Pope's environmental encyclical: Climate Change a product of human selfishness

[The Larch]

Ok, if this doesn't bring back Seedy nothing will.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33182065

Pope Francis blames 'human selfishness' for global warming

Pope Francis has blamed human selfishness for global warming in his long-awaited encyclical calling for action on climate change.
In the letter, he urges the rich to change their lifestyles to avert the destruction of the ecosystem.
Environmentalists hope the message will spur on nations ahead of the UN climate conference in Paris in December.
But parts of the document, leaked earlier this week, have already been criticised by some US conservatives.
It has been dismissed by two Republican presidential candidates.
Humans to blame
The encyclical, named "Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home", aims to inspire everyone - not just Roman Catholics - to protect the Earth.
The 192-page letter, which is the highest level teaching document a pope can issue, lays much of the blame for global warming on human activities.
Pope Francis writes that: "We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.
"The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life."

He criticises what he calls a "collective selfishness", but says that there is still time to stop the damage, calling for an end to consumerism and greed.
'Moral approach'
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi launched the pontiff's second encyclical at a news conference on Thursday.
The teaching is more evidence of a pontiff determined to act as a catalyst for change, and a powerful diplomatic player on the world stage, says the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt.
The release comes six months before international leaders gather in Paris to try to seal a deal to reduce carbon emissions.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the document, saying climate change was a "moral issue requiring respectful dialogue with all parts of society".

It has also been widely praised by environmental groups, with WWF president Yolanda Kakabadse saying it "adds a much-needed moral approach'' to the debate on climate change.
Greenpeace leader Kumi Naidoo highlighted passages calling for policies that reduce carbon emissions, including by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
But a leak of the document, published by Italy's L'Espresso magazine on Tuesday, had a frosty response from sceptical conservatives in America, including two Roman Catholic presidential candidates.
Jeb Bush said he did not get his economic policy from his bishops, cardinals or pope - so why his policy on the environment?
Meanwhile Rick Santorum questioned whether the Pope was credible on the issue of climate science.
US Senator, Jim Inhofe, chairman of the US Senate Environment Committee, said he disagreed with the Pope's "philosophy" on global warming.
"I am concerned that his encyclical will be used by global warming alarmists to advocate for policies that will equate to the largest, most regressive tax increase in our nation's history."
However, many academics have welcomed the pontiff's input.
Prof Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford in the UK, said: "If Pope Francis can't speak up for our unborn grandchildren, then God help us all."

Will Pope sway Americans? - Roger Harrabin, BBC News environment analyst

The UN's climate change chief Christiana Figueres says the Pope's message will influence talks in Paris this year on a deal to tackle global warming.
Developing countries are demanding firmer promises of financial help from rich countries so they can adapt to inevitable changes in the climate and get clean energy to avoid contributing to further warming.
Ms Figueres said their position would be strengthened by the Pope's insistence that this was the clear moral responsibility of the rich.
The encyclical will be welcomed by poor countries in Africa and Latin America.
The big question is how it will play in the USA, where it has already been dismissed by a Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who is a Catholic.
Leading Republicans have warned the UN that they will undo President Barack Obama's climate policies - so if the encyclical sways any of the conservative Catholics in Congress that could prove significant.

[Grey Fox]

The Rich have no morals.

[derspiess]

Catholics

[viper37]

The Rich have no morals.

the poor as soooo much better

[Admiral Yi]

When the poor ask for free money it's not greed.

[derspiess]

People on the left are drooling over this thing, but they're conveniently ignoring the abortion part.

[Ideologue]

When the rich use their superior organization, it's market efficiency.

It's disgusting how the welfare of the fucking planet is a partisan issue. We clearly either live too short to think about the future properly, or live too long to keep the damage minimal.

[Ideologue]

People on the left are drooling over this thing, but they're conveniently ignoring the abortion part.

Why, you think we were gonna vote for Francis for world president?

[derspiess]

People on the left are drooling over this thing, but they're conveniently ignoring the abortion part.

Why, you think we were gonna vote for Francis for world president?

No.

[Syt]

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/18/a-child-born-today-may-live-to-see-humanitys-end-unless/

A child born today may live to see humanity's end, unless...

Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, according to Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders of the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He blames overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change.

Fenner's prediction is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn't seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway. When the G7 called on Monday for all countries to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 85 years, the scientific reaction was unanimous: That's far too late.

And no possible treaty that emerges from the current United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for November's United Nations climate conference in Paris, will be sufficient. At this point, lowering emissions is just half the story — the easy half. The harder half will be an aggressive effort to find the technologies needed to reverse the climate apocalypse that has already begun.

For years now, we have heard that we are at a tipping point. Al Gore warned us in An Inconvenient Truth that immediate action was required if we were to prevent global warming. In 2007, Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor to the British government, declared, "Avoiding dangerous climate change is impossible – dangerous climate change is already here. The question is, can we avoid catastrophic climate change?" In the years since, emissions have risen, as have global temperatures. Only two conclusions can be drawn: Either these old warnings were alarmist, or we are already in far bigger trouble than the U.N. claims. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case.

Lowering emissions and moving to cleaner energy sources is a necessary step to prevent catastrophic temperature rises. The general target is to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Higher increases — like the 5C increase currently projected by 2100 — run the risk of widespread flooding, famine, drought, sea-level rise, mass extinction and, worse, the potential of passing a tipping point (frequently set at 6C) that could render much of the planet uninhabitable and wipe out most species. Even the 2C figure predicts more than a meter's rise in sea levels by 2100, enough to displace millions. It is no wonder that the Pentagon calls climate change a serious "threat multiplier" and is considering its potential disruptive impact across all its planning.

This is where the U.N. talks fall short — by a mile. The targets proffered by the United States (a 26 percent to 28 percent decrease from 2005 levels by 2025), the European Union (a 40 percent decrease from 1990 levels by 2030) and China (an unspecified emissions peak by 2030) are nowhere near enough to keep us under the 2C target. In 2012, journalist Bill McKibben, in a feature for Rolling Stone, explained much of the math behind the current thinking on global warming. He concluded that the United Nations' figures were definitely on the rosy side. In particular, McKibben noted that the temperature has already increased 0.8C, and even if we were to stop all carbon-dioxide emissions today, it would increase another 0.8C simply due to the existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That leaves only a 0.4C buffer before hitting 2C. Even assuming the Paris conference implements everything that's promised, we will be on track to use up the remaining "carbon budget" — the amount of carbon we can emit without blowing past the 2C threshold — within two to three decades, not even at mid-century.

These emissions-reduction frameworks, it is safe to say, are simply insufficient. By themselves, they only offer a small chance of preventing the earth from becoming mostly uninhabitable – for humans at least — over the next few centuries. For the talks to be more than just a placebo, they need to encompass aggressive plans for climate mitigation, with the assumption that current wishful targets won't be met.

Apart from coordination to cope with climate-driven crises and associated instability, climate-change leadership needs to encourage and fund the development of technologies to reverse what we are unable to stop doing to our planet. Many of these technologies fall under the rubric of "carbon sequestration" — safely storing carbon rather than emitting it. Riskier strategies, like injecting sulfates into the air to reflect more of the sun's heat into space and ocean iron fertilization to grow algae to suck in carbon, run a high risk of unintended consequences. Better and safer solutions to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere don't yet exist; we need to discover them and regulate them, to avoid the chaos of what economists Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman term "rogue geoengineering" in their book Climate Shock.

None of these approaches are substitutes for emissions reductions. Achieving a carbon-neutral society is a necessary long-term goal regardless of other technological fixes. Technology could buy us the time to get there without our planet burning up. Ultimately, we need a Cold War-level of investment in research into new technologies to mitigate the coming effects of global warming. Without it, the U.N.'s work is a nice gesture, but hardly a meaningful one.

[Ideologue]

Then why shouldn't we be pleased that an ideological rival has moved leftward on a vital issue? Incidentally, if you want to start supporting a higher minimum wage, I'm happy about that even if you still wanted union organizers shot or something...

[Admiral Yi]

When the rich use their superior organization, it's market efficiency.

My bumper sticker is more comprehensible than yours.

[crazy canuck]

People on the left are drooling over this thing, but they're conveniently ignoring the abortion part.

And if people on the right continue to ignore climate change we are not going to have to worry about whether a fetus has the right to life for much longer.

[Malthus]

The problem of climate change is one that will bear down particularly hard on the poor, not the rich, though.

If the poor want to become non-poor, they are going to be using energy - lots of it (as there are lots of poor people); they will also want that energy to be comparatively cheap. The rich can far more easily adapt to higher, cleaner energy prices.

[derspiess]

Then why shouldn't we be pleased that an ideological rival has moved leftward on a vital issue?

Just sayin' you (lefties) are using it as something to beat conservatives over the head with, but are cherry-picking when you do so.

For the most part I don't give a shit, either way.  I'm not Catholic.  If you want to go after Santorum or Jeb on this, feel free.