PopeWatch: Green Encyclical Likely to be Worse Than Anticipated

Judging from one of the three designated presenters at the rollout of the Green Encyclical on June 18, the Encyclical appears likely to be worse than critics feared. Rorate Caeli gives us the details:

The Vatican has just revealed in today’s Bollettino the line-up of speakers for the official presentation of the “Environment Encyclical”, Laudato Si, on June 18 at the New Synod Hall.

– Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace;

– His Eminence Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church;

– Prof. John Schellnhuber, Founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Metropolitan John, 84 years old, is the Patriarchate of Constantinople’s leading figure in ecumenical discussions and has long been close to the Catholic ecumenical establishment. However this is the first time that an Orthodox metropolitan would be officially co-presenting a papal Encyclical. There are reports that the Encyclical will draw upon the teaching of Patriarch Bartholomew (whose interest in environmental issues is well known) and that there was even a proposal — which proved to be “not possible” — that the Encyclical be jointly promulgated by both the Pope and the Patriarch. Perhaps of far greater interest to most of our readership would be the presence of Prof. Schellnhuber on the panel. The father of the “two-degree target” to stave off global warming, he is the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (which is funded by the German government), Chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was one of the experts (alongside Jeffrey Sachs) tapped by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences to write their joint statement on climate change published in April of this year, titled “Climate change and the common good: a statement of the problem and the demand for transformative solutions”. A description of the final document’s call for a “zero-carbon world” can be found here; the final published version seems to have been removed from the official website Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but to our knowledge has never been retracted.

In the words of the New York Times, Schellnhuber is “known for his aggressive stance on climate policy” and famously declared in 2009 that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth is less than one billion people: A scientist known for his aggressive stance on climate policy made an apocalyptic prediction on Thursday.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated.

“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, who has advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy and is a visiting professor at Oxford.

At that temperature, there would be “no fluctuations anymore, we can be fairly sure,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, exercising his characteristically dark sense of humor at the morning plenary session on the closing day of an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He is also known for his intense advocacy of rapid de-industrialization in order to stave off global warming. A 2009 article quotes him as follows: Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

“Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it’s completely useless,” John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the conference.

Schellnhuber recently briefed U.S. officials from the Barack Obama administration, but he says they chided him that his findings were “not grounded in political reality” and that “the [U.S.] Senate will never agree to this”.

He had told them that the U.S. must reduce its emissions from its current 20 tonnes of carbon per person average to zero tonnes per person by 2020 to have an even chance of stabilising the climate around two degrees C.

China’s emissions must peak by 2020 and then go to zero by 2035 based on the current science, he added.

“Policymakers who agreed to a two-degree C goal at the G20 summit easily fool themselves about what emission cuts are needed,” Schellnhuber said.

Last but not the least he is an advocate of a very real form of “World Government”, also in the name of defeating the climate crisis. His ideas are laid out in “Expanding the Democracy Universe“, where among other things he discusses his dream of an Earth Constitution, a Global Council elected by the people of the whole world, and a Planetary Court with jurisdiction over the whole world and with the power to penalize violations of the “Earth Constitution”.

Go here to read the rest. The bleakly humorous aspect of all this is that the Catholic higher clergy, by and large, have been doing a lousy job in areas where they purportedly have expertise for the past half century: the Faith is moribund in Europe, in South America the Church is being bled by the rapid progress of Evangelicals and the problems of the Church in the US are too well known to readers of TAC to need reciting here. The fecklessness with which the Church has been governed allowed an influx of homosexual priests who have done great harm to the Church during the pedophile scandal, often aided and abetted by bishops who looked the other way. Catechesis has been a disastrous failure, and generations of Catholics are now bone ignorant of the Faith. In short, the higher clergy have not been doing a good job in areas where we expect them to have expertise and know what they are talking about. With this type of appalling track record since Vatican II, why should we have an ounce of trust when they decide to pronounce in areas, like climatology, where they clearly have no expertise? Clerics today seem to be indifferent to the fact that they are not doing the jobs they are paid to do, and eagerly climb on political bandwagons, usually leftist in nature, perhaps to attempt to conceal the fact that they are incompetent or worse when it comes to doing the tasks they have sworn to dedicate their lives to performing.

In short, the higher clergy have not been doing a good job in areas where we expect them to have expertise and know what they are talking about. With this type of appalling track record since Vatican II, why should we have an ounce of trust when they decide to pronounce in areas, like climatology, where they clearly have no expertise? Clerics today seem to be indifferent to the fact that they are not doing the jobs they are paid to do, and eagerly climb on political bandwagons, usually leftist in nature, perhaps to attempt to conceal the fact that they are incompetent or worse when it comes to doing the tasks they have sworn to dedicate their lives to performing.

For the fruits you will know the three… for their advisers you will know the leader.

Another of Pope Francis’ advisers for his encyclical on the environment is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs is a longtime promoter of environmental measures, especially contraception and abortion, for purposes of population control. He was invited to Rome to participate in the Holy See’s climate-change summit in late April.

Pope Francis made a very demeaning comment criticizing as rabbits the Catholic mothers that are blessed with many children. The mother of St Catherine de Sienna gave birth to 22 children. St Ignatius was the youngest of 13 children. How many more future Saints would be denied to live by Pope Francis’ birth control policy emulating Mao’.

A close adviser called by Francis is Leonardo Boff, one of the main leaders of the Marxist libration theology whose works were condemned by His Holiness John Paul II for the perversion of the Gospels with the inclusion of the main tenets of the Marxist ideology and was punished to silence for a year.

Speaking to Le Monde, days before of his recall to Rome, and previous to the definitive condemnation of his book, a defiant Boff affirmed that he “does not abjure for anything of the historical materialism.” Boff invoked Gramsci and Althusser. Gramsci was the communist theoretician of the seizure of power in developed societies. Althusser undertook the intellectualization of Stalinism. Boff said that “Is the poor who have hegemony, not the Church.”

Marxists and environmentalist fanatics are one and same.

i’m a sinner. tell me how to find the strength not to sin and drive home what is right and wrong. constantly remind me how great Jesus is. you’re the pope.

On a regular basis that's more the province of your priest(s) and local bishop.

And those of us who attend Traditional Latin Masses still get plenty of clarification of sin and the 'snares of the devil', exposition on the the value of human life and emphasis on the Enormity of The Sacrifice in weekly homilies.

Doing my best to ignore this pope. Tagline.

The Pope has filled various Vatican posts with pro-abortion bishops, priests, and laypeople. They have been attacking pro-lifers—using pro-abortion clichés.

The very kindest interpretation of the Pope’s choice of so many pro-aborts, and his choice of this Nazi wacko, is that the Pope is senile.

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