Faith in Values: Are We Finally Nearing the Tipping Point on Climate Change?

[cbayer]

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2012/11/28/45819/faith-in-values-are-we-finally-nearing-the-tipping-point-on-climate-change/


A hiker surveys the damage from climate change atop an iceberg in Alaska. Correcting climate change used to be a bipartisan effort, but recently has become more partisan, causing faith groups to get involved.

By Sally Steenland | November 28, 2012

If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will shriek and frantically try to escape. Drop that same frog into a pot of warm water, however, and gradually turn up the heat, and it will drift off to sleep and die.

Some version of that second scenario is happening to us right now. I’m not saying we’re on the brink of perishing, but on a range of issues—from climate change to gun violence to women’s reproductive health—incremental changes have lulled us into complacency, relaxing our sense of danger and weakening our response reflexes.

Pundits call the state we’re in the “new normal.” What they mean is that we get used to things as they are. And if we don’t exactly get comfortable with the status quo, we feel like David in a battle against Goliath.

Case in point: climate change. For several years now, increased pollution from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been fueling extreme weather across the globe. Droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and heat waves: Our planet’s weather report is starting to sound like the biblical plagues.

more at link

[dimbear]

1. The boiling frog has an interesting history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Note particularly that the frogs which didn't jump out in the experiment had had their brains surgically removed. Not really quite fair to the frog.

Also see Snopes.

Should this old fable lead off a 'science' article?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. It's about time that churches caught up with the unaffiliated, and reality

In a recent post The Folly of Faith I mentioned that a connection exists between global warming denialism and religion. Here I would like to provide more justification for this claim.

Evidence exists that many who deny the dangers of global warming do so out of religious conviction. A Pew survey asked the following question: "Is there solid evidence the earth is warming?" Let me just give the percentages who said yes and agreed that it is the result of human activity:

Total U.S. population 47 %; Unaffiliated with any church 58 %; White mainline Protestants 48 %; White, non-Hispanic Catholics 44 %; Black Protestants 39 %; White evangelical Protestants 34 %.

Also interesting was the result that 21 percent of all Americans, 18 percent of the unaffiliated, and 31 percent of white evangelicals said there was no global warming at all. While mainline Protestants and Catholics are close to the national average, they still are below that of the unaffiliated. Surely the fact that 58 percent of the unaffiliated support the scientific consensus while less than 50 percent of believers do is evidence for a correlation between religion and global warming denialism.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/global-warming-and-religi_b_864014.html