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Don’t forget to check our website at www.hobartsynagogue.org
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Will Howard doing his presentation on the opening night of the UPJ conference.
Daniel schmusing.
Daniel Patsy & Susan having a chader lesson with Rabbi Black.
Clare, Angelo & Majorie on the Cartela cruising on the Derwent.
Len & Renee on the Cartela having a wonderful time waiting for dinner.
Climate Change and Global Warming
Will Howard’s shortened talk at the UPJ Conference
Climate change is one of those issues where science, politics, economics, ethics, and even
spirituality intersect. Many faith communities are now engaging in the debate over climate
change. Documents such as “Common Belief¹” and the Interfatih Call to Action, express the
concern of many Australian faith communities (including ours) over human-induced climate
change because of a perceived human duty to act as stewards of the earth. Judaism expresses
this principle as “Tikkun Olam” or “repairing the world,” and perhaps it is appropriate that an
issue of such global reach and long-lived impacts as climate change has gained such
prominence during a “shmita” or sabbatical year, mandated by the Torah to allow the earth to
heal itself, expressing an ancient Jewish perspective on sustainability.
This essay won’t focus much on the science itself, but it will give you my perspective as a
climate researcher as well as a perspective on what science can, and perhaps more
importantly, cannot, say about our social and political responses to climate change..
As a marine geologist I work with sedimentary records of past climate change in the ocean.
These archives tell us there were warmer times in the past, and that cyclical changes in global
climate are the dominant feature of our planet’s environment of the past million years or so. But
they also give us some cause for concern:
The dominant cycles driving climate arise from changes in the geometry of the Earth’s orbit
around the sun; the shortest such cycle is about 20,000 years long. That means these cycles
will probably not act fast enough to counteract the input of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide over the
two centuries past and to come.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now significantly higher than it’s been for about 20 million
years. So human activity has pushed at least one climate influence into “unknown” territory, and
towards thresholds or “tipping points” that may challenge our ability to adapt quickly. We are
changing our planet on unprecedented scales and rates.
The geological records I work with also tell us that pace of mechanisms in the global carbon
cycle which redistribute carbon dioxide into the oceans, vegetation, soils, and other natural
repositories are slow, meaning we will be living with the fossil-fuel-derived greenhouse gases
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