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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 Pope is the best one we've had in MANY years! He seems genuinely concerned for the average person, and seems to apply the standards Jesus used, which is precisely what a pope should do!
May God bless him!
And may people who stubbornly believe it's OK to screw up the environment be sent to a very warm place, where there won't be any climate change, ever.
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.
You liked the Popes that hushed up rampant pedophilia and hobnobbing with the powerful and rich?
What ever floats your ark.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ha, haha, hahahaha.
Well this atheist wishes you both irrelevance, though if he's going to be relevant I'd prefer his brand.
On a side note why is it whenever I read posts like the above, when I click on them, I can be absolutely certain the poster is none other than Mr AC.
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.
-1 Downvote for quoting the Daily Mail on anything.
"his ridiculus support for evolution"
Um, every pope for eighty years has supported evolution. The catholic church has been officially supportive of evolution since the 1950 encyclical.
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."
Idiot. Pope Frank doesn't represent you. He represent GOD. You think Catholicism is a democracy?
While I admire many of Francis actions, he was not the first Pope to respect evolution. That honor goes to Pius XII, which is surprising considering most Popes named Pius were complete bastards who should not have been allowed to live much less given any authority. The Vatican accepts both "God made Man with magic" and "God used evolution to create Man" as valid possibilities. They do not say it was evolution, just that God can use whatever tool he damn well pleases because he's God for fucks sake.
Good job on being more conservative than the Vatican of half a century ago. It takes a lot of brain-damage to accomplish that feat.
You do know that there's PLENTY of scientific evidence out there which ISN'T funded by big oil refuting the ridiculous notion that carbon-dioxide is pollution?
What I particularly liked about your post is the large number of sources you included to support the above statement.
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.
First of all, "scientific evidence" doesn't show whether or not something is or is not "pollution". "Pollution" is a term of judgement.
The science shows that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can change the climate. There are not "PLENTY" of scientists who disagree with that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...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! --
Kirribati Islands. The water supply is already compromised by sea water, they are in the process of moving the population to Fiji. http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
Adam & Eve - the executive version:
His boss, kicked "us" out of the executive lounge - where we had free finger food and funny games* all day - and there was nothing else to do, than to praise him and follow his rules - not to eat the apple from the special tree (tree of awareness).
We voilated his only rule and became aware due to eating the apple from the tree of awareness.
God realized that now at least four entities (god, adam, eve, satan a.k.a Snake Plisken) with awareness existed.
And so he said when people are aware of theirselves they don't need a caring god, they can live on their own with *any help* from daddy.
This is why HE/God/His boss can't/won't fix it. Because our sin is awareness so mankind is fully responsible for it's own actions
And as we are responsible for our actions, we should try to act accordingly.
And not hope, that the CO2 content conserved over hundreds of millions of years excavated and reintroduced into the atmosphere over a term of ~150yrs. will have really no effect on the climate.
*(adam & eve games)
*(in the start at some point in time god went arsonist on some olive trees)
So what you're saying is "because lots of the power we have available now is produced by burning coal, we shouldn't try to produce power in the future by doing something else"?
I mean, of course the wind turbines get produced by burning coal - that's so that future wind turbines will be produced by drawing electricity from a grid powered by wind turbines (and tidal power stations, and hydro plants, and solar plants, and nuclear, and ...)
I remain mystified by how such a sane and decent person has risen so high within a large institution.
He represent[s] GOD.
I'm not so sure - he often sounds like a compassionate atheist.
A modern wind turbine in typical European conditions generates enough energy to "repay" the costs of building and installing it in about six months. http://www.theguardian.com/env...
Backup can mostly be other renewable sources (solar, hydro, biomass) demand management and storage (pumped water at the moment). For the rare but real occasions when none of this covers the need, cheap gas turbines designed for a low duty cycles seem like the best option.
Have you heard of this guy Paul who wrote most of the new testament? He said: "For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."" (Galatians 5:14)
Some of your neighbors are gay. Paul ordered you to treat *all* your neighbors with love, and so did Jesus. Pope Francis is just following orders. If the Bible is your authority on truth, you should too.
Conservative Christians/Catholics grossly misunderstand their Biblical history. Compared to the conservative Jewish tradition of his day, Jesus was a FLAMING liberal. Eating with sinners and tax collectors! Breaking the law when it doesn't make sense! Forgiving sinners that were caught red-handed! These are part of why everyone was so pissed off at him: he was too liberal.
Conservative Christianity has been infected by hatred, judgmentalism, self-righteous pride, and disgusting selfishness. And you, Mr AC, are a fine example of exactly this.
You seriously need to have a heart-to-heart with your God before it is too late.
If a US politician advocates for Israel does this mean they are allied to a foreign power? If a US politician takes campaign contributions from a multi-national corporation does that mean they are violating the foreign immoluments clause of the US Constitution?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Sure they can - generating heat is always roughly 100% efficient, so as long as the wind turbines are generating the same amount of energy as the coal that would otherwise be burned for heat, you're good to go.
For the immediate future though, yes, any sort of metalwork is probably going to be fueled by fossil fuels, simply because they are cheap, and 2-3x as efficient when producing heat is the *goal* rather than an intermediate step. Using electricity to generate heat is phenomenally wasteful unless 100% of the total electricity is produced sustainably - in a rational world heating applications should be the *last* thing converted away from fossil fuels (nuclear could also be a viable option, but not until someone starts building nuclear reactors designed to operate at iron-smelting temperatures). Until we reach that point it makes far more sense to use the electricity for things that need non-thermal energy, and fossil fuels for things that need heat.
That in no way detracts from the benefit of deploying renewable energy sources - without such deployment that same "dirty energy" would instead be invested in producing more "dirty energy" generating facilities - demand is constantly increasing, and old generating facilities are constantly being updated or replaced.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>. Coal is one of the most dense and cheapest forms of energy on the planet, so it involves much less harm to the environment
Well, except for the fact that it's the #1 source of radioactive pollution, hideously toxic and unregulated under grandfathered environmental exemptions, and the undisputed #1 source of CO2 per watt: which at current rates of usage increase will almost certainly rapidly alter planetary temperatures to something resembling the Cambrian Period in only a few centuries, devastating virtually all existing ecosystems in the process.
I agree invoking "biomass" is not a magic bullet - but done intelligently you can efficiently convert farm waste, etc. to energy, and even optionally produce biochar (at a loss of energy) - an extremely old and ecologically beneficial form of carbon sequestration.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's not even a matter of whether a particular substance is a "pollutant" or "toxic". Many necessary substances can be harmful if present in high concentrations. You can die just by drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that water's a pollutant, even though too much can kill you. The argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant because plants need it is similarly confused -- too much of a good thing can be harmful.
To get to the heart of the matter, the EPA considers any harmful emission to be a pollutant, even if the substance emitted is necessary for life.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You hypocrites are always making fun of religion, and calling catholics pedophiles and faggots.
That's bullshit and you know it ...
We would never call catholics 'faggots'.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.
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.
Are you a practicing climate scientist who has personally checked all those facts? Not many people who would agree with you are. But they are looking at something written down that they- perhaps even you can never check or verify other then asking someone else if it is correct. But it's your version, it's real and factual, just like the faith Jews or Christians, or Muslims have.
Bullshit. First, there are degrees of wrong. Plus, you know, science works.
I am actually a published, practicing scientist. I can do the basic smell test on the papers, if not understand the tiny details.
To come to the conclusion that "the concensus is probably right and that in any case, I have no compelling reson to doubt the conclusions" the only "faith" I need to have is to discount the preposterous notion that the world's climate scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy to defraud us all.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Coal is used to refine raw iron ore into iron or steel because the ore consists to a huge percentage of OXYGEN! ... which is mainly done with electricity.
So you need coal to reduce the iron ore to iron, and for that you basically can only use coal: not gas nor oil.
However the majority of steel production is recycling of existing steel
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Straw man. The Pope and the mainstream environmental movements are not arguing for that, so using it to criticise him is not a valid argument.
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.
Wow, you really like these straw men, huh. When I think of moral imperatives, I think of things like equal rights for black people and the end of slavery, equality for homosexuals, not polluting the world or hunting species into extinction, that sort of thing. ISIS isn't really representative of the Pope's views or what he means by "moral imperative", so I'm happy to say you are wrong.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Obviously there is, hence the name carbon cycle. Plants use solar energy and CO2 to produce biomass, and pretty much everything else then oxidizes that biomass for energy, releasing the original amount of CO2 in the process. A nice closed loop that keeps recycling the same carbon over and over again.
The problem is that when we burn fossil fuels we're releasing *geologic* carbon from the rock - carbon that mostly hasn't been part of the ecological carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years - and there's not really any natural process to return that carbon to the rock at anything remotely like the rate at which we're releasing it* - which means the total amount of carbon in the ecosystem is increasing. And since carbon isn't the limiting factor on the amount of biomass on the planet, that pretty much means that the atmosphere and oceans have to absorb all that extra CO2 - there's nowhere else for it to go.
* You may ask, so then how did all that fossil fuel build up in the first place? The answer is varied, but for coal there was a period of ~60 million years (the Carboniferous Period, 359-299mya) during which plants had evolved cellulose to give them rigidity, but nothing had yet evolved a way to digest it. So you have 60 million years of the carbon rich cell-walls of plants building up and compacting instead of rotting away and being recycled - add another 300 million years of slow chemical and biological degradation underground and coal is what's left.
As it happened that process dramatically reversed a slow but implacable greenhouse effect caused by the gradual decay of carbon-bearing rocks - the same basic process that made Venus what it is today. Without those 60 million years worth of rapid global carbon sequestration it is questionable whether complex life would still be able to survive on this planet. You'll excuse me for not wanting to find out what happens if we bring it all back.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Skeptical Science is neither. It is a propaganda website, run by the innermost clique of fraudsters accused of manipulating data, "hiding the decline", and suppressing all dissenting evidence.
Actually, that's just wrong. Skeptical science was started by a cartoonist, and the people involved there are mostly not climate scientists, so your first claim is obviously false.
Of course they publish work that supports their own opinions.
The link from above is merely an explanation of why the claim that warming stopped in 1998 is wrong with actual links to the peer reviewed science to back up the facts used in the explanation.
Those idiots actually still support Mann's Hockey Stick - what may be one of the most thoroughly disproven claims in modern science.
Actually, it may surprise you but is has not been disproven at all. In fact, "[m]ore than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph".
It's be more remarkable if Skeptical Science ever admitted to error, or allowed dissent.
If have seen both, what they don't allow is people to post demonstrably false information, go off topic or dip into personal insults.
The fact is that every single climate model predicted major increases in temperature that have not occurred. Yet somehow these models are still supposed to be correct?
That's a claim, not a fact, and Skeptical Science has a debunking of that claim too.
Fanatically anti-fanatical