Going The Wrong Way - Faster

Today, we’re continuing in the series we started last week, looking at items that have been in the news recently and thinking about how we respond to them as Christians.

This week, we’re going to look at some items that have been in the news recently, related to global warming. I’ve titled this talk, ‘Going the wrong way – faster.’

That’s the situation when it comes to global warming. The world is going the wrong way -0 and we’re going the wrong way faster. It isn’t good news. As Christians, it shouldn’t distress us. But we need to think through how we will respond to it.

I think it will help if I give you an analogy.

Occasionally it happens that a motorist makes a mistake and drives down a motorway the wrong way. This is a picture of someone driving the wrong way down a motorway. It was in 2020, on the M4. The person was a nurse. She drove seven miles the wrong way, and she was drunk. Fortunately, it didn’t end in an accident.

If you should ever make such a mistake, the advice is, slow down, turn on your hazard lights, and pull over to the nearest safe place as soon as possible.

How is this an analogy for global warming? The advice for a driver is to slow down and stop. The advice to prevent global warming is, reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero. And then start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Continuing to emit large quantities of carbon dioxide is going the wrong way. But recent news reports tell us that the world isn’t just doing that: the world is emitting even more carbon dioxide than before. It’s going even faster the wrong way. It’s bad news for the world.

Let’s look at some news reports which tell us that.

The first news item was on 17th January. The BBC reported, ‘Levels of the most significant planet-warming gas in our atmosphere ROSE MORE QUICKLY THAN EVER PREVIOUSLY RECORDED last year.’ The gas the BBC was talking about is, of course, carbon dioxide.

In 2019, most countries of the world reached an agreement in Paris. They would cut carbon emissions by 43% by 2030. That would be a huge reduction! It was an ambitious goal. How much progress do you suppose the world has made in the last five years? Do you think the world has achieved the 43% reduction? The answer is that the world hasn’t achieved any reduction at all. Carbon emissions have not fallen. They have risen. And last year, there was a greater level of carbon emissions than ever before. So much for achieving this goal. The world continues to go the wrong way – and it’s going even faster the wrong way.

The second news item was on 10th January. Carlo Buontempo, the director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, had the figures for global temperature for 2024. The past decade has been hot. The last 10 years have been the ten hottest years on record. You can see that on this graph. Every single month in 2024 was either the warmest or second warmest for that month ever recorded. And last year was the hottest year on record. Buontempo spoke to the news agency Reuters. But he didn’t just say, ‘2024 was hot.’ He said, ‘The trajectory is just incredible.’ It wasn’t just the fact that the world was heating up that astonished him. It was the RATE at which the world was heating up that astonished him. There was no sign at all that the measures the world had been taking were bringing global warming under control.

Our car is heading the wrong way down the motorway. It’s going fast, and it’s accelerating.

The third news item was a week ago, on BBC news. It began with the newsreader, Ben Brown, reporting on the wildfires in California. He then went on to talk about global warming. He got a professor involved. Let’s see what they have to say.

Ben Brown:

‘Well, with that evidence that climate change has played a significant role in the Los Angeles fires, new figures show that last year was the hottest since records began. Scientists from the European Climate monitoring body say temperatures were 1.6°C higher than the pre-industrial average. They say that it shows that a key warming threshold of 1.5° that was agreed in Paris 10 years ago is now in danger of being permanently breached.

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Well, how worried should we? We can speak to the climate scientist Richard Betts, who is head of climate impact research at the Met Office, also a professor at the University of Exeter. Thank you very much for being with us. We were told, you know, 10 years ago when all this was being discussed in Paris, that this figure of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, you know, we couldn't breach it. Now we have breached it. So how alarming is this for the world, for the planet?’