I thought the science was settled…

I usually try to stay out of politics on my blog but this one goes right to the heart of caring for God’s creation.  Apparently, researchers at UW-Milwaukee have a different take on Climate Change then I’ve been hearing lately from denominational higher-ups and politicians

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.”Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate,” researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.”In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000.

The article goes on to ask the question about just how much human activity affects this shifting climate.  Sounds to me like climate researchers are not quite as sure as Mr. Al Gore.  If climate change is detrimental to humanity but we are not the cause, how does that change the current vein of environmentalism that seems to have captivated mainline Christianity?  Have we gone down the wrong path and lost our way caring for God’s creation?

Upon further reflection:  Why am I so worried about this being political when it should be a scientific and theological discussion about caring for God’s creation and how best to do that?

This entry was posted on March 16, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.