Rev. Richard Cizik Arrives In AK Convinced People "Too Alarmist" On Warming, Changes Tune Quickly

[hatrack]

EDIT

In what may constitute global climate changes of biblical proportions, many conservative Christians who look to the Bible for guidance are becoming more and more skeptical of issues of global warming. The popular movement, however, brews to the contrary as leading global warming scientists and national Evangelical Christian pundits are uniting to spread global warming awareness to congregations. Those leaders met in Homer in August to see just how the phenomena are affecting humanity.

According to Rev. Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals and national spokesman for Evangelicals, he returned from Alaska an altered person.
Cizik arrived in Alaska “convinced that people have become too alarmist about global warming.” However, following a week of seeing the effects of climate change happening in Alaska, he said his outlook changed. For Cizik, it was a matter of noticing the extreme difference between Portage Glacier today and of several years ago.

As Cizik and the rest of the group toured the north Alaska village of Shishmaref, they saw how the population that has lived there for centuries is being swallowed up by the ocean. The permafrost is melting, hunting on the ice has become dangerous and unpredictable, and the lack of ice exposes the community to the wrath of storms over the ocean. Their subsistence lifestyle is being lost, and the community recently voted to move to the mainland. “On our expedition to Alaska, for example, we could actually see the melting of glaciers and Arctic sea ice, the destruction of habitat and other variables that are altering human life on earth,” Cizik said. “For these, as well as other impacts, there is, right now, overwhelming empirical evidence. And, tragically, we humans are causing it. This new vision has changed me, profoundly. I now can ‘see’ what God intended all along … Ironic, isn’t it, that it took a scientist and his colleagues to open my eyes? As the Scriptures say, God works in marvelous and wondrous ways.”

The unlikely group also flew over the dead spruce forests, the disappearing sea ice and melting permafrost ,and realized the issue was closer to home than they first realized. “We left changed people, more convinced than ever that scientists and Evangelicals had to speak with one voice and do everything in their power to save this indescribably beautiful and precious gift we have all been given,” Cizik explained. Other leaders of mega-churches are also willing to offer a message of “creation care” to their congregations – as long as they can prove the gospel agrees.

EDIT

http://www.homertribune.com/article.php?aid=2451

[IndyOp]

1. Ironic, isn’t it, that it took a scientist and his colleagues to open my eyes?

Jeebus. :eyes:

[hatrack]

2. That, and a 15-minute helicopter across the dying Kenai forests

:eyes:, indeed.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Better late than never, I guess

Although "as long as they can prove the gospel agrees" hardly fills me with confidence. :banghead:

[Turbineguy]

4. Another

15th Century Thinker.

[Kolesar]

5. Cizik has been working on climate protection for a while

I don't know why the newspaper wrote up Cizik's experience as some recent revelation. In any case, Richard Cizik is a brave man and we should applaud him :applause:

[tom_paine]

6. Yes, observing the extreme effects on Alaska's glaciers are eye-opening

I went there in 1998, and stayed with friends who'd lived in Anchorage since the 60s.

We went to Portage Glacier. There is a two-mile spur trail that goes up a side canyon to another small hanging glacier, called Byron Glacier. I had not mentioned climate change nor even thought much of it at the time. With my back facing the smaller glacier and looking back up the trail, I could see the mountain flanking the opposite side of Portage Lake, where a tongue of ice, a small glacier, came down the mountainside about halfway.

Suddenly my friend said, "It's good you came up here to see it while you still can."

Thinking he was exaggerating a bit, I asked what he meant.

Pointing to a tongue of ice now halfway up the mountain, he replied, "That was almost all the way down to the lake not ten years ago."

I gasped.

Yes, the effects of global warming on Portage Glacier is dramatic and swift. I imgaine that tongue of ice no longer exists now, and has retread back over the ridge, no longer to be seen from the side canyon. I wonder if that small hanging glacier is still even there at the end of the trail anymore, and if it is, how much longer IT will be around before it reterats back over IT'S ridge.