Bioextinction Workshop, Report One

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Fiasco said:
i was aware that he said “…one of the forgotten greats.”, but not the others. An advocate of abortion doesn’t deserve that sort of praise!

It’s a good thing that those quotes are not covered by the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, especially the “forgotten greats” one.
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The Catholic Church’s magisterium is exercised without this solemnity in statements by popes and bishops, whether collectively (as by an episcopal conference) or singly, in written documents such as catechisms, encyclicals and pastoral letters, or orally, as in homilies. These statements are part of the ordinary magisterium of the church…

Even public statements by popes or bishops on questions of faith or morals that do not qualify as “ordinary and universal magisterium” have an authority that Catholics are not free to merely dismiss. They are required to give that teaching religious submission: “Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.”

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magisterium
 
JPUSC said:
The Catholic Church’s magisterium…
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Private opinions are just that: private opinions. That quoted document does not cover your Papal statements, along with innumerable others made over almost 4 years.

Apart from that, we’re off topic.🤷
 
JPUSC said:
This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will.
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Correct. And as lynnvinc correctly says in her post #13, “If you want to understand environmental issues from a Catholic perspective, you can read what the popes and bishops have to say”.

Pope Francis confirmed long-standing magisterial teaching regarding the scientific question of man-made global warming with just one sentence in #188 of LAUDATO SI’:

" Here I would state once more that the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics."

So, we may debate this matter forever, but no one has the right to tell others on this Forum that the Roman Catholic Church has settled the issue.

Love and protect the earth from pollution and desecration insofar as it’s reasonably possible to do so. That is what the magisterium teaches us. Period. The rest is speculation, politics or idealism.
 
lynnvinc said:
I don’t know why some want the environment (God’s creation, which He pronounced “good”) to be destroyed so as to kill off a large portion of people, who depend on a healthy environment, but the thought has started to occur to me that perhaps for some it may be sadism - pleasure in others’ sufferings. Like the way some are perhaps getting pleasure from seeing children ripped from their mothers and fathers being deported, the crying, the pain and suffering.

Then I think of ISIS and Nazi Germany, the way some get pleasure out of genocide.

I’m just trying to understand why people would want to watch, much less participate in this 6th great extinction event, except maybe they get some thrill from it.

Or it could be thanatos (a death wish), or some hidden, maybe subconscious hostility toward one’s children and progeny (which is a theme in some ancient literature and folklore).

Since it is the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, maybe they will be looking into this human motivation for harming and killing off life on planet earth.

They say that animals can’t go to Heaven, but I’m thinking the real point is that animals, unlike humans, cannot go to Hell. Maybe that’s why the Church is interested in why so many people are death-driven with such a strong will to kill. It’s not just lives that are at stake in this human-caused 6th great extinction, but souls.

Maybe if we can understand the motives, maybe we can get people to stopping harming life on earth and themselves.
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I have never met a single person who wants to kill off humanity. Nor have I ever met one who wants to destroy the environment.

But I do realize there are some who identify their own ideologies with absolute truth and find it an aid to argument to claim that whatever doesn’t fit their ideology will result in Armageddon, either for a particular people or the whole of humanity. Almost every radical ideology resorts to that. I remember, as a kid, finding some of those aluminum strips planes used to drop in order to test radar. There were people then who claimed it was weather manipulation that would result in worldwide catastrophe. And those aluminum strips were their “proof”.

Nowadays, it’s rigged graphs instead of aluminum strips.
 
buffalo said:
Extinction has been with us since the fall. We cannot prevent it.
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And a good thing too. If all the now extinct species were still around, the world would be a more chaotic place. I would not like dealing with the Jurassic period on a daily basis.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I have never met a single person who wants to kill off humanity. Nor have I ever met one who wants to destroy the environment…
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I just put that out as a possible motivation, or subconscious motivation. And there could be some sickos out there who do have such desires.

However, for the most part it’s probably a “they know not what they do” situation. Even tho there are others, including our past 3 popes, who keep on telling them. That’s why I oscillate between “they know what they do” (and don’t care or actually enjoy it) and “they know not what they do.”
 
buffalo said:
What do you base it on? Source?
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That the extinction rate is much greater now than in the past (or the “background rate”) is common knowledge among biologists. It is in the textbook I used for teaching environmental studies. You can google it.

Here are 2 sources I just googled (using Google Scholar) re the rate of extinction today being extremely high. It is not only from climate change (which is just beginning and not very harmful yet), pollution, and hunting down and killing off various species, but humans taking over more wilderness areas and disrupting the corridors for migrating species. Also introducing exotic or invasive species into new areas (purposely or accidentally), where they take over and cause other species to go extinct.
Here’s a graph from “75 Percent of Animal Species to be Wiped Out in ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’” usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/06/19/75-percent-of-animal-species-to-be-wiped-out-in-sixth-mass-extinction
with the caption “This graph illustrates the number of species that have gone extinct under the most conservative estimate, compared to the highest possible estimate of expected extinctions without human interference [dotted black line]. Courtesy Stanford University”:

https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/641df8b/2147483647/resize/300x>/quality/85/?url=%2Fcmsmedia%2F6e%2Fcf%2F60ceeb434f299f019cdbf6db44e6%2F150619-extinctiongraph-graphic.jpg

The greatest factor in this 6th mass extinction event going on now will likely turn out to be climate change, which eventually over the next several 100s of years may wipe out most species on earth and may decimate the human population as well.

The 3rd and greatest mass extinction event 251 mill yrs ago (the end-Permian) wiped out 90% of life on earth and was also caused by global warming. The difference now is that the warming of today is happening magnitudes of order faster than even during the end-Permian, giving species even less time to adapt.
 
lynnvinc said:
That the extinction rate is much greater now than in the past (or the “background rate”) is common knowledge among biologists. It is in the textbook I used for teaching environmental studies. You can google it.

Here are 2 sources I just googled (using Google Scholar) re the rate of extinction today being extremely high. It is not only from climate change (which is just beginning and not very harmful yet), pollution, and hunting down and killing off various species, but humans taking over more wilderness areas and disrupting the corridors for migrating species. Also introducing exotic or invasive species into new areas (purposely or accidentally), where they take over and cause other species to go extinct.
Here’s a graph from “75 Percent of Animal Species to be Wiped Out in ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’” usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/06/19/75-percent-of-animal-species-to-be-wiped-out-in-sixth-mass-extinction
with the caption “This graph illustrates the number of species that have gone extinct under the most conservative estimate, compared to the highest possible estimate of expected extinctions without human interference [dotted black line]. Courtesy Stanford University”:

https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/641df8b/2147483647/resize/300x>/quality/85/?url=%2Fcmsmedia%2F6e%2Fcf%2F60ceeb434f299f019cdbf6db44e6%2F150619-extinctiongraph-graphic.jpg

The greatest factor in this 6th mass extinction event going on now will likely turn out to be climate change, which eventually over the next several 100s of years may wipe out most species on earth and may decimate the human population as well.

The 3rd and greatest mass extinction event 251 mill yrs ago (the end-Permian) wiped out 90% of life on earth and was also caused by global warming. The difference now is that the warming of today is happening magnitudes of order faster than even during the end-Permian, giving species even less time to adapt.
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The estimates of the past rates very widely.
 
buffalo said:
The estimates of the past rates very widely.
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Yes, as mentioned 90% of life died out during the end-Permian extinction, due to global warming and its knock-on effects.

However, we are causing global warming orders of magnitude faster than during the end-Permian (when it was caused by natural processes), so many species will not be able to adapt. We are in the sixth great extinction event in the Earth’s history. It’s a very serious matter, esp since our human population may also be decimated in the life-inhospitable world into which we are hurling very quickly (in terms of geological time-frames).
 
lynnvinc said:
Yes, as mentioned 90% of life died out during the end-Permian extinction, due to global warming and its knock-on effects.

However, we are causing global warming orders of magnitude faster than during the end-Permian (when it was caused by natural processes), so many species will not be able to adapt. We are in the sixth great extinction event in the Earth’s history. It’s a very serious matter, esp since our human population may also be decimated in the life-inhospitable world into which we are hurling very quickly (in terms of geological time-frames).
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I do not agree with your comment on global warming.

Species have great and rapid adaptation capabilities. Life always fills the voids of extinction.
 
buffalo said:
I do not agree with your comment on global warming.

Species have great and rapid adaptation capabilities. Life always fills the voids of extinction.
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Not according to climate scientists and biologists who understand climate change is happening and happening very rapidly in geological terms.

see studies of Dr. Camille Parmesan:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01404.x/full
nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6918/abs/nature01286.html
annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.37.091305.110100
nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7399/abs/nature11014.html
 
lynnvinc said:
Not according to climate scientists and biologists who understand climate change is happening and happening very rapidly in geological terms.

see studies of Dr. Camille Parmesan:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01404.x/full
nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6918/abs/nature01286.html
annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.37.091305.110100
nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7399/abs/nature11014.html
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The orbital changes as well as sun intensity have more to do with this than any human effects.
 
buffalo said:
The orbital changes as well as sun intensity have more to do with this than any human effects.
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Not re this current warming. All other factors have been looked into and discounted as causes, leaving only our industrial GHG emissions. I’ve been following the science very closely for nearly 30 years, well before it became “politicized” by the fossil-fuel-funded denialist industry.

For anyone who is open-minded about the issue I would suggest looking at the responses to the various denialist faulty and deceptive claims that try to deflect the issue away from industrial GHG emissions as the cause:
Showing the CC denialist funding of Koch and Exxon:
So-called Catholic orgs (or orgs headed by Catholics) are also implicated:

The Acton Institute, headed by Fr. Sirico, received over $300,000 from Exxon (exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=5 ), and over $3,000,000 from Koch & Koch-sponsored orgs (pg. 12 of greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Koch-Industries-Still-Fueling-Climate-Denial-2011-Update-Greenpeace.pdf & pp. 8-9 of bridgeproject.com/app/uploads/Kochs-vs-the-Pope.pdf ).

Fr. Sirico has been a guest speaker several times on EWTN’s The World Over, sowing doubts about CC and slander against environmentalists.

Acton’s man in the Vatican, Kishore Jayabalan, has sown seeds of doubt about CC and slander against environmentalists on Rome Reports (as program that used to be on EWTN).

Acton, along with other CC denialist orgs like Heartland, held conferences in Rome before the release of Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical, Laudato Si, in 2015 and have since attacked that encyclical and/or misconstrued its meaning.
 
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