Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Jesus and climate change

This week is Jesus Week at University of Queensland. Several student christian groups sponsor a series of talks that aim to stimulate people to ask "Who is Jesus?"

Today I attended an excellent talk by John Cook, "Jesus and Climate Change". A similar talk can be watched here. John is founder of the blog, Skeptical Science. He first described why he cares about climate change. It is not just an environmental issue but a social justice issue. The people who have contributed least to global warming are those who will be affected the most. Furthermore, people in these poor countries have the least resources to adapt to the human induced changes [droughts, rising sea levels, increased flooding, ...].
John then discussed how Biblical passages such as Matthew 25 and Amos 5, challenged him as a Christian to be concerned about justice for the poor.
Cook's Christian commitment surprised one columnist in the Guardian.

Recently John was lead author of a paper

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature

that concluded that 97 per cent of the 11,000 plus scientific papers published in the past twenty years supported human-induced global warming. This paper was tweeted by President Obama and led to a very funny and effective skit by John Oliver!

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