I have written this for my parish Magazine: "Viewpoint":
You may have heard of the film "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. It's very good and a number of us at St Mary's West Derby looked at it early this year before we gathered for a course on climate change called the Omega Course. The film is powerful and well worth watching. I think it's been on TV and you may well have seen it. The Church has a few copies of it on DVD if you would like to borrow it.
A book has been produced too and that is well worth a look. With the same title as the film it is subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we have to do about it". When I went away on a short course the other week with some other clergy we were asked to review the book. It shows how climate change is a reality and juxtaposes facts and figures with beautiful pictures of forests and ice caps. I can lend it to anyone who is interested.
One graph in the book brings the message home. It shows how the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased to around 380 parts per million (ppm) today, this is a big increase from the levels before the industrial revolution (when we started digging all that carbon in the shape of coal and oil and gas out of the ground). The levels are still rising and he warns us that within 45 years they will be above 600ppm with the likelihood that global temperatures will be significantly higher. This would mean that many of our cities and coastal areas would be lost to the sea, and many more people would die through extreme weather - storm or flood or drought.
On the course we had an adviser who advised the government speak to us. He warned us that we were getting distracted by trivial issues like carrier bags. He told us that it matters what we do in the UK. We are in a position of power and influence but currently are doing the minimum. There has been no progress in the last 5 years in cutting our carbon levels.
We have thought of ourselves as the centre of the world. We have lived our lives as poor stewards of God's beautiful creation, seeing the world as ours to do with as we choose. Certainly the problem the result of human activity - it's about is how we have lived and how our parents have lived. We are responsible.
I think it's important to reach that point of acceptance. To take on some of the responsibility and not to blame those Americans with their gas guzzling 4 by 4s or those Chinese with their new cola fired power stations. If we can do that then we are in a position to move - individually and as a community - towards a way of living that preserves the lives of others and a world for our children. It's not climate change we need to fight - it's our behaviour. Perhaps an analogy is that of addiction to alcohol or drugs: we have become addicted to a high carbon lifestyle and we are finding it hard to let go.
And the sheer complexity of the issue makes it difficult to know what to do. Certainly we need to do something more significant than not using carrier bags. We need to very significantly cut the carbon we emit.
Our Christian tool kit offers us a lot of ways of thinking and acting that can lift us out of the despair which affects us all so badly on this issue. We are people who believe in hope, in new life, in the value of mustard seeds growing into big bushes. Certainly there are things we can do to change the way that you and I behave but much more than that there are Christian ways of thinking, and acting that could offer hope to humankind. We are in a position to influence events and be part of the redemption of human kind and not just its sinfulness.
Please pray about this challenge to God's planet and how we can respond. I would welcome your thoughts and ideas on what we can do at St Mary's and St James'. I have started a blog on the internet and would love to hear from you. If you type in hope4creation.blogspot.com you will find it.
With my prayers
Revd Mark