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By Joelle Novey
October 10, 2010
A pdf version of this presentation with
footnotes is available
here
Our reading this morning came from the Biblical story of Noah. Noah
gets some last minute preparation
instructions, and then the weather goes haywire. Rains come,
flooding and practically destroying the
Earth. The floodgates of the sky broke open. And it was Noah's task
to save humanity and all of the
species of animals.
At the conclusion of this destructive and unnatural weather, God
sends a rainbow as a sign.
One of the most compelling commentaries I have read about that
rainbow—the rainbow that appears at
the end of the story—is that it is a sign of peace. Warriors who
fought with bows and arrows would turn
their bows upside down to send a message that they would do no
further violence. So maybe, God's
rainbow for Noah, and for the rest of us, is a setting aside of
destruction. The sky that brought such a
violent downpour is now the place, after the storm, where we see an
inverted bow.
How did Noah know that the flood was coming? Well, the story tells
us he was a righteous man. So my
guess is that he was sent a message, but that probably wasn’t enough
by itself. Noah heard the warning
because, when the message came, he was listening.
Today, we, like Noah, are starting to get the message that something
is beginning to go very wrong with
the weather.
We are getting this message from the natural world around us.
For example, spring is coming over a week earlier all over the
Northern Hemisphere. The cherry trees on
the Mall, for example, are blossoming a week earlier than they did
when they were planted in 1912. Our
cherry trees came from Japan, where the dates of blossoming have
been written down for over a thousand
years. From the Middle Ages until 1800, the blossoms came more or
less at the same time each year, give
or take. Then, starting in 1800, the blossoms have come earlier and
earlier. By the 1980's and 1990's, the
flowering times in Kyoto were earlier than at any time in the last
thousand years.
The gardeners here today may be aware of another sign of what is
happening to our world. On the back of
seed packets, there is a plant hardiness zone map, which tells you
when you can plant certain plants or
seeds, depending on where you live. The National Arbor Foundation
re-did this map a few years ago. And
what they found is that warmer temperatures have shifted the entire
map. If you put your finger on the
new map, you can see that where you live feels like it used to about
200 miles south just 25 years ago.
My guess is that our climate right here is now something like
Norfolk, Virginia was 25 years ago.
Some of you may be familiar with an invasive vine called “kudzu.” It
used to be known as “the vine that
ate the South.” It was contained to that region by cold winter
temperatures. But now, kudzu is not only
growing all over our region, it is well-established in southern
Illinois. And recently, kudzu was found growing in Ontario, Canada.
The vine that ate the south is now the vine that is eating the
continent.
Like Noah, we are getting a message from thousands of plants and
other natural systems. And we need to
pay attention, and to listen to what they are telling us.
Why are the cherry trees blossoming earlier, and why is kudzu now
happy growing in Canada? To talk
about why, I'm going to need to talk about climate change.
But this morning, I'm only going to speak directly about climate
change science for a few minutes,
because it’s a really scary thing to think about.
I have a little bit of experience with this, so I can tell you that,
in a few minutes, when I speak about the
problem of climate change, some of you are going to feel like you
don't want to be here or don't want to
listen. You may feel like you want to think about something else,
what you’re having for lunch, or
something that happened at work this week. You may feel like there
must be something on the internet
that would debunk everything I'm saying. You may think, "Who is this
woman? She's not a scientist. I want
to see some footnotes.
It's okay to have feelings when we hear about climate change. I have
them too. I would ask that, for the
next five minutes, you hear what I say about climate change as if;
open to this as if it were in fact really
happening, as if my facts are good, and as if all of us needed to
reconcile ourselves and our lives to this
reality.
When you feel those feelings of resistance, acknowledge them, but
please keep listening. We are here
together, all of us, in a holy community, so we are not confronting
these problems alone and when we
feel scared, we are feeling scared together.
Temperature measurements from around the world indicate that global
average temperature has gone up
1.4 degrees in the last 150 years. And because my husband is an
algebra teacher, I want to also mention
the importance of slope: as we get closer to the present, the slope
of that temperature line is getting
steeper and steeper. The temperature is going up faster and faster.
We may have less than 150 years to
adjust to the next 1.5 degree increase.
Out of nearly 160 years of records, the ten warmest years have all
occurred since 1997. The warmest year ever was 1998, followed by
2005 and 2003.
In a recent book by Katherine Hayhoe, a scientist from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
she explains what is happening to average world temperature this
way: "When we graph temperature over
the last two thousand years, we end up with a hockey-stick-shaped
line. The cooler, flat line endures for
almost two thousand years. This is the handle of the hockey stick.
Then, there's a sharp curve upward over
the last two hundred years — the blade of the hockey stick. This
depicts our recent warming trend ... This
warming is already greater than anything we've seen in the past,
going back one, two, or even five
thousand years.
The only explanation that can account for these changes is us. Our
burning coal for electricity, flying
airplanes, and animal agriculture, along with other activities, are
producing carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases. These gases trap heat. When the sun shines on the
Earth, the increasing these gasses in
our atmosphere seem to be trapping this heat rather than letting it
escape, and the accumulated heat-trapping
gases are warming our planet.
Scientists have said that the safe concentration of carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere is 350 parts per
million. The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere hasn’t gone much
higher than that for hundreds of
thousands of years. But we're up near 400 already, and rising.
What would it mean if we kept emitting these heat-trapping
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and
the Earth continued to warm? By now you've probably heard some of
what that would mean:
• The massive ice sheets of Greenland and west Antarctica could
melt, raising sea level by forty feet or
more over the coming centuries, eventually placing the world's
largest cities, including ours, below sea level.
• Many of the world's species of animals and plants that can't adapt
or move fast enough could be doomed
to extinction.
• Extreme draught could threaten as much as a third of the world,
drying up land that used to be farmland
and leading to widespread human hunger and suffering.
• Our children and grandchildren could be living in a world
increasingly characterized by severe droughts,
massive heat waves, and worldwide conflicts due to food and water
shortages.
I know this is difficult. Please stay open, and please keep
listening.
The injustice of this is hard to swallow, but the world's poorest
people who have done the least to cause
this problem, are the first ones to be experiencing its effects. One
estimate puts the worldwide death toll from climate change already
at 300,000 people a year, many of them in Africa.
Oliba Peter is a farmer in eastern Uganda. "The rain comes very late
here," he says. "And when it comes it
is rough, just like the wind. It’s not predictable, like it used to
be. We no longer get enough food from the
soil which has increased starvation. There are also many diseases
that come as a result of famine, whichaffect us very much.
Author Bill McKibben was in Dhaka, Bangladesh during an outbreak of
dengue fever. The mosquitoes that
carry this disease thrive at the new warmer temperatures. "I can
remember going to the hospital in
Dhaka," McKibben says, “and looking at this huge ward full of beds,
a couple of hundreds beds, and people
in every one of them just shivering away. And I remember thinking,
"God, is this is unfair. These people
have done literally nothing to cause this.... You know, the 4 percent
of us in this country produce 25
percent of the world's CO2. It's not perfect epidemiology, but the
moral math works for me. If there's a hundred beds in that
hospital, 25 of them are on us.
Okay, five minutes are over. Take a deep breath.
Like Noah, we’re getting the message that something is going very
wrong with the natural world.
But unlike Noah, we're in a very different situation. The Noah story
reflects a world in which
only God could mess with the weather.
But we are confronting the reality that is our society, and the
heat-trapping emissions we create when we
use coal-fired electricity, and fly in planes, and support animal
agriculture, that have been trapping heat
and causing the Earth to warm.
This speaks to the truth of the seventh principle of Unitarian
Universalist tradition, which talks about the
“interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” xvi We
have come to a time in history when
it turns out that we aren’t just dependent on the climate—the
predictable cycles of the climate are
dependent on us.
Today, we are called upon to be Noah, but only after we also
recognize that this time, we are the cause
of the flood. As the sky broke over Noah's head, the sky is breaking
in ours; but this time, it's us.
What are we supposed to do about this?
It is not too late to change course, to reduce the accumulation of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
and to prevent some of the most catastrophic consequences of climate
change. That's why I'm so grateful
to be in this community this morning. We're going to need everyone's
help!
Davies Memorial is one of hundreds of congregations right here in
our own community that are listening,
like Noah, to the warnings from our natural world. I get great
strength from seeing every day that caring
people in congregations of every faith across the DC area are
responding together to what they are
learning about climate change with great integrity and compassion.
So if you feel alarmed and agitated after hearing about the causes
and consequences of the climate
change problem, please, don’t direct that energy towards shutting
this out. Please choose today to direct
that energy into joining with others and taking action.
There are ways to respond personally. There are ways to respond
communally. And there are ways to
respond politically.
One place to start personally is with our own electricity use. The
coal-fired power plants that create half
of our electricity are the country’s biggest source of greenhouse
gas emissions. Could you wash the
laundry in cold water? Could you skip the dryer, and hang the
clothes up to dry on a line? Could you get a
professional audit and weatherization work to seal your home before
the weather gets cold?
Another place to take personal action is in transportation. Could
you carpool with someone to work, or
church? Could you bike or bus instead of driving?
Animal agriculture is responsible for about 18% of greenhouse gas
emissions Could you imagine eating
less meat?
There are ways to respond communally. Through the green sanctuary
program, and through work with
Greater Washington Interfaith Power & Light, Davies Memorial is
coming together as a community to
reduce the electricity use in this building and to make the seventh
principle central to your life together
as a congregation.
And there are ways to respond by speaking out.
After services today, you’ll have an opportunity to sign postcards
encouraging the EPA to protect
communities from coal ash – a toxic by-product of coal-fired power
plants. One of Maryland's dump sites
for toxic coal ash (generated by the Mirant Chalk Point Power Plant)
is dumped only a few miles from here
on North Keys Road in Brandywine.
And today, around the world, people are holding “work parties” to
take action on climate change in their
own communities, and ask our leaders to get to work as well. For
events taking place today in the DC
area, or to see photos of these events streaming in from around the
world, visit 350.org.
Of course, all of these responses require us to think about doing
something really hard: change. Just as
Noah had to listen, and stop whatever he had been doing to focus on
the task of building an ark.
It’s hard to change things about how we do the laundry, or how we
get around, or how we eat. It’s
difficult to change the way a church has “always” done things. And
it takes some courage to speak out for
a cause.
At the end of the Noah story, we read the rainbow promise, a promise
never again to destroy the Earth.
A rainbow looks like half of something. Half a circle. It is
practically an invitation to us to respond with
our own rainbow.
We will not solve the climate problem overnight, but we can make
today the day, that we make our own
rainbow promise. We can promise today to listen to what the natural
world is telling us. We can promise
to stay open to the possibility that we may have to change the way
we’ve been doing things to bring our
lives into greater harmony with the Earth.
We can promise to turn — to follow the example of that first
rainbow, a weapon of war turned upside
down. We need to promise, to turn away from our destructive
practices that we now understand are
destroying the sky.
This is our end of the rainbow deal. May the task of making and
keeping this promise teach us something
important about ourselves, and bring us closer to each other.
References
Nahmanides (12th Century Spanish rabbi), in his commentary on
Genesis 9:12. Expounded upon by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (Chief Rabbi of
Efrat) in his commentary on Parshat Noach, 5769. Both sources cited
in “The Rainbow and an Ethic of Sustainability,” by Jonathan Neril,
at www.canfeinesharim.org.
iPages 16-17 in Hayhoe, Katherine and Andrew Farley, A Climate for
Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. New
York, NY: FaithWords: 2009
Katherine Hayhoe, presentation to Interfaith Power & Light
affiliates, March 9, 2010.
Pages 108-109, A Climate for Change, Hayhoe & Farley, 2009.
Page 10, A Climate for Change, Hayhoe & Farley, 2009.
Pages 18-19, A Climate for Change, Hayhoe & Farley, 2009.
The Science of 350,” at
http://www.350.org/en/about/science
Page 23, A Climate for Change, Hayhoe & Farley, 2009.
Climate “Change Human Impact Report: The Anatomy of a Silent
Crisis,” Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF): 2009
Africa Talks Climate,” on BBC World Service Trust site:
http://www.africatalksclimate.com/reports/stories-soroti
The Moral Math of Climate Change,” on Speaking of Faith radio
program (show now renamed Being).
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2009/moral-math/
“Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options,”
from Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome:
2006.
Greater Washington Interfaith Power & Light helps congregations of
all faiths, across the DC area, to save energy,
go green, and respond to climate change. GW-IPL can be reached at
http://www.gwipl.org, or joelle@gwipl.org
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