Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Spanish-born American Philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The recent Papal Encyclical announced the Catholic Church’s decision to join the scientific claims that humans are causing global warming and denounce climate scientists who oppose the claim. It came almost exactly 400 years after Galileo was denounced to the Roman Inquisition in the spring of 1615. The Catholic Church only acknowledged the errors of their actions, their last and most negative brush with science, when they forgave Galileo in 1992. Pope John Paul said labeling Galileo a heretic and confining him to life imprisonment was an error. It only took 377 years for the Church to catch up with reality. No doubt Galileo is delighted, assuming he made it to heaven.
Galileo supported the Copernican heliocentric view that put the Sun at the center of our Solar system. This contradicted the Church belief in the Ptolemaic geocentric view with the Earth at the center. He also challenged the Ptolemaic view that everything beyond the moon was perfect. Through his telescope, Galileo made and recorded the first observation of sunspots in 1610. It was heresy to claim the existence of these blemishes. Later, the sunspots became an important part of the research to determine natural causes of climate change.
Now history repeats itself because the latest conflict between science and the Church involves the Sun, or more accurately, exclusion of consideration of the Sun as the primary cause of climate change. The Vatican released the full Encyclical on Thursday, 18 June 2015.
There is considerable hyperbole in the early part of the document apparently designed to define the world in serious trouble because of human activity. There is also the establishment of guilt and culpability.
Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.
Some statements are quite remarkable and seem inappropriate for a document of such gravity. For example,
The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.
The reality is that most of the world is unoccupied (Figure 1). Also, the world is not overpopulated, and the proven solution to population reduction is development in the process of the demographic transition.
Figure 1
The primary purpose of this article is to address the basis for the climate concerns outlined in the Encyclical. The practice of hyperbole extends throughout the Encyclical including the heading for the section on climate change. It is labeled “Pollution and Climate Change”. This idea introduces the incorrect link made in comments by President Obama about “carbon pollution.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Encyclical identifies CO2 as the major cause of climate change, but CO2 is not a pollutant.
The distorted headline provides context for disturbing evidence that the Vatican does not know its science, any more than it did 400 years earlier. Their position is a matter of faith not facts, evidence, or science. With great irony, lack of knowledge about the sun is central again. Item 23 of the Encyclical provides all the information we need to show they don’t understand the science and, therefore, cannot understand how it is misused.
It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.
Unfortunately, the Vatican is not aware that “variations in the earth’s orbit and axis” known as the Milankovitch Effect, is not included in the IPCC Reports or their computer models. The “solar cycle” refers to the changing activities on the Sun, manifest by sunspots, and they are not included in the Report or the models.
“Volcanic activity” is included in the AR 5 Working Group I Report under the heading of “Aerosol Burdens and effects on Insolation.” They comment,
Clouds and aerosols continue to contribute the largest uncertainty to estimates and interpretations of the Earth’s changing energy budget.
The quantification of cloud and convective effects in models, and of aerosol–cloud interactions, continues to be a challenge.
In Chapter 9, “Evaluation of Climate Models” they report on the gap between model results and reality.
The differences between the modelled and measured AODs (aerosol optical depth) exceed the errors in the Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) retrievals over land of ±0.05 or 0.2×AOD (Kahn et al., 2005) and the RMS errors in the corrected Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) retrievals over ocean of 0.061(Shi et al., 2011).
The great concentration of greenhouse gases the Encyclical identifies includes carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. They apparently don’t know these represent approximately 4 percent of the total greenhouse gases and are only 2 percent of all atmospheric gases. (Figure 2)
Figure 2: Source After Heritage.org
They don’t seem to realize that water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas. They acknowledge their list is only gases affected by human activity, but they don’t seem to understand that restriction is by design. The IPCC was directed only to examine human causes of climate change.
The cited paragraph contains all the evidence of the Vatican’s lack of understanding of what the IPCC studied. Limitations of IPCC studies were primarily created by the definition of climate change they were given, and they result in the very restricted nature of their conclusions. They seem unaware that all IPCC predictions are wrong. The reality is, if the predictions are wrong, the science is wrong. As a result, the position of the Vatican set out in the Encyclical is a matter of faith, not science. It appears that they are getting burned again, which sadly suggests they didn’t learn from history. As Mark 12:17 (King James version) says,
“And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.”
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This Papal story really is getting lots of coverage in Australian MSM. It is literally vommit indicing!
This is ironic because their “god” is an anthropomorphic figure of the sun. All this nonsense from early star worship.
I,m seeing far to much religious debate on this pontification, it would be far better to discus the political implications and the far from the popes remit. His sojourn into world politics and fairy science is beyond the pale.
For the record, this is an excellent example of the type of disinformation that hurts the skeptical case. Emphasizing an irrelevant fact is a propaganda attempt to persuade the reader of something other than the truth. It is a fact that CO2 is a small percentage of the entire atmosphere, and human created CO2 is a small percentage of the total CO2. However, when one says that the writers of the encyclical didn’t seem to know that, one has left the impression that it’s an important fact. Too many deniers emphasize the small proportion of human created CO2 trying to leave the impression that I cannot affect climate. That’s disinformation and should be discouraged.
The Pope has now managed to bring his position and the Roman Catholic Church into disrepute. Sadly, many of his poor flock in South America would not understand what he has done or why he is wrong. But many in the western world will understand and reject what he has just done.
The Vatican has descended from the historical ‘moral high ground’ it once claimed to have held into the secular mud pit of the climate controversy.
Yep, standing on the rim would have been smarter.
New trade off the bench late in the fourth quarter. Hasn’t learned the playbook, sadly.
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MARKL
June 18, 2015 at 9:24 pm
Until the Pope turns off the air conditioning that he has the ability to control (maybe he already has … but I’ll give pretty good odds, without checking further, that he hasn’t), and gets rid of all of the gated communities that he has the ability to control, I will have to agree with comments such as Mark’s.
“Climate change” is just a tool, to be used by the unscrupulous, as an added means to get to their desired ends.
“Climate change” is just a tool, to be used by the unscrupulous, as an added means to get to their desired ends.”
THIS QUOTE – IT’S DEAD ON.
It is a shame that science is so misunderstood.
Galileo could not falsify Ptolemy. He had no evidence, to the unaided human senses, that the earth moves. Such evidence would take 300 years to appear. The Foucault Pendulum is a visible proof of the earth’s motion. The aberration of light was discovered earlier; that evidence requires a telescope and setting circles. The often cited rotation of water draining out of a pan is suspect. With our ability to look down from space, the coriolis effect is easily visible, and explain the jet streams.
The science is clear. The warming stopped 18 years ago while the carbon dioxide levels continued to increase. It was warmer in the Medieval Warming Period than it is now. Those are facts. I know the IPCC deleted the MWP. They could not make it go away, however.
And what got Galileo into trouble was lese majeste. You should not make your leader bear the title of Simplicio and publish in the vernacular. Bad idea. But Galileo was very headstrong.
Read Owen Gingerich for a complete explanation of Galileo and the Church.
zzz
It does get tiresome.
I have nothing to say about 99 % of the post, because the pseudo-history in the first 1% told me all I needed to know about the agenda the author is pushing.
Anthony: Congratulations on your award at Heartland conference. After waltzing thru the comments on this subject of the Pope’s authority and reasoning, and the bitter comments from both sides, I have a headache, not sure how you handle it.
If there is anything worse than the politicization of science, and the hijacking and corruption of the scientific process to further political views, then it would probably have to be doing the same in the name of religion.
I think the world has ample examples of what becomes of making anything related to science a religious issue.
The incredible irony, of the left now supporting the re-entry of religion into matters of science…in effect to condone religious leaders telling people what the truth is and what to think and how to behave and manage their lives…you could not make this crap up!
The problem with Galileo was his haughty arrogance. The Church was fine with he and his theories, studies, etc but it had a monumental problem with his captious claim (protestantism distilled) that he could interpret Scripture as a private individual AND, as was observed by others, he could not produce proof of his claims, some of which were wrong
O, and Dr Strangelove. Sodomites being admitted to Seminaries are the initial problem and then giving them Holy Orders wildly intensifies the problem for sodomites are interested in adolescent boys, not children.
Lay men, like you, are the ones most culpable for sex crimes with children.
Any organization that accepts sodomites into positions of authority is only begging for problems as sodomites are, by nature, subversive and will diligently work to eliminate all rules, strictures, norms that oppose their malign vice.
The media has cultivated your mind and you strew dead flowers in your commentary – pedophile- when the VAST majority of the laity victimized by sodomitic clearly were adolescent males.
Per Cassidy421:“The Church today is following popular scientific opinion”; Pope Francis is following a political agenda that’s not supported by most scientists and is based on lies and fraud and hate – character asssassination of scientists that oppose it and censorship and professional retaliation against them…”
(Which I’m in agreement on…)
Does it say anywhere in the encyclical that society / government / politicians / scientists must push aside unpopular opinion (ostracized people?) – which in this case are climate “skeptics” – with valid knowledge – that want to be / need to be at the main table of discussion?
Or is it basically restricting the table to those who have already been “vetted” – meaning you can now say anything positive, as long as it’s in agreement with what has already been decided (by those who really don’t want to play fair… and never intended to)?
I’m going to review it in whole (at least, once), but not yet. It’s like a long, bad movie (you’ve seen before) – it’s really hard to force oneself to go through it again – and keep going through, to the end.
“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”.
What a sad indictment of one professing infallibility. A few weeks of solitary retreat in California’s Death Valley should work wonders in bringing the him closer to the one he claims to represent.
These goggles, they work! Here, have a peer through them.
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It’s a shame this site runs posts lambasting groups and organizations for things which even the most basic of fact-checking would show are false. This post provides a good example. Leaving aside the misrepresentation of the Galileo affair, which at least has popular mythology as some form of justification, this makes the remarkable claim:
Upthread, Zeke Hausfather points out it is wrong to say solar cycles are not included in climate models, linking a page showing the CMIP forcings clearly include solar forcings. There is a more basic point Hausfather misses, however.
While people might have to do research to find out what forcings are used in climate modles, and understanding what climate models do can be difficult, it is trivially easy to see the IPCC reports do include “the Milankovitch Effect.” In fact, the IPCC has even discussed it in Frequently Asked Questions sections, such as that of Chapter 6 of the Fourth Assessment Report which said (amongst other things):
Not only does the IPCC discuss Milankovitch cycles, it discusses how they’ve been examined with climate models. Despite that, this post criticizes the Catholic church because, supposedly, “the Vatican is not aware that ‘variations in the earth’s orbit and axis’ known as the Milankovitch Effect, is not included in the IPCC Reports or their computer models.” The reality is if we use the logic of this post, which says:
Then Dr. Tim Ball has shown “all the evidence” we could need of his “lack of understanding of what the IPCC studied.” And as a result, the position of Ball set out in this post is a matter of faith, not science.
Heh, Hale cycle to Milankovitch, blind to everything in between. What a spectacle of credulity, crying fooletry, papish schmoozitry, dizzy damning doozitry.
Kids, that’s the mantra to get the sun to rise. It works every time.
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It’s an artifact of what we can and have studied so far. One, a repeatable, short term, totally solar thing which is easy to observe. The other, theoretically elegant, long term, totally earthly thing for which it is easy to find, or pervert, evidence.
Nearly everything else? Not yet considered, either from long time scales, or the inevitable presence of unknown unknowns.
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I’m trying not to do any sort of point-by-point rebuttal to this post, but I can’t resist pointing out one other thing it says which is embarrasingly wrong. The post says:
Now, nobody actually knows who the first person to observe sunspots was. We know it wasn’t Galileo though. Galileo may have been the first person to observe a sunspot through a telescope (or Thomas Harriot may have been), but sunspots had been observed more than a thousand years before that, with the naked eye. The Chinese had documented observing sunspots at least 2,000 years ago. In the West, one sunspot was observed in 807 for eight days. People didn’t know what it was, but they saw and documented it for eight days.
But that’s a sideshow. Even if Galileo were the first person to observe sunspots, those observations were never considered heresy. A number of people began studying them about the same time (Johannes Fabricius even published a book about them before Galileo began studying them), and none of them faced accusations of heresy.
One of the people who began studying the issue around that time, Christoph Scheiner, tried to defend the idea the heavens were unchanging (and thus, the spots couldn’t be spots on the sun itself). Galileo and Scheiner wound up debating each others’ ideas via correspondence which were published for everyone to read. Galileo clearly won the debate, and Scheiner himself rejected the idea of unchanging heavens.
And rather than be accused of heresy for any of this, this all happened during the time Galileo found himself becoming a celebrity great enough the pope himself invited him to Rome (not for his work on sunspots, though). It was during that time he became friends Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who went on to become Pope Urban VIII.
If we are to believe this post, Galileo was committing heresy at the same time he was being invited to Rome so his presence could be celebrated and he could meet the pope. And while committing heresy by pointing out sunspots were real, he became friends with a person who then went on to become pope.
In other words, this post is terrible, and Dr. Tim Ball clearly knows far less about what he’s writing than he pretends. This post is an embarrassment to the site.
Brandon Shollenberger
June 19, 2015 at 5:57 pm
….”This post is an embarrassment to the site.”
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As of this moment there have been 260 comments to this post.
Do you discount them all ?
I’m not sure what you mean. Why would calling a post on a site an embarrassment mean I discount all the comments on that post? I’ve seen plenty of bad blog posts that had good comments made in response. Often, that happens when comments point out the problems in those bad blog posts.
There is much exotica here, but my ancient baseball archive records the score as Galileo 1 and the Pope 0. I suspect future sports historians will score this one as Old Sol 1 and the Pope 0.
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Would a sharper shovel help with the digging ?
Seems a little odd that the Encyclical is copywrited …. I mean, isn’t distrubution to all the goal?
Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is a business.
NAH, that couldn’t be.
http://iceagenow.info/2015/06/50000-witches-executed-because-they-caused-climate-change-video/
http://actualite.20minutes.fr/Interstitial/TwentyMinutes/2015/06/21/5586742874ce0.html#xtor=EPR-182-%5Bwelcomemedia%5D–
Heh, The Farce of Battle.
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The Bishop of Rome has joined the Club of Rome…
What if global cooling resumes in the next five years?
What will the Pope say then?
Will he say
“Forgive me, my dear people. I was wrong and you have suffered and died as a result of my grave error”.
Or will he say:
“It’s eff-ing freezing in here! Throw another denier on the fire.”