Or how to be a Christian pain in the arse.

Kairos is suggesting a Carbon Fast for Lent; it even has a calendar of suggestions.

Among them are (with helpful study notes):

Observe heat use at school or work and make a suggestion for increased energy efficiency.  Don’t mess around with underlings: take your concern straight to the top. When you go to collect your weekly dole, make sure you walk.

Reduce the idling time of your vehicle to a minimum or speak of your concern to someone who is idling excessively. Make sure you point out the excessive carbon footprint of the next idling police car you see.

If you have two cars, discuss becoming a one-car family. Resolve not to travel in a car for one day or one full week, whatever is a challenge for you. Convince your wife that she doesn’t need her car.

If you have children in your life, inventory their toys with them. How many do they actually use? Discuss, at an appropriate level, the negative effects of over-consumption.  Good plan: blame global warming on your children. They’ll thank you for it later.

Arrange for KAIROS to give a Carbon Sabbath Initiative (CSI) workshop at your church. This will stimulate church growth: by comparison, it will make the vicar’s sermons seem really interesting.

Inventory the amount of time you spend with loved ones. Decide to spend at least two days a month in 2010 enjoying activities that will bring you closer together. This could be tricky: after doing all the other suggested activities you probably won’t have any loved ones.

The global warming debacle continues with an admission of yet another climate hoax:

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

I suppose one good thing about all this is that it should lay to rest the absurd canard that scientists are above corruption, pristinely objective, fastidiously apolitical and immune to the myriad frailties that assail mere mortals. Scientists are just as untrustworthy as everyone else.

Is humanity a cosmic stage where the armies of righteousness battle the fallen powers of darkness until the Final Battle when the Beast will be cast into the Lake of Fire, the dead will be raised and Christ will return to claim his own?

Or is it all about installing a bike rack, eating local and holding recycling bin classes?

Well, the winner of the Greening Sacred Space Award has the answer:

St James has had a walkthrough audit, they have held 2 eat local feasts, they have bought a bike rack, they offer regular recycling/composing/green bin use education to the community at large. They are part of the newly formed Eco-Churches of West Hamilton and they are heavily involved with climate change action (350, Copenhagen). The have helped develop a green cleaning products guide that FCG have adapted.

Personally, I am proud to announce that St. Hilda’s, ANiC is doing its bit to become green. While CGI simulated congregations from the Diocese of Niagara were occupying the worship space, they didn’t look after it very well; the orange carpet was afflicted with damp, became mouldy and turned a verdant shade of green in parts. To combat global warming, the greening of the carpet will be encouraged to flourish.

As we all know, climate science is rational, dispassionate, non-political and irrefutable. That’s why the UN’s climate chief suggested that anyone who questions him should rub his face in asbestos:

Rajendra Pachauri, the besieged head of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that he is the victim of a “carefully orchestrated” campaign to block climate change legislation.

“I would say [there are] nefarious designs behind people trying to attack me with lies, falsehoods,” he told the paper, swatting away allegations that his India-based climate institute, TERI, has benefited from decisions made by the IPCC, which he also chairs.

Climate change skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder,” he said.

“I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are actually no scientists claiming that anthropological global warming is a reality. After all, scientists are supposed to be sceptical, yet anyone who expresses scepticism is told by the chief UN tinpot alchemist to rub his face in asbestos.

The well-respected climatologist, Osama bin Laden dispatched this warning from his high-tech weather monitoring station deep in a cave somewhere in the mountainous region of Afghanistan:

“Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury — the phenomenon is an actual fact,” the tape says according to al-Jazeera. “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.”

“George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs.”

“They are also behind ‘globalisation and its tragic implications’. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money.”

Having set the world straight on climate change, George Bush, large corporations, industrialised countries and globalisation, Osama will be focussing his energy on US health care reform; it will be called Osama-care.

Professor Andrew Watson – who bears an eerie resemblance to Richard Dawkins – is a professor in the University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences; thus everything he says is weighed dispassionately in the scales of scientific methodology and evidence. In this exchange, Professor Watson demonstrates the clinical objectivity of a scientist by calling Marc Morano an “asshole’.

The least Watson could have done is use the Queen’s English and say “arshole”.