Going Green for Lent
This article from Newsweek talks about a woman who is going to “reduce her carbon footprint” for Lent. It refers to other Christians who are taking a similar approach and even ropes the Pope into the story inferring that he is onside with this because of his admonition to be good stewards of the planet.
There is another article regarding two UK Bishops who are encouraging their parishioners to observe Lent by going green and as it turns out, they are of the Anglican communion. That story here and here.
This reminded me of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/globalclimate0406.shtml) discussion of global warming that came out a few years ago, well before the recent weekly revelations regarding the fraud at the IPCC and the collusion of falsifying data evident in the e-mails from East Anglia. It all tends to highlight for me a fundamental shift in our society that is currently underway, not started by but accelerated by the East Anglia e-mails.
Let’s step back to the previous generation for a moment and perhaps the one before that, of which most of the Catholic Bishops are a part. I know that the way that I was raised in the culture was to assume that science, scientists, the scientific method, etc., etc. were automatically above reproach and above manipulation and so on.
How does that kind of doctrine of infallibility come about? I think the generation that saw the explosion of the results of science and technology just accepted; because those results were so positive, so exciting, so unimagined and so socially useful; that the assertions of “science” must be true.
I know that I was taught the scientific method in school and it appeared to be above the regular fray, above opinion, above emotions; just hard, clear and rational. And is it not, in its purity? That is to say that a scientist makes a reasonable hypothesis regarding an object or a material or a phenomenon, and then he constructs tests to show if his hypothesis is true or not. If not true, he either checks his experiment for contamination, or uses another test, or abandons his theory. And to say that something has been proven requires the successful test to be duplicated by others in other locations. Pretty simple and straightforward, yes?
Thus, the scientist was given a place of prominence in our minds and in our society. It is a place of trust, perhaps almost a place of priesthood, as the mediator between us and the cosmos. Indeed this faith in science has taken on many of the aspects of religion and has for most of us non-scientists, has established a genuine practical faith. The practitioners, the scientists, are held automatically to be above any moral suspicion at least in the realm of science.
I think that this backdrop heavily influences the people of the past few generations perhaps even more than today’s generation, who are so into themselves and the uses of the technological toys that they don’t even consider the issue. However, they do accept the brainwashing of educators so the net effect is the same.
How many times in our lives have we heard, “scientists say”, or “it is scientifically shown” or “it’s a matter of science” or other similar invocations of the infallibility of science. More recently we have heard that “scientists agree” which suggests something new, that they might not agree; in which case it would be morally acceptable not to just swallow the theory at hand without some caution. But when the “scientists agree” people get offended or shocked that someone might not accept what they agree upon. This was one of the reasons that the IPCC statement on climate change had so many signatures of “scientists” on it, because the people at the IPCC wanted to create that sense that if one disagreed with the conclusions, that such a person was doing the verboten, the sacrilegious act of disagreeing with “science.” That is the moral equivalent to saying there is no God, in our society.
So it is not surprising that a group of older men raised in the believing generation, might equate reason, mathematics and science to such an extent that they swallow the global warming theory hook, line and sinker, as is evident in this preamble from the USCCB website from 2001;
At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God’s creation and the one human family. It is about protecting both “the human environment” and the natural environment.
The issue of global climate change raises two central religious and moral concerns: “How are we to fulfill God’s call to be stewards of creation in an age when we may have the capacity to alter that creation significantly, and perhaps irrevocably? How can we as a ‘family of nations’ exercise stewardship in a way that respects and protects the integrity of God’s creation and provides for the common good, as well as for economic and social progress based on justice?”
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, June 2001
Note that they want to avoid the partisan politics but in buying the concept, which they have assumed is pure and above-reproach science, they inadvertantly took a political side. Some might say, not so inadvertantly. I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
Later on they come close but not quite to the point of endorsing, putting their imprimatur, on the global warming theory;
In their June 2001 statement, Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence and the Common Good, the bishops note: “Although debate continues about the extent and impact of this warming, it could be quite serious … Consequently, it seems prudent not only to continue to research and monitor this phenomenon, but to take steps now to mitigate possible negative effects in the future.” The statement also calls for a less polarized public debate and more focus on the global common good. The bishops call for thoughtful dialogue that relies on the political virtue of prudence. Prudence is not simply a cautious and safe approach, but rather a thoughtful, deliberate, and reasoned basis for taking or avoiding action to achieve a moral good.
Prudence. Yes indeed, this is a matter of prudential judgement and they realize that fact, which is no doubt why they stopped short of committing themselves to the global warming theory.
Now we are faced with the new paradigm. Science might not be so reliable after all, because scientists are not reliable. Surprise, surprise! Scientists are human beings with human tendencies and human biases, etc. There are still those who refuse to believe that science as we practice it is not infallible. Some have political reasons in this case for their refusal, but I think there are other honest souls who just can’t get over the idea that some in the scientific community could actually trump up numbers and charts and re-write history to “prove” their theory, knowing that it is tenuous at best, and an utter fraud at worst, just for a socialist/marxist political/ideological agenda.
The USCCB urges us to leave the politics out of it, yet it has become increasingly obvious, long before the most recent explosive revelations of out and out fraud and deception, that the only solution that the global warming movement theorists and activists were interested in was a massive transfer of wealth, extorted from the west through creating a crisis and manipulating guilt on an urgency basis. The crowning scene for this was Copenhagen in 2009. They had set aside all pretence by that point and the communists were demonstrating in the streets.
I wouldn’t bame those bishops if they mourn for the loss of scientific purity, reliability and accountability, but then we might all take a pause and reflect this Lent that placing our faith in man and/or science is to actually have a god other than God, a violation of the first commandment, and henceforth we should view what we are told by “science” with some of the suspicion that we normally reserve for door-to-door salesmen and street-vendors with Rolex watches for ten bucks.