In June 2015, Pope Francis put it this way:
“Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity.”
This excerpt from his Climate Change document released Friday, June 19 was variously described as “a stinging indictment of big business and climate doubters”, and “…Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment has been called everything from an “anticapitalist revolution†to an “explosive intervention†that is set to permanently transform the debate around climate change.”
From whatever position one starts from, there are certain ground rules
that must be observed by all who wish to debate this position.
If you drive at 48 km/hr (30 mph), the energy is only 1/4th that of your car traveling at twice that speed, 96 km/hr (60 mph). It is not just 1/2 the energy because you are driving at 1/2 of the speed and you “think” or assume that it should be one half. If you will agree that in many instances radioactive isotopes can kill a cancerous tumor, then the reason the patient survives this radiation is in part because the half life of the radiation predicts the amount of radiation that is left after periods called the “half life”. But the same prediction is also applied to fossilized wood from Mt Ararat (allegedly Noah’s Ark), or to the Robe of Turin (said to have come from Jesus), and also to rocks which – using the same half life rules – are dated to be millions of years old, predating the first dinosaurs some 300 million years ago.
You cannot have truth both ways. You are not allowed to invent your own truth. You cannot deny the Holocaust, the Moon Landing, Dinosaurs, Five major extinctions of life on Earth since its formation 4.5 billion years ago, or the Pre- epoch event known as the “Big Bang” some 13.7 billion years ago that gave rise to 100 billion galaxies in the “visible” universe. Not if you are to believe, at the same time, in paved roads (physics of binding energies, coefficients of restitution, etc.), air travel (principles of energy conservation leading to higher pressure below the wing than above it giving rise to Lift over Drag ratios greater than 1), insulated coffee cups ( well-defined heat transfer physics) or the drugs you take to get to sleep. It is called evidence. The evidence is there.
False arguments are continually made that Earth moves through cycles and that global heating-so obvious from the video shown on this website’s home page-is merely Earth going through a “warming period”.
This is of course false to fact for those who understand even basic science: all of the normal warming events in Earth’s past history have been subtracted out. The data is corrected by thousands of climate scientists and many stochastic computer models. There remains a large residue: Earth has not seen this before. The residue is us, we humans. It is our CO2, that is driving Rising Tides, growing SST (sea surface temperatures), reduction of the biomass of the planet through rapacious desire for palm oil and lumber. The despoiling of the Earth is us. There is no value judgment placed on this conclusion. It is an empirical fact. And there are not two sets of facts in the sense that the Earth is both flat and round at the same time. Or that we both did and did not land on the moon.
If my job depended on producing growing bottom lines to my shareholders then I’d be in a moral dilemma. How will I deny the truth yet make lies plausible? Plausible deniability. The vast majority of others continue to dig themselves a hole thinking they are solving the problem while the hole simply gets deeper. But they do not know how to stop digging.
What do you think of the Pope’s encyclical? Is it time to push the conversation back to science where it belongs and out of the hands of politicians? Does Earth and its air, land and water belong to all of us? Actions speak louder than words. And for many, their actions say “No”. The Animal Farm trope is: “All of us on Earth are equal. But some are more equal than others”. The usual canards remain the squeaky wheels. And these are the wheels that get traction on evening news. Is it past time for us to teach a little science, maybe a lot of science, to set the records straight? And to be ever vigilant at those who are always willing to be sorry rather than safe, instead of the other way around.
RB