S
- Status
C
CatholicGuy22
Guest
Yes i think we should stop harming our planet. Besides we woudn’t want Jesus to see a dirty planet when comes back from heaven to judge mankind now would we?
N
Neil_Anthony
Guest
This is great. The Catholic Church is not a climate-change denying crackpot organization. We have to protect the environment.
H
Havard
Guest
I think most of us that you would call ‘deniers’ are not in the black and white, but in the shades of gray. Specifically, we are not denying climate change altogether, we’re just skeptical about the extent to which some claim man is responsible for climate change.
Here are some things to think about:
-Skeptics of man-made global warming have often pointed out that the rise in global temperature seems to track much more closely to increased solar activity than it does to an increase in man-made greenhouse gasses. Doesn’t that seem to strongly suggest that the sun, not mankind, is more likely to be responsible for global warming?
-Mars has also been experiencing global warming. Since man can’t be a factor on that planet, doesn’t it suggest that perhaps a factor other than man, i.e. the sun, is responsible for the warming on both planets?
M
mdgspencer
Guest
I found this posting of extreme intererest, because the Pope seems to be taking a position on the global warming controversy. However, when I read the speech itself this is unclear. He speaks of climate change (simply using the two words in section 4 without elaboration) without using the words global climate change or global warming. The next word he uses is desertification, which is a strictly local deterioration in the environment. I am providing a link to the Pope’s speech next:
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace_en.html
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace_en.html
Code:
If the pope actually believes that there is global warming, I would hope that he will say this clearly. As it is, it is not clear that he is speaking of global warming, but he could be speaking of something else.
The secular media seems excited that he is, seemingly, speaking of the evil of global warming, but they simply siezed on two words in a speech that could mean something else.
Beyond this, the Church has certainly made me more concerned about environmental matters, having been inclined to simply see environmentalism as simply a matter for some social activists, of which I am not one. In some matters I have been beginning to think they have some right on their side because of some things the Church has been saying.
P
prodigal-sun
Guest
Climate Change, Air pollution, ground and water pollution. THese are all environmental issuses. My question is how are they to be dealt with. Surely, making developed countries foot the bill and watch underdeveloped countries like china have a free for all is no way of correcting any balance in C02 emissions.
For instance Canada, with a population of 30,000,000 and provides for 2% of C02 emissions is going to do what exactly? Cutting us back to even 1.5% emissions would completely devastate our economy. I pray my Prime Miniister leaves that Copenhagen deal in the garbage where it belongs.
Peace!
For instance Canada, with a population of 30,000,000 and provides for 2% of C02 emissions is going to do what exactly? Cutting us back to even 1.5% emissions would completely devastate our economy. I pray my Prime Miniister leaves that Copenhagen deal in the garbage where it belongs.
Peace!
E
estesbob
Guest
Notice he said nothing about cap and trade or funneling billions of dollars to third world countries
F
FightingFat
Guest
Great article from G.Monbiot re:Copenhagen
monbiot.com/archives/2009…s-is-about-us/
"This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.
The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.
The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.
This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.
The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people’s interests forbid us to live.
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battlelines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
So here we are, in the land of Beowulf’s heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone’s demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.
Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe that they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.
While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it’s only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accomodated on a finite planet.
For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There’s another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.
We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees(1). We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.
But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth - must begin. If governments don’t show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers’ weakness. They will attack - using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest - the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world’s ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today."
So right, on so many levels…
monbiot.com/archives/2009…s-is-about-us/
"This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.
The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.
The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.
This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.
The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people’s interests forbid us to live.
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battlelines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
So here we are, in the land of Beowulf’s heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone’s demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.
Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe that they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.
While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it’s only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accomodated on a finite planet.
For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There’s another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.
We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees(1). We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.
But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth - must begin. If governments don’t show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers’ weakness. They will attack - using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest - the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world’s ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today."
So right, on so many levels…
L
ltravis
Guest
What is going on???
J
Jeffrey
Guest
Wow… I wholeheartily disagree with the pope.
G
GeorgeSword
Guest
So, in your view, we should ignore it and continue to go on our way, polluting the planet and making all cities look like Beijing whilst ignoring melting ice caps and the harm we are doing to the world? Actually, whether it is caused by man or not, we certainly aren’t helping, either.
J
Jeffrey
Guest
DOn’t put words in my mouth. I think the planet warms and cools naturally… matter of fact we are on a cooling trend now. Global warming is hogwash.
E
estesbob
Guest
I seriously doubt you disagree with what the Pope said. i suspect you disagree with the MM is reporting he said.
G
GeorgeSword
Guest
Saying that you disagree with him would imply that you disagree with his suggestion that we do something about it, would it not? Whether, as I stated above, it is natural or not, even if it is not happening, now is as good a time as any to try to turn ourselves around and treat our planet a bit better, while we at least have an excuse.
Y
youngoldguy
Guest
M
marci
Guest
I agree with you. I love the moves the pope has made concerning the availability of the LM, the translations of the liturgy, liturgical music, etc. But I totally disagree with the Vatican jumping on the man made global warming band wagon.
I heard a stat the other day that human industry contributes 2% of the total carbon parts per million in the atmosphere. Now, if we are at 370 how can we get below 350 if industry only makes up 2%? Impossible.
Climate change laws, cap and trade, etc. is all about redistribution of wealth. It is about communism plain and simple. It’s about a centralized world agency power grab to control world resources and finances.
If these people get there way, we will see industrialized nations lose their standards of living and that will trickle down to devoloping nations being thrust into chaos the likes of which hasn’t been seen by modern man.
The debat is NOT over. Are we really about to give up our sovereignty as a nation to a bunch of totalitarian dictators at the UN over a theory? The earth goes through climate change. How do you explain periods of global warming (even greater than today) before man had even discovered electricity.
If the argument is about pollution, that’s a horse of a different color, but it’s not about that for the Al Gore’s of the world. He flies around in his jets and lives in his 20,000 square foot mansion while driven around in a convoy of SUVs. But, it’s OK for him to do it because he offsets his footprint by purchasing “carbon credits”. Well, if he really cared about pollution and the environment, wouldn’t he want EVERYONE to conserve? Including the wealthy?
The whole thing is one giant scam. There are billions at stake for these so called “green industries”. People should be careful what they wish for. There are consequences to every action.
I think the Pope (name removed by moderator)articular needs to be careful of who he lends his support to reguarding this debate. Population control is a central part of the cimate change debate for the zealots. The Vatican needs to recognize that when it’s speaks authoritatively on these subjects, those population control proponents grab on and say “see, even the pope says we need drastic action”. His comments will always be twisted and used by the progressives to validate their arguments which the magisterium would never support. Unfortunately the average catholic doesn’t know squat about church teaching.
What will the pope do when one day this new global authority says that all nations much adhear to a 1 or 2 child policy for the sake of the planet’s health. He will say that this is wrong and an evil, but the train will have already left the station thanks in part, to those who supported the building of the tracks.
M
mdgspencer
Guest
I provided a link to the pope’s speech in post number 5 here. Actually, the pope never used the words global warming or global climate change. Feel free to look at his speech to see what he said if you would like. He did say a great deal about protecting the environment though.
M
Michael_Saint
Guest
By calling those who are skeptical about the “science” of global warming, using the term “climate-change denying crackpot” will not help you convince people such as myself that you are correct. Plus, I find it hurtful that such a phrase would be applied to a Catholic Christian brother in the Lord as I am.
M
Michael_Saint
Guest
I believe in taking good care of the environment, just like the catechism teaches us we should.
But I do not believe our motives should be to save the planet from “global warming”, necessarily, because I am not convinced that this current warming period is man made.
M
Monty_Arch
Guest
The speech says “Can we remain indifferent before the problems associated with such realities as climate change, desertification…”
So the Pope believes in climate change as real, though he didn’t mention it as man-made.
- Status