We warned the Ecumenical Patriarch that endorsing the global warming agenda was reckless. Anyone with eyes to see clearly saw that global warming (since renamed “climate change” — a harbinger that the effort might freeze over) was a political, not scientific, enterprise designed to wrestle control of economies away from nation-states and hand it over to non-elected bureaucracies.
Now more evidence about the massive corruption surrounding global warming has emerged. The American Thinker ran a piece (see: Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg) that alleges fraud from more research institutions that told us that global warming was a real threat including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It will take time for the reports to filter into the mainstream, but once they do, you can bet this house will come crashing down like ice breaking from a glacier.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese press office remain uncharacteristically silent about the support the “Green Patriarch” gave global warming activists just a few short months ago. Yet “support” is too mild a term. Pat. Bartholomew in fact threw the full moral weight of his office behind specific policies like the Copenhagen Protocols that were built on the fraudulent science.
It was a huge blunder. It fosters the dry rot that destroys credibility. The eagerness to align the Ecumenical Patriarch with the Progressive wing of American politics reveals that his handlers have a poor understanding of the American political and moral culture. They blew it big time.
Don’t say he wasn’t warned.
These excerpts from the story highlight the extend of the fraud perpetrated by these “scientists”:
You know, this is what bothers me about frauds like climategate. I’m not a lawyer, but fraud is a crime. It’s no different in essence from outright thievery. Think of all those countries that are setting up protocols to restrict normal human activity. They destroy jobs, and most people live off the sweat of their brow. To put additional onerous restrictions on individual working people is atrocious.
Davos is next week! The World Economic Forum is in Davos Switzerland is next week! I wonder if the Green Patriarch will gas up the Gulfstream Omogenia-1 to hang out in Switzerland with the world’s elite as he hawks global warming alarmism. He usually goes to this forum but then again we heard ZERO about the Green Patriarch in Copenhagen so you wonder if Davos is on the agenda at all.
Here is a great article by George Weigel that helps put environmentalism into perspective. It is also a staunch reminder that the entire “Green Patriarch” project promoted by 79th Street and the Phanar has been a complete failure that may have caused permanent damage to the Church.
Papal Environmemntalism: pro-life and pro-marriage
By George Weigel
Published in the Denver Catholic Register http://www.archden.org
In his Jan. 11 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI continued to carve out an interesting Catholic position on ecology. The Pope insists that care for creation is a moral obligation that falls on both individuals and governments. His very invocation of “creation,” however, challenges the secular shibboleths that underwrite a lot of contemporary environmental activism.
Here is the money paragraph in the papal address to the diplomats assembled in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace:
“Twenty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, it was easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water, and air. The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation. It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and comes from God.”
Now, the overlap between orthodox Christians and radical environmentalists may not be what the mathematicians call a “null set;” but I rather doubt that those who qualify on both counts would fill, say, the new Cowboys Stadium. Dubieties on this front harden when, two paragraphs later, the Pope explicitly linked an aroused environmental conscience to the inalienable right-to-life: “…this concern…for the environment should be situated within the larger framework of the great challenges now facing mankind… . [Thus] how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn? It is in man’s respect for himself that his sense of responsibility is shown. As Saint Thomas Aquinas has taught us, man represents all that is most noble in the universe…”
Two paragraphs after that, Benedict tied care for the environment to the defense of marriage rightly understood—another issue that does not, I suspect, loom large on the agenda of Greenpeace:
“…we must remember that the problem of the environment is complex; one might compare it to a multifaceted prism. Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes. I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe, or North and South America…”—that is, countries (or, in our case, states) that have given legal sanction to so-called “same-sex marriage.”
So: according to Benedict XVI, a consistent Catholic environmentalism must include the defense of life from conception until natural death and the defense of marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman. Indeed, I expect the Pope would argue that any environmentalism worthy of the name would take up the cause of life and the cause of marriage, for the truths that undergird the Catholic pro-life position and the Catholic defense of marriage-rightly-understood are moral truths that can be known by reason—they’re not some “sectarian” Catholic theological chicanery, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Vice President of the United States notwithstanding.
It will be interesting to see if the new papal environmentalism coaxes a few brave souls from the ecology camp into common cause with those less politically correct movements in defense of life and marriage. I’m skeptical, not least because of decades of moral confusion during which radical environmentalists have shown far more concern for endangered species of insects than for endangered pre-born children. As for the gay insurgency, it takes no prisoners and is unlikely to see its cause as counter-environmental. Still, the papal challenge has been laid down, and as they say in Rome, “We think in centuries here.”
Try it. It is, if you’ll permit me, the best option.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3215.
And now “Glaciergate.” Will this ever stop?
Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
The unraveling fraud that is anthropogenic global warming should not be a surprise. Almost every effort – whether scientific, philosophical, religious or economic – that is used to serve a political agenda is prone to fraud. When it is not done for its own sake (i.e., with integrity) it is almost fraudulent by definition (think “bait and switch”). In such cases, the arguments are invariably forced to fit the agenda because the agenda itself – not the means (be it scientific, philosophical, etc.) – is “what really matters.” It brings to mind the old saying: When you’re a hammer, everything becomes a nail. (This creates problems when it’s not actually a nail.) While this saying describes what happens to those on the receiving end of the deal, there is another old saying for those who are on the other end – the end with the control: power corrupts.
well put, Chrys.
Frank, you are right. We don’t need to ‘save the world’ in an ideological manner. To attempt to do so is to abandon our faith and God’s calling to us.
We are commanded to dress and keep the earth, be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth. The damage we do to the rest of creation is from our sin, it will be healed as our sin is healed.
To look on the environmnet as a separate living entity as the ideolgists tend to do is wrong. As with us, the blood of Jesus Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit is the life. We are to mediate that life.
http://www.spaceandscience.net/index.html
John L. Casey, June 2008
Director, Space and Science Research Center
This sounds awful dogmatic to me. Dare I say “religious”?
Which sentence/part sounds dogmatic to you?
Let me try to rephrase it.
Let’s change it to:
The sun is the source of heat and energy for the earth. Sunlight is a key factor in photosynthesis, a process vital for life on Earth.
The power output of the sun is estimated to be 4 x 10 ^26 Watts. Out of it only 1600 Watts/m^2 reaches at 93 millions miles (the distance between the Earth and the Sun). This value varies slightly (by no more than 0.1 percent) throughout the year. Due to reflection off the atmosphere, the slant o sun’s rays and day/night succession the average intensity striking the earth is 250 Watts/m^2.
This part can be changed into:
Maybe the last sentence is troubling you. The Sun alone does not have the power, or the Sun is not the one who makes decisions. But a change in sun’s energy of .5%, even less, would be catastrophic for us. Certainly, we do not worship the sun, but it is an amazing, astounding thing … if one takes the time to observe (notice) it for a few minutes a day.
Eliot: the declaratory tone. Also that this verbiage could just as easily be applied to the Creator.
Perhaps I just over-reacted. Forgive me. I got nothing against science and I appreciate simple, declarative sentences that explain facts. (Although I would have to add that your caveat that “…a change in the sun’s energy of 0.5%…” leads many [such as myself] to Intelligent Design theory.)
Please understand, I don’t dispute the facts as presented, it’s just that in my sojourn through Science, the prophetic language is inescapable (and often pontifical and insufferable). Science –true science–is much more circumspect and humble in its pronouncements. Contrast this with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and the extent to which Star Trek and Star Wars have become virtual religions. (In England recently, 290,000 people listed as their religion “Jedi” on the census forms. This made The Force the fourth largest religion in Britain, after Hinduism and ahead of Judaism.
I love to escape into science and look for it to be an oasis of quanta where there is no political agenda. Unfortunately, even in this sphere the ugly medusa of political correctness is making serious headway.
George, I totally agree with you. Indeed, “science –true science–is much more circumspect and humble in its pronouncements”.
“Jedi” religion …??
This is sad example (among many) which shows how the media/film industry defiles the mind, culture, religion, everything …
My guess is that the ugly medusa of political correctness has been plaguing our science for quite a long time. Maybe someday will see/understand everything.
Harvard astrophysicist dismisses AGW theory, challenges peers to ‘take back climate science’
I am all for being a good steward of what God has given us… yes.. but this is getting a little ridiculous!
It seems like the global warming fanatics are pushing more and more for people to be charged “Eco-Crimes” for everything. Examples (being fined for not sorting trash, cutting down trees without a permit, etc…)
Would Jesus be charged with an Eco-Crime because he cursed the fig tree and made it wither?
Frank, that which you complain about is the ideological even neo-pagan component. Hubris and lust of power at at the foundation of it.
St. Issac the Syrian:
The scientistic neo-paganism which informs the modern ‘evironmental’ movment will fail because it denies the Cross and seeks rather the imposition of its own will in place of God’s will–a receipe for disastor.
Do we believe that Christ saved the world and baptized all of creation? If so, why do we (Orthodox Christians) need to save the world through this facade of political ideology?
Just throwing that out there for discussion…
I dont know much about this line of thought, so thats why I am asking.
-FD