Let's play a little game. Read the following statement and guess the source.
Aggressive exploitation of fossil fuels and other natural resources has damaged the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we inhabit. To give one example, some 1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other climatically important “greenhouse” gases have been pumped into the atmosphere. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air now exceeds the highest levels of the last 800,000 years. The climatic and ecological impacts of this human interference with the Earth System are expected to last for many millennia, warranting a new name, The Anthropocene, for the new “man-made” geologic epoch we are living in.
The National Academy of Sciences? While it sounds like it could have come from one of their recent reports, such as the new "America's Climate Choices" monograph, our scientific community cannot take credit. The Environmental Protection Agency, the fossil fools favorite villain? Nope. Perhaps that dreaded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that climate zombies weave into elaborate conspiracy theories? Wrong again.
If you have not guessed from the title or a little googling, it comes from the Vatican. You can find it on page 3 of a report entitled, "Fate of mountain glaciers in the Anthropocene." It was the product of a workshop at the Vatican to examine the causes and consequences of glacier melt, particularly as impacts the primary water supply for millions of people.
The working group consists of glaciologists, climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, physicists, chemists, mountaineers, and lawyers organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, to contemplate the observed retreat of the mountain glaciers, its causes and consequences. This report resulted from a workshop in April 2011 at the Vatican.
I have many Catholics in my social network. The ones I like and spend time with are concerned about social justice. However, I am also on email lists of others with preoccupied with sexual morality, an ironic fixation in the context of the priest abuse scandal. It is the second group that would benefit from reading the Vatican's declaration from this conference and any cognitive dissonance resulting from it.
We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life.
We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish.
Amen to that.
If this were just an opportunity to make a few conservative Catholics squirm, it would not really be worth the time. However, the Vatican's report has far greater utility.
Like all of us, the Vatican and the Catholic Church are far from perfect. There is no need to rehash the many failings of the organization throughout its history. We all could jot down our favorite list of its corruptions and abuses. However, this is an example of the Church doing the right thing instead of the wrong. It deserves attention and praise.
Climate change is already having an impact on the hydrological cycle, which will severely impact food production and water availability for future generations. This is probably the largest ethical and moral challenge we have ever faced as a species. The selfish choices we make for ourselves and we allow our politicians to make for us will harm the unborn of the future, not to mention the already born of the present.
There has been a systematic effort to undercut the moral significance of climate change. When evangelical Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative to argue stewardship of the planet was a moral issue, politically connected religious conservatives told them to "shut up." The "Cornwall Alliance" was created with money from fossil fuels companies to promote the self-centered idea of dominionism in place of stewardship and portray concern for the environment as evil. Hopefully, this statement from Vatican can reinvigorate the focus on stewardship.
Many prominent conservative politicians, such as John Boehner and Paul Ryan, point to their Catholic faith as justification for taking away the reproductive freedoms of women and the civil rights of homosexual and transgender people. While they are quick to point out what they consider dust in the eyes of others, it would be unfair to ignore the logs in their eyes. There are some signs their hypocrisies have been noticed. For example, the Catholic Bishops pointedly reminded John Boehner of the misplaced priorities in Paul Ryan's vicious budget blueprint. The concluding paragraph of this letter addresses the cynical characterization of slashing programs for the poor as "moral."
The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing in these debates, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources.
Catholic University's invitation to John Boehner to give the 2011 commencement address also sparked an outcry from professors at numerous Catholic institutions because of his punish-the-poor, protect-the-rich approach to governance. The Vatican's call to "protect the habitat that sustains us" stands in equally sharp contrast to politicians that protect the interests of oil, gas, and coal companies responsible for destroying that habitat and funding a campaign of false witness against climate scientists.
It is also important to publicize the Vatican's declaration and report in the Hispanic community, who predominantly identify themselves as Catholic and have become an increasingly powerful voice in the church. The appeal to conscience will likely resonate with people who have too often been on the wrong side of social and environmental injustices.
Finally, there are several scientific issues that the Vatican's report frames quite well. One is that it deftly undercuts climate zombies' favorite canard that currently observed climate changes are part of a "natural cycle" that has nothing to do with human activities.
The primary triggers for ice ages and inter-glacials are well understood to be changes in the astronomical parameters related to the motion of our planet within the solar system and natural feedback processes in the climate system. The time scales between these triggers are in the range of 10,000 years or longer. By contrast, the observed human-induced changes in carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, and soot concentrations are taking place on 10-100 year timescales –at least a hundred times as fast. It is particularly worrying that this release of global warming agents is occurring during an interglacial period when the Earth was already at a natural temperature maximum.
The report also makes a clear and concise statement about the co-generation of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. In particular, the energy and transportation sectors responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are also dumping other highly toxic compounds (e.g. mercury) into the air at the same time. Anyone who suggests that only carbon dioxide is going out of smokestacks and tailpipes is not telling the truth.
Air pollution and climate change policies are still treated as if they were two separate problems, when they actually represent the same scourge. Emission sources for air pollutants and greenhouse gases coincide, and a combined policy strategy reduces the cost of counteracting both these threats to human health and the well-being of society.
Even the focus on glaciers is noteworthy. A statement about glacier melt in the Himalayas in the 2007 IPCC report sparked controversy. One of the working group reports suggested that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 based on projections from local sources, which should have been bracketed with a cautionary note indicating the nonscientific nature of the estimation. The official summary report merely noted the potential risk to the region's glaciers: "If current warming rates are maintained, Himalayan glaciers could decay at very rapid rates."
The focus on one sentence in 20,000 pages of documents shows the desperation among climate zombies to deny reality. It is ignoring a sea of dead trees to focus on a few still holding leaves. Based on the data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, here is the forest when it comes to glaciers since 1980.
Whatever your feelings about the Catholic Church, this discussion of the moral dimensions of addressing climate climate rings true.
"If we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us."