If there’s one thing that gets Anglicans excited it’s global warming: apparently there isn’t much time left:

Climate change, caused by increasing greenhouse gases, has become the defining environmental, economic and social issue of the 21st century. It has now been established that the safe threshold of carbon dioxide concentration (350 parts per million, ppm) has been exceeded, with the current value of 390 ppm and rising. Unless halted through dramatic action,  ‘runaway’ climate change will threaten the well-being and possibly the survival of our planet.

Global warming may be the only sin left in Anglican dogma, but not all scientists agree that it is man-made:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Some scientists, on the other hand, are not swayed by Plimer and put much of the blame for global warming on cow flatulence:

Livestock-rearing generates more greenhouse gases than transportation according to a new report from the United Nations (U.N.), which adds that improved production methods could go a long way towards cutting emissions of gases responsible for global warming.

This marginalising of the bovine community must be countered by humanity acknowledging its own culpability in the over-production of methane; I am looking forward to our bishops taking the lead in repenting of their unrelenting turgidity.

Which brings me to what I truly believe would be an appropriate theme song for the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod in 2010; it could be led by the 3 cantors: