Christian Values

Reuters reports that 20 states have now enacted "religious freedom" laws, and I see from CNN that the Arkansas senate has just passed a similar law. Finally, I have put my finger on what bothers me about those laws.

It appears that these laws are at least partly being supported by conservative Christians who want to preserve the rights of business owners to deny service to people whose lifestyles disagree with their Christian faith. It's an effort to guarantee these business owners the right to uphold their Christian values.

So just exactly what "Christian values" might these be?

The one constant in these news stories seems to be that conservative Christians want to preserve their right to tell other people what they cannot do.

Jesus, by contrast, focused almost entirely on prescriptions for what I should do. He never once encouraged me to try to control the behavior of any other person.

Let's recall Micah 6:8 (NIV): "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Similarly, Matthew 7:1-2 says, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

God does not require us to make a list of things that others are not permitted to do. Rather, he wants us to follow a fairly simple list of what we, ourselves, should do.

Those who focus on thou-shalt-not pronouncements about the behavior of others, ignoring the thou-shalts that Jesus actually spoke, are not trying to uphold Christian values.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Change

Today's news has two articles related to global warming:

• From Discovery News, "Snow Now Melts In Wyoming Two Weeks Early"
• From Reuters, "Study Shows Acceleration In Decline Of Antarctic Ice Shelves"

Of course, the first article is not necessarily related to global warming. Any one climatic observation or weather event may or may not be a part of the overall suite of climate mechanisms that we call "global climate change" or "global warming". But Wyoming is not the only place that's warming earlier in the spring or cooling later in the fall. Many years ago, when Kathleen and I went to our kids' Saturday morning YMCA soccer games, we usually had to wear a jacket. Nowadays, Saturday mornings in Houston during soccer season are rarely that cool.

The second article is most definitely related to climate change. The disappearance of floating ice sheets does not, in itself raise sea levels. But this disappearance has two consequences: First, as the article mentions, the missing sea ice provides less resistance to the advance of Antarctic glaciers, which can now move faster, dumping into the ocean vast quantities of ice that is not already floating. That will indeed raise sea levels. Additionally, the missing ice is replaced by open water, which is an amazingly good absorber of solar heat. That heat warms the water, reducing the opportunity to form new sea ice. It also raises the temperature of the air, delivering energy to melt Antarctic glaciers.

This is one of the situations that has climate scientists very apprehensive. It's exactly the sort of positive feedback mechanism that can, without warning, begin a runaway change that happens far too fast to react to in any useful way. If we cross one of these tipping points, the human race will have little ability to move the climate back toward what it had been, regardless of whether we actually try.

At present, many of our political leaders are actively avoiding any belief in the existence of climate change and resisting all efforts to spend any money to do anything about it.

Colder Europe Due to Global Warming?

ScienceDaily has an article about recent findings from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, showing that the thermohaline circulation is slowing down, leading to an expectation of cooler weather for Europe -- likely resulting, at least in part, from global warming.

The article suggests that melting of Greenland's ice cap is a probable cause of the circulation slowdown. This idea is nothing new. Climate scientists have realized, for some time, that this is a possibility. Some believe that this has happened before, far distant geologic time.

It's called "thermohaline" because this circulation is driven by heat and by the salt content of the ocean. Salty water is denser than fresh water.  Greenland's ice melt, thus, floats on top of the saltier water coming northeast from the Gulf of Mexico. If enough fresh water invades the northern Atlantic, that northeastward flow is slowed or even halted. In what humans have come to think of as normal operation, this thermohaline circulation takes warm water far into the North Sea, warming Europe. Eventually, the increasingly salty water (because evaporation leaves the salt behind) is so dense that it has no choice but to sink to the depths of the sea and return southwestward. In the diagram above, we see that this circulation is worldwide. 

If the north Atlantic branch of the circulation shuts down, the result will be a colder Europe, thanks to global warming.