The climate change agenda

The cold hard truth about global warming

Orlando Bishop Thomas Wenski has received enough angry letters in response to his OP-ED columns on the environment to know that some Catholics recoil at the mere mention of ecology movement.

Indeed, the daily hype in the news about “global warming” — its strong identification with the policital left and the extremist agenda of some environmentalists — has alienated many people from legitimate concerns about the environment and their God-given responsibility to be good stewards of creation.

Catholics, after all, are admonished by the Catechism of the Catholic Church to have a “Religious respect for the integrity of creation.” Pope Benedict XVI wasn’t just jumping on the environmental bandwagon when he said in his 2008 World Day of Peace Address, “Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow.” He was speaking a longstanding truth of the faith.

Secular agenda

There are key differences between Catholic teaching about the environment and that of the secular ecology movement. Pope Benedict made one of those distinctions clear in his World Day of Peace message.

“Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit toward nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.”

Where Pope Benedict and the Church part ways with many environmentalists is in the view of man. The Church sees human beings as the centerpiece of the environment and worthy of protection, whereas many environmental groups consider humans the cause of environmental problems. Hence, groups like the Sierra Club support the availability of abortion and contraception as a means of encouraging “responsible choices” that affect the birth rate.

The Zero Population Growth poster that hangs in Steven Mosher’s office illustrates this difference. It depicts a nature preserve with animals and a single man and woman.

“I think that pretty well encapsulates the role of the radical environmental movement — to reduce the number of people,” said Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. “People are not the enemy of the environment. People are stewards, caretakers of the environment and the one resource you cannot do without.”

Bishop Wenski, former chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ international policy committee, said the Church sees through the agenda of groups that push population planning and birth control as a way of being more environmentally friendly.

“It’s not pro-earth, it’s just anti-man,” he said. “That’s where the witness of Benedict XVI is so important, because he’s calling on principles of Catholic social teaching to provide the interpretive key on how we should address those challenges.”

Catholic perspective

It’s precisely because of such differences that Catholics have a significant role to play in the conversation about the environment and climate change, Bishop Wenski said.

“We have to engage people with purely secular agendas in order to make the contribution we can, which is our particular idea of creation and man’s place in that creation,” he said.

Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, said Catholics need to be interested in the truth when it comes to issues like the environment. “That means stepping back and trying to fairly assess what’s out there.”

That can be difficult when it comes to climate change.Weather Channel founder John Coleman, for example, claims that former Vice President Al Gore, a leading proponent of the global-warming theory, refuses to admit that his global warming research is flawed.

“I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it,” Coleman wrote in a column on the website of San Diego’s KUSI, where he is now a weatherman. He called global warming a “hoax” and “bad science.”

Americans tend to agree. A Rasmussen Reports national survey in February found that 54% of U.S. voters say the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is. Only 21% say the media present an accurate picture. Indeed, “global warming”— now being referred to as “climate change”— is a tough sell during one of the coldest winters in recent memory.

Growing consensus

However, the U.S. bishops accept what they call the “growing consensus” on climate change advanced by the International Panel on Climate Change, at the same time saying they recognize there is uncertainty about the pace and seriousness of the change.

Royal suggests the climate change question cannot really be proven one way or another. “Between Al Gore and those who think we shouldn’t bother are a wide range of scientists and public-policy experts.My assessment is that there probably have been moderate changes contributing to the environment.

“The simple fact is that since 1998, the average global temperature has been basically flat. That in itself doesn’t prove anything, but it does give us some indication that these wild predictions are probably exaggerated and that we should be cautious.”

Likewise, Ronald Rychlak, professor of law at the University of Mississippi, also questions the so-called consensus on global climate change. His examination of the evidence, he said, shows some of it has been stretched out of proportion and that there are serious questions about the model used to blame climate change on carbon dioxide emissions.

Regardless of disagreement about the evidence, however, John Carr, executive director of Justice, Peace and Human Development for the U.S. bishops’ conference, said it’s clear that some damage is being done to the environment, and most of the efforts to address climate change are good in and of themselves.

“The virtue of prudence governs here,” he explained. “You don’t have to accept the most extreme projections to know that [pollution and other such activity] put people and the environment at risk. You don’t have to accept every ‘sky is falling’ prediction to move forward. That’s what the Vatican is doing as well.”

Rychlak, an advisor to the Holy See’s delegation to the United Nations, said the Church should continue to study the issue, which it has done through sponsoring conferences on climate change.

“The goal has to be what’s good for human life — preserving the sanctity of human life — and that certainly means being good stewards,” he said.

“It’s important to understand that we have a distinctive voice, drawing from the teaching of the Church and Pope Benedict, not the movement of the moment,” added Carr. “We’ve never been called trendy as a Church.We don’t fit easily into the climatechange debate. There’s something in our position to make everybody uncomfortable.”

Judy Roberts is a staff writer for Legatus Magazine.