Finally, the Anglican church is certain about something.

Faith demands action on climate change, Archbishop says 29/03/06
Dr Rowan Williams,spiritual head of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, has called on the UK government and other government’s around the world to take practical steps to get people to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC in London this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that both faith and human values demand consolidated action to address the climate change situation, not least because of the terrible impact it is having, and will continue to have, on the world’s poorest people.

The Archbishop said that there was no escaping the fact that ordinary people had a moral responsibility to change lifestyles. But he stressed that this was not a matter of simply ‘lecturing’. It was something pressed upon us by the facts of the situation.

The consequences if we did not address C02 emissions, Dr Williams warned, would be the deaths of billions of people worldwide from the effects of extreme climate change.

He said the biblical narrative made it clear that God would hold people accountable when they had been warned they were going down the wrong path.

Snort! (sound of beverage being sprayed out nose) Given what's been going on in the Anglican church for the past forty years or so, he's now going to get religion? About climate change????

And the Archbishop also said that US President George W Bush's stance of refusing to cut emissions because it might compromise American jobs was not compatible with a Christian point of view.

"I think if we look at the language of the Bible we very often come across situations where people are judged for not responding to warnings," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"I think what the Bible and the Christian tradition suggest is that those who have that challenge put before them, and not only that challenge but the evidence for it, and don't respond, bear a very heavy responsibility before God."

There's more about how it's all the U.S.'s fault that Kyoto isn't working, and in fact the UK can't seem to get its own emissions down to target levels. (Not that it would matter much if it did, see Junk Science for more detail). Read the rest if you must.

The really funny thing about all this is the Archbishop's earlier statements about not wanting to be the "comic vicar to the nation" by commenting on things to which he could not make a contribution, like, I don't know, moral issues -

from The Guardian

Dr Rowan Williams was talking eloquently about society's expectations of the Church of England and said words to the effect that society was missing the point in expecting the church to be in the business of moral leadership. At this the man from the Daily Mail practically fell off his chair. He recovered sufficiently to offer a spirited rejoinder. Surely moral leadership was the whole point of the church? An archbishop who didn't believe in moral leadership was worse than useless. Or words to that effect………………………….

I invited him to elaborate on the remark which had so astonished the man from the Daily Mail. Was he really so averse to the idea that the Archbishop of Canterbury should offer moral leadership? "Leadership is, to me, a very, very murky and complicated concept," he begins, sitting in an armchair in his Lambeth Palace office, his minder a watchful presence across the room.

"I think the question I always find myself asking of myself is, 'Will a pronouncement here or a statement there actually move things on, or is it something that makes me feel better and other people feel better, but doesn't necessarily contribute very much?'"……………………..

He accepts that his scholastic background brings with it both pluses and minuses.

"The downside of it is, I guess, that academic habits die hard, and the urge to qualify and complicate dies hard. I don't congratulate myself on that - that's just one of those things that makes it a bit more difficult sometimes."

Could he understand why a doctrine of habitual reticence should make the Daily Mail man come close to implosion? "Hmmm, yes, I can. I think there is a bit of a myth, if you like, that Religious Leaders - 'capital R capital L' - are, by their nature, people who make public pronouncements on morals." Williams parodies this position as, "Why doesn't the archbishop condemn X, Y, Z? Because that's what archbishops do, you know, they condemn things. They make statements, usually negative, condemnatory statements." It's part of what he terms being "comic vicar to the nation".

Negative, condemnatory statements like the ones he made about the U.S. not playing along with Kyoto? Maybe he's really aiming for "comic vicar to the Western world". Or has he received a direct revelation from God that He is really more concerned about atmospheric CO2 than people's morals?