Guest essay by H. Sterling Burnett
Pope Francis evidently has decided to make fighting global warming an important papal cause in 2015. He praised the United Nations’ climate treaty efforts in Lima, Peru; the Vatican has indicated he will issue an encyclical letter to the world’s bishops; he is encouraging the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to take up the battle against climate change; and he’s planning to address the next UN climate conference in Paris to pressure world leaders to adopt a strong climate agreement.
The Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences may be behind the pope’s rising interest in global warming as a moral and political cause. Its chancellor, Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, said, “Our academics supported the pope’s initiative to influence next year’s crucial decisions. The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”
Many Catholics undoubtedly support the pope’s efforts and, unlike many of his critics, I would argue the views of the pope, a significant moral leader, should be considered as climate policies are shaped. As the leader of the largest Christian denomination in the world, he is charged not just with saving souls but also with alleviating the suffering of the world’s least fortunate, and with leading the Catholic Church in efforts to make the world a better place.
Having said this, I also know moral imperatives and public policies should be grounded in the best-available science, in the reality of the human condition, and in the state of both the planet and the people. Concerning global warming, the pope evidently has been badly misinformed and led astray.
None of the disasters asserted by climate alarmists to result from global warming has come to pass. Hurricane numbers are down, deaths from natural disasters have declined, sea ice is on the rise, and crop production is increasing. Climate models have yet to be validated, missing the lull in temperature rise for the past 18 years and the declining rates of sea-level rise for the past decade. Instead, the gap between temperatures projected by climate models and temperature observed in reality grows yearly.
Investor’s Business Daily has speculated the Vatican is itching to tackle climate change, despite the above-stated facts, because,
[The] Vatican … has been infiltrated by followers of a radical green movement that is, at its core, anti-Christian, anti-people, anti-poor and anti-development. The basic tenets of Catholicism – the sanctity of human life and the value of all souls – are detested by the modern pagan environmentalists who worship the created, but not the creator. … Big Green believes that too many human beings are the basic global problem. People, according to this view, are resource destroyers. Climate change, they say, is due to the overpopulation of Mother Earth.
The pope would do well to question the sources of his information and to recognize his efforts should be focused on alleviating the poverty and suffering of billions of people in the world today. The best policy to accomplish that goal would be alleviating energy poverty worldwide.
As a CNS editorial stated,
Alex Epstein argues, rather than taking a safe climate and making it dangerous through the use of fossil fuels, we have been transforming a dangerous climate into a safer, more manageable one for human flourishing.
Humans have long fought a war with climate, and to the extent we’ve won it has been through the use of technology, most recently including, fossil fuels.
Note from Anthony:
As a Catholic myself, I’m disappointed in this stance, especially since it seems out of place with doctrines of the past where there Church denounced many issues of science through its history, only to later admit they erred, jumped to conclusions, and admitted such errors in judgment decades or centuries later.
For example, it only took the Catholic church 359 years to decide that Galileo was right after all, and that the Earth DOES in fact revolve around the Sun.
I plan to ignore the Pope and its science panel, as many are likely to do given their track record on getting science wrong in almost every case where science and religion have collided through history,
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I am a political conservative, and a conservative, church going Catholic. The Pope’s predicted pronouncements are no surprise. He is a doctrinal political progressive, as are much of the Church’s hierarchy. The USCCB was a big supporter of socialized medicine in the US under Obamacare, and they were shocked, shocked when their progressive political partners used the act to force the Church to start funding contraceptives and abortifacients.
There are widespread reports that Pope Francis is consolidating power in the Curia, where “reform” has come to mean agreeing with the Pope. He has removed theological conservatives from positions of power and engineered the release of a communication from the “Synod on the Family” that sought to undermine core Catholic doctrine on divorce and homosexuality.
Like all progressives, he wants a seat at the tables of power. His environmental encyclical, if it is as described, is designed to make him a player on the progressive restructuring of the entire global energy economy. After decades of conservatism, under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, conservative Catholics have to get ready for a bumpy ride under Francis.
The Biblical command to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s,” is the source of the western principle of separation of church and state. It is sad to see the partnership between progressive politicians and clerics, embracing the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to break down that barrier, for purposes of enlarging Caesar’s power.
There is plentiful greed and power at stake to deal unto the masses a repressive control. For all that is good in the doctrines of Christian faith, it is beyond logic what transpires from its leaders.
I’m a lefty Christian (Protestant).
Arguing for redistribution of wealth from a justification of Scripture is A-OK with me.
Arguing for redistribution of wealth from a justification of dodgy science is definitely not.
If we lefties think we are right we should argue for our position from a sound basis that we are expert in.
The Church isn’t an expert on Science..
Well the coerced redistribution of wealth are against Christian teaching. Judeo-Christian philosophy argues that the individual changes him/herself for the better and by improving him/herself – then they make the world better by the better decisions they make. That is what makes the world better – let people donate to the poor, let the Church teach this. Collective philosophies such as confucianism are false and usually lead to corruption. The Left borrow heavily from the latter.
It isn’t an expert on redistribution of wealth, either.
If it followed scriptural references, the Catholic church would be against it. But they’re not.
No surprise there but you’re right about the Church’s misanthrope stance in science.
Gary
I am becoming increasingly concerned about this Pope. He is a ‘populist’ but the Christian message is not about being popular it’s about being true to Christ’s teachings.
Is spot-on. But I’m afraid he is projecting liberal values onto the Church.
GaryM, I am a Protestant but otherwise share your conservatism. Do you give any credence to the, I guess we’d have to call them conspiracy theories, that Benedict was pushed out of the papacy by powerful persons who hope to increase their power and wealth with a more liberal and progressive pope providing theoloigcal cover for their actions? I refer to those persons and organizations that are using fear of CAGW to stampede the populace into giving up their freedom so that their grandchildren won’t be roasted to death?
Ed,, Just saw this. I wondered at the time about the rapidity with which Benedict left the papacy. But if there was a concerted effort to oust him, I suspect it was among the modernist Catholic clergy. The equally surprising rapidity with which Francis was chosen just heightens my suspicion. But suspicion is not knowledge, and we may never know.
It is strange that the Church seems to pick up political issues like climate change only after they have lost importance and interest among the populace. When was the last time the Church had any lasting influence on western society? Not since the Counter-Reformation, IMO.
Pope John Paul II played a large part in freeing his native Poland and eventually all of eastern Europe. The don’t try and assassinate you unless you are making a difference.
If this is really about wealth distribution to the poor it is very inefficient . By the time the vested interest middle men get their cut there is not much left over. It is really only fossil fuels that will lift the masses of poor people in populous countries like India and China out of poverty, but proportionally there aren’t that many Catholics there!
Religion, politics, and science; what an unholy trinity.
Science has always striven NOT to be the third leg of that Trinity. Only pseudoscience.
could it be that carbon indulgences are forthcoming? The logic would be that carbon-credits only buys corporeal forgiveness, not spiritual absolution. And guess who has a monopoly on access to forgiveness in the hereafter?
The Church has extensive experience with the selling of indulgences; and, with the consequences thereof.
Anthony Watts: “For example, it only took the Catholic church 359 years to decide that Galileo was right after all, and that the Earth DOES in fact revolve around the Sun.”
The Earth revolves around the center of gravity of the solar system. The Sun is usually there, but depending on the position of the planets, it occasionally is not (that is what I recall, anyway, from some Sun movement simulations I did a few years ago).
Further, Galileo wasn’t exactly right to proclaim that the Sun is fixed in position and that everything in the Universe revolved about the Sun. The Church would have been wrong to say that Galileo was completely correct in his teaching.
Michael Flynn (sci-fi writer and occasional contributor to this blog) has a fairly extensive smack-down of the whole myth of Galileo’s mistreatment at the hands of the Church, here: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
Thank you Lee! What an awesome read. There should be a separate post on this.
Do be sure to read all nine parts of the Smackdown, of which Lee Bertagnolli linked only to the first. They are chained, but here is the Table of Contents:
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
Apparently many Catholic philosophers (as they referred to everyone then who studied anything in addition to theology) and even the pope were sold on what Galieo said. They didn’t want to publicize that because they were aware that Protestants would object to their not interpreting the Bible literally. In addition, the Pope wanted proof and Galileo couldn’t provide that . But Galileo and others were perfectly free to refer to heliocentriciy as an hypothesis.
The other issue with the Galileo affair was that the Church really didn’t care if the Sun circled the Earth or vice versa – it worried about igniting 100 years of religious war.
Not necessarily a poor judgement.
Saying “Shut up, mate. It ain’t worth it” may be anti-Enlightenment but it wasn’t anti-compassionate.
Since gravity is one of the two infinite range forces of nature (well our models of nature), I would argue that earth revolves around the CM of the entire universe, which surely isn’t the solar system. But maybe each and every point, is the center of the universe, since everything else is expanding away from everywhere else.
This pope believes in redistribution of other people’s money, so it only follows he would embrace the tenets of global warming.
The announcement came out of the Vatican’s Office for the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and not directly from the Pope’s office. What should be noted that Pope Francis will be issuing a Papal Encyclical and not an advisory statement. In modern times Encyclicals are issued to stress some theological virtue, clear up some doctrinal issue, or re-teach some Church teaching. Encyclicals have never introduced some new doctrine or novelty. If a Pope wishes to comment on some political or sociological issue that has no bearing to doctrine or theology he will just issue a papal statement.
That is why I don’t think the Encyclical will not be about Climate Change. Stewardship of the world’s natural resources, perhaps. But not Climate Change. The Pope may mention changing climate in how it effects humans and civilizations; but, it will be in very general terms and it will not be from a perspective that Man is changing the world’s climate. For if he does that he will not only exhaust whatever moral capital he possesses, but he will directly take sides in a heated political debate that is far from settled. He will also dilute the moral seriousness of Papal Encyclicals, which to this day carry weight for both Catholics and Protestants alike. Again, Encyclicals are papal documents addressed to other Bishops, which are intended to be of a theological and doctrinal nature.
BTW, if anyone believes that the Climate Change debates are nasty, they should view the theological debates that go on behind closed doors in the Catholic Church. They are not for the faint of heart.
JP
If the debates are ‘behind closed doors’ how come you re so well-informed as to their contents?
Could you perhaps give us an example of such a debate.
Francis is committed to helping the poor and underprivileged. For him, then, pushing the CAGW Belief is a means to an end. He believes the CAGW religion will help the poor. What a doddering old fool.
Apparently, he’s committed to having them poor and die soon. Oh, the irony.
A low carbon economy is a Third World economy.
“Hmmm… An article about what the Pope says without one reference to a Vatican document, or even a single quote from the Pope. Your quote source is a comment, or speculation from Investor’s Business Daily?”
Forourlady,
The original source is the Office for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
I am very shocked and disappointed. This is a direct reversal of the approach and intent of Saint Pope John Paul !!. The entire climate change movement is a religion not science. If it was science it could be falsified by experimental evidence, In addition this religion is radically and directly anti Christian. The Climate change agenda is a central part of the culture of death movement that John Paul spent his life fighting.
Con Trari the fall of communism? Or are you going to pretend that John Paul and the church were not a huge player in that?
This may be the church’s biggest error since at least the Galileo affair. In that case they had an excuse, Galileo was a jerk, totally wrong and abusive to others about things like comets and to top it off; what most people forget is that the protestant reformation was a conservative back to basics movement and Galileo came along right when the church was trying to prove they weren’t radical.
There really is no excuse for this foolish choice.
Thanks Paul. You’re right; No excuse, just shame.
If anyone wants to start a petition from Catholic scientists to the Vatican I would be happy to sign and support it. To me this is a very big deal.
The Vatican doesn’t want your opinion. Opinions come from the top, down, money from the bottom, up. I don’t expect much money to make it back down. There won’t be any limit to sucking, once the Vatican joins the UN and the EU at the trough. Prepare to be sucked dry.
I don’t think the criticism of the Pope is warranted since Climate science when not playing politics is more religion than science. Who can blame the Pope for supporting free expression of religion?
I think the pope has to oppose apostasy. The church of climate change is just another one (see Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, 1980).
Now that is a great book. Available in English translation from the Italian.
Because the people who listen to him know nothing about science; and, apparently, neither do his advisors.
Cardinal George Pell is a sceptic on AGW. He would stir up the Australian Greens.
example :
It does not look as if his voice is as strong as it should be.
Catholics have to listen to the Pope lest they be ex-communicated
Thanks, Anthony.
Same here, ignore him on this. But I will trust him a lot less.
When I was a young kid in secondary catholic school, I noticed we had a showcase containing a book of Galileo’s. I was told not to even look at it, it was sinful. Then, way too late, came 1992. I was already hooked on science and Galileo.
I actually have a copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
I am a Catholic, but the Pope is wrong as sin on this issue. CO2 is not a pollutant.
BTW, didn’t the RCC also institute various inquisitions taking thousands of lives, believe the earth was flat, the sun revolved around the Earth. More? In fact they have not been very good at science when mixing theology into stew.
Two words: Giordano Bruno. In 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.
To answer your questions:
1) BTW, didn’t the RCC also institute various inquisitions taking thousands of lives.
In 300 years, 3000 people (10 per year) were killed for heresy, mostly by civil authorities. Compare that to 262,000,000 killed in the last 100 years by secular governments in our enlightened era.
2) acting believe the earth was flat?
No. It was well known for 100s of years that the earth was a ball shape.
3) the sun revolved around the Earth. ? The sun does revolve around the earth, Ptolomy made very accurate models. See the antikythera mechanism: http://www.antikythera-mechanism.com Heliocentricity wrt the “Cosmos” is quite another matter, known to be published in Samos at least 300BC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos. Furthermore, Heliocentricity (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was published by Copernicus, a Catholic cleric, in 1543, long before Galileo.
4) more? Fr. Georges Henri LeMaitre, a Belgian priest and physicist invented the big bang theory and predicted Hubble’s red shift discovery.
In fact, anti-religious critics have not been very good at getting their facts straight.
I don’t know where your 3000 in 300 years comes from but the Albigensian crusade accounted for at least 5 times that number at Beziers.
Old Man in the forest…
You are confusing 2 very different words inquisition and crusade. They are completely different.
I stand amazed that such heat and passion has been generated by the Guardians inept environmental editor with an article speculating on the content of an as yet unwritten Papal Encyclical. He has garnered 5400 comments, 2 orders of magnitude more than he had previously ever achieved, and provoked the global blogosphere into bitter debate. yet what did he say except that the Pope intends to intervene in the Paris 2015 speilfest. Forgive me if in am wrong but that is a Conference of the Parties, one of which the Vatican is not – so he can only attend if invited.
If the Catholic Church really is going to make a definitive statement concerning the Global Warming Narrative I must say it is a bit late in the day.
The author of this post seems to base his opinion on a suggestion that the Vatican has been infiltrated by atheists promoting the antithesis of the “basic tenets of Catholicism”. Really, and the Curia never noticed! I do not have a dog in this fight but would advise the faithful to lie down with a stiff drink and think a little bit about global politics before nailing their theses to kirk door.
You might be in the treatment room for the big match.
Who needs a Catholic church which is only a bad copy of GREENPEACE and other similar eco-religious sects ???
Pope Francis, let the church do its core business and don’t intervene in topics in which you have no competence at all !!! Amen!
Amen, amen.
How sad. I have great respect for the political wisdom of the Roman Emperor Constantine to convene the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in AD 325.
Millions, if not even billions still believe in the consensus stories from that Council. I doubt it would have been possible with mere bloodshed only. Something the well-intending Franciscans seemed to have ignored in Latin America. Even bigger mystery to me is why Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Latin America wanted to be named Pope Francis.
Oh well, low expectations are perhaps the best for a skeptic in the matters of organized faith.
I too am tremendously disappointed by the stance on Global Warming taken by this pope. Given his concern for the poor, his support for global warming activism shows how blind most people remain to the negative consequences of CAGW policies for the poor of all nations.
However, it is erroneous to argue that the Catholic Church got a lot of science wrong. The Church did not hold on to an earth-centred universe officially after getting it wrong with Galileo – it just sort of shut up on the topic. However, the apology issued by Pope John Paul II concerning Galileo was not directed at acknowledging the earth goes around the sun, but that Galileo’s arguments were theologically correct – Galileo warned that there would be grave theological consequences if the Church took a stance on a scientific issue that ignored physical evidence. Galileo was right.
This was tacitly acknowledged by the Catholic Church in that no pope issued any document taking an official stance on evolution until 1950, when the Papal Bull Humani Generis stated that Catholics were free to believe in evolution with the exception that they must not believe that the human soul was a product of evolution. Since evolutionary theory does not concern itself with the soul, this hardly tramples on science.
As a historian of science I can think of no negative position taken by the Catholic Church since its huge blunder on Galileo on any scientific issue which merits our condemnation. In the late Medieval era the Church opposed the teaching that lower life forms have continuously spontaneously generated – a commonly held belief since the time of Aristotle – and on this position no scientific evidence has ever contradicted the position taken by the Church. The scientific underpinnings of pasteurization and sterile practices depend on this being true. More positively, the Church opposed the totalitarian eugenics policies enacted in Germany and elsewhere prior to the Second World War, and continues to uphold the teaching that scientific research must not contravene the sanctity of human life – the ultimate human rights argument.
I generally agree with this entire comment. Pope Francis’ biases are not infallible. Therefore, I dismiss his comments as politics.
Sorry, but the hisorical written record completely refutes your appologia. Nice try. No cigar.
Rud Istvan – Examples, please? As a professor in the history of science and technology I would be most interested in finding if there are any other cases of persecution of real scientists. If often turns out that the argument is a bit of a bait and switch, since the later examples pitching religion against science seem to occur in local controversies between Protestant religious or political leaders versus science supporters. Examples of these include the highly suspect confrontation between Church of England Bishop ‘Soapy’ Sam Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, for which we must rely on Huxley’s own account, or in the US the Scopes Monkey Trial.
In the so-called Giordano Bruno case, it was Bruno’s pantheism and rejection of Christian doctrine that got him into trouble – not that I am defending his treatment. The Galileo affair took place in the context of the Reformation, in which the Catholic Church was being rejected and vilified by Protestants for its failure to support Biblical literalism. Sadly, the Church decided to defend the literal meaning of passages in the Bible that seemed to indicate a geocentric universe, in a political response to the fevered Reformation religious atmosphere.
Please give some examples of official Church teachings that rejected scientific advances since Galileo!
After a bit of a search I found:
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/never_talk_about_religion_or_politics_etiquette_rule
From which I offer this excerpt:
…… “Do not discuss politics or religion in general company” is from 1879.
The saying was further popularized by the Peanuts comic strip in 1961. The character Linus said, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people…religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”…..
===========
Seems like pretty good advice.
Especially when talk turns to “the Great Pumpkin”.
The Catholic Church obviously recognises the threat that the religious cult of AGWarmism poses. His Holiness therefore has nailed his colours to catastrophism to avert open warfare and attempt to preserve Catholicism from such a conflict. The difficulty may well arise as and when the CAGW narrative unravels.
The Climate Change movement has always been a religious movement, not scientific. This just reinforces that and makes it more “official”.
Of course we have the opposing views of Ozzie Archbishop Pel who maintains that Carbon Credits are a form of Medieval indulgences.
http://business.financialpost.com/2011/10/26/carbon-credits-like-medieval-indulgences/
Ok, but I still like Catholic girls in their little short skirts.
It’s funny to see so many “Catholics” disagree with so much that the Catholic church teaches yet claim to be Catholic. What is wrong with you people?
Albert, the Church does not “teach” on the matter of climate science. The Pope was not speaking from the Magisterial authority. Therefore climate science is not a matter of dogma. What is wrong with you?
Sorry, just a knee-jerk reaction to ridiculous dogma. AGW aside, know lots of “Catholics” who really don’t agree with most of their dogma yet want to participate in the social/culture or continue to be a part of the group. That goes for many religions. What’s wrong with those people?
And….the Pope is absolutely using his position of authority to sway his sheep. Yeah, he’s “teaching” I don’t like it. No sir, not one bit.
You’re not sorry, you’re glad someone took your bait, so you could express your opinion.
Feel better now ?