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Lawrence Krauss On the Pope's Encyclical: Not Even Close?
Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'
Three modes of persuasion/rhetoric identified by Aristotle are ethos, pathos, and logos.
ethos is an appeal to authority or credibility
pathos is an appeal to emotions
logos is an appeal to reason
Tthe pope's statement may have enough ethos with some audiences to make an impact.
The Pope holds a great deal of moral authority. Scientists not so much.
I've read Laudate Si'. It's not really about the science, or arguing that AGW is true, or that biodiversity is being lost, or that pollution is killing people. It takes these things for granted but it does not marshall evidence per se.
It's main point is that AGW, true or not, is evil and must be stopped, and it ties this into social teaching by associating the consumer culture of rich countries with the exploitation and immiseration of small, poor ones; mankind's moral obligation to protect the Earth, and it asserts baldly things like "man has no right" to push a species, any species, even the smallest plankton, to extinction (Francis actually mentions plankton).
I don't hear scientists talk like this, and that's fine, it's probably not their place. But evidence isn't enough to actually move people to action, you do actually have talk about right and wrong, and why this thing is wrong and must be stopped. And Francis specifically argues against the idea that technology will one day solve this problem for us, to him the problem with the planet is 100% between people's ears, it has to do with the way modern people see the world as a resource to be exploited. Don't ask me to defend this, I think he's a little too pessimistic here, but it just continues the idea that his argument isn't about science, or technology, or even the material world, to him it's fundamentally spiritual.
And he has a point; why should we care about climate change if the Earth if it's just a ball of dirt and we can just fly a rocket to another one? Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not. So does Krauss think scientists should hold more moral authority than a Pope? Is that the paradox here? Should scientists teach us right and wrong?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
As like most ancient religions, they need to keep up with the times. The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now. As well it supported environmentalism for a long time. What the pope did was make this issue more important then the others.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or the selfish Aynn Rand style would be to give out condoms in the 3rd world.
If the population is in half we could all buy our gas guzzling SUV's, use water and electricity, and still have a cleaner earth and cheaper gas prices and rents/mortgages.
People are inheriently selfish and evil in the Christian sense and will always pick their self interest as sad as it is true. How many who whine about global warming and oil companies are willing to take a bus to work or ride a bike 4 hours each way? No hands I see ...
http://saveie6.com/
I agree that moral posturing is a largely sterile exercise; but you are using the (possibly true) equivalent between two stances on 'what other people should do to solve this problem' to advance a false equivalence that those two proposals will work similarly well "no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways".
It's nice that there's an encyclical agreeing that listening to the experts on the matter is important, and noting that most predicted effects of climate change will not be blessings upon the already poor is pretty logical pope stuff; but there is a very, very, strong case to be made that the Catholic church is...a poor source of advice... when it comes to either population or to inducing social change.
Even when backed by violence, religious suasion has a lousy track record of keeping people from having sex, regardless of marital status, risk of disease transmission, willingness/unwillingness to deal with possible additional children, etc. It also doesn't have a terribly promising track record on motivating to abstain from various carbon-intensive goods and services if they are available.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion; and simply mitigate some or all of the effects of what people are doing anyway. Whether it's prophylactics or non fossil fuel energy sources, it's always going to be easier to prevent STD spread, or generate electricity without burning dinosaurs than it will be to sell people on celibacy and sitting in the dark.
As I've argued before, much to the anger of some, at least one country, the US, can do a lot by reducing coercion in a critical area that happens to be responsible for around 25% of US CO2 emissions.
The US is the only country I' m aware of where most urban areas are mandated to follow suburban planning policies, making redevelopment within cities prohibitively expensive as all developments are subject to absurd parking mandates that make little sense in high density areas where good doesn't-even-need-subsidies transit should be the norm.
Change that, and give developers more freedom to build what people actually want, and a sizable number of people won't feel forced to live in suburbia any more (and many people who currently live there thinking urban living is somehow synonymous with run-down crime ridden neighborhoods will change their minds.)
Staggeringly enough, I don't think most people want to live inefficiently. Most want to make the maximum use of their dollars to get the best living environment they can. Most state and counties currently force them to waste dollars on supporting huge amounts of infrastructure that offer little value to them.
Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee some idiot will respond to this claiming I'm the one forcing people to do something, because I'm proposing offering a choice of living more efficiently, and that... I don't know... will make people who still choose to live in the middle of nowhere feel bad or something? Or maybe they're terrified that the market will choose the urban areas and all of a sudden suburbia will become run down and impossible to live in? I have no idea. I don't understand the mindset.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Krauss brings up points that the pope doesn't _because_ of the pope's "moral authority". For example, Krauss makes the point that contraception is a must. A large world population is simply unsustainable without doing major environmental harm (and may simply be unsustainable, period). Needless to say, the pope couldn't really go there, although he has previously said that people should have fewer children -- never mind how.
So, while I think the pope is doing much good, he is dangerously restricted by the very moral authority you mention. It's a double-edged sword.
It's a direct link; but God is the sort of important dude who deals with a lot of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.
Unless God decides to read the Pope into a given program, it's purely need-to-know. In addition(as is likely in this case) God will sometimes 'preserve the integrity of privileged omniscience capabilities and/or techniques' by providing the data gathered by the non-public method through a 'parallel construction' that offers a plausible but fictitious origin for the information.
Here, investigative theologians and divine conspiracy theorists suggest that God's climate data are probably actually derived from his clandestine monitoring of the position and location of all particles in existence. Since this blatantly violates the reasonable expectations of privacy established for all particles by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this program does not officially exist. So far, none of the heavenly host have been willing to make any public statement on the matter, so it remains speculative.
Whoever thinks the pope is trying to pick sides in a political debate is either genuinely insane or has trouble forming simple logical concepts. Because on the scientific overall concept it's not even a debate. The best methods for combating climate change though, are still only scientific. Politics dosent even enter in until you try to implement those methods.
Go ahead and mod me down but I'm really sick and tired of people thinking what they believe makes a crap in a biscuits difference to reality. Even though the popes statement may be lacking its a great step to get hundreds of millions of stupid people to start acting responsibly and be aware of the issue. It's just so ironic that it is a belief in faith, with no foundation in factual reality, that brings awareness to the factual reality we as a species are facing.
Marketing is the science of coercing people to live differently. Is it OK when it's done in the name of corporate profits, but somehow bad when it's in the name of trying to head off probable disaster?
Please tell us how people addressing climate change are acting out of "greed and self interest". And if you bring up Al Gore's private jet, you have to spend 10 minutes in the Fox News penalty box.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak.
No it does not. Unless you have such a vague notion of faith as to make it effectively meaningless it HAS to intrude on the material plane. Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion. Everyone would have a vague notion of something "beyond" and it would end there. But it doesn't.
It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
There is HUGE amounts of evidence that it doesn't really work like that in the real world. Organized religions cannot help but get involved in claiming all sorts of things that science can and does dispute.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable
And yet the church claims to understand them in great detail except when it is convenient for them to claim to not know. Cannot work both ways.
Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.
The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.
There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The tricky bit is that greenhouse gas emissions are a classic negative externality(arguably even more so than pollution generally, which more often stays comparatively close to the release site, rather than having minimial proximate effect but worldwide cumulative effect).
Negative externalities are not things that people tend to just stand up and volunteer to fix because they are nice guys like that, never mind getting all of them to do so, rather than some doing so and the rest taking advantage of the newly cheaper coal.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology; but unless you internalize the externality you can expect to wait a long, long, time for anything to happen voluntarily.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
You speak of one type of religion -- one that is anti-science. You are also invoking the so-called conflict thesis, which was basically made up by a distortion of history in the 1800s and which actual historians now recognize is largely bogus.
There are plenty of religions in the world (including the Catholic Church) that have been pioneers in scientific research. Why? Because they believe there is a moral responsibility to understand God's creation, to appreciate it, to protect it.
The pope's recent message is more of this.
The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science.
Can you seriously look at this list of Roman Catholic clergy who were scientists throughout history, including many of people who FOUNDED entire modern scientific disciplines, and tell us that there's a fundamental conflict there?
Read about the relationship between the Catholic Church and science over the past millennium. Aside from the Galileo affair (where the actions of the church should be condemned), you'd be hard-pressed to find many other examples where the church has impeded scientific progress... and MANY periods where they have explicitly promoted and funded it.
Yes, there are plenty examples of anti-science religious wackos out there. By all means, condemn their ignorance. But religion can also be an inspiration to cause people to look harder at the world around them. That's what the Catholic Church has promoted for the past thousand years or so. The belief in "unproven" things generally does not come into conflict in the Catholic Church -- they aren't biblical literalists (unlike some evangelical movements) and pretty much never have been. St. Augustine and other early writers were already talking about the allegorical nature of scripture 1500+ years ago, so they aren't the wacko "young-earth creationists" who insist that evolution can't occur or that the earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
It's one thing to believe in something that is against empirical evidence -- some religions do that. But others mostly believe in supernatural phenomena when it CAN'T be proved nor disproved. (This is the true original meaning of agnosticism, developed by a SCIENTIST to classify a belief that some statements about religion cannot be proved nor disproved from empirical evidence and are thus beyond adjudication by science.)
If such beliefs do not conflict with empirical evidence, then what is your SCIENTIFIC basis for discounting them or declaring them antithetical to science? At worst, they show wishful thinking. Any scientist who has ever bought a lottery ticket should be drummed out of the profession if wishful thinking should be banned. At best, they might inspire some moral or ethical thinking about "bigger questions" that science doesn't usually address.
The Catholic Church not only was pro-science for much of the past 1000 years -- in many cases it was a PIONEER in science. To not admit that fact either shows ignorance or unsupported anti-religious bigotry.
(P.S. I'm NOT a Catholic. I don't care what the pope says. But I do care about ignorance of history. The Catholic Church has been responsible for many bad things throughout history, but so has every other nation or organization which has existed for centuries. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another such organization, nation, or other corporate body that's at least a couple centuries old and has been so consistently pro-science.)
The Catholic Church has been pro-science for a while now.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science. Their entire MO is based on faith in unproven/unprovable things and do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The fact that the catholic church hasn't stood in the way of science isn't the same thing as being pro-science. I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
You have evidently never heard of the Jesuits. It's entirely possible to believe in religion and still be a grounded person - and it's entirely possible to be completely devoted to science and still be crazy (see Nazi Germany as an example). Religion when taught as a form of philosophy (which is what it really should be) can make for a great moral compass. Religion when taught in the form of governmental law is what's harmful.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
The coerced solutions only get noticed when they go wrong. Look at some of the highly successful coerced solutions: Requiring seatbelts in cars, banning the use of CFCs as propellants and refrigerants, banning the use of lead compounds as fuel additives. All cases in which a destructive practice was ended not by voluntary changes, but by a government passing laws and declaring 'Stop doing that or we'll start throwing some executives in jail.'
Science can tell us what the planet is and where it's going, but it can't tell us if that's a good thing or not.
This is a very insightful comment, and I hope you don't get modded down by anti-religious morons.
Umm, religions can't tell us if it's a good thing or not either. Not in any objective sense of the word that we can all agree upon. Science can tell us the effects of our actions. Religion cannot. So science CAN tell us if what is happening is a good thing at least for any non-moral sense of the term good.
The vilification of the "Galileo affair" is generally just more anti-Catholic propaganda from the Enlightenment era:
Agreed, but I didn't want to get into that whole mess. I've already explained what's screwed up with our perception of the Galileo affair a number of times here, like in posts here and here.
The "faith" is that the universe behaves in predictably. If that isn't so, every world view in the world is rendered moot.
But really, calling science faith is like calling two column accounting faith.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seeing as how science and religion deal with different things, there is no "irreconciliability" nor is it unreasonable for a church to be pro-science.
Yeah, accounting is faith in conservation of money, which is disproved by the empirical observation that the money supply increases.
As for the universe behaving predictably, science laws are probabilistic at best. So in the specific case of a photon being measured, you cannot predict which state it will collapse to: you can only say there's a probability. There is an inherent self-contradiction in quantum mechanics between Shroedinger's equation and the final measured state.
See Penrose:
"quantum theory itself, quite apart from its need to be unified with general relativity theory, is basically self-inconsistent"
He goes on, at length (please see the pdf to read the strange characters in the quotation below, I started correcting them then realized it would take more time than I want to spend on this):
The point is that the law we use to predict a particle's state is inconsistent with the observation of that state, when it occurs. The law is continuous, the observation is discrete.
It took science a few decades to admit Mendel was right, too. Science has lots of authority problems. See Feynman in Cargo Cult Science, where he describes how researchers subsequent to Millikan found ways to fudge their more correct observations about the charge on an electron, because they wanted to agree with the great authority whose experiment they were replicating. Or Feynman's account of how an important finding about rats is ignored by science.
We have learned to live with them.
The trick is to _not_ give their religious beliefs any legal power and humor them beyond that. Before we found that, the world was a truly fucked place.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Thank you for making my point - blind adherence to authority is detrimental to the progress of science, no matter if the authority is the pope or a scientist.
The difference is that scientists acknowledge this fact and take steps to prevent it from occurring (we're all biased and irrational beings so it's impossible to completely eliminate), whereas religions celebrate this blind authoritarianism and take steps to preserve it as much as they can.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
But both refer to the place the aliens came from. I like the bible cause it gives us a good record of alien visitation. I pretty much hate religion for locking up all the alien landing sites as religious sites that no one can dig in.
Don't mythologize native Americans. They were very few in number, yet did manage to hunt a few species to extinction. If everyone in North America were native American today, our ecological footprint probably wouldn't be much different.
If you read past the flowery language, you'll see that the Catholic Church's position is based on misogyny and the denial of women's rights to control their bodies. Mind you, so are most religions so don't think I'm bashing Catholicism particularly.
Specifically in the Catholic case, it's also highly hypocritical. We have this "divine gift" from God, yet priests are not allowed to enjoy it --- all so the Church will inherit their property, of course, rather than natural living heirs. How conveeeenient.
It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of premises lead you to assign an equal estimated probability for a universe to be created by an otherwise hidden powerful sentient being, as a law of nature? And more importantly, how would you make verifiable predictions concerning how the world would look like if it were created by a powerful sentient being as compared to by a law of nature? Finally, if you can make verifiable predictions of the actions of a mysterious sentient being, why bother including the sentient being in the theory since you could just include the rules on how it would act instead?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You are aware, I trust, that you are describing a very small group of men that made up some of the Nazi leadership. The overwhelming majority of Nazis were Catholics and Lutherans.
And *you* are aware, I trust, that churches throughout Germany had many of their priests/pastors/clergy killed and replaced by Party-approved men, and crosses and other sacraments & symbols were stripped out and replaced with Nazi symbols and flags.
Right?
Read up on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the context of the events related to churches etc in Germany during the Nazi reign.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I really enjoy Lawrence Krauss, and Richard Dawkins, and, alas, Christopher Hitchens etc. I am an "anti-theist" and someone who has absolutely no belief in god. That being said, I have spoken at my wfe's church, cooked for their dinners, and was friends with the last pastor. He and I accepted that we had no common ground in the spiritual world, but we both agreed that community is good, and that creating friends and being good friends and neighbours is good. How could that not be? I stood up in front of the church and said I was an Atheist and that I enjoyed the community. I got applause. This is a true story.
Lawrence, Richard, an others obviously need to continue the Atheism work that they do, but they also need to understand that this was a HUGE movement by the catholic church. HUGE. The pope is a chemist. A scientist. If you judge this pope by his words and his actions, he may be the sort of man that can lead a sizeable portion of the world population in a better direction.
I think "Atheism" and "Climate Change" are separate. If this pope did not do enough, reach out. He isn't the nazi-youth that was there previously, this is a man trained in chemistry and seems earnest. I think this is the best chance science and a major religion have ever had to work together to address a real problem facing human kind. Rather than snipe at the pope for not going far enough, holy shit guys, 1 billion people claim to listen to this guy, convince him to do better.
I'm no member of an advanced spacefaring race but if I were I might find that insulting.
The actual order of events in genesis is:
1. 'Let there be light'
2. Separation of sea and sky.
3. Creation of dry land.
4. Creation of day and night.
5. Creation of water-based animals.
6. Creation of land-based animals and humans.
Days 1, 5, and 6 might be a 'fair' approximation of the actual way the world formed. But days 2-4 are totally bogus and seem to be out of order. The way the Earth actually formed, it congealed from a ball of dust and was initially molten; it gradually solidified (forming dry land), had a day & night cycle, and then over millions of years got cool enough for seas to form.
Why would an 'advanced spacefaring race' mangle the order of events in this way? Do they just like $@#$ing with us? :) Actually that WOULD explain a lot of things.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I think the Buddha's Kalama Sutta, called his "charter of free inquiry" , is relevant here. The current Dalai Lama has said "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
There's often confusion between science (testable observations) and science (reasoning, thinking, rationality).
They overlap in a very specific way: reason is the capacity to think about thinking. Ie. I have a thought, "the Gods like me" and then rather that just start behaving like the Gods like me, I actually then have another thought, "wait, how do I know the Gods like me, what am I basing that thought on?"
Most people gain the ability to think about thinking in their early teens. Until then, we just parrot what we're told.
Now, this enquiry, "how do I know if this is really true?" is the basis of science. Science is technically called a "3rd person perspective", ie. it is objective. It comes from like, 13th century or something, where who armies were about to charge each other on the battle field, both of them yelling "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!!!" and a clever guy standing on a hill watching, said to himself, "well, they can't both be right". He was literally the 3rd person there, as the first two could not stand objectively and see the scene. He realised, they can't both be right, so at least one side is deluding themselves, is mistaken, yet they appear completely convinced. So how do I know if I ma right? I can't just rely on feeling certain of my view. It has to be..... TESTED!
That's science and reason. The ability to know that we can fool ourselves, so we need a way to TEST.
Ironically, climate change is one of those things where they say, oh we can't wait until it is really testable, we have to act, which you know, is a problem. It is such a problem that people resort to calling others immoral denialists, for pointing to it. And ironic that the Pope weighs in on it, too.
But if you read many of those paragraphs in the Pope's thing, you'll see that he is only using it to promote Christian values, like self sacrifice, helping the poor, etc. And he's very against postmodern values, where people try to think about alternatives. It would be nice if he said, please build some nuclear power stations, or improve the efficiency of cars, but no, he's all like, stop being selfish you sinners! Stop being materialistic! Stop being greedy!
And frankly, I'm of the opinion that climate change has been tuned in to a polarised, good guys v bad guys, "science" v "denialists", that it is no wonder that the Pope can come in and say, see I told you, you must respect the ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY OF GOD!
It is just a symptom of ecology having been dumbed down to such an extent that it has become religious an polarised.
The actual calculations and reasoning you have to make just to figure out the carbon footprint of an espresso are complex, full of assumptions, and difficult. Ecology is NOT a simple subject. The climate is NOT a simple subject. Should you build a coal station, to raise living standards faster, improve healthcare, and thus reduce child birth rates, or should you be "sustainable" and limit energy availability, so development takes longer, and people maybe continue with high birth rates for longer? That's just an example.
But no, denialists! And now with the Pope's blessing, evil selfish god-denying denialists!
But back to your point, someone would have to sit down with Hitler, and rationally explain to him Human Rights, and that he has no basis for thinking that his race was superior to other races, or if he does cite evidence, you critically examine it, and even then, ask, so what's the moral reasoning for him thinking that his place is to dominate others rather than help others? Most of this stuff can be reasoned out and doesn't require Gods.
And we actually know form developmental psychology that humans go through several stages of ethical and reasoning ability, so we know that what appears to be completely self evident to Hitler, is not reasonable to other people who have a higher and more reasonable capacity. It goes back to that ability to think about thinking, which is the start of being able to take the perspective of other people, and that's the basi
This is why you are called a denialist. All data is incomplete (as we can not measure everything in the universe, or every atom in the planet), some models are doing very well (see here, for example), and "hidden consequences" doesn't mean anything as if they are hidden you don't know about them, meaning you can't use them in your argument. If you'd said "consequences", you'd have to tell us what they are. You are clearly intelligent - how you can selectively ignore the scientific method is beyond me, especially when your entire life is predicated on it being effective.
You can feign indignance or you can read the IPCC report. Your choice.
You bring up the theory of continental drift. I'll raise you aether, magnetic field lines, general relativity, quantum theory, and many, many others. All of these were met with vicious opposition at the start. Again, the process of science is designed to slowly lumber towards the truth. You can't get at the truth immediately or quickly. It doesn't work that way. Nor does it matter what a single person thinks - the only think that matters is the gradually-accumulating body of evidence and theory.
It is completely and 100% irrelevant whether a bunch of scientists behave rationally or not. Actually, scientists are expected to act irrationally! Scientists are human beings and asking them to be rational really is asking too much, and the process of science is designed to take this into account! Which is why continental drift was eventually accepted, yet most religions continue to insist that God created Adam and Eve out of mud.
You're drawing a ridiculous and unjustifiable parallel between the process of science - which is a continually-improving process to get at the truth - and faith-based dogma, which is essentially the opposite of that. I'd appreciate if you instead just said what you mean - that you hate science and think scientists are wrong and full of themselves (which is, by the way, completely OK! Even most scientists often think other scientists are wrong and full of themselves!)
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Your understanding of this field is flawed, it seems. The "mild warming" you are talking about does not improve agriculture. The crops humans rely on are heavily suited to their environment. Our staple grains are usually less nutritional with increased CO2, so we'd need to grow more to sustain the current population. The land suitable for agriculture will move towards the poles, into areas with sub-par soil (in the case of areas previously scoured by glacial activity) and no infrastructure to farm it (as the farmers live where they currently farm, and moving them, their machinery, and the associated industry support continually towards the poles for generations to come). So not only are your grains less nutritional, you need to grow more of them with fewer resources in poorer soil.
People do care and they have called out the charlatans. You seem to believe the charlatans, though, which would explain why you are claiming things the evidence simply does not suggest. I'd suggest reading the IPCC reports, but I don't think that'd help you.
According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere around 95% of the city dwellers were wiped out during the initial contact with Europeans.
So that means that Native Americans had already discovered "economic development" when Europeans arrived, but the vast majority of those practising it were killed by simultaneous epidemics of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis all introduced (at about the same time) to North America by Europeans.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Here are the folks who advise the Pope on science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some names you may recognize: Edward Witten, Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Mario Molina, Maxine Singer, etc.
Scientific skepticism is an assumption, a conclusion without proof, which is faith.
You are aware, I trust, that you are describing a very small group of men that made up some of the Nazi leadership. The overwhelming majority of Nazis were Catholics and Lutherans.
You are aware that the majority of Germans were Catholics and Lutherans in 1938 right?
It only makes sense that a political party in a certain country would be made up of people who believe in the two most represented religions in that country. So maybe, just maybe this is correlation not causation. Just saying.