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Pope Francis To Issue Encyclical On Global Warming
HughPickens.com writes The Guardian reports that following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, Pope Francis plans to publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds. "A papal encyclical is rare," says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences who revealed the pope's plans when he delivered Cafod's annual Pope Paul VI lecture. "It is among the highest levels of a pope's authority. It will be 50 to 60 pages long; it's a big deal." The encyclical will be sent to the world's 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. Within Catholicism in recent times, an encyclical is generally used for significant issues, and is second in importance only to the highest ranking document now issued by popes, an Apostolic Constitution. "Just as humanity confronted revolutionary change in the 19th century at the time of industrialization, today we have changed the natural environment so much," says Sorondo. "If current trends continue, the century will witness unprecedented climate change and destruction of the ecosystem with tragic consequences."
Francis's environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate. "There will always be 5-10% of people who will take offence. They are very vocal and have political clout," says Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant. "This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality." Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, says Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be "un-biblical" and a false religion. "The pope should back off," says Beisner. "The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US."
Francis's environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate. "There will always be 5-10% of people who will take offence. They are very vocal and have political clout," says Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant. "This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality." Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, says Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be "un-biblical" and a false religion. "The pope should back off," says Beisner. "The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US."
This Catholic will tell him to get bent. The contents of an encyclical are not considered infallable.
Therefore repent as you suffer for what happens to you is just.
He's not a climate scientist and his paper isn't peer reviewed.
Since global warming stopped 18 years ago, its mission accomplished!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming--deniers-now.html
Either the answer is prayer, and so what are all those pages for?
Or the answer is not prayer, and what is the Pope for?
Oh well if the Catholic Church says it's real then it *must* be real.
to not give a fuck.
Climate change is a non-issue. The temperature has NOT risen since 1998. Fact. If people build homes on increasingly marginal land and closer to the sea or low-lying areas, then OF COURSE the effects of ANY climate event will be more severe! This is NOT proof that carbon dioxide is pollution.
Pope Frank can go right to hell. Between this and his bullshit about "welcoming" faggots to the church and his ridiculus support for evolution this has to be the worst pope in modern history. I know our local church is talking about issuing our own (albeit meagre) statement against him in the hope of starting a movement to have him defrocked. Pope francis does not represent me or millions of other catholics in the world. He is the result of an elite and corrupt segment of liberalsin the vatican who are trying to destroy the church from within.
"which has declared the US environmental movement to be "un-biblical" and a false religion." - We can safely ignore crackpot non-science bullshit like that as consumers of good science, thanks.
Acknowledging the scientific consensus is "environmental radicalism" now? Let's face it, the deniers are the ones engaging in radicalism.
Apparently listening to the world's scientists and acknowledging reality is now a "radical position".
Pretending that all is well with the climate, and that our only problem is that our entire scientific community is delusional, OTOH -- that's the reasonable and moderate position.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Can't God just wave his magic wand and make global warming go away?
As an atheist, I have to say that I respect this Pope for trying to drag the church, with many kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
And not just the church - look what he did to help the US and Cuba. A year ago that wasn't even on the radar.
I wonder what else he has up his sleeve.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The leader of one very large religion joining forces with the very large religion of MMGW.
All MMGW religion is "settled science" with no need for the denying heretics to be heard
Facts be damned! - we "believe" in MMGW!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I know of them! I've been annoyed reading of them before. It's a conservative organisation that is defined as the exact opposite of the environmental movement. It is their belief that natural resources were created by God, for Man - and thus it is not only mankind's right to exploit them, but a divine duty to do so. They also reject the possibility of climate change on the grounds that God wouldn't create a world so fragile that humans could break it*, and regard the free market as the solution to pretty much everything. Their approach is that no-one would willingly damage land they personally own, so if all land is in private hands then it will be safe from environmental destruction.
Their main rhetorical device is to frame things as helping the poor. For example, on climate change, they'll point out that emisions reductions have a considerable economic cost, especially in developing countries - cheap energy is the great driver of economic growth and advancement. Therefore emissions reductions efforts frustrate the growth that would otherwise lift people and whole countries out of poverty. Throw in a picture of some starving children in Africa, and it turns into a story about how stupid liberals are killing children by denying them access to the wealth of oil and industrial agriculture. It's effective because it's arguably true to some extent - and it would be a perfectly valid argument, if they weren't ruling out any possibility of climate change causing far worse problems on grounds, not of scientific reasoning, but of theology: God wouldn't let that happen.
*According to their own website: "As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify it catastrophically."
...and is an atheist of long standing, what Pope Francis has tried to do has only revealed how morally bankrupt the RC church really is that it spends time and effort trying to embrace science, even when that science is disputed by scientists, because its a "moral imperative". We've already heard from some preposterous stuff from deep-green environmentalists (aka back to the wonderful Stone Age world of peace with Mother Earth) that AGW is a moral imperative, and sure enough, religious people are trying to join as well.
I am old enough to mistrust any politician or religionist who talks about anything as a "moral imperative" because it usually implies mob justice and the crushing of civil liberties. Look at the history of the World. Look at ISIS right now whose highest priority is the moral imperative of submission to Islam. Tell me I'm wrong.
Personally I think that the Pope should spend his time cleaning out the stables before inviting people to see his horses. He could start by rescinding the preposterous policies on contraception created by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s, toning down the opposition to abortion to a rational policy, and letting priests marry and letting divorced people remarry. Because the stench of hypocricy and unjust policies is much stronger than the Vatican's entire supply of incense to conceal.
But what do I know? I'm just a poster on Slashdot.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Why doesn't he just call his boss and have him fix it?
must be the source of great amusement to the remaining 300+ million Americans. 21th century, and they are still taking the bible as a literally?
As an atheist, I used to think I knew what the catholic church believed. Then I started chatting with a nun friend and heard Francis's proclamations, and I'm realizing that in all that ways that matter that my nun friend and Francis beliefs aren't that far from mine.
There is a reason calling somebody a fundie is an insult.
They don't offer facts or actual research to refute that all the polluting done by man has an impact, they simply close their eyes and plug their ears and yell "I'm not listening to you!" "Global Wobbling", "It's cold out!", "Scientists just want to keep their grants!" over and over again.
That's not skepticism, that's what they're told to parrot when they get up off their knees praying in front of the energy lobbies. The fact that a fair amount of the country is dumb enough to buy it doesn't make them skeptics either.
All the "conservative" Catholic AGW deniers are apoplectic right now. Just watch, you'll hear something along the lines of "Francis is a radical commie sympathizer!" especially after their involvement in helping normalize relations with Cuba.
Who the fuck cares what the pope says?
Never thought I would see the day when the head of the the Catholic church represents a beacon of scientific rationalism dragging the rest of the first world into the modern era.
...boggles the mind. I mean, this is a tech website, you'd expect people here to be on average more intelligent or at least to have a better scientific culture than the average. And yet, whenever there's an article about climate change, there's always a bunch of morons spouting completely ignorant statements defeated by 10 seconds of googling. Where do all these people come from?
Someone has to look out for the Christians of the world.
Hint: Jesus was against Pharisees and Money Lenders. If you think he said for you to get rich and destroy the world, you're reading the wrong bible.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So if any US politicians change their tune about global warming because of what the Pope said, does this mean they are allied to a foreign power? Isn't it important to start booting people out of office that would do that?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
How utterly and typically ‘republican’ – to only accept those ‘scientific’ facts that happen to help you at that particular moment If the pope were to honestly embrace science including skepticism and scientific method, he would question his place on the planet for the religion he serves as head of. From a US perspective this could be the final straw the causes US Catholicism to break away from the holy catholic church of Rome
i'm an atheist who was raised catholic, but this pope is the biggest ass clown ever
I remain mystified by how such a sane and decent person has risen so high within a large institution.
Vatican = Owned by the Jews
Pope = Rothschild tool, and Rome has ruled the world for over 2000 years.
Rothschild Bankers behind man made "climate change" movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqNds9pNuI
Get ready to be taxes for your "carbon footprint" like good little dumb slaves.
Jesus never existed either.
Now go back to church like good little slaves and worship the pope who lives in his own golden castle country, and continue donating to the pedophiles collection defense fund every week too.
...for exactly this kind of imperious bullshit.
Absolutely. When you don't like the solution, it means the problem wasn't real anyway.
The facts involved in global warming are actually easily verified. You can do so in your basement if you like. All you need to do is to prove that CO2 absorbs IR energy of a certain spectrum. Then you will be able to calculate the temperature change for a doubling of CO2, as a straightforward result of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. You can even test that if you like, with the same equipment. Coming up with a good estimate of global atmospheric carbon levels might be a little tricky, but probably doable. Verifying that there is a vacuum outside of Earth's atmosphere is hopefully not a big point of contention, because that one would be really challenging. You would probably have a hard time measuring incoming solar irradiance very precisely, but you might be able to rule out large changes in it. You would be able to test fairly easily that Earth re-radiates absorbed solar radiation in the IR range.
That CO2 absorbs IR energy is the crucial point, and the most easily verified. Knowing that the Earth is surrounded by vacuum lets you ignore non-radiative heat transfer to and from this place. With those two facts, if you raise the partial pressure of CO2, the temperature must rise, all other things being equal. Solar irradiance is the only factor to consider with regards to whether or not things are being held equal, and it varies less than .1% on all but the longest time scales. The atmosphere can be held constant because almost all of it is transparent in the IR (and visible, naturally) with the exception of H2O and CO2. Now, the H2O is a serious problem, but it's also not something we can do anything about. There are large deposits of the liquid form almost anywhere you'd care to look, and for most purposes we consider the atmosphere to be saturated with the stuff. That leaves our faithful friend carbon dioxide.
This is undergraduate stuff. Hell, it's after-dinner conversation in my house. Calling it religion is labeling yourself as either a liar or someone dumber than his nick would suggest. AGW is comprehensible and provable by anyone with a first-world education.
You haven't bothered to research any cost-neutral schemes, nor paid any attention to actual projections of carbon taxes. If you make up the numbers I am sure they are pretty shocking. There isn't a "scientific" cure, that doesn't mean you can ignore the problem. We're somewhat worried about sea level rises, but the temperatures are the bigger issue. The rate at which we're dumping carbon into the atmosphere is completely unprecedented in human history, and on track to equal the largest outgassings in the planet's history. That's what's so special about it, "dumass". Food production areas don't shift easily, Siberia is not going to be farmable even if it melts. You melt permafrost, you get a bog, and it will stay a bog for hundreds or thousands of years. Fertile topsoil is not just dirt and not something that just happens, it's a complex ecosystem of its own that takes geologic time to develop. Farming there is slightly more viable than trying to fertilize the desert, or using hydroponics exlusively, but not that much more viable, and whatever happens you will still have to deal with a short growing season; the length of the day won't change. It's not "shifting the food production areas", it's getting rid of the existing food production areas and hoping that the rest of the ecosystem changes will be in our favor. The odds are not good.
How about instead of being part of the problem, we start working towards a European lifestyle. We could halve our emissions per capita without dipping below their living standards. This shit isn't that hard. Stop acting like you have a God-given right to pollute the planet. In point of fact, you have a God-given responsibility not to, as the Pope will no doubt point out. You know all that whining about entitlement that you've been doing? Look in a mirror.
What else would be un-biblical, or rather non-biblical event in nature? A super-volcano eruption or a kilometers wide asteroid impact? Anything that might kill over 1/3 of the world population is of course completely non-biblical. It is doubtful that the current climate change would kill over 1/3 of the whole population so it still belongs to the group of biblical changes. We are not about to kill over 95% of the ecosystem this time, right? Right?
Just where everyone should get their science information - a hardcore Lefty priest.
I don't think that is how Catholicism works. If you did not want to view everything the Pope says as the divine, incontestable, word of God, then I think you picked the wrong religion.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Evolution works - let's see what's next!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
For many years the Catholic Church has maintained that global warming is a real problem and that people should act accordingly, -as stewards of God's earth. Pope Francis has taken it a step farther but it's not a sudden change in position.
I was raised Catholic but no longer consider myself one. I still have a fascination for the Church's history and how it functions. I also share some of its values. To those that consider it an ultra-conservative organization, that's only partially true. It often isn't, at least not in the US political sense of the word "conservative". It's also a very large organization that exists within many countries and cultures. Though there is only one set of beliefs and teachings, the emphasis placed on those different teachings varies from place to place. For example, many Catholics in the US practice birth control even though the official teaching of the Church is that it's a sin (aside from "Natural Family Planning"). Few US priests (at least in my part of the country) are going to attempt to lecture their congregations on it.
So even though the Pope has put more teeth behind the Church's official stance on global warming, that doesn't mean that Catholic climate change skeptics are going to suddenly tow the party line. It will hopefully mean that the larger organization will make funds available to its churches to make them "greener" but I doubt it. Money tends to flow only in one direction within the Church.
As an atheist, I have to say that I respect this Pope for trying to drag the church, with many kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
Actually you are off by a century (maybe more). In the 1920s a Catholic priest at a Catholic university proposed the currently accepted theory regarding the origin of the universe, the big bang. In the 1960s (or earlier ?) the Catholic church accepted the biological evolution of life including man. The church stated last century that the language of Genesis is figurative not literal. It also stated last century that scientific discovery is not in conflict with faith.
If you want to look at earlier centuries much early research was done by members of the clergy, ex genetics. And various bishops were key in establishing the modern western tradition of the scientific method in Europe.
The part of the problem not described is what kind of action is recommended.
If the encyclycal writers are puzzling about this I have an answer for them: In 6 months every person in every region should reduce thheir daily CO2 emissions from every sector by 1/2.
Francis's environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles...
Isn't it strange that accepting what for all practical purposes must be called the scientific consensus is described as 'radical'? And stop calling deniers 'conservative' - a conservative is somebody who, after giving the matter some thought, feels that the old ways are best - whereas the deniers are people that refuse to apply their intellect at all, if there is a risk they might have to change their minds. I have a lot of respect for conservatives; rather less for deniers.
Centuries ago a pope bought the whole Earth-centered universe idea from the secular scientists of the day (people we now consider more as philosophers given that it pre-dated modern science) and he put his Catholic stamp of authority on it (based on the un-Biblical notion of papal infallability). When the secular guys changed their mind in response to new evidence, the Pope sat there in his throne trapped by the "infallability" of his predecessor and could not similarly change. It seems that elites who pretend to be superior in their knowledge of all things cannot resist the urge to pontificate on things they are neither qualified not authorized to speak upon and as a result are easily fooled into "approving" of the current "common wisdom". As even catholic monks like Copernicus rejected the Geocentric universe, the popes were still as trapped by their un-Biblical yet VERY institutional claims of infallability and they persecuted people who were armed with the truth. They HAD to go after people like Galileo because it was a threat to the infallability claims of the Popes upon which much of their authority in Europe was based. I know, serious Catholics will point out that modern Popes do not claim to be always infallable and limit that claim to certain religious pronouncements only, BUT that fine point was lost on the masses and not often corrected by Popes since the idea served them so well for so many centuries. Incidentally, while the Pope and the Catholic church fell into that trap, Protestants generally did not so it's an error to ascribe "flat earth", "geocentrism", or "anti-science" to all of Christianity.
Don't like the facts and think Popes or the Bible declared the universe was centered on the Earth? We call the calendar we all use the "Gregorian calendar" because it was designed by pope Gregory. We call the Earth-centric system the "Ptolemaic system" in honor of Claudius Ptolemy the Greek astronomer and mathematician (NOT some Pope). Stricly speaking, the Bible does not say the Earth is at the center of the universe, nor does it say the Earth is flat, nor does it say there should be a Pope or that such a person is EVER infallible (though is DOES say that leaders of the Church should be MARRIED MEN who have proven their ability to head a family before being given more responsibility leading a Church... though that's a subject for another day).
There's every possibility that this new doofus Pope is about to jump on the "Global Warming" bandwagon late in the game, as his predecessor did with geocentrism, to be similarly left "holding the bag" when new data comes in and the "mainstream" scientists change their minds. Popes who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, it seems.
Conservative Christians have had a wary eye on this guy since he was first named (LONG before your posting); he is a Catholic from South America and most of them, like most from Central America, got their popularity by embracing "liberation theology", "social justice", and the marxists who were opposing the dictatorships in those regions. These Catholic leaders are far more interested in wealth redistribution than in theology, and the cardinals in Vatican City were useful idiots if they did not see any of this coming.
Incidentally, some illiterate idiot with reading comprehension problems always enters conversations like this by announcing that Jesus was a socialist... usually aided by a Biblical verse or two about helping the poor, or charity, or the inability of a rich man to enter heaven (always with the simpleton interpretation of a highschooler who read the Cliff's Notes the night before an exam instead of the actual book). Allow me to point out that while the Good Book does say that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to attain heaven, it also say that through God, all things are possible (therefore a Godly rich man could). Jesus did indeed extoll the virtues of charity and told his apostles to leave everything behind and follow him, BUT [1] he did NOT tell everybody else he met to do this, and [2] he NEVER defined "charity" as "happily let the government take your stuff and give it to your lazy neighbors" (Charity is an INDIVIDUAL CHOOSING to give of himself to a person in need) and [3] when Jesus said "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's" he was NOT teaching "separation of church and state" or "pay your taxes"... he was challenging his critics to declare publicly themselves whether they thought it was possible for Caesar to have a superior claim on ANYTHING over God's claim of ownership.
It always helps to read ALL books (including the Bible) in their ENTIRETY and get everything IN CONTEXT before pretending to know what's in them.
When non-PhD-Scientists spoke out against AGW, the advocates of it denounced them as "not a scientist" and therefore not relevent (though the non-scientists who supported AGW were not similarly declared stupid).
Then when Freeman Dyson, one of the world's most-famous Physicists, said things AGW fanatics did not like they screeched that his degree was in the wrong field and his views were therefore not valid (of course when it turned out that their climate hero Dr Hanson was similarly degreed in Physics rather than climate science: well...CRICKET SOUNDS)
Now, here's the consistency test:
Is it in any way valid or important that the Catholic Pope (NOT a "climate scientist" and NOT a PhD physicist) says ANYTHING for or against "climate change" AKA "global warming" AKA "judgement of the flying spaghetti monster"??? Do you embrace everything else the Pope pushes (like opposition to abortion and homosexuality) or just the stuff you wanna use to push your cause? If you held Dyson's views irrelevant but now place anything other than scorn on this Papal pronouncement, you are just an AGW fanboy who should go back to your suspended "combat mission" on your X-Box and wait for mom to summon you to dinner.
These comments read like a script from Family Guy. For every statement of what is opinion or could be sense, there seem to be two or more putdowns, 2 insults, and a number of mindlessly stupid irrelevancies.
Yes, the Catholic Pope addressed Global Warming giving the Scientific Consensus. Yes, he is remarkably sane for a high ranking Catholic - electing him was an grave error, or else the cardinals felt quite desperate. Yes, he should be kicking out of the Vatican all criminal priests with diplomatic immunity, purging his organization of pedophiles, talking about God's Kingdom and using God's name, divesting the church of it's ill gotten gains and putting them to good use. But it is an obviously false religion. As it influences people less, it rides along with their opinions more.
The truth is - I don't think Catholicism is an organization that can be reformed. Now that I have said that much, watch for the insults, put downs, and mindless irrelevancies.
Global warming is directly related to the amount of energy we consume. The amount of energy we consume is proportional to the number of people on the planet.
A sensible thing to to would be to allow members of the Catholic faith to control the size of their families. This will help to reduce the growth of emissions. It may also give them a better quality of life.
Unless keeping the number of Catholics higher than the number of Muslims is much more important.
please, please let boehner/fox news/anyone take a public stand against the pope on this ... please let them see what happens when they alienate their bigger regular christian base by trying to appeal to a wacky fringe which is super religious AND is able to disagree with the pope themselves... itll be awesome
Peer review isn't an effective mechanism for this type of work. What's needed is a new system based more on the principles of cryptography and security authentication, where the science and data can be validated even if one assumes that the scientists involved are fundamentally untrustworthy. Why should someone have to put more trust in climate scientists in making decisions to change lifestyles than they do in the participants needed to mine and validate a single Bitcoin? The raw data collection, analysis, etc. all need to be independently verifiable, with protocols that don't depend on review by peers who a crypto system should regard as equally untrustworthy.
Give me the one time costs any day baby. BTW - although cement releases CO2 during manufacture, it absorbs it back during hardening. This is called the lime cycle and is carbon neutral. (CO2 released to provide the energy needed is not carbon neutral, but still is a one-time cost)
Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.
Oh r-r-r-right. So then it must be correct, right? The views of millions of evangelical Christians are worth precisely dick. And if they're fundamentalist evangelicals, they're views are worth even less than zero.
Whispered under breath:
Eppure si raffredda.
So the "ice age is coming" of the 1970s becomes "global warming" in the 1980s/90s and has now morphed into "climate change" because the warming stopped 14-18 years ago. "Climate Change" is so nice because they won't have to change their scam's name every time the climate does something they don't expect .... like CHANGE! For goodness sake climate is always changing and humans for all their arrogance have very little to do with it. Urban heat island is proven and CO2 might have a 1 degree C change for each doubling.
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
Here are 2 predictions. First I predict that CO2 will continue to increase because China and other countries don't care about CO2. They don't even care about real pollutants much less CO2. Second I predict it will get colder over the next 20-30 years. Why?
Dr Libby in the 1970s said that "looking forward it will stay cold until the mid 80s (it did), then it will warm by about 1/4 degree F until the end of the century it did), then it gets cold". When asked how cold she was predicting a 1-2 degree F drop with an outside chance of a 3-4 degree drop.
Dr Easterbrook in 2001 said the PDO was done it's positive warm cycle and that we were in for 25-30 years of cold weather. How cold? We have his good, bad and ugly predictions based on previous negative cold phases of the PDO. The best we can hope for is the 1945-1977 period. The others are really bad.
Why do I join with them and side with their predictions? While past performance is not a guarantee of future correctness it is a lot better record than the IPCC and their dozens of models of which none have been accurate. They are all based on CO2 controlling the climate and the other 2 are all cyclical natural cycles. I'll go with those who have a good track record at predicting future climate. Dr Libby is the most impressive as her prediction is 30+ years going and still accurate.
If you want to read a great explanation of why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief there was a great article describing that and all the other problems with climate science by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
The science is done so that another scientist will independently test the results and come up with same conclusion. Just because you don't do it doesn't mean it is not done already. In case you find something wrong with the way data is handled you are free to handle it differently and publish your results for peer review.
"Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US." We are fuckwits, irredeemably completely and utterly fuckwitted. If you believe a fairy tale being in the sky told you you go around being a fuckwit with the ecosystem of your home with out consequence then what else could you be except a fuckwit.
On behalf of my fellow fuckwits everywhere I call upon you to burn climatologists every were as witches because those fuckwits would stop me making a profit,
Which is why I expect him to be assassinated soon. Pope Francis' reign will be brief if he actually tries to reform the Church, just as John Paul I did (and was poisoned for his trouble).
...I thought the Catholic church were supposed to be waiting in eager anticipation of armageddon. Are they trying to delay it now? What's going on in theocracy land?
No, that's EXACTLY the point. "Publish results for peer review" is just going back to a trusted systems (or trusted parties) model. A valid authentication system would assume the peers aren't trusted, either. Peer review is identical to asking someone to trust that a file they're downloading is valid not because the MD5 signature validates, but because three other people posted a note claiming that they checked the MD5 signature, and say it's valid. If it isn't good enough of an authentication procedure that you'd use it for your online banking, why should it be good enough to authenticate scientific advice for major policy decisions?
I once attended a great presentation by David Brin, making the point that modern society has evolved past the previous concept of a higher authority telling people to basically "be good," to instead use human adversarial tendencies productively in several distinct fora, like markets, politics, and courts. But the current system of peer review--especially in climate science--seems to have closed ranks to the point where it's almost returning to the priesthood model of "be good, take our word for it, or join our ranks and be indoctrinated." That's not to say they're wrong, not at all, but the model for how they provide proof is wrong. It isn't like physical sciences, where most of the major things, there's proof by public, self-evident demonstration, e.g.: "See that nuclear explosion? E really does equal mc^2." Climate science either needs something similar, or a fundamentally different approach toward the production of scientific research.
Wait outside your nearest Catholic church next Sunday and count the number of people that look like they are between the ages of 14 and 45.
Very few? So why will anything that the pope proclaims have much impact on the future?
This is more about the Vatican flipping the bird at other religions by suggesting that they are somehow morally superior now.
Post after post echoing the same old false stereotypes of "religion is anti-science", "the religious are anti-science and/or ignorant", "church opposes science", "religion is no better than superstitions", and "about time they accept science as right"....
When are new atheists going to accept reality that religion isn't nor ever has been out to get science and technology...
He would do well to review the environmental problem posed by over population of the planet as global warming is only a side issue on the real problem
Posted BY R Jenkins Australia
and what an arsehole our primeminister (catholic) is.
> Christianity was always about wealth distribution.
Nonsense.
The Bible teaches capitalism, not socialism. Read this commentary.
Authentication of raw data might be useful, but hard to enforce when it requires a human agency to collect - and data fudging cases are pretty rare anyway. I don't see this as a significant problem.
Sounds more like your issue is with the trustworthiness of conclusions derived from those results, and I don't see how authentication could help there at all. The nearest electronic equivalent we have to that is a reputation score, and reputation has long been an important factor in scientific publishing. This is backed by anonymous review by a number of other reputable peers, and has been working pretty well for the last few centuries.
climate scientists in making decisions to change lifestyles
There's a lot of enormous leaps in that phrase. The vast majority of climate scientists simply present their conclusions about what has happened and is likely to happen, and peer-reviewed studies rarely even touch on solutions to the problems discovered (a few climatologists have been separately advocating for change, but not as part of the scientific body of work). No climatologist that I'm aware of actually has the political power to decide the lifestyle of anyone beyond their own family. And then there's the whole question of whether climate solutions require significant lifestyle changes in the first place, beyond simply phasing in a carbon-neutral energy infrastructure.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?