Roslyn, you’re absolutely on target here. The New York Times noted last year that with global warming melting the Himalayan Glaciers, the stability of the water supply in six major rivers that sustain three billion people – the Yalu, the Yangtse, the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Indus and the Ganges – will disappear. There are already a billion and a half people with no access to safe drinking water.
Ah, the man-made global warming myth…There is no question that the globe is warming but it has warmed and cooled before, and is not as warm today as it was some centuries ago, before there were any automobiles and before there was as much burning of fossil fuels as today. Human activities have very little effect on the climate, compared to many other factors, from volcanoes to clouds.
Those who think global warming is a natural process point to the fact that in the last 10,000 years, the warmest periods have happened well before humans started to produce large amounts of carbon dioxide.
A detailed look at recent climate change reveals that the temperature rose prior to 1940 but unexpectedly dropped in the post-war economic boom, when carbon dioxide emissions rose dramatically.
The final nail in the coffin of human-produced greenhouse gas theories is the fact that carbon dioxide is produced in far larger quantities by many natural means: human emissions are miniscule in comparison. Volcanic emissions and carbon dioxide from animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean outweigh our own production several times over.
The global population increases by a net one million every four days, augmenting the number of people without adequate resources. It will be made worse over this century as rising sea levels begin to inundate coastlines, with 130 million Bangladeshis forced to migrate out of there delta into land already more than fully occupied by Indians. But the people who attack you on this forum are (I suspect) among the invincibly ignorant: nothing that anyone can say about the population explosion, global warming, dropping aquifers, declining supplies of fossil fuels, etc…, will convince them; they don’t read the papers.
If you look at the data, the only places that are growing rapidly in population are…non-Christian countries. This suggests that education into the Christian way of life may help stem the population growth. Global warming itself is true, the suggestion that it’s all because of humans is not. Declining supplies of fossil fuels suggests we find another source of fuel…nuclear (but oh no! not in my back yard!) and solar.
They have already made up their minds that humans alone count, that God made the world exclusively as a stage for human salvation, that only Catholics can be saved, that evolution is a lie – these are medieval assumptions.
Humans are insignificant as a cause of global warming. God did make the earth as a home for humanity. That doesn’t mean to waste our resources (in fact, we’re called to conserve). And, as a Catholic, you should know that the Church teaches neither that only Catholics can be saved, nor that evolution is a lie.
This brings us to a theological impasse, since those of us who work in the service of the church and wit the rest of the world to protect the future of both humanity and intact ecosystems will never agree to return to the medieval world view.
In this context, it is theologically indefensible – I would even say immoral – for the church to continue promoting its obsolete opposition to so-called “artificial” birth control. Keep up your good work and clear thinking!
Ah, so you want to follow some of God’s laws, but not all of them. Note-God’s laws, not the Church’s. Placing an artificial barrier between sperm and egg makes it artificial. And wrong. Taking a pill that makes the environment inhospitible for the fertilized egg is artificial. And wrong. Aborting a live fetus is artificial. And wrong. All of these violate the commandment not to murder.
