A Political Theology of Climate Change

Michael S. Northcott, Michael Northcott

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780281072323
• eBook ISBN: 9780281072330
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The failure of political institutions, including national governments and the United Nations, to mitigate climate change reflects the modern constitution of the nation-state as a cultural and secular, rather than created and providential, agency. Northcott constructs a new political theology of climate change that acknowledges the role of borders in the constitution of the nations, and their providential ordering under God as assemblies of persons who recognise particular duties to each other within those borders. Against this conception, a global economy promotes a state of conflict over access to basic natural goods. Elite agents use networks of power to act without reference to the common good or to fair access to natural resources.

1. The Geopolitics of a Slow Catastrophe

In the summer of 2012 a larger extent of the Arctic Ocean was open sea than at any time in the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens. The extent of ice loss from 2007 is far above predictions from climate models, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So extensive is the melting trend that some scientists predict the imminent disappearance of multiyear ice formation, and the disappearance of summer ice altogether between 2020 and 2035.1 Ice core evidence indicates that neither of the ice caps of the planet have melted completely, even in summer, in the last two million years.2 The effects of this much open water on the Northern Hemisphere are already unfolding. The temperature of the North Atlantic was two degrees Celsius above historic norms in 2012, which contributed to an extensive drought in North America that year. Warmer oceans sustain stronger storms. Hurricane Sandy was the largest storm system ever recorded in the North Atlantic. High pressure over Greenland, in a summer when satellites revealed that 97 percent of the surface area of Greenland’s ice was melting, pushed a late tropical storm inland toward the northeastern United States, causing a fifteen-foot tidal surge which destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, taking out electricity and transportation systems in much of New York City, coastal New Jersey, and Delaware. In the same year northern Europe had an exceptionally wet summer, while Iceland and Greenland basked in unprecedented summer heat.

While the earth as a whole had warmed only 0.8 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial era to 2013, a comprehensive study of archaeological climate ‘proxies’, which include ice cores and fossilised tree rings, combined with contemporary observations from satellites and ocean- and land-based thermometers, indicates that the pace of climate warming in the twentieth century is unprecedented since the end of the last ice age.3 At the same time the Mauna Loa record of CO₂ in the atmosphere revealed an unprecedented annual jump in atmospheric CO₂ of 2.97 parts per million (ppm) in 2012. While the period from 1750 to 1950 saw a rise in atmospheric CO₂ from 270 to 310 ppm, from 1950 to 2013 atmospheric concentrations had risen to 400 ppm. This rapid rise coincides with the consumer revolution in the Northern Hemisphere and represents what Will Steffen and colleagues call the ‘great acceleration.’4 The geophysical consequences of the great acceleration have given humanity an unprecedented material influence over the earth. In this book I argue that this influence, while unprecedented in earth history, has analogies with pre-scientific beliefs about the influence human beings believed they had over the climate, and nature, before the Copernican revolution. Indeed, such beliefs are still in evidence until the Enlightenment; the 1755 Lisbon earthquake provoked speculation on whether it was an instance of divine judgement on human activities in general or on the Portuguese.5 Arguably, then, climate change is taking human culture back into familiar cultural territory, even as it is taking the earth’s physical state into ‘new climatic territory’.6

Tangible evidence of a new climate state is most notable to contemporary Europeans and North Americans in increasingly dramatic changes in weather in the Northern Hemisphere, which natural scientists believe are a result of the influence of melting Arctic ice. Melting ice is affecting ocean currents, and especially the Gulf Stream, which brings heat from the tropics into northern Europe, and the related high atmosphere jet stream. This is producing ‘stuck’ weather patterns and a growing number of intense precipitation events, stronger storms, including snow storms, as well as heat waves and droughts.7 It is also provoking the release of quantities of subterranean methane beneath the Arctic Ocean and from subarctic lands and oceans. Methane has a shorter life in the atmosphere than CO₂, but it has a warming potential seventy-two times that of CO₂ for two decades after release. Weather balloons and satellites above the open ocean northeast of Norway and eastern Siberia in 2013 recorded substantial methane release from the ocean floor was under way in this area, sustained by the growing melt of surface ice.8 Speleological investigations of caves in Siberia reveal that climate-changing quantities of both carbon and methane were last released from Siberian permafrost 500,000 years ago; that event triggered global temperature change 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial global surface temperature average.9 Annual releases of carbon from frozen trees and soils in subarctic tundra would potentially exceed annual emissions of greenhouse gases emitted from human activities. So methane and carbon release from a melting Arctic and subarctic region potentially presage a catastrophic and far more sudden increase in global temperatures than the gradual existing warming from 1750 to the present of 0.8 degrees Celsius.

Another amplifying effect from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is that warmer atmospheric temperatures create more surface water condensation, which increases atmospheric water vapour. Atmospheric water vapour is presently rising at 1 percent annually, and this is promoting more extreme precipitation and storm events.10 At the same time rising land temperatures create more extreme heat events, enduring droughts, drying of soils and forests, and stronger wildfires. Together these events constitute a daily pattern of weather across the globe that already shows more extremes and marked effects on species productivity as well as human communities. Temperature extremes in the summer of 2012 on the American and Eurasian continents saw significant declines in agricultural production. In the U.S. a six-month drought reduced wheat, soy, and corn production by 20 percent. In northern Europe production of cereals, fruit, and vegetables was down because of summer-long rains and lack of sunshine. Poor summer weather not only affects the appearance and quantity but also the quality of fruit and vegetables because, as agricultural scientist Mike Gooding observes, ‘the nutrients available to the plant might well be reduced. We do know that rainfall, for example, will often cause leaching and loss of nutrients from the soil, and at certain times that will certainly reduce the amount of protein that ends up in the produce.’11

It was once thought that climate change would make temperate agriculture more productive, since elevated atmospheric CO₂ and warmer temperatures would increase crop productivity. Instead, growing weather extremes are already making farming more challenging, in temperate as well as semi-temperate and tropical zones. Consequently, although human food production was at record high levels in 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2012 warned of an ongoing rise in global food prices, which had already doubled since 2000, and suggested food production risks failing to meet rising consumption.12

A Slow Catastrophe

The connection between temperature rise and rising anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide was first accurately modelled by New York glaciologist Wallace Broecker in 1975, and there are now four Global Circulation Models run by supercomputers belonging to United States and United Kingdom government agencies that are increasingly accurate in tracking observed climate changes and in matching predictions to observations.13 According to these models, present rates of rising greenhouse gas emissions will see global temperatures rise by 4 to 7 degrees Celsius by 2100 compared to pre-industrial temperatures.14 But there remain substantial uncertainties as to how ‘sensitive’ the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions, and much depends upon the potential of feedbacks — such as the melting of frozen methane — to drag the system into a warmer episode.

A one-third increase in atmospheric CO₂ from pre-industrial levels of 270 parts per million (ppm) to 400 ppm in 2013 has provoked a globally averaged warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius and significantly elevated warming in the Arctic region and in North Africa. This slow historic increase in temperature is at first sight comforting. But it is occurring at a faster rate than study of climate ‘proxies’ such as ice cores and tree rings indicate has occurred before in planetary history. Nonetheless, the relatively modest rate of warming seems to indicate that the atmosphere and oceans have so far performed well in soaking up greenhouse gas emissions. But earth responses to atmospheric pollution are accelerating because the rate of greenhouse gas emissions growth has risen sharply since 1950, with an annual rise of 2 percent to 2000, 2.7 percent from 2000 to 2010, and 3 percent from 2011.15 Whereas atmospheric CO₂ levels rose at 1.5 ppm per decade from 1750 to 1950, from 1950 to 2010 they rose at an average of 14 ppm per decade.16 Though only a trace gas, the proportion of CO₂ in the upper atmosphere closely corresponds to changes in earth’s temperature, and the recent growth trajectory of atmospheric CO₂ has produced a decadal temperature rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius since 1960, whereas the rate of warming was below 0.02 degrees Celsius from 1750 to 1960.17 According to the World Bank and the International Energy Authority, three degrees of warming looks increasingly likely by mid-century, four degrees by 2080, and even six degrees of warming by century’s end with ongoing unrestrained growth in greenhouse gas emissions.18

NASA’s Chief Scientist James Hansen argues that the measures or ‘proxies’ of past climates, such as ice cores and fossilised tree rings, reveal that just two degrees of warming correlated to a largely ice free Arctic and a much reduced ice mass on Greenland. Greenland if melted would represent seven metres of sea level rise, inundating the first and second floors of many buildings in London, New York, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as the Nile Delta, most of Bangladesh, Louisiana, Florida, parts of eastern England, and the Netherlands.19 At six degrees of warming the Antarctic ice sheet will also begin to collapse. With much polar ice gone, the flood would rise two hundred feet, or a sixth of the way up the newly constructed Shard office block in London, standing as it does just a few feet above the Thames River. On the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions growth, by the end of the present century, or within the lifetime of my grandson Jacob, the planet will be a ‘new creation’, but not of the making of God or evolution.

While warmer conditions can provoke much more rapid sea level rise of one metre every twenty years, as they have in past deglaciation events, present sea level rise of only 3 millimetres a decade is hardly perceptible across the lifetime of a non-scientific observer. Hansen uses the analogy of a Christmas tree light to explain the perception problem of climate change. The contribution of human greenhouse gas emissions to climate heating is equivalent to the heat from two one-watt tungsten filament Christmas tree lights per square metre of the earth’s surface. The imperceptible quantity of extra heat per square metre sets up a contrast ‘between the awesome forces of nature and the tiny light bulbs. Surely their feeble heating could not command the wind and waves’?20 Climate science models drawing together historic proxies and real time observations of temperature change are confirming that this small heat load per square metre is translating into a large-scale but slow rate of global warming. But human beings have yet to modify their behaviours significantly in response. Other species, oceans, and land areas are, however, already showing observable responses. Satellite photography and spectography reveal a marked increase in the growing season in the subarctic region in the last thirty years, which shows up as a greening of the northern tundra in Siberia and Canada in spring and autumn as plants respond to increased CO₂ and warmer temperatures.21 Scientists also observe that species are gradually migrating in many places on the planet.22

Carbon Wars

While the Arctic region has experienced the most warming in the last fifty years, it is a largely uninhabited region, and hence the effects of warming in the region are more visible to satellites and shipping than to significant numbers of human beings. The changing topography of the ice affects the hunting practices of indigenous human communities in the Arctic Circle and the behaviours of polar bears, but there is so far no evidence of increased human suffering from Arctic ice melt.23 By contrast, drought and raised temperatures in North and East Africa are alread...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Geopolitics of a Slow Catastrophe
• 2. Coal, Cosmos, and Creation
• 3. Engineering the Air
• 4. Carbon Indulgences, Ecological Debt, and Metabolic Rift
• 5. The Crisis of Cosmopolitan Reason
• 6. The Nomos of the Earth and Governing the Anthropocene
• 7. Revolutionary Messianism and the End of Empire
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