Monday 24 March 2008

New bandwagon needed

As well as an explanation for why we jumped on the old one.

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."


From The Australian, here.

Any large scale decisions about climate change that feed into policy will cost massive time, energy and money—and of course, if the climate change consensus is correct that will be time, energy and money well spent.

But if that time, energy and money is spent without careful thought both as to the nature of the problem, and the best possible solutions to it, then it has the potential to divert funds away from genuine and current problems without any measurable benefit. Hunger in Africa, or Indonesia, or Pakistan or... are serious current issues that seem to have dropped off the public radar. And within Christian churches, as well as these problems that face the world we ought to be spending a good deal of our time, it seems to me, praying for our brothers and sisters under persecution in places like Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Nigeria, the Sudan, North Korea... the list is really quite long.

Compassion matters; but that compassion at a personal level ought not as a general rule to be going into the politics of climate change. That's true in the church; and it's true in the secular world too, especially when that climate-change moralizing distracts us from problems closer to home. Immediate problems like binge-drinking or any number of social ills that are affecting individuals and families around our city.

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