Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that only a dozen years remain to reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by 45% to meet the goal of net-zero emissions from power plants and vehicles by 2050--the reduction level needed to avoid a disaster scenario in which sea rise will overwhelm many coastal cities with killer heat waves, droughts and more intense storms causing famine, poverty and the dislocation of populations fleeing uninhabitable parts of the world.
Faced with what they call a moral dilemma, the world’s religious leaders have responded.
“There’s an urgency about this issue and churches have to step up more than what they’re doing,” said Brian McGurk of St. Christopher’s Church in Chatham, which will host the second annual Faith and Science Forum, co-sponsored by the Woods Hole Research Center and the Faith Communities Environmental Network.