How's everyone enjoying their "Global Warming"?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I highly doubt that accusing each other of supporting pedophilia is conducive to any discussion. Besides, this is thread for global warming--let's refocus.

[Rawedge Rim]

Rather odd that someone who identifies as a christian finds humor in the fact that he's financially supporting an organization that's protecting child rapists. Also rather odd that you question what a bunch is.

Tell me RR, how many child rapist priests are you okay with? How does it feel that you tithe is used to move child rapist priests around? Kind of seems that anyone, especially a christian, would have a zero-tolerance policy towards the rape of children.

Sorry man, I tend to agree with your posts more often than not, but there's no way you can square conservative, christian beliefs with the ongoing atrocities being committed by and covered up by the catholic church.

You pay taxes, correct? So that means you support pedophile policemen, firemen, EMT's, teachers, council men, public defenders, prosecutors, doctors, etc., soldiers, sailors marines, and even the air farce.

Got much support for the Boy Scouts? How about state orphanages? Boys club of america, summer camps?


So I would really suggest you reevalutate what you think you know, and look at the problem as what it is; a world wide societal issue that needs to be dealt with. It has been proven time and again that the percentage of priest of sexually abuse children is the same as any other profession, and since even before Pope Francis, the standards have been tightened, and the cases you are hearing about now are from decades ago.

That horse you are riding must be about the size of Paul Bunyans big blue ox, it's so high.

No.

I pay taxes because if I don't, men with guns show up and kill me. You pay your church by choice. You associate with your church by choice. It's not a high horse to say that I choose not to volunteer my money to an organization that protects child rapists, it's the christian thing to do.

Your continued protestations are not a good look. Your argument is literally, "well everyone does it so it's not a big deal."

Wayfriend much?

[Rawedge Rim]

I highly doubt that accusing each other of supporting pedophilia is conducive to any discussion. Besides, this is thread for global warming--let's refocus.

True. Not sure how we got into thread creep there.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

I highly doubt that accusing each other of supporting pedophilia is conducive to any discussion. Besides, this is thread for global warming--let's refocus.

True. Not sure how we got into thread creep there.

The usual suspect cut-and-pasted his propaganda, Hashi mentioned the irrelevance of the pope, I pointed out that the pope's a pedophile's best friend and protector, RR felt the need to defend the pope.

That's how we got there.

Consider it dropped in this thread until another cut-and-pasted piece of propaganda is posted.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+


Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg | Twitter [Video: 1 min]

[Hashi Lebwohl]

*yawn* Boring and irrelevant.

[TheFallen]

Yeah I have a few issues with a naive woke and pretty much entirely unrealistic teenager preaching in holier than thou fashion all over the place and being given the multiple platforms she has been with such hushed reverence, like she's the second coming or something.

Hang on... wouldn't Greta make the ideal Dem nomination for 2020? She's got all the right qualities...

[Gaius Octavius]

And...she's not even AMERICAN. The Dems would love that.

"We must abolish the white race to save the planet from global warming." *Dem excitation intensifies*

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Vatican calls Greta Thunberg 'great witness' of Church's environmental teaching [In-Depth]

Swedish teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg holds up a sign as Pope Francis greets her at the end of his weekly general audience, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 17, 2019. (Credit: Vatican Media via AP)


ROME -- On Thursday top Vatican officials hailed Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, recently named TIME Magazine's "Person of the Year" for her environmental advocacy, as a "great witness" of Church teaching on care for creation and the human person.

Speaking to reporters at the Dec. 12 publication of Pope Francis's message for the 2020 World Day of Peace, celebrated on Jan. 1 each year, Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Vatican office for Integral Human Development, called Thunberg "a great witness to what the Church teaches on the care of the environment and the care of the person."

"What is her objective? Skipping school for a future, a future that can't be guaranteed because there is no care for the environment," he said, adding that in many cases, there is a complete lack of coherence between the international policies on the environment and what children are told.

Asked whether she was a model of the "ecological conversion" Francis calls for in the message, Turkson said that "model" was not the right word, but insisted that her activism brings attention to the Church's insistence that "attention to the poor and society also coincide with care for the environment, the common home."

"It's a coherence with the Church's teaching," he said, adding that care of the environment is also a matter of faith.

Turkson said a separation is often made between attention to the environment and to the faith "that must at times be overcome," and pointed to the Old Testament, which recounts how "fidelity to God's covenant implied care for the weakest members of society and for creation, the environment."

"You cannot find someone who really adores the Lord and transposes care for the environment and for others," he said, adding that Thunberg's "protest and her witness brings attention to the great need to be coherent in our care for the environment and also for the people who live on earth."

[...]

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I challenge her to go to Beijing and shame-talk the Communist Party. She won't, of course, because she is not committed enough to her cause to risk being put in prison. No, she goes only where it is easy and where people won't hold her accountable for her words and actions because of her age. I suspect that she can't handle adversity...but if she wants to play on the international stage she had better get used to it.

[Rawedge Rim]

I challenge her to go to Beijing and shame-talk the Communist Party. She won't, of course, because she is not committed enough to her cause to risk being put in prison. No, she goes only where it is easy and where people won't hold her accountable for her words and actions because of her age. I suspect that she can't handle adversity...but if she wants to play on the international stage she had better get used to it.

come on, she's what? 12 maybe. She has less to do with this than her "handlers" (or whatever they call them).

[TheFallen]

She's 16 actually - but I agree with you, RR. Greta Thunberg is being envisaged and exploited by those managing her as basically a money-making brand - "her" book is already in shop windows here. I wonder who actually wrote it, where the profits are actually being banked and exactly who is benefitting from those profits?

On another note, publishing a book with no doubt a pretty hefty print run isn't particularly green, is it? Why didn't Saint Greta insist on it only being made available in electronic downloadable format? After all, this is a girl who is so green that she apparently herself insisted on travelling to the US by wind-powered yacht... so why acquiesce to the chopping down of a fair few trees?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

After all, this is a girl who is so green that she apparently herself insisted on travelling to the US by wind-powered yacht

You missed the part where they had to fly someone out to the yacht by helicopter, burning "fossil fuel" in the process.

Her age is not an issue for me. Who the fuck does she think she is, shame-talking adults and pretending that she automatically has the moral high ground because of some self-imposed ideological purity? There are 16-year-olds who are actually doing something about the environment or making the world a better place; all this spoiled brat has done is be a meme.

We should celebrate her next birthday by burning 17 tires in diesel fuel.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

I challenge her to go to Beijing and shame-talk the Communist Party. She won't, of course, because she is not committed enough to her cause to risk being put in prison. No, she goes only where it is easy and where people won't hold her accountable for her words and actions because of her age. I suspect that she can't handle adversity...but if she wants to play on the international stage she had better get used to it.

She's a severely handicapped tool. Her abusive parents are doing this, not her.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

She's a severely handicapped tool. Her abusive parents are doing this, not her.

Her parents did not make her say this:

We have to make sure that they cannot do that. We will make sure they, that we put them against the wall, and that they will have to do their job and to protect our futures.

We can give her the benefit of the doubt that English is not her first language, but if she is going to play on the international stage she has to own her words, and those words appear to indicate that if politicians do not comply with climate alarmist demands that action will need to be taken.

She has now decided to take a break from activism. Good idea, actually--hollow activism is hollow. If she wants to make a difference then she should do something instead of talking about it--go back to school--yes, she is still playing hooky because apparently climate alarmists don't need school, get a degree in political science, then run for office when she is old enough. She has not learned that actions speak louder than words.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

She's a severely handicapped tool. Her abusive parents are doing this, not her.

Her parents did not make her say this:

We have to make sure that they cannot do that. We will make sure they, that we put them against the wall, and that they will have to do their job and to protect our futures.

We can give her the benefit of the doubt that English is not her first language, but if she is going to play on the international stage she has to own her words, and those words appear to indicate that if politicians do not comply with climate alarmist demands that action will need to be taken.

She has now decided to take a break from activism. Good idea, actually--hollow activism is hollow. If she wants to make a difference then she should do something instead of talking about it--go back to school--yes, she is still playing hooky because apparently climate alarmists don't need school, get a degree in political science, then run for office when she is old enough. She has not learned that actions speak louder than words.

I saw that.

She's been fed a script and programmed by her parents for years. The fact that she's autistic makes it more heinous and tragic.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Why Greta, not Boris, may be the right way to assess Francis's political impact [In-Depth, Analysis]

Pope Francis salutes at the end of an audience with representatives of the popular movements at the Vatican Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016. (Credit: L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP)


[...]

First for the apparently unrelated events: Boris Johnson and Greta Thunberg.

[...]

Speaking to reporters at the Dec. 12 publication of Francis's message for the 2020 World Day of Peace, celebrated on Jan. 1 each year, Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Vatican office for Integral Human Development, called Thunberg "a great witness to what the Church teaches on the care of the environment and the care of the person."

[...]

Thunberg, of course, isn't a politician, and her Fridays for Future movement has no power to set policy anyplace. Yet she's become the global face of young people demanding action on climate change, inspiring countless thousands to follower her lead all over the world.

An essentially secular Swede, Thunberg premises her activism on science, not religion, and although there's no reason to believe she got involved in the fight to curb climate change because of Francis, she's obviously fond of the pontiff; when the two met last April, Thunberg told the pope, "Thank you for standing up for the climate and speaking the truth. It means a lot."

For secularists long accustomed to thinking of religion as an obstacle to progress, it must indeed be a bit bewildering, but also encouraging, to know that the world's most visible religious leader has their backs.

During the long St. John Paul II era, Vatican-watchers learned to gauge the pope's political impact through an essentially vertical lens. John Paul shaped national and international affairs in the here-and-now, playing a key role in the collapse of Communism, shaming several Latin American police states into transitioning to democracy (as a veteran cardinal once put it, the only Latin American dictator to survive a meeting with the pope was Fidel Castro), and voicing the moral opposition to the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

In truth, John Paul's impact was always as much horizontal as vertical, because his role in bringing down the Berlin Wall began with supporting an essentially bottom-up civil protest movement in Poland called Solidarity. Because it succeeded so relatively quickly, however, we tended to leap from the method to the result.

Francis's own background as a Peronist populist in Argentina means he's arguably even more sensitive to the dangers of politics being hijacked by elites (of whatever ideology) serving their own interests, and thus the importance of a strong and engaged civil society.

One way you see that instinct in Francis is that, under previous popes, their most important political address every year was to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican, representing the vertical system. With Francis, however, it's instead his message to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, an initiative launched under his inspiration.

Last August, the Vatican published a book called The Emergence of Popular Movements: Rerum Novarum of Our Time, a reference to the 1891 social encyclical of Pope Leo XIII that launched modern Catholic social teaching. Clearly, the idea was to lift up popular movements as the most important embodiment of the Church's social agenda in our time, with Francis calling them "a lever for profound social transformation" in his preface.

If the right way to assess someone's success or failure is to measure them against their own objectives, therefore, perhaps it's not the Tory victory but the global acclaim for a 16-year-old non-Catholic teen which, ironically, provides the best data point for Francis from the past week.

[Gaius Octavius]

So delusional. Also to correct a mistake in that article, the UK is indeed a Catholic country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism


And here's why I call it delusional. You can't take Brexit in isolation. Rather, it's part of an international trend whereby woke progressive politics are being wholesale-rejected by the masses. The pope's political ideas are unpopular, even if a vocal minority sings his praises constantly in your echo chamber.

[Zarathustra]

We've just had the best decade in human history. Seriously

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world's population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I've been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I've been faced with 'what about_' questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that 'the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking' and 'we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet'. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we'd learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: 'Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist', ask him this: 'But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?' For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminum, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.

As for Britain, our consumption of 'stuff' probably peaked around the turn of the century - an achievement that has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less 'stuff' every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That's a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

If this doesn't seem to make sense, then think about your own home. Cell phones have the computing power of room-sized computers of the 1970s. I use mine instead of a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar, watch, CD player, newspaper and pack of cards. LED light bulbs consume about a quarter as much electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light. Modern buildings generally contain less steel and more of it is recycled. Offices are not yet paperless, but they use much less paper.

Even in cases when the use of stuff is not falling, it is rising more slowly than expected. For instance, experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted. Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.

Until recently, most economists assumed that these improvements were almost always in vain, because of rebound effects: if you cut the cost of something, people would just use more of it. Make lights less energy-hungry and people leave them on for longer. This is known as the Jevons paradox, after the 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons, who first described it. But Andrew McAfee argues that the Jevons paradox doesn't hold up. Suppose you switch from incandescent to LED bulbs in your house and save about three-quarters of your electricity bill for lighting. You might leave more lights on for longer, but surely not four times as long.

Efficiencies in agriculture mean the world is now approaching 'peak farmland' - despite the growing number of people and their demand for more and better food, the productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 percent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it's estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow.

Land-sparing is the reason that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries. In 2006 Ausubel worked out that no reasonably wealthy country had a falling stock of forest, in terms of both tree density and acreage. Large animals are returning in abundance in rich countries; populations of wolves, deer, beavers, lynx, seals, sea eagles and bald eagles are all increasing; and now even tiger numbers are slowly climbing.

Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK's economy has almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 percent, total primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 percent. Much of that decline has happened in recent years. This is not necessarily good news, Constable argues: although the improving energy efficiency of light bulbs, airplanes and cars is part of the story, it also means we are importing more embedded energy in products, having driven much of our steel, aluminum and chemical industries abroad with some of the highest energy prices for industry in the world.

In fact, all this energy-saving might cause problems. Innovation requires experiments (most of which fail). Experiments require energy. So cheap energy is crucial - as shown by the industrial revolution. Thus, energy may be the one resource that a prospering population should be using more of. Fortunately, it is now possible that nuclear fusion will one day deliver energy in minimalist form, using very little fuel and land.

Since its inception, the environmental movement has been obsessed by finite resources. The two books that kicked off the green industry in the early 1970s, The Limits to Growth in America and Blueprint for Survival in Britain, both lamented the imminent exhaustion of metals, minerals and fuels. The Limits to Growth predicted that if growth continued, the world would run out of gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, copper and lead well before 2000. School textbooks soon echoed these claims.

This caused the economist Julian Simon to challenge the ecologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet that a basket of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would cost less in 1990 than in 1980. The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, Simon said, arguing that we would find substitutes if metals grew scarce. Simon won the bet easily, although Ehrlich wrote the check with reluctance, sniping that 'the one thing we'll never run out of is imbeciles'. To this day none of those metals has significantly risen in price or fallen in volume of reserves, let alone run out. (One of my treasured possessions is the Julian Simon award I won in 2012, made from the five metals.)

A modern irony is that many green policies advocated now would actually reverse the trend towards using less stuff. A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers - and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a path to a cleaner, greener planet. We don't need to veer off in a new direction. If we do, we risk retarding progress.

As we enter the third decade of this century, I'll make a prediction: by the end of it, we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world. There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. Britons will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources. The global political future may be uncertain, but the environmental and technological trends are pretty clear - and pointing in the right direction.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The 2010s were going great until January last year, when I got stabbed in the back and fucked over.