Does the climate alarmist Vatican know about Cardinal George Pell?
The Vatican wants to fight climate change, but Cardinal Pell writes in The Australian:
… I first became interested in the question in the 1990s when studying the anti-human claims of the “deep greens”. Mine is not an appeal to the authority of any religious truth in the face of contrary scientific evidence. Neither is it even remotely tinged by a postmodernist hostility to rationality.
My appeal is to reason and evidence, and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues…
The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.
I fear, too, that many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence…
My suspicions have been deepened through the years by the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views. Those secure in their explanations do not need to be abusive.
The term “climate change denier”, however expedient as an insult or propaganda weapon, with its deliberate overtones of comparison with Holocaust denial, is not a useful description of any significant participant in the discussion. I was not surprised to learn that the IPCC used some of the world’s best advertising agencies to generate maximum effect among the public…
“Prudent alarmism” – now THERE’s a concept!
It is indeed refreshing. Cardinal Pell is well spoken and well informed. I would really love to hear him speak in person! Maybe next time I get to Sydney….
It is good for non-scientists to hear that with some application, we can learn enough to understand the underpinnings of the climate debate. It is good to read a succinct, confident statement of the fact that there is no credible evidence that current worldwide climate has been configured primarily by human-caused emissions of CO2.
What I miss here, and what is largely missing in the incipient political debate in the US, is what I find in spades here at Junk Science and also at What’s Up With That. That is the wealth of credible evidence, along with well developed theoretical constraints, that CO2 does not seem to act as the principal driver of temperature rise, and that water vapor probably is involved in a negative feedback relation with CO2 and other drivers. Companion to this evidence is a body of theory and empirical evidence that there are numerous other drivers, such as solar activity, various oceanic cycles, earth-orbital cycles, water vapor, and so on.
I believe that the good Cardinal’s essay was exactly the right length and quite well structured, and that throwing in everything we’ve come to know on the subject would be overkill and overwhelming to many readers, so I guess I am just frustrated that the phenomenon (climate) is so complex that a mere “No, it isn’t CO2” just doesn’t satisfy.
Perhaps I can hope that Cardinal Pell will follow up with more essays on the evidence we now have, now that he has so brilliantly explained what the evidence does not show. And I hope that rational, centrist leaders in the US will follow his example.
I hope one of our presidential candidates invites him to speak in America on his way back from England.
Isn’t it nice to have a breath of fresh air!