Our Climate Future is Open to Possibility
I'm an IPCC scientist seeking understanding from top theologians
This January, I responded to a survey from the U.S. Guardian sent to all Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead authors since 2018 about our planetary situation. You know the one. Less for those with less and more for those with more while the world burns and species go extinct. They asked, “How much temperature increase do I expect? How do I feel? What am I doing?”
Like most IPCC scientists, I expect the world to warm more than 1.5C (2.7F), the ambition set in 2015 by the Paris Global Agreement. Through reason and trust in science, I know what this means. Floods and fires. Not enough food or water for many. Disease. Migrations. Suffering and deaths. Most of the IPCC scientists who responded noted they feel despair. But I imagine and speak of possibility.
I speak of the future, including for the climate of our planet, as open. This isn’t hope or optimism, though I use to call it this. It’s faith and a knowing that comes from 30 years of studying how our planet works that led me into relationship with the Earth and the Divine. And this led me somewhere I never expected to go, theology school.
I’m an IPCC scientist seeking understanding from top theologians, the folks who study and talk about the nature of the Divine. About how we know. And about the Good. Across the world’s spiritual traditions, theologians offer that we will arrive at a reality far different than the one we measure with thermometers and predict with computer models.
“Our modern culture has acquired its most significant characteristics in its conscious and unconscious reaction to medieval culture. Its scientific discoveries made it impatient with the mythical errors of medieval religion. But it failed to realize that mythical descriptions of reality…have the virtue of giving men a sense of depth in life.” (Niebuhr, 1987)
At the Iliff School of Theology where I am a student, I’ve been reading The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, a collection of his sermons, speeches and essays. He was a 20th Century, American-born, public theologian of German ancestry, who offered ideas about where we are headed and how we’ll get there. He reminds us that in Europe during the transition from the Middle Ages into the Age of Reason, a key part of culture was left out, depth. We need depth. The kind of depth that comes from faith in ultimate concern, as Paul Tillich another German theologian describes it, that is not money, power or even science. Faith in the Divine or God for many. Faith in mystery, humanity or love for many more.
How did we get here to a place where many top scientists despair? During the Enlightenment, scientists sought independence from religion and from human bias. Francis Bacon proposed, and others supported, that systematic observations were essential and that these observations be done and described as if there was not a human doing the observing and deciding on the methods. Like many, Niebuhr claims that science is a powerful process for gathering information because of this independence. He notes that the social sciences are more constrained by the observer. While for the natural sciences, he states, “the scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested”.
Perhaps this is feasible, but I have not found it to be true for me. I’m part of the experiment, of reality, of the dance of conscious, subconscious and the Divine.
Theologians can get wordy. Niebuhr offers his idea of the dance this way:
“The field of historical events is too complex and too lacking in exact analogies in its recurrences to coerce the mind to a particular interpretation of the causal sequences, but, even if the mind could be coerced, the historical observer may always turn out in the end to be an agent in history rather than an observer of it, with a sufficient stake in the contests of history to defy conclusions which should compel the mind but will not compel the interested self.” (Niebuhr, 1987)
Though he writes this of history and social science, might it also be true of climate science, especially at this time? Scientists study what we care about, people and planet, plants, animals, beauty, and the future. We are not disinterested. We are human and it is our future too.
In 1992 as a college sophomore at Duke University, I chose to study biogeochemistry, because I saw it as equivalent to medicine and law. I saw science as an endeavor through which one could reduce suffering and guide humanity towards well-being. And through science, I have spent a lot of time in wild, remote, cold regions of our planet. It was in the wild parts of our planet, think tundra in Greenland and the mountains of Colorado, that for the first time I felt a oneness with the Earth. A belonging to this system of elements moving, constantly cycling.
In biogeochemistry, we study where elements accumulate such as the carbon in our atmosphere, and that this happens because the processes by which carbon moves out of the atmosphere are slower than by which it moves in. We are the mover of carbon into the atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels and alter the land and oceans from storing carbon to releasing it to the atmosphere. I’m part of the experiment. We all are.
Our future isn’t simple or determined. Nor do I believe people are broken or foolish. We are in process along with our planet, though we are in a bind right now.
Reading Niebuhr and Tillich led me to think about who are the wise. Are they only German? I write this humorously, as Niebuhr proposes “humor is a prelude to faith”. After years of citing German global change scientists, of which there are many, I’ve been smiling as I now read the writings of many German theologians. European thinking in reaction to medieval culture has been centered over the last three hundred years. Whose thinking should we center this century. Who are the wise?
The wise are we. All of us. Any of us. I see the talks and writings of theologians, and those of preachers and scientists, as prompts. They place ideas before us that can further reflection about ourselves, our planet and the Divine. Their ideas may drive us into despair. Or we may be irritated, especially when ideas are radically different from our own. However, I’ve learned to trust that what is rising in my thinking is mostly about me and is there to guide me toward what matters to me and know my responsibility to our world. This too is theology. To know ourselves, what matters, and pursue a Life Worth Living, as a group of Yale theologians describe it.
What if when we hear that 3C (5.4F) is likely, we choose love and connection? What will open for the future if we choose what we want for ourselves and our world?
Niebuhr stated, “It can be seen that love is the law of life, even when people do not live by the law of love.” Writing during the mid-20th Century, he maintains that we’ve broken this law and sent ourselves spinning into chaos and death. He claims that this is a consequence of sin, and we will be judged. Theology is a space for exploration and for disagreement. Theologians often don’t agree and I don’t agree with either this concept or its language. Sin is a crazy loaded word.
Error is how I see it. Error because we have forgotten ourselves and our capacity to center love, and therefore do not see that balance is essential. What’s needed for balance? Biogeochemists know that flow in can’t be greater than flow out or an element will accumulate where it is flowing into, such as carbon in the atmosphere. Balance depends on restraint more than accelerating carbon flowing out, because there is greater certainty and less risk with restoring processes to the pace of the Earth rather than accelerating others.
It’s choice. Freedom to err, then remember responsibility and choose restraint. To live from our wisdom and in balance by choosing less for oneself so that those who have less have more, including the earth herself. To choose not to extract, sell and use all the fossil fuels.
As a climate scientist in theology school, I answered the reporter’s survey different from those featured in the article. Science in partnership with faith, reason together with love, can offer possibility and “a sense of depth in life”. Like religion, science is a path to love and relationship. To faith in humanity and knowing that our future is open.