Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Context

Notes on The Coming Global Biogeochemical Crisis

Context

For the last week, I have felt as if I do not have my priorities straight. Bls is right to say that there is no crazy like church crazy and nothing crazier than some piddling young layman in a liberal diocese in a liberal Province blogging about matters that hypothetically more expert people are doing to death. And when I started reading Rev. Sam the Elizaphanian’s series of parish fora and when I heard Sunday Worship last week, I realized that there are some matters on which I do have a unique perspective.

The preacher at Sunday Worship was Sir John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office, a notable Evangelical, and a lead author on the last set of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Houghton has played a still to be assessed role in the American religiopolitical landscape by using his friendship with John Stott, sometimes called “the evangelical Pope” and an Anglican priest, in order to speak with Evangelical leaders in this country about global climate change. Have you heard about the National Association of Evangelicals and their new work to promote “creation care.” Well, there in the background is Sir John Houghton.

I am a very junior climate scientist. I work on other planetary bodies as well as the Earth. My area of expertise, if it could be called that, is restricted to some aspects of the circulation of the Pacific and vortices so undistinguished that the Australians call them “willy-willies.” But I hear things. I go to seminars. I become distracted from my research reading reports in Science and Nature or other papers and reports that often do not come to public notice. I also have been a professional historian, which has given me a deep interest in historiography and its relevance to the earth sciences and an unusual perspective on the collapse of classical civilization in the Mediterranean world and other collapses in other parts of the Earth.

And I also read roughly five readings from the Bible every day, am never sure whether I ever get through the Psalter, and I sin constantly. Basically, I am just like most of you. What follows may be utter rot. And if it is, I would very much appreciate you telling me that. I will warn you that I may be free with citation, but I will respect copyright, cite all quoted sources, and try to remember from whom I have paraphrased.