You seem to suggest that because there are bad actors or hypocrites within Christendom, you should have a hard time being a Christian.
It is certainly a valid question to ask, why people who claim to be like Christ are often so very unlike Christ. One key difference is that Christians don't usually make claims like "the science is settled", we don't generally try and tax people into submission and most of us don't act like people are recklessly irresponsible if they choose a different path to the one we have chosen.
Another thought, using the comparison to Christianity. Several of the people I know who talk about climate change caused by human carbon emissions live in a way that suggests they don't believe a word of what they say. We don't need to look very far among the glitterati to find people who talk of the need to curb carbon emissions while flying in private jets or travelling in luxury yachts etc, emitting more carbon in a single trip than most of us probably generate in a year. Although I'm personally skeptical that carbon emissions are the great evil we're endlessly told they are, I try and live in a manner that's at least mostly environmentally friendly. I conserve energy because it saves me money. I usually drive with an eye on my fuel economy, to avoid excessive wear and tear on the car and nasty bills at the pumps. I recycle where it makes sense to do so (I can drop off plastics, paper and cans at my township office a mile away; I have little interest in making a 30-mile round trip in the car to drop off glass at the nearest place that takes it). In that regard I'm probably more environmentally conscious than many of the people I know who bleat about carbon. In the same way we can compare the people who claim to be Christians but live their lives as if they didn't believe a word of what Scripture says - the ones who preach a message of love but are quick to gossip, backstab, reject anyone who isn't just like them, lie, cheat and so on. We could compare them to the people who claim no allegiance to any faith system and yet live a life far more aligned with the commands of Jesus than some people who show up at church every Sunday. We might compare them to the parable Jesus gave of the two sons who were asked to work in the vineyard - one said yes but didn't go and the other said no but went. That was the bit when Jesus indicated that prostitutes and tax collectors would enter heaven before the great and the good of the day.
I don't inform my views from those people I try to listen to the scientists themselves. Being in a scientific field, I am slightly better equipped to do that.
To the extent I can I look to understand the science. That said it's probably safe to say that the government is given more information than the regular people (the likes of you and I) so when the government talks as if something is critical and acts as if it makes no difference at all it's hard to take the claims that it's critical seriously. To be clear I'm talking governments of all leanings and flavors here - they all seem to be as bad as each other where that's concerned. Another thing that seems concerning is the way so many scientists are endlessly trying to find sources of funding. I often wonder to what extent scientists feel pressure to go with the flow rather than shake too many cages, particularly when they are trying to raise a new round of funding. And of course where a planet is concerned it's not possible to run a properly controlled experiment so the best we can come up with is scientific opinion, which hasn't always been accurate. There was a time when scientists believed the earth was flat and the sun orbited the earth, until that nutjob appeared who insisted the earth was round and orbited the sun. One thing I really don't understand with the green movement is why it doesn't try to appeal more to basic self-interest. It's all well and good making grand claims that we need to sacrifice now to save some catastrophe further down the line (even though the promised catastrophe keeps getting kicked further and further down the line). That's a tough line to sell, particularly when it comes from people who aren't practising what they preach. But in the here and now it doesn't have to focus on self-sacrifice. Turn the heating down a couple of degrees in the winter and watch your bills drop. Back off the air conditioning in the summer and see how much you save on the electricity bill. Buy the car that gets 40mpg instead of 25mpg and see how much you save at the pumps. Those savings are right here, right now, and accrue to me rather than some vaguely defined person at some vaguely defined point in the future. Along the way you reap the environmental benefits. I know this is more about popular psychology than the science or otherwise behind climate change theories but it seems to make so much more sense.
Science, like theology and all aspects of human endeavor, is self-limited by its own internal biases and bound inexorably to its presuppositions. The science of climate change is no different
I fear the science of climate change is worse, given the impossibility of performing tests using suitable styled control groups. If we had half a dozen earth-like planets orbiting the same sun at about the same distance we could perform a suitable experiment. Instead it seems we have historic data, observations that this may cause that, and much speculation. And then we have the endless politics that look more like an attempt to divide and rule than an attempt to save anything beyond the existing power of certain entrenched special interests.
Certainly a government trying to manage something like climate change which has a direct implication to the economic well-being of the state and it's population then there will be many competing interests. And government does have to somehow balance all that - not an easy task and one rife with all sorts of corruption and incompetence. The best they can probably do is incentivize innovation toward the end goal of reducing impacts. I've never had to deal with funding for pure science research, but we geologists do rely on investor funding for exploration projects and that can get in the way of scientific advancement of a mineral property. I'm sure the same pressures exist within the more pure research areas as well. There is that. I would not call climate models 'opinion' but modelling something that is essentially a chaotic system is pretty difficult. They are tweaked all the time to account for new data. That does not seem to have radically changed the outcomes though. And the flat earth is not a great go-to, as most learned people from antiquity knew the earth was round. Heliocentric model certainly was another matter, but I think its understandable given the position people view the heavens from. The Babylonians were able to predict eclipses and the path of the planets to great accuracy even though they were working from a wrong model. I'm a bit young for first-hand knowledge, but did not Jimmy Carter essentially make that appeal to Americans during the oil crisis? Different problem, but same appeal. How'd that work out for him? Americans back then were probably not as willing to sacrifice anything for their comfort though. A bit different nowadays.
It's curious that where climate change is concerned they seem more concerned with economic impact of decisions, whereas when dealing with the coronavirus it seems concern about economies splits along political divides with many having no concern at all about an economic apocalypse as long as it appears to save some lives. Maintaining a balance is undoubtedly an unimaginably difficult task but I would hope that there might be a solution a little more inventive than "introduce a new tax on...." I have a friend who does scientific research and from what he says it seems he has about as little security as it's possible to have, he's constantly looking for funding for his next research and it appears he's practically having to justify his very existence all the time. In a situation like that it's easy to imagine a degree of pressure for the research to yield the "correct" results. Modelling a chaotic system is certainly difficult, not least because it's hard to know what factors totally outside our control might be affecting our planet. Simple things like solar activity blur issues, and the reported melting of the polar ice caps on Mars suggest there's at least something going on over and above people driving SUVs too much. It's been a while since I did any computer modelling but I remember there were times when it seemed very much like the idea was to tweak the inputs and the calculations to create the expected results (going right back to the idea of commercial pressure being a force that can counter doing things properly), rather than building a model that would usefully project. The point of the flat earth model and the whole geocentric/heliocentric matter was simply to indicate that scientific consensus alone doesn't mean something is correct - it can just mean that a lot of clever people are wrong. If you're talking about the Suez crisis that's not something I'm old enough to remember first-hand either. If people won't change their behaviors in exchange for a tangible personal benefit that accrues from the moment they make the change the chances are they're not going to make a bigger change in the hope of a benefit accruing to someone else, in some other nation, at some unknown future time. If the thought of cutting heating bills doesn't inspire someone to turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees are they really likely to do it based on the vague threat (issued in so many different guises over such an extended period it's easy to liken them to the boy who cried wolf) that some people on the other side of the world will find their rice paddies flooded more often at some unknown time in the future?
The only thing "we're" going to do about climate change is make some people very rich indeed, and other people poorer. How about nuclear reactors as a ~clean energy source? The most reliable ~cleanest energy we can produce? Nah. How about we don't handicap the total sum of human knowledge by 'aborting' ~50 million people a year, because who knows who among that population might have solved X, Y, Z problem sooner rather than later? Nah. What are the offsets involved when a society is brought from poverty into wealth - when its citizens start becoming concerned with X, Y, Z - if in the meantime the road to that wealth is paved with coal, and other polluting industries? It's fine for the West but nowhere else? Heh. Are we going to give up planes? Nope. Are we going to give up ships and ocean liners? Nope. Are we going to give up cars, even those pretty electric ones that are the face of lithium mining? Nope. Are we going to give up the rest of our technology, which again, is powered by lithium? Nope. Are carbon taxes going to solve the issue? Nope. I bet if we throw more nagging children at the problem and shove them in front of the UN that'll solve the problem, right? Nope. Sure, we the people will reduce our carbon footprint - that mass of SUV drivers who give up their SUVs will make an impact - while the significant polluters will set themselves 20-year goals, and so nothing meaningful will get done in any meaningful frame of time, and even then, the process is apparently too far gone. But that's a pretty Western view: what about those parts of the world where surviving today is more important than far-off future planning? So no, nothing will get done. "We'll" hit plenty of goals though.
This reminds me of an article I read some months ago that essentially said that the only people who really get to gripe about a carbon-driven apocalypse are people who are willing to live like the Amish. Anything less is rank hypocrisy. If you truly believe that carbon emissions will flood a billion brown people out of their third-world homes within a decade but then turn the air conditioning on because it's a little bit too warm for your liking, you don't get to tell anyone else how they should live. If you believe that carbon emissions will unleash ever-more devastating hurricanes and typhoons upon the world but then drive to work because you put a higher standard of living for yourself higher than the very right to life for millions of others, you don't get to tell anyone else how they should live. As you said, we can't have cars for ourselves but then tell the developing world that they can't have cars because there aren't enough to go round. And it's not as if people are going to give up their cars in this country so that people in other countries can have them instead. It would be good to reduce the overall amount of energy we use in our lives rather than fussing about whether we burn coal or dig rare earth elements out of the ground to power it all, but people have got used to the idea of driving a 400hp, 3-ton machine a mile to the store so they can buy a carton of soda, only to return 10 minutes later because they want some popcorn as well. Perhaps that's why the appeal to emotion is what works. The kids who don't understand the issue, who can do little more than parrot what their parents tell them (that they have no future unless they can swim forever or some such) and who can cry about it and demand that Something Must Be Done, at least until they come to understand what it would look like to do anything even remotely useful. It's OK kid, if you feel so badly about carbon emissions you can walk the 10 miles to school in the November rain.
That's the thing. I don't go out of my way to: - Produce plastic straws - Produce plastic bags (although unlike other people, it seems, I'll reuse these for years) - Package items in 37 layers of plastic - Invent plastic that doesn't biodegrade within 20,000 years - Farm trees unsustainably - Spill oil into this gulf or that ocean - Build and develop cruise liners (hang on though, how much does a racing Yacht cost?) - Ensure that my electricity was provided via coal - etc. etc. etc. But yeah sure, here I'll pay 25p for a 'lifetime' grocery bag, because that weave of plastic bags wasn't already doing it. I've been using metal straws for years, by the way, thank you very much for that paper straw in the unrecyclable plastic cup. Bravo, pat yourself on the back Starbucks and whoever else. If I could viably generate my own electricity I would. If I could viably grow my own food I would. If I didn't need a car I wouldn't have one. It's not like they're cheap. I walk 2+ hours to the shop, one way, when I'm in the mood. One mile drives? Not if I can help it. I'm with a 'green' energy supplier. I can't afford a hybrid or electric car, but I can afford the more efficient petrol/diesel ones. I don't fly just for the heck of it. I've never been on a cruise. But oh yeah, may this or that company, body, organisation, etc., lecture me about 'carbon footprints'. Well listen buddy, this is the world I inherited. I can only do so much. May you now fly away on your private jet to warn about the dangers of whatever. And oh yeah, it's not as if the whole of society is built in such a way that it's near impossible to get away from any of this without becoming Amish, as you said. And - and - for that matter, how much would my carbon footprint drop if the structures I relied on did the things they demanded of me in a reasonable amount of time? Well, I'll still be guilty of being in bed with the various mining industries, but if I did anything more it would require giving up the things that I need to survive, make money, provide for my family, etc. It wouldn't happen willingly, and definitely not when the corporations and governments doing the vast majority of the polluting are doing effectively nothing about it. No more than warp 5, please. Herzliche Glückwünsche on that new coal power plant, Deutschland.
That feeds into a related point, in the UK at least, about the whole issue of disposing of rubbish. I remember as a child I'd walk to the post office, buy 4oz of candies and they would be weighed out and put into a paper bag. Each one was loose and once they were gone all the waste was the paper bag. If you didn't eat them in time they went sticky and stuck to each other and the bag, which made a bit of a mess but was rarely an issue for a young boy with a sweet tooth. Now you buy a box of candies and each one is individually wrapped in plastic then the whole lot is put into a plastic bag, which is put into a cardboard box, which is wrapped in plastic, and the powers that be complain about the amount of trash I'm producing and whether I'm recycling it or not. I haven't darkened the door of a Starbucks or a McDonalds in more years than I care to count so I can't say much about their current ways but when I was a more frequent visitor to fast food outlets it didn't seem like much of the packaging was made with any thought to the environment at all. I've frequently wondered whether I could generate enough electricity to power my house. Aside from cooking and air conditioning it may not be totally out of the question, it's just a matter of whether it makes financial sense to even try. I've often wondered about living in a cabin in the woods, powered by a combination of solar, wind and hydroelectric. One day I walked three miles to deliver a check to a local company for some stuff I ordered, only to find their office was closed so I walked back home, taking in a detour of another mile or so to take the check to the post office. Where I live it's all but impossible to get by without a car (unless you are literally Amish but even they pay people to drive them around, they just don't own the car themselves) but avoiding multiple trips and driving economically save me money so for the most part I do that. Like you, I could probably prune a little off my carbon footprint but there seems little point given the next power station fired up in China will undo my efforts untold thousands of times over.
I don't think disaster can or will be diverted, regardless the causes of climate change, and I believe populations could be greatly reduced when all trends are considered, not only environmental ones. I'm no statistician or climatologist and not a scientist but at the rate of change we have witnessed in a few short years and no evidence in the fossil record to suggest that this is a brief anomaly, as polar ice regions quickly melt away, I cannot help but expect major upheavals.
Sometimes I think the Amish are onto something. If you don't stray far from where you were born, if your family stays in one place, you've got a wide social support network, you live in a manner that's largely self-sufficient and so on. If you can't generate the electricity for yourself you can't have it, so you may have a big solar panel to power a freezer and not much else. No need for air conditioning, just open the windows and build your house so the natural breeze cools it. No need for lots of heating of water - you take a bath once a week whether you need it or not. Clothes are dried on the line so no need for lots of power there, and if you use wood as fuel for cooking it serves a double purpose as it also heats the house. If you throw an extra thick Amish-made quilt on the bed the chances are you don't even need to keep the house heated all night even in the winter, those things are solid.
Taurelilómëa-tumbalemorna Tumbaletaurëa Lómëanor"... I've got the perfect spot for in-river, low head hydroelectric. Just can't convince myself that the time is right to drow the $20K to make it happen.