Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Thursday, April 5, 2007

Climate Change Nightmare!

Thursday, April 5, 2007

...on Mars:

Global warming could be heating Mars four times faster than Earth due to a mutually reinforcing interplay of wind-swept dust and changes in reflected heat from the Sun, according to a study released Wednesday.

Scientists have long observed a correlation on Mars between its fluctuating temperatures -- which range from -87 C to - 5 C (-125 F to 23 F) depending on the season and the location -- and the darkening or lightening of swathes of the planet’s surface.

The explanation is in the dirt.

Glistening Martian dust lying on the ground reflects the Sun’s light -- and its heat -- back into space, a phenomenon called albedo.

But when this reddish dust is churned up by violent winds, the storm-ravaged surface loses its reflective qualities and more of the Sun’s heat is absorbed into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise.

The study, published on Thursday by the British journal Nature, shows for the first time that these variations not only result from the storms but help cause them too.

It also suggests that short-term climate change is currently occurring on Mars and at a much faster rate than on Earth.

We’ve got it all - violent storms, rapid temperature change, receding polar ice. All we need is to pinpoint the source of all the martian CO2 emissions and send an emergency mission to start a carbon offset program, and we’re well on the way to saving the Red Planet as well as our own from the horrors of climate change!

Naturally, the article contains this caveat:

For Earth, global warming is mainly associated with human activities -- notably the burning of fossil fuels -- that release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, trapping more of the Sun’s heat.

Naturally.

I wonder if planets in the solar system have any common trait that might help to explain the variations in their climates... Yep. It’s a headscratcher...

Once again, I’m left with questions about this whole thing. We know that the average global temperature on Earth has been creeping upward over the last little bit. We also know that climate change seems to be occurring on other planetary bodies in the Solar System (Jupiter, Saturn’s moon Triton, Mars, and even Pluto, for example). We also know that average temperatures on Earth have been much higher (there’s a reason that Greenland is called Greenland) and much lower (there’s a reason that Greenland was abandoned by its inhabitants) over the course of recorded history. Given these facts, why is it that Earth seems to be the only planet about which scientists have reached the untouchable conclusion that the climate change process isn’t natural?

Posted by Marc Vander Maas in Environmental Stewardship at 16:29 | Comments (15) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
climate change, global warming, mars

Acton Media Roundup

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Rev. Robert A. Sirico made an appearance this morning on The Laura Ingraham Show. The discussion ranged from Rudy Giuliani’s recent comments about his support for taxpayer-funded abortion to the mystery and joy surrounding the events of Holy Week for Christians. If you missed his live appearance, you can check out this link to find a radio station near you that broadcasts Laura’s show on tape-delay, or (for a small fee) find the interview in Ingraham’s online audio archive.

One other notable Acton media appearance this week - and I want to apologize for the delay in bringing this to your attention. Acton’s own Dr. Kevin Schmiesing was featured in his hometown newspaper in the mid-80’s for his achievements as a high school “mathlete.” Far be it from us to withhold the evidence of this achievement from you, our beloved and well-respected readership:

Jordan Ballor notes that Dr. Schmiesing’s last name is misspelled in the caption. Shoddy journalism!

This achievement was likely one of many early glimpses of the peculiar genius of Dr. Schmiesing which would eventually earn him a position at the Acton Institute and would garner him a number of awards, including his recent second place finish in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for Best Article. All this is in keeping with Acton’s commitment to bring you the finest scholarship available produced by award winning math nerds, not the run-of-the-mill math nerds you’re likely to find at other institutions.

I kid, of course. Congratulations again to Dr. Schmiesing, who has been and continues to be a much more impressive scholar than I could ever hope to be!

Posted by Marc Vander Maas in News and Events at 11:08 | Comments (4) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
Acton Media Update, Dr. Kevin Schmiesing, Laura Ingraham Show, Media Appearances, Rev. Robert A. Sirico

Moral Duties and Positive Rights

Thursday, April 5, 2007

During a conference I attended last year, I got into some conversation with young libertarians about the nature of moral duties. In at least two instances, I asserted that positive moral duties exist.

In these conversations, initially I was accused of not being a libertarian because I affirmed positive rights. This accusation was apparently meant to give me pause, but I simply shrugged, “So be it. If being a libertarian means denying positive moral duties, then I’m not a libertarian!” I then pointed out that I never said that government must be the agent of respecting or meeting those duties, to which the accusatory tone of my dialog partners subsided.

I gave the biblical example of the case of the Good Samaritan, who recognized the love imperative to stop and assist a victim of violent crime. I think it is an established element of Christian theological ethics that both negative and positive rights exist as a basic reality. That’s why we can commit both sins of commission and sins of omission, and the Book of Common Prayer includes confession to God that “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”

This, for instance, is in part why the Westminster Larger Catechism, in its exposition of the Decalogue, describes both the positive and negative elements that are obliged in each commandment. So in the case of the commandment against murder, the Catechism outlines both “duties required” and “sins forbidden,” the former of which include “comforting and succoring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent,” and the latter of which include avoiding anything that “tends to the destruction of the life of any” (Q&A 134-136).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his classic text, Life Together, that

The other person is a burden to the Christian, in fact for the Christian most of all. The other person never becomes a burden at all for the pagans. They simply stay clear of every burden the other person may create for them. However, Christians must bear the burden of one another. They must suffer and endure one another. Only as a burden is the other really a brother or sister and not just an object to be controlled. The burden of human beings was even for God so heavy that God had to go to the cross suffering under it.

The confusion of these young libertarian thinkers on the distinction between positive and negative rights as well as the knee-jerk assumption that positive rights entail government action speaks to the important difference between libertarianism as a political philosophy and libertarianism as a full-blown world-and-life view. The former is certainly not without its problematic elements, but is far superior to a Weltanschauung that cannot account for positive moral responsibilities to family, friend, and neighbor.

By the way, I don’t mean to equate the errors of a few representatives with the entire variegated classical liberal tradition. Arnold Kling’s articulation of a “civil societarian” perspective seems pretty well immune to the criticisms noted above.

As I noted above, the parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates the claims upon my time and abilities that are made by other people. Bonhoeffer writes,

We must allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our more important daily tasks, just as the priest–perhaps reading the Bible–pass by the man who had fallen among robbers.

Ironically, Bonhoeffer rightly observed that religious professionals face a particular danger in not respecting the concrete claims of individual moral responsibility.

It is a strange fact that, of all people, Christians and theologians often consider their work so important and urgent that they do not want to let anything interrupt it. They think they are doing God a favor, but actually they are despising God’s “crooked yet straight path” (Gottfried Arnold).

I explore the truth of this observation in my own experience in a previous Acton Commentary, “The Good Samaritan: Model of Effective Compassion.”

Posted by Jordan J. Ballor in Bible and Theology at 10:19 | Comments (3) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
book of common prayer, classical liberalism, duties, good samaritan, libertarianism, morality, rights