Perhaps you missed the Vatican-sponsored international symposium on climate changeheld in Rome on April 28. It was a busy news day. The horrific earthquake killed thousands in Nepal, and riots broke out in Baltimore.
Or, maybe, you just didn’t care to tune in. In Crisis magazine, which bills itself as “a voice for the faithful laity,” William M. Briggs, a Catholic, in a post titled: “Vatican Burns with Global Warming Enthusiasm,” writes: “Used to be in the West when the Catholic Church spoke, people listened….The church was an influence. And it liked being one.” Briggs continues: “Not so now. The West has these past fifty or so years assumed an adversarial stance towards our ancient and venerable institution.”The one-day “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity” conference, accordingto BloombergBusiness, “brought together more than 150 accomplished scientists and spiritual leaders from more than a dozen faiths.” The Economist described the event this way: “the Pontifical Academy of Sciences [PAS], an important part of the Vatican’s intellectual armoury, convened a brainstorming session with the UN secretariat and a gaggle of NGOs, including the New-York based Earth Institute, a study centre which advises the UN on sustainable development.”The summit served as a teaser of what to expect next month when it is predicted that the Vatican will release a papal encyclical on the “human ecology”—the first time a Catholic leader has dedicated an entire encyclical to environmental issues. Public Radio International’s reporting explained an encyclical as: “the highest teaching issued by a pope. It is essentially a church policy paper, meant to offer guidance on specific issues for the bishops, priests and faithful that make up the family of about 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide.”In its reporting on the day-long event, The Financial Times (FT) cites Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, who the newspaper calls “a member of the pope’s inner circle” and who wrote an early draft of the encyclical, as saying: “Today, the ever-accelerating burning of fossil fuels that powers our economic engine is disrupting the earth’s delicate ecological balance on an almost unfathomable scale.” The FT refers to Turkson’s statement as “a sign that Pope Francis will aggressively push for climate action.” Turkson also “suggested it was a sin for ‘humans to degrade the integrity of earth by causing changes in its climate.’”
Regarding the encyclical’s content, the same FT coverage quotes UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who met privately with Pope Francis before the conference: “It will convey to the world that protecting our environment is an urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and people of conscience.”
But there is concern that Pope Francis is focused too much on politics and not enough on faith, as those who are shaping his views veer from widely accepted biblical truths. Addressing the dilemma, BloombergBusiness states: “The Encyclical is expected to insert the pope into an American political problem.” In teaching his followers how to identify other true believers, Jesus Christ, in Matthew 7:16, states: “You will know them by their fruits.” Then 2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 warns the followers of Christ: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” A more modern version, states: “You are not the same as those who do not believe. So do not join yourselves to them. Good and bad do not belong together. Light and darkness cannot share together.”Following the summit, the PAS released a declaration that states: “The Catholic Church working with the leadership of other religions…” The listed authors include known abortion advocate, Jeffrey Sachs. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General and a supporter of abortion, also addressed the Vatican conference.While the Catholic Church, and all of Christianity in general, support life, one has to wonder why the Vatican would invite “darkness” in to advise it on climate change? While the abortion issue is one point of obvious conflict, others involved in the one-day event likely endorse a variety of views that disagree with a biblical perspective. When the advisors’ beliefs are the antithesis of the church’s, why should their opinions be invited and accepted as fact on one narrow topic? Why would the Pope join himself with those who are not Christ followers? The scriptural admonishment is similar to a parent who worries about the people his children run around with because, if they don’t share the same beliefs, the crowd often becomes the influencer—and not the other way around.A thorough examination of the Declaration’s authors is bound to reveal a cadre of secular humanists—who place man above God and nature higher than man. Which, once again, is contrary to the biblical view presented in Genesis 2:15: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it (NIV).” In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn addresses this passage: “Plainly this imposes on mankind an obligation of stewardship. …Still, the first part of that Genesis passage means something too: that the earth is to be worked, and that this work and the fruit it bears are also blessed. After all, what is work but the application of human ingenuity and labor to God’s creation to increase God’s bounty?”
McGurn continues: “All too often the vision of man here is as the despoiler, speeding the planet along the path to doom and destruction. In this reading, modern technology is almost always an enemy, progress is illusory and more babies mean more carbon footprints melting the ice caps where polar bears live. Indeed, the number of environmentalists who end up embracing population control is astounding.”One cannot help but admire Pope Francis’ concern for the poor—a totally biblical view.However, the proposed fix for perceived manmade catastrophic climate change (climate change is real and has been happening long before humans burned fossil fuels) — the elimination of fossil fuels — will create more poor people, not fewer. McGurn posits: “when we measure the costs of fossil fuels, shouldn’t we include the human costs that result when restrictions on fossil fuels would mean denying hundreds of millions of people in the developing world the life-enhancing improvements that come from cheaper energy?” Likewise, Marc Morano says: “One of the greatest friends of poor people around the world—an estimated 1.3 billion people who lack running water and electricity—is carbon-based fuels.”
“An open letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,” from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, states: “Today many prominent voices call humanity a scourge on our planet, saying that man is the problem, not the solution. …these voices demand that people surrender their God-given dominium, even if doing so means remaining in or returning to poverty.” The letter continues: “Severe poverty, widespread hunger, rampant disease, and short life spans were the ordinary condition of humankind until the last two-and-a-half centuries. These tragedies are normal when—as much of the environmental movement prefers—human beings, bearing the imago Dei, live, and are treated, as if they were mere animals, which need to submit to nature rather than exercising the dominium God gave them in the beginning (Genesis 1:28). Such dominion should express not the abusive rule of a tyrant but the loving and purposeful rule of our Heavenly King. It should thus express itself by enhancing the fruitfulness, beauty, and safety of the earth, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.”Pope Francis is not the first pope to opine about the environment. The Economist points out that Pope Benedict XVI’s statements often linked to his belief “in the ‘respect for the human person.’” To which The Economist adds: “To the ears of secular greens, that sort of talk can appear too focused on the welfare of homo sapiens at the expense of all other forms of life.”And here is the problem, articulated by a commenter in response to Judith Curry’s post: “Pope Francis, climate change and mortality.” Ticketstopper wrote: “The Church is concerned about souls. Animals and plants don’t have souls. I would be very interested to see how a Pope can reconcile the demotion of emphasis on human souls with an emphasis on environmental friendliness.”The forthcoming encyclical will be on human ecology. As McGurn suggests, it is time we put “the human back in human ecology.”One closing thought: If you believe that an all-knowing God created the heavens and the earth, that he gave man dominion over it, and called on man to work the earth, why did God put fossil fuels under our feet when he could have made it all dirt? Do you think He knew that the world would have the vast population we have today and that, for such a time as this, we’d need the dense forms of cost-effective energy that coal, oil and natural gas—even uranium—provide? I do.
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Marita ,
I used your final point : why did creation put all these resources there if not to be used ? Was it just some sort of a “look but don’t touch” cosmic joke ? , some years ago defending CO2 at an Inter-mountain Rural Electric Association annual meeting here in Teller County , CO . It was a persuasive point in this very christian community .
I didn’t add : … like the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil .
Yes, it’s an aspirational and effective closing thought!
Well, no, actually. What would be more effective is asking people why their god would have given them brains if s/he/it intended for them not to use them…
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow or CFACT is paid by fossil fuel companies to lie about the dangers of their product.
…so why would anyone believe a single word they say?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Committee_for_a_Constructive_Tomorrow
SourceWatch is a propaganda site funded by an extreme left-wing, anti-capitalist and anti-corporate organization, the Center for Media and Democracy.
Established in 1983, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) aims to “strengthen participatory democracy by investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda” — focusing largely on what it views as the transgressions of political conservatives. Another CMD objective is to assist liberal and leftist “grassroots citizen activism that promotes progressive themes of public health, economic justice, ecological sustainability and human rights.”
This history of far-left agitation has earned CMD grants from some of the largest left-leaning foundations including the Foundation to Promote Open Society, part of billionaire currency trader George Soros’s progressive philanthropic empire. The Foundation gave CMD $100,000 in 2010.
The left-leaning Tides Foundation has given CMD $160,000 since 2006, including funding a PR Watch “senior researcher” in 2009. The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, another major left-wing foundation which has Lyndon B. Johnson’s former press secretary and PBS host Bill Moyers as its president, has given CMD $250,000 in 2005 and 2006.
Despite this history of far-left advocacy and funding, media sources often mistakenly cite CMD’s SourceWatch as an independent watchdog.
If you want to know how the Cfact Institute is funded, you can go to their website where you will find, for example, that it does not solicit or accept grants from any of those government agencies using billions of taxpayer dollars to convince Americans that “global warming” is real or that anything the government does about “climate change” can have any effect on it. In 2012, Heartland received 50% of its income from foundations, 28% from individuals, and 18% from corporations. No corporate donor contributes more than 5% of its annual budget.
In contrast, a recent article by Ron Arnold, a Washington Examiner columnist and executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, noted that over the past decade environmental organizations received 345,052 foundation grants totaling $20,826,664,000—over twenty billion dollars—largely from a 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association and the smaller, farther-left National Network of Grantmakers. Arnold said that “Today, foundations are the backbone of Big Green.”
On a recent CNN television program, Marc Morano, the communications director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) took on the Sierra Club director, noting that this major environmental organization has received $26 million from natural gas corporations to support its attacks on the coal industry. So “fossil fuels” industries are okay if they are giving the Sierra Club money.
While the Koch-affiliated foundations that provide grants to conservative groups were singled out, along with Exxon Mobil, in The Guardian article, no mention was made of multi-billionaire George Soros who is famed for funding all manner of liberal groups and who reportedly has invested heavily in “clean energy” companies—solar and wind—whose products do not produce the so-called greenhouse gas emissions.
So whose trying to call the kettle black through dark glasses? Take the blinders off!
George Soros broke the Pound Sterling a few years ago by selling sterling he did not currently hold forcing a devaluation of the pound. He also funded a charity in the Ukraine to persuade folk the EU was a better bet that Russia. Stalin had caused a genocide in that Country between the wars killing many millions of Ukrainians making Hitler look a saint in comparison. This move was calculated to cause a rift with Russia which may harvest a whirlwind.
We have brains, and free will. This is why evil is able to exist, we do bad things as well as good.
Thanks Bob! I used that point in a speech on energy at a prayer and politics conference. I don’t think I’ve ever used it in print before. I like the cosmic joke line.
“Creation??” There is no such thing.
Really? Was it always like it? I see energy as the source of all matter. E=MC2. Matter is created from energy, ergo energy is God if you like.
Who says energy was created (and not just recycled, from what came before?)
Where did the energy that makes up “God” come from?
You miss the point here, I said “I see God as this energy”. You might like to use another term but energy exists. Genesis also says “In the beginning there was void”. Nothing at all, And “God said let there be light”.
In other words Energy caused this light, the creation of matter and everything in our universe. I am content to see God as this Energy. You of course can deny God or Energy, but do we exist and so does the universe.
Where did God’s energy come from?
Scripture answers that question: Psalm 90:2.
“You are God” is no answer.
Where did God come from?
What existed before him?
If he exists, is he composed on energy?
If he is, where did that energy come from?
Big bang notwithstanding.
It would be wrong to consider climate change as a “narrow topic”, and concern for the environment as automatically disconnected from a concern for poverty or other socio-economic issues. The two are intimately connected and science tells us that developing countries are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
We are clearly under a biblical mandate to manage God’s creation well, to keep and protect it. Genesis 2 is God’s commentary on Genesis 1: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it”. “Take care of it” is a translation of the Hebrew “shamar” which means to keep, guard, preserve and protect in all ways.
Protecting the natural capital of God’s creation is the best way to ensure that future generations will be sustained and healthy. That doesn’t mean stopping fossil fuel use tomorrow, but it does mean we must begin an orderly transition away from fossil fuels to more benign sources of energy. In fact the transition is already underway. As Christians we need to get behind the transition or get out of the way.
Presently nearly 85% of electricity is generated from a stabilizing base load of cleaner coal, nuclear, and natural gas. A transition proceeds as wind and solar become more competitive with fewer subsidies.
Agree in principle – the removal of the entrenched subsidies
to fossil fuels will go along way to propelling power sector
decarbonisation forwards. Appropriate carbon pricing including carbon taxes and
emissions trading, will be essential to shifting plant investment and retirement
decisions.
Do we need to de-carbonise? I’m critical of the flawed CO2 theory and am unable to see why it matters one jot unless this theory’s mechanism is explained. Do you understand this action?
It’s good to be critical but you have to add the thinking part too. Follow reason, evidence and reflection and you will find the truth.
I believe that I have, I can find no credible explanation for involving CO2 in any meaningful man made climate changes. Heat releases CO2 from water. It may not also become its cause.
We also have a problem with the current pause in global warming, I paste my own explanation here and would by happy to see other explanations with the mechanism invvolved:-
Do we need to be esoteric concerning where the Earths heat energy might be stored and the mechanisms involved. Surely hysteresis temperature curves of matter as it changes from form into another are a simple explanation. Freezing water the temperature falls to the freezing point in a uniform fairly straight line graph. As it starts to freeze the energy extraction remains constant but the graph levels off for a prolonged period suddenly dropping again as the state changes to solid. (We understand ice contains energy, and as it melts we are extracting it.)
We see the same shaped curve in wax as it reaches its melting point and energy input hardly moves the temperature until it is liquid. The interesting thing is both materials require a lower temp to revert to solid. Its the overlaid graphs I find so interesting in the shape produced. This both absorbs and releases considerable energy with little temperature variation.
Talking of the quantum physics properties of a minor gas CO2, is a nightmare to comprehend and quantify, but Polar Ice is much more physical and apparent. Can it make a difference? Can the likely mechanism be explained this way and measured to prove the temperature hold is meaningful?
I remain very skeptical with the overcomplicated and illogical CO2 argument being a cause of any imminent catastrophe. Or have I got it all wrong and there is a better explanation?
The Earth emits infrared radiation. Atmospheric CO2 absorbs it. Some of what it re-emits goes downward.
Some incoming energy never reaches the Earth for the same reasons, the atmosphere and clouds. We need to see how it arrives and why less leaves. I am unable to see how CO2 is involved in any meaningful way, this is a minor but essential gas required by all life including humans. Can you give a mechanism for what you are claiming perhaps?
“Flawed” CO2 theory??
Yes a “flawed”theory about co2.in that NASA did a study tha t proved that CO2 is actually a coolant of the earth and local environs, because they took ice core samples, come arctic and Antarctic glaciers and discovered that there was 5 times more,CO2in the atmosphere as is present today.
Also the so- called “global warming” has stopper he sea levels have actually dropped and the sun-caused not human-caused”global warming” has ceased to the tune of 1.06degs Fahrenheit less than before all the GW hype began. We are actually in a phase of ” global cooling” that will last about fifty years.
I mean really dude or duetted,use your own brain for something to hold your ears apart and listen to what’s going on around you.
With faith in God-given dominion, is there a realistic hope for less greenhouse sensitivity to CO2?
While incorporating the Max Planck study results, Michaels and Knappenberger noticed that warming would only be as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius–less than half what the IPCC originally predicted.
They suggested that Lewis’ findings would basically eliminate “the possibility of catastrophic climate change.” http://www.dailycaller.com/2015/03/31
In case you didn’t notice, the lead author of the Max Planck Institute study is Bjorn Stevens. Funny how he isn’t even quoted in the Daily Caller article that you reference . The “They” that you quote are two Cato Institute spokesmen,
Renewables are not a realistic solution to the Climate Change scare. Renewables depend on an energy source that is effectively only 1~5% that of fossils.
So that’s why it takes all that infrastructure, land and materials to harvest what you get from fossil energy plants. And the subsidy claims are mostly hyped. The so called claimed subsidies fossils get are mostly tax breaks that every other business or corporation is qualified to get.
Renewables are the entities that get the real subsidies in the form of grants, rebates, production tax credits, generous depreciation credits and mandates in the form of renewable portfolio standards that requires energy producers to source a certain percentage of their energy production from renewables. This would be like if the labor department required everybody to get a certain percentage of their income from green jobs regardless of what it’s worth so that if the income is substandard it’s subsidies. The net effect is that wind and solar get over 50x the financial breaks that fossils do in general. It’s renewable welfare and it’s not sustainable, just like Obamacare would not fly without the subsidies and mandates.
So renewables will never stand on their own. And they don’t contribute anything really to the tax base.
@Scottar: Your response reveals an ideological bias that doesn’t reflect the actual evidence. Renewable power capacity will continue to increase, like it or not. Even the International Energy Agency admits that investing in clean-energy innovation is essential to meet climate goals. There is lots of public support. A status quo/business-as-usual approach is not an option.
First of all renewable don’t really add to capacity as they require conventional power for backup, renewables can’t stand by themselves, as I explained they rely on exorbitant subsidies and mandates to even exist. Utilities would not accept them without the arm twisting.
And climate change is not due to human’s, its a naturally caused event and there is much scientific evidence that the gravy train riders won’t admit. You’re just drinking the koolaid listening to the echo chamber of warmistas but I’ll get back to you on that later.
With U.S. renewables approaching 14% of electricity “generated,” in the short run you’re probably correct!
The EIA and IER noted that from fiscal 2010 to 2013 federal subsidies for electricity-related renewables rose over 50%.
Fossil fuel subsidies fell about 15%.
Now the church has become a whore, sadly…I pray for him. St. Peter and John Paul II would have other words for him…privately
I should have thought it entirely appropriate that the Pope embrace the anthropogenic-climate-change fraud. Both his profession and that of the I.P.C.C. (and, indeed the entire U.N.O.) are religions.
Nothing to see here; move along, please.
ΠΞ
What the pope is showing is a serious lack of faith that this planet was designed to allow human life to flourish. Man-made global warning is nothing more than an excuse to grab control of as many people in the world as possible. And – if the pope is trying to reach the sinners of Western Europe (and the West in general) with the truth of the saving gospel of Jesus the Messiah, why doesn’t he just preach the Word of God?