Southern Baptists Get It Wrong on Climate Change

Well this is very disappointing, but not surprising. Just weeks after the IPCC finished its release of reports on the scientific consensus on climate change, which showed a strong consensus that humans are causing climate change, and after even President Bush pays lip service to this consensus, the Southern Baptist Convention decides the science is all wrong. This is the AP Report:
Southern Baptists approved a resolution on global warming Wednesday that questions the prevailing scientific belief that humans are largely to blame for the phenomenon and also warns that increased regulation of greenhouse gases will hurt the poor.

. . .

The SBC resolution, approved near the end of the denomination's annual meeting, acknowledges a rise in global temperatures. But it rejects government-mandated limits on carbon-dioxide and other emissions as "very dangerous" because they might not make much difference and could lead to "major economic hardships" worldwide.

Originally, the measure also backed more government-funded research into global warming's causes and alternative energies to oil. But the resolution was amended to drop that language, in part over concerns that it would endorse strong government engagement in the issue.

The global warming resolution acknowledges humans bear some responsibility for rising temperatures while urging caution, said Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research with the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

"It does not deny there has been a recent warming trend in average global temperatures," said Duke, who helped write the measure. "What it does do is call for more objective analysis in the data that would explain causes of the warming we're experiencing."

Read it all.

I am far more pleased with what the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori , who has a PhD in Oceanography, had to say. I also wonder whether the SBC's unwillingness to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence of evolution is beginning to infect consideration of other policy issues that rely on science.

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