Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier preaches the alternative faith of global warming:
Both Australia and South Africa are already experiencing the negative impacts of rising global temperatures.
“Rising global temperatures”? Not for some 18 years:
Never mind these cool facts. Freier adds:
Monday’s motions of the Church of England – together with Pope Francis’ ecology encyclical and many other faith voices – serve as a reminder that we have a moral responsibility to act on climate change.
Don’t we have a primary responsibility to the truth? But to fix the problem he’s exaggerated Frieir endorses a (non) solution that’s far more dangerous and drastic:
God bestowed on us the gift of life, but with that comes the obligation to be protectors of our earth, our environment, and our fellow man… This December, world political leaders will gather in Paris to sign a universal agreement aimed at limiting global temperature rises well below two degrees Celcius. As we look toward this historic summit, we need our leaders to demonstrate their commitment to achieving a unified and ambitious agreement that phases out fossil fuels...
But how does phasing out fossil fuels, in the absence of cheap alternative sources of electricity, help “our fellow man”? Doesn’t it condemn the poor to poverty? And what measurable good would such a phase-out achieve? Data please.
But Freier continues:
All too often, the effects of these changes are most acutely felt by vulnerable populations, who have done the least to contribute to climate change. Australia’s Pacific neighbours are already badly affected, with Kiribati recently asking that its people be moved to Fiji to escape rising sea levels.
Again, simply fact-free fear-mongering.
The truth is that most low-lying islands like Kiribati have been growing in size or stayed stable, and are not drowning:
New Zealand coastal geomorphologist Paul Kench, of the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, and colleagues in Australia and Fiji, who have been studying how reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans respond to rising sea levels. They found that reef islands change shape and move around in response to shifting sediments, and that many of them are growing in size, not shrinking, as sea level inches upward. The implication is that many islands—especially less developed ones with few permanent structures—may cope with rising seas well into the next century…
Their analysis, which now extends to more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, indicates that about 80 percent of the islands have remained stable or increased in size (roughly 40 percent in each category). Only 20 percent have shown the net reduction that’s widely assumed to be a typical island’s fate when sea level rises.
Some islands grew by as much as 14 acres (5.6 hectares) in a single decade, and Tuvalu’s main atoll, Funafuti—33 islands distributed around the rim of a large lagoon—has gained 75 acres (32 hectares) of land during the past 115 years.
As for Kiribati, the big problem is not global warming but over-crowding and thoughtless development on another island that’s actually growing in size:
But 2,000 miles to the west in South Tarawa, Kiribati’s narrow, six-square-mile capital island crowded with 50,000 people, the picture is much darker. Over the past half-century, residents of the 15 other Gilbert Islands have flocked there in search of jobs and better schools for their children… To minimize flooding, they built poorly designed seawalls that regularly collapse. Meanwhile, the government increased South Tarawa’s area by 19 percent over 30 years by building causeways between islets and creating new land over the reef with lagoon sand poured behind seawalls. The widespread erosion and flooding that resulted “is primarily due to [local] human activities,” which unless stopped will “increase erosion and susceptibility of the reef islands to anticipated sea-level rise,” one study concluded.
Though the study’s lead author is Naomi Biribo, a senior civil servant in Tarawa, [President Anote] Tong has ignored it and become a minor international celebrity by blaming the island’s coastal problems uniformly on climate change....
Scientists like Kench say that the people of Tarawa will face the same choices as other coastal denizens when the sea rises further. Either they allow the beach to move forward and they retreat inland to higher ground, or they build concrete seawalls and the beach is washed away… Or they can move back to their home islands. Aranuka, for example, has seen its population drop to 800 as many moved to Tarawa. It has the same land area as Tarawa, but instead of being long and thin, part of it is three miles by five on the lee side of the island—"Good protection against the waves,” said Kench. “I’d say it has a good chance of surviving climate change.”
Meaning well does not excuse making false claims and telling half-truths to promote a scare and a solution that would actually do far more harm than good.
