'Urgency' theme of global Catholic climate delegation

Obama is willing - but the country will not accept significant changes. At least not until Miami is under water.

Lifestyles must change, eh? Based on what objective evidence? Oh, I forgot, there is no absolute objective evidence to support the myth of man-made global climate change. Just another myth we are supposed to take at face value and on faith.

It seems that Clint Green is a 21st century Thomas...until global warming is so obvious that there can be no doubter, then he will believe. It's a pretty narrow view for one claiming Christian values not to at least accept the concern of persons knowledgable of the scientific principles involved in ascertaining a probable catastrophic situation in God's world to take such a head in the sand approach.

There is no doubt our lifestyles must change. For the poor, for the working middle class, and for the middle class our lifestyles have changed. The mindset of the rich and American corporation must change substantially. These two groups are destroying our climate with their callous disregard for our envrionment.

hi clint ... i'm saddened by your sense that there is myth involved. i've studied climate change carefully and there is evidence, not myth, that supports our need to pay attention to the changing climate. the evidence comes in the form of key changes in measurable numbers in dozens of arenas.

and even if it weren't true that the climate is changing even much faster than previously thought, there are at least a couple of good reasons for us to start making changes. the first is that we all will have a healthier quality of life. The second is economics. If the U.S. will be in the forefront of new technologies related to improving the climate, we will again become the economic leader and powerhouse of the world. We will surpass china and india' economic trajectory. so, if for no other reason than simple profit, leading the band wagon instead of coming late to the parade will be in our country's best interest.

finally, what happens if i and thousands of other scientists are wrong and we still go ahead with initiatives to improve the climate on all fronts? There's only a win-win and that's that our grandchildren will be living in a healthy world AND they'll be living in an economically strong and vibrant society.

what happens if we're right and we do something about it? Same as above.

what happens if we're right and we don't do enough about it as soon as is needed? there will be global changes that will lead to violence, war, increased poverty, further u.s. economic tragedies and the loss of opportunity with its accompanying sense of no hope which feeds the first 3 items in this sentence ... and ... there will be catastrophe of major proportion in various parts of the globe environmentally and thus societally. Such catastrophe is neither sound science nor wise economic policy.

There's only a win-win if we engage fully and as a leader in the needed policies and technologies. Anything less than thorough systemic change, including eventual life-style changes, will most likely be the cause of our country's fading glory. Furthermore, continuing on our current slow, non-systemic path will most likely lead to climate change results we would never want for ourselves nor for our children and their children.

thanks, JL.

I bought a 2009 Prius. I now get 60+ MPG. I do believe that we all must do something to move us in the right direction. Are Bishops, priests and religious turning in and changing their vehicles? I haven't heard any sermons on this in Church...

I forget. Is it global warming or global cooling we are supposed to be hysterical about this week?

In March of this year I purchased a 2009 Toyota Prius. I now get 60+ mpg and produce as little as I can in the way of emissions. It cost me $26,000 but did include a payment so that for 7 years I pay no labor or parts. I try very hard to continue to coordinate my trips so that as much as possible gets accomplished in a single venture. I was too early for the Cash for Clunkers deal but my 95 Taurus would not have qualified anyway. I was motivated by the fact that my car had in a practical way died and the need to do something for the environment.

I am pleased beyond words that the Catholic Bishops of the world are taking a stand, that they are looking for numbers.

I too am looking for numbers. How many of the Bishops/priests/religious congregations just here in the USA have of their own volition overhauled their fleets/vehicles to go green? Can we count, please? Let's see the numbers. Exactly how urgent is it to them in number/dollar terms? Anyone bought a bicycle?

Clint,

there's plenty of objective evidence that the climate is changing: polar temps, raifall patterns, the changes in the ranges of various plants and animals. this happens to coincide with the humans of this planet dumping a lot of CO2, etc into the air (let's ignore for now how we're fouling both our fresh and ocean water). We don't know for sure that humans are the direct and sole cause. We do know we're not helping matters any.

so lets look at the alternatives.

If the climate scientists are wrong - we only marginally improve the climatic changes, spend a lot of money and inadvertantly, probably live a bit healthier lives on the average.

If we do things your way and you're wrong - we lose Manhatten, Miami, most of Houston, ..........

but what the heck - we wouldn't want to inconvenience anyone.

I would say the evidence is rising sea levels and melting glaciers. Just because it isn't evident here in the U.S. doesn't mean that it isn't happening. We, in the U.S., use more natural resources per capita than the majority of the world. It's time for us to be more responsible citizens of planet earth.

NOAA has information about climate change at their site. Another site is globalwarming101.com. I saw a presentation at a local college by Will Steger, the founder of this site. He shared his experiences on several expeditions to the arctic, Anarctica, and Greenland.

Pope Benedict XVI and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops acknowledge that the impact of climate change falls heaviest on the poor. As Catholics, our faith demands prudent action. With full support and cooperation of the USCCB, the Catholic Climate Covenant is designed to help Catholics take action to reduce our carbon footprint, care for "the least of these" (Mt 25) and raise our voice on behalf of Creation and the poor. Visit our website, http://catholicclimatecovenant.org, and take the St. Francis Pledge to Care for Creation and the Poor! You can also become a fan of our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Catholic- ... t/28024216 0380?ref=nf, follow us on Twitter (CatholicClimate), or friend us on MySpace (Catholic Climate Covenant).

Most of the correspondents do not seem to understand that they are equating the cause of increasing global temperature (which cycles up and down over the centuries, and has not yet reached the level a thousand years ago when Greenland was named because some of it was green) with increasing atmospheric CO2 levels. Absorption of infrared in the three bands of CO2 is almost complete within 100 metres from the ground. Much of this vibrational excitation is transferred to heat by collision with oxygen and nitrogen, and any re-emitted infrared goes out in all directions, not just towards outer space. Our CO2 blanket around the earth is already functioning almost maximally.
Our politicians are non-scientists - mostly lawyers - who are like Al Gore and don't understand what they are talking about with the CO2 greenhouse effect. We should be looking at ways to minimize the adverse effects of global warming if it continues (and it seems to have not progressed in the last few years), not impoverishing ourselves by making our currently-cheapest form of energy from carbon more expensive.

Thank God for people like Clint Green and the anonymous poster who refused to accept the MSM's and Algore's nonsense like the majority of lemmings at this site. People....you obviously have a computer so do a search for the myth of man-made global warming! You might actually learn something...to give you a head start, here's the first few sentences...

"1. There is no proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activity. Ice core records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases have preceded—not resulted from—increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapour is far, far more important than CO2."

Boy everybody is sure beatin' up on poor Clint. Ease up. Well I know this for a fact. The bishops want numbers in this particular hot button topic but they want to ignore them when it comes to child sexual abuse. How about a little consistancy in your thinkin', dear bishops? Ever heard of logic?....Just sayin'.

I want an 80% drop in emissions in China and Russia and all of Eastern Europe. Think that will happen bishops?

The political hoax of man made global warming is now supported by the Vatican hierarchy. Why? I would have thought they learned a lesson when it became apparent that Gallelio was correct. The Earth still revolves around the Sun, the Earth isnt flat and man cannot control the climate. Those of you who accept this hoax have my simpathy, just as I have sympathy for children who are afraid of the dark.

Anthropogenic climate change is a myth. Claims that the world will be inundated with rising sea levels are pure hysteria. Scientists who used to fearmonger about global warming are now acknowledging the evidence that the globe has been cooling for a decade. The changes in energy consumption and production that the green totalitarians want to foist upon America and the rest of the world will hamper economic progress and keep many poor Africans and Asians living in squalor. The greens do not care about humanity; they consider humans to be the problem. They'll continue their lives of consumption while purchasing carbon offsets -- the green indulgence -- to soothe their consciences. My diocese is planning to encourage parishioners to take the St. Francis Pledge in October. Global Warming hysterics are going to look like fools in thirty years.

Engineers and scientists have long seen their disciplines usurped for political gain. Thirty years ago professional publications warned us not to be duped by non-scientists ringing our death toll. Perhaps we should have all of the population of the temperate zones move to the southern zones. Then we could avoid snow, cold and heating costs and also vast fields of grain which already feed much of the world. This natural unbalance has been caused more by colonization and creation of cities in warmer climates. We need to stop exploiting our earth and our population by stopping the spread of useless material possesions,that the whole world does not need.
I notice that the above global warming advocates have not abandoned their computers and obviously some have enough credit or wealth to buy Prius cars. What are you willing to give up? Really give up.

And more than climate issues caused the problems in southern countries. The inequality and suffering of the poor have been there for centuries , supported by a Church that never said no to the conquerers. That is their legacy and it has nothing to do with Mother Nature.

Our priest said something about climate change at mass this morning. The bishop must have said something lately. First time I heard this mentioned in our church. Lay off Clint, talk to your bishop.

I think it is great to put pressure on our polictical leaders to act now boldly and courageously in response to the global ecological crisis that we are waking up to; and, i think we have to look in the mirror.

What is the strategy that the bishops are implementing WITHIN the ranks of the Catholic church to own their own and to call the rest of us to our shared complicity and responsibility in the ecological crisis we are in?

The voices for the change that is necessary have been speaking for a long time, Thomas Berry, Ilia Delio, Paula Gonazalez, to name a few. We need to be the change we are hoping for in the world.

Let's lead by example.

I hear very little concern about this matter from my local catholic parish.

It is certainly a stretch for the Church to be getting involved in global warming! This is a scientific question in the first place. And any remedies if such are possible are dependent on the scientific question. Maybe the warming which is being observed at the polar ice caps is a natural event. The earth once had an ice age and slowly but surely the ice melted away. Maybe that process will continue until it is all gone. If it is a natural process, there is nothing that humans can do to stop it. So stop worrying about it & be happy!

When has climate NOT changed? Climate related hardships on humans, especially to the poor among us, such as from floods or droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, etc., have been occurring on this planet since God made it and the climate will continue change whether we are here or not. The hardships brought by climate change is a separate issue onto itself and totally separate from the yet unproven THEORY that a little extra CO2, (plant fertilizer), from human activity, (less than 5%), is a major cause of global warming. It is a FACT that millions upon millions of innocent people have died from climate change in the distant past. It is also a FACT that the bulk of those deaths occurred long before humans were exploiting so-called 'fossil' fuels that add some extra CO2 to the air and also at a time when there were not nearly as many people living at one time on the planet and at a time when there was therefore also far less exploitation of the planet's resources.

The number of people alive right NOW on this planet would not be possible if not for the energy and other technologies that we invented. Go ahead and think about it. Take away coal, crude oil, steel, electric power, etc. and we're suddenly an agrarian society again. The huge number of people alive today simple could not all survive if not for our ingenuity at inventing and exploiting those things. Not only would you be chopping fire wood and plowing your field behind a horse, half your children would die of small pox or polio or plague or some other disease we conquered via technology. Not only would you have dry or salt fresh killed meat to preserve it because you had no refrigeration, you would be stifled from the heat of summer and suffer frost bite in the middle of the winter no matter how much wood you threw on the fire. No plastics, no drugs, no telephones, no mass produced anything; your life would be absolute MISERY compared to the comforts you enjoy right now. However, one thing that you might at first think is good, is that you would have a far less chance of dying of cancer. But that's because your chances of surviving all of the other diseases in order to live long enough to get cancer - would be really really slim.

So a theory comes along that says that the extra CO2 we add to the air is going to cause or has caused 'global warming'; AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Have you read or seen one single thing that PROVES the theory? Polar bears are NOT endangered but even if they were - that wouldn't prove CO2 causes global warming. Sea level rise has been going on for at least the last 8000 years and is actually slowing down right now per 'Topex' and 'Jason' buoy data (Univ. Colorado) but even if it was accelerating - it wouldn't prove CO2 causes global warming. The ice on top of Mount Kilimanjaro is not disappearing because of it miraculously being above freezing at 17 thousand feet, it's evaporating faster than the snow fall because most of the rain forest around it was cut down by ignorant people but even if it was melting - it wouldn't prove CO2 causes global warming. Total cyclone energy (what drives hurricanes) has been decreasing over the last twenty years but even if that was increasing - it wouldn't prove CO2 causes global warming.

AGW actually remains unproven and the only place it occurs is in computer climate models written by people being paid by the government to 'study the problem'. To date there is still not one piece of empirical scientific evidence that all of the air's CO2, let alone the puny extra amount that humans add to it, has any measurable affect on our climate....not one, (if you think there is, tell me?). The single scientific chance that they ever had to provide a sliver of proof of AGW was their prediction of there being a 'hot spot' at altitude over the tropics because only greenhouse gas accumulation would be able to explain it. Yes, it really would have gotten my attention IF that hot spot had existed - but to their chagrin, it does not! Despite almost 30 billion tax dollars spent by the US government alone on research to find a link between CO2 and global warming - NONE HAS BEEN FOUND.

So if you really think that stopping the use of fossil fuels is going to make life better on this planet you are an idiot because way more people will die in an agrarian society whether AGW is ever proven or not. If you believe that AGW is true and that the fantastic predictions made by Al Gore in 2000 still have a chance of happening I hate to disappoint you - since the time Al Gore made those predictions there is exactly zero evidence of any of them happening despite what you might read in the NYT. Worse still is that the UN made the SAME predictions back in 1989 saying we only had ten years to DO something to stop global warming.

So it's been 20 years since they tried to use climate to scare us into submitting to their quest for a global governance, (hatched by the Club of Rome and endorsed by atheist lunatics like Maurice Strong who wants to find a way to kill off the third world). I never believed them even for a minute nor should you. The whole thing is a dangerous hoax, it was always a hoax and has zero scientific merit. Al Gore is a LIAR. Lie number one is that there are no '2500 scientists', just try to get a list of 2500 names and their degrees; they do not exist! Consensus? What consensus? You will be hard pressed to find more than handful of respected atmospheric physicists or paleo-geologists or meteorologists, etc. who have the slightest belief in this nonsense ...and who are NOT sucking on government funds.

And now I get to mention two of the very TOP people paid by government to research man-made global warming, Michael Mann and Phil Jones. They now admit that they intentionally destroyed the original raw temperature data and that we must simply trust their 'adjusted' data at the Climate Research Unit, (East Anglia), with now not ANY means for us to verify that they didn't just invent and manipulate their 'adjusted' temperature data from whole cloth. Should I or anyone trust the data from someone who publicly says earth continues to get warmer but privately said in an email that they need a way to 'hide the decline'? Climategate - the hoax is now exposed, laid bare on the table for everyone to see. Thank God it's over.