Thoughts on Global Warming

Al Sikes

In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists had concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950” (New York Times, February 3, 2007).

The most recent global warming report—this one from the United Nations Environment Program’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—escalated the forecasts of damage while concluding that humans could still act in amelioration. In the weeks following this report disparate dissenters renewed their claims that the warming changes are part of nature’s cycles. The dissenters declaim as reports, movies, papers, and the like rise like the proverbial flood tide.

The global warming issue has perplexed me as no other in my lifetime. And having spent almost half of my career life in government, public issue analysis is not an alien skill.

Weather clearly has a cyclical element. Indeed the complexity of weather and ultimately climate causation pulls many analyses into the field of chaos theory. Chaotic conditions are not easily analyzed. And the public, if it is to act decisively, will be required to make some rather abrupt and difficult changes.

Until recently, climate-effected policies were mainly debated in secular terms. Understandably, organizations representing people of faith have begun to cast global warming in biblical terms. I have always felt pushed at least in part by my faith to try and understand the risks and potential responses. Our dominion over the earth is a gift from God. Indifference is not an option.

But as the claims and counter-claims escalate, the debate is often polarizing. The divide is frequently expressed in heated partisan or ideological terms, and there is an expectation by the verbal combatants that their putative allies will adhere to the divisive dogma.

My general affiliations and sensibilities would suggest that I should be skeptical of both the claims and proffered solutions. Inviting the government into a whole new level of intervention is sobering. But I cannot confidently conclude there is little if any threat and cannot analytically prove the alarmists wrong.

Peter Kreeft, in commenting on Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager, notes, “The Wager is not an attempt to prove that God exists. It is not a new argument for the existence of God. Rather, it tries to prove that it is eminently reasonable for anyone to ‘bet’ on God, to hope that God is, to invest his life in God. It moves on the practical, existential, human level rather than the theoretical, metaphysical, theological level.”

Pascal said of man’s struggles with belief that “you must wager. There is no choice, you are already committed.” Pascal was speaking of the reality of death and the choice that reality demands. He then proceeded with a mathematician’s formulation paired with his own devout faith to argue that a belief in God was the only sensible wager.

I will not argue a given set of beliefs about global warming, its consequences and solutions, but drawing on Pascal, humankind has no option but to choose. We cannot afford the luxury of indifference. As Pascal might note: “Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.”  

Al Sikes, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, is a Trustee of The Trinity Forum. He formed Hearst Interactive Media and continues as a consultant to the Hearst Corporation, and is the founder and chair of the Reading Excellence and Discovery Foundation.

9 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Science and Technology, Wed 07 Mar 2007