Tuesday, March 24, 2015

A Growing Chorus Demanding an End to Denialism.

Climate change denial is immoral.  Who says?  A growing chorus of voices in the United States for starters.

California governor Jerry Brown slammed radical Republican, Ted Cruz, for his denialism arguing it made him "absolutely unfit" for the office of president.

“That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of scientific data,” Brown said Sunday during an appearance on Meet the Press. “It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.”

Now the top woman in the Anglican Communion, a former oceanographer, has denounced climate change denial as an immoral position that reject's God's gift of knowledge.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.

“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”


They're in good company.  Pope Francis, who intends to release a Papal Encyclical on climate change, isn't hedging on the issue.

“An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.



3 comments:

  1. Flying back to Canada from Mexico yesterday was disheartening. River after river was dry and the landscape was brown as if it had not rained for a very long time.Anyong

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  2. Are you sure you weren't seeing arroyos, Anon? These can look a lot like dried out rivers but they're really flash-flood spillways. I've had some experience crossing them on my BMW enduro after a heavy rain washed out the bridges.

    But you're right, the place is drying out. The same holds true for much of Central America. It's widely thought the people of those countries will be driven to migrate el norte. Gwynne Dyer long ago wrote warning that the US might be willing to use deadly force to repel a mass migration out of Mexico and Central America.

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  3. You could be correct Mound. But flying at 30,000 feet, they are very wide from the distance. Anyong

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