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Despite the santorum splattered about, the Pontiff of the Church Universal and Triumphant [EDIT: This is actually referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church Universal and Triumphant] is going to agree with the climate change consensus in an encyclical to be released on Thursday. Early leaks give some idea of the content.
Pope Francis is preparing to declare humans as primarily responsible for climate change, call for fossil fuels to be replaced by renewable energy and decry the culture of consumerism, a leaked draft of his much anticipated statement on the environment suggests.
The source for this somehow concerns Australians, but we will take any indication of infallibility where we can get it.
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists? It does add a entirely new dimension to the debate, and I hope that God will forgive your Conservative asses for screwing up Her creation in the quest for profit.
UPDATE - janrinok 18 Jun 12:36UTC
is it possible to update/append aristarchus' post "Pope Affirms Anthropogenic Global Warming" (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/17/0317256), as follows:
Update: The encyclical can be read and downloaded here.
I am not affiliated with the submitter, aristarchus, or the pope. I have a slightly paranoid reason for asking for this update; it is my experience that, whenever politically important documents are published, the actual document often gets overshadowed by an enormous load of blog commentary, providing a bit of "damage control" and "spin". It is my fervent opinion that the readership of Soylentnews deserves to read the actual source documents. (It's only 82 pages long, in this case, anyway).
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Funny) by Alfred on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:13PM
1) advice from the best counselors
2) input from the greatest contemporary thinkers of the day
3) The latest modern research
4) any data that is available at their disposal
5) who knows what else best of the best advantages
and you get scientific assertations like....
Oh wait, that was a different pope. Good thing popes have a superior track record of scientific understanding to settle a scientific debate.
Well this time is different. </sarcasm>
(Score: 2, Interesting) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:52PM
There is no such thing as a vacuum
Which is rather ironically correct. A vacuum as understood in classical physics does not exist under modern physics. QM has vacuum fluctuations [wikipedia.org] even when the average energy is zero.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday June 17 2015, @05:30PM
Great, so professor Casimir [wikipedia.org] isn't going to be post-humously excommunicated.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday June 19 2015, @03:04PM
I assume you're sarcastically implying that the Casimir effect is due to a lack of room for vacuum fluctuations between the plates? That is how I remember the pop-science version of the effect so it could be. Keep in mind that particles are points. The photons could have a big family gathering in the nanometre-scale space where we measure the Casimir effect and still have plenty of room to spare so that one isn't going to fly. We must consider their wave nature for this problem.
The Casimir effect is due to quantisation of the electromagnetic field between the two plates.
The vacuum energy between two perfect (over the whole EM spectrum) mirrors is a divergent sum over all of the different allowed frequency photons. Similarly, there is a divergent sum representing the vacuum energy outside the plates (think of it as being between each mirror and another, distant mirror). The important thing to note here is that the sums cancel out to give 0 energy difference between inside and outside BUT the terms are different, because long wave photons are not permitted in the small space between the mirrors. (That is, it is the wavelengths which don't fit in the space, and only some wavelengths).
However, real mirrors are not perfect. They are transparent to any sufficiently high energy, i.e. short wavelength, high frequency quanta. This means that each space has its vacuum energy reduced relative to the perfect mirror case because of the high-frequency photons which aren't contained in that space. The high-frequency photons make up a larger portion of the small space's vacuum energy in the perfect-mirror case, therefore the energy of the vacuum is now lower in the small space in the real-world case. This energy difference is what powers the attraction between the plates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @05:48PM
"There is no such thing as a vacuum"
Yes, correct actually. There is *no thing* which you can call a vacuum, unless you mean an appliance. Show me a thing which is vacuum! This is exactly the kind of precision you should expect from a theologist or lawyer. We call space without anything in it a vacuum, but since there is nothing there, there is nothing to affix a label to.
Besides, as we all know, the quantum foam means that no, there isn't actually any truly empty volumetric space, anyways.
So whatever your level of pedantry... you picked an example that makes you look stupid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:13PM
but since there is nothing there, there is nothing to affix a label to
Which is what we call a self-defeating argument. Labels adhere to anything, even nothingness.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:30PM
Amusingly, centuries later we have re-defined vacuum to accommodate our new knowledge that "empty" space isn't actually empty after-all.
So the pope was right for the wrong reasons and the scientists were wrong for the right reasons. :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2015, @03:02PM
Of course there's no such thing as a vacuum. You can approximate a vacuum, but you cannot ever reach it.
Note that a true vacuum would be of temperature zero (because at every non-zero temperature, space is filled with photon gas), and thermodynamics tells us that temperature zero cannot be reached.
And please show me an extended space with no matter inside. With very little matter, you'll find a lot. But without any matter? Not so much.