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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: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:36PM
I view it as an inevitable artifact of taking a long, complex, rambling, self-contradictory, mistranslated, incomplete, politically-edited, cryptic common-language
bookcollection of plagiarised, half-remembered fantastical folk tales as your most fundamental truth.FTFY.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:49PM
Well, I mean, even if you took something relatively sensible and accurate, like say, a well researched sociology textbook, and declared it your universal truth, you'd suffer from the same problems of contradictions, selective reading, and things that you got wrong.
Specifically disparaging the bible is always fun(I'm still a smug atheist), but the point I was trying to make is that a book can't be a universal font of truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:57PM
Do you not trust the dating of the dead sea scrolls? If you do, how do you explain how consistent they are with the bible? That is at least evidence that these stories can be transmitted with little corruption for thousands of years.
Personally I suspect carbon dating may not be so reliable. It was calibrated to tree rings and egyptology, much of which was calibrated to the bible (check out Joseph Scaliger). Tree rings are also calibrated to pre-existing "accepted" chronology. It is an interesting subject. For example, if knowledge of this century is lost sometime in the future they will carbon date it to far later than it was due to nuclear testing. There are other phenomenon that could cause similar effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Physical_characteristics [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:40PM
>> half-remembered fantastical folk tales
> Do you not trust the dating of the dead sea scrolls?
Once the folk tales were written down, they remained pretty static (apart from the political changes and dodgy translations, obviously). It's the fact that these stories were passed around exclusively by word of mouth for hundreds or thousands of years before ever being written down that made me write "half-remembered". That said I guess in the long run it doesn't make much difference whether it was an "original" folk tale or a "half-remembered" one that eventually mutated into some biblical story and got written down. You can forget I wrote that bit if you like.
> Tree rings are also calibrated to pre-existing "accepted" chronology.
I'm not sure this is true. I'm not an expert but as I understand it, you cut down a hundred year old tree today, and measure the rings back to 1915. You then examine a piece of wood used in a building suspected to have been constructed somewhen in WWII. Because you know what the rings 1915-1945 look like, you can match the rings from that period and confirm that the wood was alive in that period, and see exactly when that tree was felled, let's say 1938. If that tree was a hundred years old at felling as well, so now you can see what the rings 1838-1938 look like, and in this way you can go back in time indefinitely, as long as you have a supply of old bits of wood that fit into your jigsaw. Obviously all this is re-confirmed every time a new piece of wood is found to fit with the record, and there are countless thousands of bits of wood in the record. No Egyptology or bibles required.
According to wiki, dendrochronology has a "fully anchored" chronology of the northern hemisphere going back 13900 years - that's well beyond the old testament.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @06:45PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dendrochronology [wikipedia.org]
The paper cited doesn't offer evidence of that. Following that reference eventually got me to this:
http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal13%20files/intcal13.pdf [radiocarbon.org]
So it appears they have something, but we need to see how many trees are available for each year, how questionable the overlap is, etc. I don't know where to find this data.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 17 2015, @06:57PM
That is at least evidence that these stories can be transmitted with little corruption for thousands of years.
Similarly, it's easy to show that one can wildly change a story with a single rewriting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:07PM
I've a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it has an interesting note on how some of the scrolls show differing versions of the tales in the bible. So yeah, no so much on the consistency.