ATLANTA (ABP) — Christians who speak out for environmentalism can combat skepticism and end America's addiction to carbon fuels, Al Gore told 2,000 Baptists who gathered to hear him Jan. 31 in part of a three-day celebration of denominational unity.
“Don't tell me we can't solve this climate crisis. If we had just one week's worth of the money spent in Iraq, we'd be well down the road,” Gore told the loudly applauding crowd. “This is not a political issue. It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue. … All we need is the political will.”
BP photo by Cat Norman
Care for the environment is “a moral issue … an ethical issue … a spiritual issue,” said Al Gore at the New Baptist Covenant.
Gore, whose environmental work produced a popular movie and book called Inconvenient Truth and earned him a Nobel Prize, spoke for an hour and a half at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta, pounding out a message that related extreme poverty and global warming, addressed misconceptions regarding the climate crisis and offered hope for slowing and reducing carbon emissions.
Gore also called on Baptists, including Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter, who were in the audience, to face global warming as an opportunity to change human history — and to demand that political leaders do the same.
“In every crisis there is an opportunity for a reawakening and for a reassessment and for a change of course and an opportunity to do things better. And that's what the climate crisis is really all about.”
Gore, 59, began his Scripture-peppered talk by reminding the audience of the first photo of the Earth from space, which aired while the commander of the Apollo 8 mission — the first mission to circumnavigate the moon — read from the first chapter of Genesis on Christmas Eve in 1968. The picture started the environmentalism movement, prompting Earth Day and legislative action to reduce pollution and protect natural habitats.
Earth and Venus are planets similar in both size and distance from the sun, Gore said, but they have a distinct difference: the carbon on Venus is caught inside its atmosphere, causing surface temperatures there to hover around 850 degrees Fahrenheit. The carbon traps heat on Venus — a phenomena happening on a lesser, but increasing, scale on Earth.
Trapped carbon holds the sun's heat energy and warms the globe, Gore said. He showed pictures of glaciers in Switzerland, Italy, Alaska, Peru, Nepal, Argentina and New Zealand. Snow and ice levels in those glaciers were drastically higher 25 years ago than in photos taken recently.
Some fluctuations in annual Earth temperatures — even a brief warming period during medieval times — are normal, Gore said. But with nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded occurring in the last 10 years, the current climate changes are anything but normal.
What's more, if the fluctuations in temperature are natural variations in the sun's rays, it would be warmer outside the Earth's stratosphere as well. Instead, that space remains relatively the same temperature as always — apparent evidence that heat is being unnaturally trapped inside the stratosphere.
“Scientists are practically screaming to us that this is not natural,” Gore said. “I've never seen scientists in such a state of agitation, I'm telling you. When scientists use words like that, there's a signal on the mountain. The trumpet is blowing.”
Effects from the climate crisis will hit poor people the hardest, Gore told the Baptists, who had gathered to form a unified front against social ills. Snow and ice fields in the Himalayan and Hindu Cush mountains — 100 times bigger than the Alps in Europe — and they feed seven major rivers in Asia and Russia. Millions of people will lose access to water if those ice fields disappear, Gore said.
In the Western hemisphere, first-ever hurricanes in the southern Atlantic Ocean, stronger storms in the Gulf of Mexico, and reinforced tornados in the American Midwest all indicate a change in global climate.
Drought causes more damage to human life than flooding, but they're both increasing and attributable to global warning, Gore continued. In 2005, Mumbai got 37 inches of rain in 24 hours. Eighteen countries in Africa had major and record flooding in 2007, with Ghana bearing the brunt of it. Last October, Mexico had all-time record flooding, causing tens of thousands of people to relocate and more than $700 million in damages.
“When the natural world is changed by manmade pollution, the consequences can be more extensive than we realized, and the poor and the downtrodden are hit the worst,” Gore said. “We need to combine the struggle against climate crisis and the fight against extreme poverty.”
Destructive events caused by climate change are precipitated by an unheard-of population explosion, over-fishing, catastrophic warfare and “the way we think.” And actions that reduce poverty will neutralize those factors, Gore said.
He said improved health care, higher infant-survival rates, lower poverty in general, and education for girls and women all reduce the need or desire for large families. In turn, smaller families reduce demands on water and energy, he said.
And decreasing dependence on non-renewable energy sources like oil is a habit “we need to get off” anyway. To attempt to help developing countries without taking climate crisis into account will not help them, he added, and renewable energy is much easier to get into poor areas.
The United States can have a bright future in renewable energy, Gore said. Wind power and solar power are already competitive within the industry. And a 90-square-mile area in the desert in the southwest United States could provide 100 percent of the electricity the country needs.
“We have to have laws. We have to have a treaty. If anybody says they can solve it another way, they're not leveling with you,” he said.
Throughout the speech, Gore showed slides depicting statistics from declining animal populations and fracturing glaciers to urban developments in once-rural areas to the number of days in Switzerland that had frost on the ground in a given year. He said he wanted to erase three misconceptions about the warming: That there is still argument over whether it is actually happening, that protecting both the environment and the economy is impossible, and that the problem is just too big to rectify.
There is a small group of people with a lot of money that promotes the idea that scientific consensus on climate change does not exist, he said: “It is dishonest, ladies and gentlemen.”
Too many Christian leaders, “who don't really speak for me but claim to, have said global warming is not real, that it is just a myth,” Gore said. “When did people of faith get so locked into an ideological” position?”
that skepticism, rapid change can and will happen, Gore said, when Baptists speak out in the hope that they can effect large-scale change in national policies and reduce carbon emissions and energy waste
“The purpose of life is to glorify God,” the former vice president said. “And if we continue to heap contempt on God's creation, that is inconsistent with glorifying God.”