach to climate change problems ('let's fix global
warming by putting big reflectors in space', if we destroy a wetland here,
we have to pay to rebuild or restore one in another place). What I think
is that the environment and its linkages to climate are so poorly understood
that we can't reasonably expect our 'fixes' to work as we intend them (look
at the failure of Biosphere 2).
Third,
the warming in the last century is real - not even the most severe critics
says it isn't. CO2 levels in the atmosphere now are higher than they have
been in 450,000 years (methane and nitrous oxide levels too). CO2 in the
past has varied in concert with climate change, and changing the amount
of infrared absorbing gases in the atmosphere undeniably changes the overall
energy budget of the earth. While it is true that the climate system is
too complex for us to predict the consequences of 500 versus 900 ppm CO2
in the next century - that is not an excuse to say there is no problem.
We don't understand the causes of cancer because the human body is a system
as complex as the climate system, with its own sets of poorly understood
feedbacks. However, we still treat cancer with blunt instruments (surgery,
chemo) without an exact knowledge of the risks and consequences or even
how they work (except in the most obvious sense). This isn't the best analogy
to climate, except that we must choose the level of risk we want to live
with.
What
makes me most concerned about the climate problem, is that (along with
other environmental stresses) - this is a problem we, the developed world,
are foisting on the globe. Do we have the right to put larger risks on
populations in the developing world (who will likely suffer a lot more
if a crop fails or sea level rises).
Copyright
© 2005 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All
rights reserved.