Many of the people who will show up at church this weekend could probably best be described as ‘Agnostic’. When it comes to the big message of the Christian faith, that there is something beyond this mortal life, agnostics simply say “I don’t know”, but they show up once or twice a year, just in case.
Strangely, Agnostic is the term I’m choosing more and more to describe what I believe about climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have set off their loudest sirens yet about what will happen to our beloved planet if we don’t dramatically cut back on the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal.
The IPCC and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar with this message in years past, but it seems fewer people are accepting the story as time goes by. The believers who have drunk the ‘Koolaid’, basically accept the science in the IPCC reports as gospel, but the so-called skeptics do not.
The skeptics point to a growing pile of contradictory evidence on what’s actually happening to the climate. Certainly the weather across North America over the past several months must make it more difficult to keep the faith. They regard the IPCC recommendations as a dangerous formula which will drive the world back into an economic crisis that will be far worse than the Great Depression, or the crisis that began in 2008.
The worst of it is there don’t seem to be very many reliable honest brokers of the truth any more. Most of the mainstream media in Canada, especially the CBC and newspapers like the Globe and Mail, completely accept the climate change story, the same way we accept that smoking is bad for us.
The latter conclusion is based on much more solid science than the former. Al Gore’s movie was called An Inconvenient Truth. How I wish it were more ‘convenient’ to be accepted as an agnostic.
