{"id":911,"date":"2015-06-20T20:05:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-21T00:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jparnell.com\/blog\/?p=911"},"modified":"2015-06-20T20:05:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-21T00:05:27","slug":"the-pope-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/?p=911","title":{"rendered":"The Pope & Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pope Francis released an encyclical on climate change a few days ago, among other things condemning business for its \u201cobsession with maximizing profits\u201d and consumers for buying things they don\u2019t need. I\u2019m not a Catholic, but I appreciate the church\u2019s leadership on a number of issues. On this one, the Pope\u2019s dead wrong.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most disturbing about the Pope\u2019s commentary is that he creates a false moral argument against free enterprise cloaked in a nefarious mix of sound reasoning and misinformation. At a basic moral and theological level, the Pope is correct. Protestants (like me) and Catholics generally agree that God created man as a superior being with authority to oversee the earth, but that man has a responsibility to care for it appropriately. Reasonable arguments decrying the immorality of pollution in general stem from this logic. However, his definition of pollution has broadened to include most production and consumption activity because of their alleged connection with climate change. In other words, his moral argument for saving the planet is based on his acceptance of flawed or incomplete scientific arguments about man\u2019s ability to influence the climate. The linchpin to the entire argument is an acceptance of the climate change science.<\/p>\n

Having spent last week in China, far left CNN-International was one of my few available news sources. CNNI-I was thrilled to acknowledge the Pope\u2019s support and immediately trotted on Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate<\/em>. The title of the book and a quick perusal of her site (www.naomiklein.org<\/a>) illustrate the battle lines. This is an attack on free enterprise, plain and simple.<\/p>\n

Faced with data suggesting that the planet probably isn\u2019t warming now, Klein and others of her ilk have replaced \u201cglobal warming\u201d with the all-encompassing \u201cclimate change.\u201d The also skillfully drop terms like anthropogenic or man-caused from their rants, claiming that their opponents deny climate change. Of course, the earth has warmed and cooled since the beginning of time. The debate is not about the existence of climate change, but whether man\u2019s activity is contributing to some degree of catastrophic change.<\/p>\n

In her CCN-I interview, Klein stated that, \u201cthe Republican party has been denying climate change.\u201d This not only reinforces my earlier point about the slick removal of \u201cman-made\u201d from the discussion of climate, but is also factually incorrect. Most Republicans have been afraid of the climate mafia and being touted as Neanderthals for \u201crejecting science.\u201d Her real beef with the Republicans is that they\u2019ve been too slow as a group to redistribute wealth and dismantle liberty to address the doomsdayers.<\/p>\n

Klein, like others, made no mention of the actual scientific argument for anthropogenic climate change. However, she did say that she\u2019s attended many UN conference where a lot of \u201ctechnical data\u201d was presented and third world representatives were in tears because of climate degradation in their home nations. Put another way, Klein doesn\u2019t want you asking the difficult questions about climate change; it\u2019s better to leave it to the government-funded experts, proceed with the marching orders, and focus on the emotional and human side of disasters allegedly connected to human activity in the West.<\/p>\n

CNN-I parroted this logic as well, presenting stories of a flash flood in Shanghai and a drought in parts of Brazil and following them with a superficial disclaimer that, \u201cwhile no one is certain that human activity caused these calamities, it\u2019s hard to deny the evidence and we need to take action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amidst all of the climate hand wringing, Pope Francis and media like CNN-I are skipping the most salient questions. What exactly is the \u201csettled science\u201d that supports the man-made climate change argument? Why are they willing to put so much faith in a government-supported scientific community on such a critical issue? Why should we believe this community\u2019s assessment of climate change now when many of the same people were touting the destruction of \u201cglobal cooling\u201d a few decades ago and of \u201cglobal warming\u201d only a few years ago? If human activity is contributing in some meaningful way to a negative near or intermediate term shift in climate, why should be believe that world government activity is capable of developing and executing a solution? Why do many of the biggest proponents of anthropogenic climate change continue to fly around the world to attend conferences and consume far more than their share of products linked to fossil fuels?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to shift the debate in the direction of reason. Unfortunately, Pope Francis just added fuel to the existing fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pope Francis released an encyclical on climate change a few days ago, among other things condemning business for its \u201cobsession with maximizing profits\u201d and consumers for buying things they don\u2019t need. I\u2019m not a Catholic, but I appreciate the church\u2019s leadership on a number of issues. On this one, the Pope\u2019s dead wrong. What\u2019s most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}