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posted by CoolHand on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the mixing-religion-with-climate-change dept.

The Telegraph reports that as the Vatican forges an alliance with the UN to tackle climate change, skeptics accuse Pope Francis of being deeply ill-informed about global warming. The Pope discussed climate change with Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, who then opened a one-day Vatican conference called "The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development". Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, SDSN and Religions for Peace, the goal of the conference is to help strengthen the global consensus on the importance of climate change in the context of sustainable development.

But a group of British and American skeptics say the Pope is being fed “mistaken” advice from the UN and that he should stick to speaking out on matters of morality and theology rather than getting involved in the climate change debate. "The Pope has great moral authority but he’s not an authority on climate science. He’s a learned man but the IPCC has got it wrong,” says Jim Lakely of the Heartland Institute, a conservative American pressure group partly funded by billionaire industrialists who question climate change. "The Pope would make a grave mistake if he put his moral authority behind scientists saying that climate change is a threat to the world. Many scientists have concluded that human activity is a minor player. The Earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age.”

It was the first time the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago and has been described by the New York Times as "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism," has traveled to Rome to try to influence a pope. "The sideshow envisioned by these organizations will not detract from the deep concern that Pope Francis has for the truth and how it relates to the environment," says Dr. Bernard Brady, Professor and Chair of the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas. "Pope Francis will probably follow his predecessor, Benedict XVI, recognizing the interrelatedness of climate change with other moral issues and calling for persons, organizations, communities, nations, and indeed the global community, to reconsider established patterns of behavior."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @04:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @04:17AM (#177364)

    Yes, let's listen to the Catholic Church about science. Galileo must be turning in his grave.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 01 2015, @06:15AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday May 01 2015, @06:15AM (#177381) Journal

    You know, this keeps getting thrown up. Galileo this, Galileo that, and not expecting the Roman Inquisition. But you know, John Paul II basically admitted the Church was wrong in the whole thing, and tried to remove Galileo's conviction. Now I have been around, not since Hector was a pup, because that was before my time, but well before Christianity was a "thing", and I remember when Peter became the Bishop of Rome. Centralization seems to have been more of a Roman idea than a particularly Christian one, but what the hey. I just want to say, the Roman Catholic (Catholic means Universal, BTW) Church always does the right thing, but sometimes it takes them 400 years to do it. So I expect that whole "pediphile priest" thing will be totally cleared up in a few centuries. But that does not change the fact that Catholics more or less accept all of science! Have we learned nothing from Dan Brown? Is it only the hatred of the medieval and redactivist fundamentalist anti-intellectualist sects of christianity that should be accepted as the real deal? Oh, Tertullian! Now there was a dude! That guy said that he believes because it is absurd. I mean, anybody can believe stuff that is just true, but to believe something truly absurd, something ridiculous, that takes faith. We have many examples here on Soylent News! Hairyfeet believes in Micro$oft. Why? Maybe because that is how he makes money, but absurd none the less. frojack believes that nobody else besides frojack understands what's going on. MikeeUSA somehow believes that if marrying young girls was legalized, that any young girl could possibly want to marry his misogynist ass, and would not either put ground glass in is soup (that's a classic!) or dowse him with gasoline when he was asleep (burning down the house!), or put a dagger up the **** (took out Ghengis Khan!!). So, all you climate deniers who deny there is a climate, I challenge you to explain how your "beliefs" (in scare quotes because I do not believe your beliefs are real) could possibly be true? It's the Pope! He is infallible! Bow down to an infallible authority that recognizes that inductively uncertain science is the best thing we got.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2015, @05:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2015, @05:22AM (#179396)

      Get a younger girl.
      If you go young enough she'll actually be a girl, not a woman, and you'll be allright.