Mark Dowd's address to the URC General Assembly

Image by Mark Knobil.

I’m pleased to be with you today to address you at my first ever URC General Assembly. As some of you will know, I was, until recently, a TV presenter for Channel 4 specialising in religious affairs. Last year I presented a programme called GOD IS GREEN and then rather like Jonah, I took my eye off the ball and woke up, finding myself inside an NGO called Operation Noah.

Operation Noah was set up in 2001 and is a faith-based movement that campaigns for leadership on climate change. The theme of your conference this weekend is “pilgrimage.” Today, I’ve been asked to offer you some reflections on what the Earth’s changing climate might mean for the hundreds of millions of people in other lands threatened by global warming.

I’m not sure how fashionable it is to believe in the Devil these days, but if Satan did want to set humanity the stiffest of tests, then it would be harder to think of one than the present climate conundrum. A species addicted to fossil fuels and cheap energy – a process that emits billions of tonnes of invisible gases. Not only that, its cumulative effect appears so distant and intangible. Yet at the moment it begins to bite really seriously, such is climate change’s slow but menacing advancement, we may well have passed many of the so-called tipping points that make mitigation of its worst features impossible. In World Wars the enemies may be Hitler, or Napoleon – easily identifiable targets. But in this case, it’s quite simply our own way of living and our fractured relationship with the fragile beauty of God’s creation.

Not that greenhouse gases are intrinsically evil. Far from it. Without CO2, nitrous oxide and the like, this planet would have an average temperature of minus eighteen degrees. The problem is that we’ve boosted the warming effect of this huge duvet cover around the surface of the planet by around 30% in just over a hundred years. In climate history terms, that is some acceleration. And these emissions linger up there for hundreds of years. Moreover, the atmosphere links all of humanity. Remember all that talk in RE classes about the “family of man” and how “we are all one under God?” Well the fact that power stations in Texas can effect the climate in Bangladesh is physical proof of that fact – we are all connected – my decision to fly or not, insulate my house and spread the green gospel, or not, WILL impact on others. Climate is a deeply moral and ethical issue.

So where have we got to and where are we headed? Global heating of just under one degree in the last hundred years doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s enough to set in train the bleaching of coral reefs, the retreat of most of the world’s glaciers, advancing loss of Arctic sea ice and a record background rate of extinction of thousands of plant and animal species. But predicting the future is an area of huge uncertainty.

The IPCC predict anything between a rise of 1.1 and 6.4 degrees by 2100. That’s a bit like me saying, “I think the Tories will win the next election with a majority between 2 and 200 MPs” – huge margins of error! That’s because there are so many uncertainties – for example, what will be the impact of so-called “global dimming”, the possible cooling effects of cloud formations? But one thing the IPCC do make clear is that carrying on as we are – so called “business as usual” – will lock us into a rise of around 4 degrees. In planetary terms that is huge. It would mean a totally different planet. Remember that during the last glacial period, when most of northern Europe was covered by miles thick solid ice, the average global temperature was only five degrees Celsius cooler than today. The conditions that make life possible for us at all are based on very precise and carefully calibrated parameters which we mess with at our peril.

And of course, we are putting more pressure on the Earth’s fragile ecosystems because of sheer weight of numbers. By 2050 the population of the planet will have risen from six billion to just over nine billion people. The academic, Norman Myers, has calculated there will be 200 million so-called climate migrants by 2050. This has become an “accepted” figure but, of course, can only be a rough estimation. It’s far from a precise scientific measurement.

And we’ll see just why we expect so many people to be on the move. Climate change will bring a sharp polarisation of dryness and wetness. That’s already happening now: just ask those in South Eastern Australia and California about drought for example. But by 2050, with business as usual, the areas of the world under constant drought will rise five-fold from two percent to ten percent. An area like sub-Saharan Africa, already starved of much needed rain will get its annual precipitation reduced by a further ten percent.

But countries which already struggle with heavy rain can expect an intensification of rainfall patterns. India and Bangladesh are predicted to get an increase of twenty per cent precipitation – not evenly spread out over time, but in intense downpours. Human beings are massively vulnerable to these abrupt changes because of exactly where we live as a species.

One of the great uncertainties about global warming is the expected sea level rise. Some sixty per cent of human beings live in coastal cities. We have no idea at present what rises we can expect, though it’s fair to say that there is more anxiety about the prospects for Greenland and the West Antarctic ice shelf than ever before due to recent observations about glacial earthquakes and signs of disintegration. But even a rise of just one metre would affect more than 14 million people in Bangladesh. In Egypt, more than six million people would be displaced in the Nile Delta. In the Caribbean islands, a full half of the total population lives within one and a half kilometres of the coast. We are very vulnerable.

This is already having an impact. The India–Bangladeshi border looks like the perimeter of a prisoner of war camp. The wall built by the Israelis to keep out Palestinian militants might have grabbed all the world’s headlines, but slowly and quietly, the Indian government have been rolling out this structure steadily so that it will one day cover all 2500 miles of the border area. Is this the kind of structure we can expect to see more of in the decades ahead?

I talked about vulnerabilities, but of course, we all know there are huge disparities. It’s all a bit of a lottery depending on where you were born and where you live on the planet. In 1991, a huge hurricane, Hurricane Gorky, battered the Chittagong area of Bangladesh. It left 138,000 dead and 10 million homeless in its wake. Now look at what happened a year later in Florida. Hurricane Andrew battered the coastline causing a huge 43 billion dollars of damage to property off the coastline of Florida but only 65 lives were lost as a result. Superior infrastructure and fortifications protected the vast majority of people.

That there are and will be changes to our climate is certain: what remains to be seen is how severe they are, and much of that still depends on the actions we take to curtail fossil fuels in the next few years. Migration is going to be a key feature of this new world and this is not just a process limited to the human species.

Already we have seen species like the arctic tern change its flight patterns to try and adapt to the changing seasons and conditions. But there’s one big difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. To move between different chunks of the earth’s surface, humans nearly always need a passport - and if it doesn’t have the right stamp inside it, it can lead to problems. This is all the consequence of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which divided up Europe into sovereign states, each duly responsible for policing the movement of populations both into and out of their tightly controlled lands.

This system is going to come under enormous pressure in the decades to come. For a start, we’re going to need new agreements on words like "refugee". The presently accepted definition goes back to 1951:

"A refugee is a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."

This is not a system that can accommodate a refugee due to changing climate. Climate is not within the scope of this definition. Will the international system move to do so or will it stick its head in the sand, fearful that new definition may usher in new and awkward obligations? Will our churches have to pressure our diplomatic leaders to do so?

One country which did try to make the term "environmental migrant" an accepted term in law was Sweden. Swedes, it appears, lead the way on all thing progressive. Whether it be renewable energy or spending on public services, the Swedes, it seems are always there first. They defined such a person as “someone in need of protection after an environmental disaster.” All well and good until on closer inspection, following a parliamentary question about what would constitute a such a disaster, the answer came back: "Something exceptional like 'a nuclear accident.'"

There are going to be huge dilemmas ahead – make no doubt about it. Think of the Gospel and the parable of the talents – to those to whom much is given, much will also be expected. Well, there are some who predict that we here in the UK might not see the worst of climate change. People have spoken about unlikely places becoming holiday resorts and of places like the outskirts of Grimsby and Hartlepool becoming exotic vineyards. If the UK does get away lightly, what responsibility does that leave us with towards the million of migrants queuing up to come here – the land where the fossil fuel-inspired cradle of industrialisation experienced its "take off"?

Within countries experiencing climate stress, should all our attention be on the ones who want to re-settle? After all, aren’t these people, the more mobile, likely to be the stronger, the better off. Could we be encouraging an effective brain drain and leave those left behind even worse off?

Of course, the story of people on the move is nothing new. Some of the great religious epics and dramas are about the relationship between human beings and their planetary surroundings – Moses, when he wasn’t having his own personal global warming experience in a one to one with a burning bush, witnessed one of the most extraordinary consequences of a temporary climate change when he led the Israelites out of slavery from Egypt towards the promised land. And there are of course those who put their faith in God to such an extent that they cannot conceive that He will allow the worst to happen. “I don’t believe there will be big sea level rises,” I heard one man say recently, “because after the Flood, God said he wouldn’t do it again.” But think on it. I say leave God out of this. I do not believe in a capricious Creator with his hands on all sorts of climate levers. If I believe in free will then the Creation must be allowed to follow the course of its own processes. We have been taking part in an almighty experiment with the atmosphere. If we bring this on ourselves, we cannot lay it at the door of God.

When Moses received the 613 laws of the Torah on Mount Sinai, he was a conduit for the beginnings of a huge stride forward in religious ethics. For although the Israelites were the chosen people, they were also told in plain terms that they had no basis for simply looking after their own.

"You shall not oppress a stranger since you yourselves know the feeling of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt," it says in the book of Exodus. And in Leviticus:

"The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself."

Imagine these words applied to a Britain in forty years time: a society with a record number of single owner occupiers with spare rooms and capacity and the prospect of throngs of homeless individuals seeking shelter. Will it be Fortress Britain or will our country become a haven for the dispossessed? I’m reminded of a really great book by Nick Hornby: no not Fever Pitch or High Fidelity but a lesser known novel called How To Be Good. It’s a modern classic. In it, a cynical, embittered newspaper hack suddenly discovers goodness and faith and turns his family world upside down. Much to his children’s annoyance he gives away their surplus toys and laptops to the needy, the family income plummets as he ceases work and then he almost gives his wife a nervous breakdown by inviting down and outs into the home to feed and clothe them. She thinks the neighbours will dismiss him as a lunatic, but to her horror at a street party, person after person comes up to her to speak of their total admiration for her amazing husband. Their relationship eventually becomes a casualty of the man’s conversion: she cannot live with this man’s eccentric yet inspired behaviour.

Maybe this radicalism is what Jesus was aiming at in these strangely provocative words. Hating our own family and even our own lives is what Jesus demands in service to God. These words have often puzzled me, but I think Jesus’ message is clear. When the chips are down, our ethical loyalties have got to go far beyond narrow considerations of genetics, family blood ties and the tribe. It’s really easy rooting for your own. The real challenge is the stranger: those people like the poor at the edge of the city gate in Amos’ eighth century BC world: those who craved inclusion and justice.

And Jesus' universalist message is no more powerfully expressed than in the classic passage in Galatians: in the new Jerusalem, all the distinctions we make, our categories of insider/outsider, deserving and undeserving - they get smashed to pieces as we are asked to see ourselves as one under the Dominion of God through his Son. It’s beautiful but it’s a tough, tough call to answer…some would say, near impossible. Yet our neighbours will be plentiful in the years ahead. In 33AD, the time of Jesus' death there were approximately 300 million of us on the planet, by 2050 that figure will be 9.2 billion.

What this inexact vision of the future surely presses upon us is the need for action NOW. Money and time spent on mitigation in the present rather than waiting and waiting and hoping we can spend our way out of the damage done in the years ahead. People talk of three scenarios:

The Good: we curb greenhouse gases effectively and keep global warming to less than a two degree rise.

The Bad: we try but don’t do as well as we might with bigger climatic impacts, resulting in serious damage to the earth’s ecosystems. And…

The Ugly: with emissions going through the roof, no international agreements and sixty or seventy years from now, seismic shifts in the pattern of weather, the like of which humanity has never witnessed before.

These are the choices that lie before us.

Operation Noah has campaigned for a radical target of cutting emissions by 90 percent by 2030. It looks a daunting prospect, but there are those who believe such a target is possible. Indeed there are some like Zero Carbon Britain who go even further. It would involve a total paradigm shift of our society and our way of living: colossal investment in renewable technologies instead of massive military spending on submarines and tanks, the rationing of fossil fuels and the pooling of transport options, flying a one in every six year treat, locally sourced food, urban parks used for vegetables, concreted tarmacs smashed up and land rediscovered, a place for carbon capture and storage in locally sourced heat and power systems, the increasing use of the hydrogen cell. Above all, going more slowly – a place for reflection, ease and silence in our lives. That might not sound like an election winning manifesto now, but the fuel and food crises are just the start of a long and very bumpy journey that human beings are going to have to face as we re-evaluate our relationship with a planet from which we have stolen too much for too long.

The Operation Noah website is a mine of information on climate science, theology and politics: all three legs of that tripod are necessary if we are to move forward with hope in our hearts.

Register with us – come and join us! For more than anything, we remind ourselves that God is always with us and that we only need ask and we will receive. The question is: dare we ask lest we become frightened of the answers we might be given?