While we're on the topic of Science and Religion, I was emailed this sermon which was given last Sunday by Charlie Moquin, at San Juan Unitarian Universalists Church in Farmington New Mexico.
Today's sermon will describe some of the spiritual benefits of global warming. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of global warming, but I also believe that driving while talking on a cell phone is safer than not, and that driving faster can increase your gas mileage. All of this is evidence that my head is not screwed on straight.
There is a Unitarian minister from Alabama who is going around preaching against global warming. I hope to meet her some day. In a church, where there is a sanctuary for my protection.
I am not alone in liking global warming; at last count there were fourteen of us (8 in Minnesota), and our numbers appear to double every few years, so your great grandchildren will probably agree with me. I have been a fan of global warming for over 25 years, before it even officially existed. The term 'Global warming' seems to be used everywhere, even in places where they don't speak English.

I remember sitting around a huge campfire at the age of seven wondering where the heat in the wood came from and where it went. I noticed that in winter the snow near the driveway melted sooner than the snow in the middle of the field because the driveway was black and heated up faster. Sometime soon, I learned that the earth was warmer during the dinosaur age by 15 degrees and that it cooled because the carbon dioxide was removed from the air in the form of fossil fuels. It became obvious to me that burning those fuels would raise the temperature of the earth back to where it was. It didn't take long to learn that coal was the dominant fossil fuel and that we had 500 years worth in the ground. So, if you take 15 degrees divided by 500 years, you get 3 degrees per century, which matches our best current estimates. Anyway, by the age of 10, anyone could have done billions of dollars worth of global warming research without thinking much about it.
My aunt Evelyn, the religious fanatic that we all have in our families, told me in no uncertain terms that since dinosaurs never existed, global warming wouldn't either. And that argument became the religious basis for opposition to the existence of global warming. When the movie Jurassic Park came out, my Aunt decided that dinosaurs did exist, because, I mean, they look so real in the movie. So while the theory of creationism evolved over the last twenty years, so did the theory of global warming. It went from not existing, to man's contribution was insignificant, then to something else, and then to this sermon, which states that global warming is good.
I need to talk about the physics of global warming so that you all will understand why I like it so much. The dominant greenhouse gas on Earth is water, and there really is no second place. I mean water really dominates our environment. Carbon dioxide is relatively insignificant. Only when the concentration of Carbon dioxide is doubled or tripled do we see some change in climate over the time span of centuries. Anyway, carbon dioxide only has a chance of becoming significant when there is very little water in the air--in other words, when it is cold. The main mechanism that carbon dioxide works is by heating the air a little bit, and that little bit of heating causes more moisture to evaporate and the moisture is what really causes the heating. Where there is already a lot of water in the air, the increase in temperature due to carbon dioxide will be minimal.
I calculate that for every degree increase in temperature at the equator, there will be a 30 degree increase in temperature at the poles. So, when people talk about an average temperature increase, they are primarily talking about a huge temperature increase at the poles and minor increases at the equator.
In effect, global warming will make the planet more uniform in temperature. This means that besides the poles heating up more than the equator, the winters will heat up more than the summers, and nights will heat up more than days. The planet Venus, which is most famously globally warmed, has a uniform temperature from poles to equator, even though it is closer to the sun and is virtually identical to Earth in most other respects.
Uniform planetary temperatures will make hurricanes less severe, because hurricanes happen when warm water meets cold air. We blamed Global Warming for the incredible number of hurricanes in 2004, but in actuality, the lack of hurricanes the next two years were due to global warming. You didn't hear anything about global warming on hurricanes the next year.
The United States uses more energy for heat than air conditioning, so global warming will decrease our energy dependence on foreign oil.
The growing season is often limited by last and first frosts, both of which typically occur at night. Global warming will warm the winters and nights so that the growing season will be extended substantially. You may have read that global warming will harm food production. That is a lie. Scientists looked at 18 different food plants and found two that would be harmed by global warming and focused their reports on those two. Wheat has had substantial gains due to global warming already because wheat is grown in colder climates.
It was reported that California grows the most avocados and that global warming will decrease California avocado production. Both of these statements are true. The conclusion that global warming will harm avocado production is false, because avocados will simply grow more in Oregon and Washington.
There is an argument that global warming will wipe out any species unable to move north quickly enough to stay cool. That is true for any species unable to move north at a rate of about one mile per year. Trees can move north faster than one mile per year.
Unless there is nowhere north to move, like the Polar bear. Polar bears: it's too early to use the singular. We keep hearing about polar bears. Yup, they're gonna die. Conservatives made fun of Al Gore's documentary depicting a drowning polar bear, until the New York Times reported that a polar bear drowned last year. The thing is, for every pound of polar bear that goes extinct, I predict four pounds of brown and grizzly will move into the area. Nobody seems to care about these unborn brown bears.
If global warming were reversed and the planet started to cool, then many more species would go extinct. So what we have here, is fear of climate change. I don't want extinction any more than any man.
This increase in temperatures at the extreme latitudes means that huge tracts of land that are currently uninhabitable will become habitable. Canada is the second largest country by land mass, but has only the population of California. I grew up during the cold war and heard stories of soviet dissenters being sent to Siberia, presumably because it was cold there. Global warming will heat up Canada and Siberia, enable entire populations to shift north, opening up literally millions of square kilometers to agriculture and habitation. Costa Rica was ranked the happiest place to live on the planet by three different measures. One reason given: it is warm there.
With all these benefits to global warming, then why is there a push to demonize global warming? The answer is: the Carbon tax. Here we have a situation where the public is in favor of a completely new tax revenue without any real idea of how to spend the money. Politicians love when people want to collect taxes without indicating how that money should be spent.
You may have heard that global warming will lead to increased desertification, meaning more deserts. In general, that is also false. Deserts are caused more by lack of rainfall than evaporation. Warmer weather will carry water farther and over taller mountains before it precipitates out. The Sahara desert was at its maximum size at the end of the last ice age, when it was cold. I calculate that the Sahara will shrink 40,000 square miles after 12 degrees of heating. This gain of 40,000 square miles, coincidentally, is the amount of land that I calculate we will lose due to rising oceans.
At the peak of the global warming scare, oceans were predicted to rise 1000 feet over ten years. I have a friend who bought a second home near the western border of Massachusetts because she was afraid she would lose her primary home in Boston. Now the prediction is that the oceans will rise ten feet over one thousand years. My friend is trying to sell her second home.
But even those ten feet may not last for long, because it will start snowing in the largest desert in the world: Antarctica. In simple terms, it is too cold in the middle of Antarctica for it to snow because any water in the air would have precipitated out before going that far inland. With global warming, there will be more snowfall accumulation there. So well after the glaciers have melted at the north pole, snow will continue to accumulate at the south pole, causing ocean levels to drop.
Some people claim that a one foot rise in ocean levels over a century will devastate buildings and economies near the shore. The fact is that over a century, a building will be destroyed due to erosion, lightning and wind way before rising oceans. Also, when those buildings are gone, the next row of buildings becomes more valuable because now they are the closest ones to the beach. And the buildings behind them gain value because they are closer to the beach, and so on, such that the net economic loss is equivalent to losing one row of buildings far from the shore.
What is the average planetary temperature? 58 degrees Fahrenheit, or 14 degrees Celcius. How warm is this room? Why isn't this room 58 degrees if 58 degrees is so comfortable? If we were in a room and I told you that we were going to raise the temperature of the room from 58 to 60 degrees, do you think it would cause life changing catastrophes? The same people who tell you that specific plants and animals will go extinct with a one degree change over a century are talking about plants and animals that have to survive one hundred degree changes every year from winter to summer.
The title of this sermon is the spiritual benefits of global warming, and I'm getting close to discussing that, I promise you. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon from the ground and that carbon starts off dead. In the form of carbon dioxide it is still dead. But somehow, through the miracle of photosynthesis, plants are able to turn dead carbon dioxide into living tissue that either we or our food eats. Global warming means more plants, which eventually means more animals. Burning fossil fuels creates more biomass.
Our seventh principle is: "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." This brings me to my first axiom on our interconnected web of existence: Life must exist for there to be an interdependent web of existence. It could be considered a corollary to the anthropocentric principle, but the fact remains that there is no interdependent web on the moon. If we find that there are isolated pockets of bacteria living on Mars, then that would imply a very weak web, which brings me to my next axiom of interconnected web of existence: More life is better. Again, global warming means more life on this planet.
You'll hear that global warming means more allergies and insects and everything bad associated with warm weather, but the fact remains that when people retire, they sever their family ties and move from Ohio to Florida during the winter months, not the other way around. If Ohio had been warmer during the winters, then I might have seen my grandparents more.
Here are some personal examples of how global warming could have help people spiritually this winter. My ex-girl friend in Massachusetts hit black ice and crashed her car. She had to cancel plans to visit her parents in Tennessee while the car was getting repaired. Church last week was cancelled in Andover, MA because of snow. But to be fair, Church in Salt Lake City is cancelled every summer because of good weather.
I wanted to take my daughter camping after this last Christmas, but couldn't because the temperature was in the single digits and I didn't want her to get hurt. So I went alone. Then I found that the road leading to the trail head was closed due to snow. My objective was to hike for an hour and then go hot-tubbing in some geothermal hot springs. I probably would have been hot tubbing alone because most people are sane enough to forego standing naked while dripping wet in negative temperatures.
After that, as many of you know, I went hiking in the Arches National park alone in the middle of the night on New Years Eve morning. There was nobody there. Try going four hours in Arches national park during the summer and not seeing anyone. Anyway, I stepped on some snow on slick rock and almost slid off a cliff at the base of the delicate arch. I remember accelerating towards the abyss and using my eyeglasses as an anchor. That's why I'm wearing these prescription safety glasses while reading this sermon. Since the slope becomes more intense as you get closer to the edge, there is the possibility that some divine intervention was involved. Maybe dying from slipping on ice just a couple of weeks before giving a sermon on the benefits of global warming would have caused a space-time discontinuity.
More recently, I was over to Asa and Sara's house, and their neighbor, Sasha, was alone outside smoking. During the summer, several of us sat outside socializing.
Well, that about ends this sermon on the spiritual benefits of global warming. I hope you liked it. And for those of you who are convinced that I'm an idiot for thinking that driving faster can get you better gas mileage, I have this final question for you: "Which car gets better gas mileage, one that is idling its engine while standing still, or one that is going seventy miles per hour?"
God bless you all.
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