Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are set to head a prominent climate change conference at the Vatican.
Social activist Naomi Klein has been tapped by Pope Francis to join a high level Vatican conference on climate change, she said Saturday. The prominent critic of capitalism will join Cardinal Peter Turkson in leading the Vatican's upcoming conference on climate change, which is set to include priests, scientists and others.
“The fact that they invited me indicates they’re not backing down from the fight,” Klein told The Observer. She added, “A lot of people have patted the pope on the head, but said he’s wrong on the economics. I think he’s right on the economics.” Earlier this month Pope Francis issued a dire call for action on climate change, linking the crisis to economics and poverty.
“Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth,” the pope wrote in the first papal encyclical dedicated to the environment. 

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An unprecedented alliance of business, welfare and environmental groups and trade unions is demanding an end to Australia’s decade of political paralysis and division on climate policy, insisting the Abbott government make credible emission reduction commitments and the major parties agree on how the pledges should be implemented.

In an attempt to reset the bitter political debate on climate policy, the powerful line-up of interest groups has reached a historic agreement on “principles” that should guide Australia’s climate policy.

The principles do not explicitly mention the Abbott government’s Direct Action climate plan or the former Labor government’s emissions trading scheme, but they include objectives Direct Action fails to meet in its current form – including being “internationally linked”, being “capable of achieving deep reductions” and achieving greenhouse reductions “across all sections of the economy”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/29/australian-climate-policy-paralysis-has-to-end-business-roundtable-says

An unprecedented alliance of business, union, environmental, investor and welfare groups has been formed to forge what it sees as urgent common ground on climate policy.

The highly unusual coalition — to be branded the Australian Climate Roundtable — comes as developed nations gear up for the Paris Climate Conference in December, where leaders will be under pressure to update their strategies for dealing with climate change.

While Australia's main political parties support the international goal of limiting climate change to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the alliance warns the objective will require "deep global reductions".

The high-profile members cover some influential employer and industry lobby groups, such as the Australian Industry (Ai) Group, the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the Australian Aluminium Council, the Energy Supply Association and the Investor Group on Climate Change.

They will be joined by groups at the opposite end of the political and economic spectrum — the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), WWF Australia, the Australian Council of Social Service, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Climate Institute.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-29/australian-climate-roundtable-business-unions-policy-alliance/6579106

This new report reveals that if all of the Galilee Basin coal was burned, an estimated 705 million tonnes of CO2 would be released each year – more than 1.3 times [130 %] Australia's current annual emissions.

read more: http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/galilee-basin-unburnable-coal

This means that over the Galilee Basin mines' lifetime, this exploitation of coal would more than double Australia's emissions of CO2 per year. Meanwhile due to extreme weather patterns — especially longer heat waves and stronger cyclones — far more people will die through global warming than through "terrorism". But fear not, our Turdy will ask you to destroy windmills "because he does not like them" and destroy your democratic rights because the ABC is not rabid ultra-right wing neo-fascist like most of the media in this fair country. Present terrorism is a nasty side effect to Western World policies that have been basically shit policies towards the Middle East. Read: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30473

When I was young the intellectual milieu was shaped by the need to come to terms with the unprecedented crimes and the general moral collapse that had taken place on European soil following the outbreak of great power conflict in August 1914 – Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust and the Gulag, the concentration camps and genocide, the tens of millions of deaths that had occurred in two unprecedentedly barbarous wars. For me the most important book on the contemporary crisis of civilization was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, a complex study of racism, imperialism, anti-semitism and the regimes that had emerged in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The book was important to me not only because of its formal arguments and its insights but because it was written in a tone that seemed, unlike any other work I had read, to have risen to the extremity of the crimes and the breakdown it was struggling to understand and to explain.

In our own age we are faced with a crisis of civilisation of equivalent depth but of an altogether different kind – the gradual but apparently inexorable human-caused destruction of the condition of the Earth in which human life has flourished over the past several thousand years, at whose centre is the phenomenon we call either global warming or climate change. During the past decade I have read scores of books and thousands of articles, many outstanding, examining from every conceivable angle and also trying to explain the wreckage we are knowingly inflicting on the Earth. It was however not until last week that I read a work whose tone and scope seemed to me, like Arendt’s Origins, fully adequate to its theme. That work was Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home – in my opinion one of the most important documents of our era.

http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/robert-manne/2015/01/2015/1435708320/laudato-si-political-reading

Meanwhile in summertime:

A blistering heatwave sweeping through Europe has brought blackouts to France and fears of heat stroke for Wimbledon tennis fans, but meant a range of interesting ice creams for the continent's zoo animals.

With temperatures pushing 40 degrees Celsius, the UN warned heatwaves were growing more frequent and intense due to climate change and called on more countries to put warning systems in place to inform people of the dangers.

At the Safaripark Beekse Bergen zoo in the Netherlands, staff had put their emergency procedures in place including ice cubes for baboons, cold showers for the elephants, and special meat- and fruit-flavoured ice cream for the ring-tailed lemurs.

Not to be outdone, especially on the subject of ice cream, Italy's main zoo in Rome offered gelato to its orangutans with a choice of flavours including fresh fruit and vegetables or dried figs topped with eggs and insects.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-02/europe-feels-the-heat/6588854

India will not announce a target year for its carbon emissions to peak, its environment minister tells the BBC.

Prakash Javadekar said that Delhi would submit plans to cut emissions to the UN, but would not announce a target date for when it expected its total carbon emissions to drop.

His comments came two days after China told the United Nations that its emissions would peak around 2030.

India is the world's third largest carbon emitter, after China and the US.

Scientists say global emissions need to peak and drop soon if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.

"The world is not expecting... India to announce its peaking year," said Prakash Javadekar, in an exclusive interview with the BBC.

"Countries know where India stands and what its requirements [development needs] are and therefore nobody has asked us for [the] peaking year."

The peaking year is when a country's emissions reach the highest level before they begin to drop.

Beijing went public with its peak year when it submitted its climate plan to the United Nations climate convention.

The US has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 26-28% by 2025.

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — Pope Francis offered a direct apology on Thursday for the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the oppression of Latin America during the colonial era, even as he called for a global social movement to shatter a “new colonialism” that has fostered inequality, materialism and the exploitation of the poor.

Speaking to a hall filled with social activists, farmers, garbage workers and Bolivian indigenous people, Francis offered the most ambitious, and biting, address of his South American tour.

He repeated familiar themes in sharply critiquing the global economic order and warning of environmental catastrophe — but also added a twist with his apology.

“Some may rightly say, ‘When the pope speaks of colonialism, he overlooks certain actions of the church,’ ” Francis said. “I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God.”

He added: “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/world/americas/pope-francis-bolivia-catholic-church-apology.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Todays' joke comes from the Christian Post. The Post posts a new daily joke at the moment, but the best joke by far is the Post own way to take itself ever so seriously. Yes, the pope made a comment about air conditioning in his latest Papal Enciclycal.

A Reverend from one of the many US CONservative churches — a real estate salesman selling you an illusionary plot in the sky by taking your today's hard-earned cash, a priest of hot air and hot-cross buns — comes to the defence of air conditioning:

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Chhokra notes the good things inventions like air conditioning bring to the world, siting a National Bureau of Economic Research study that concluded it saves lives.

According to the study, "air conditioning reduced heat-related deaths in the United States by 80 percent and could save even more lives in hotter, often poorer countries." He also writes that air conditioning "increases labor productivity and preserves capital stock, which has crucial implications for developing economies."

And that's not all. Malkin also points out that last fall Carrier Corporation unveiled a groundbreaking HVAC system for the Vatican that saves Michelangelo's masterpieces on the Sistine Chapel. This way such great works of art stay clean and cool for preservation.

What is it with this Pope that he would disparage prosperity and a higher quality of life for everyone? It neither makes theological nor political sense.

I'll leave the answer to that question to my Catholic friends.

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Sorry, I am not one of your catholics friends... Iam a rabid atheist. But I am the first one to recognise the reverend has a point. Being cool saves lives and helps being more productive...

But in order to cool oneself with air conditioning, one has to use energy that mostly creates CO2. The energy used for such cool feat is usually quite a lot more in comparison to the energy saved, despite high efficiency of the machines...

So, the point the Pope is making is that while you're nice and cool, someone somehere else will suffer from more heat. Agreed, everyone should have the means to keep cool, but no matter what is done to the technology, keeping cool WARMS UP THE PLANET.  It's easy to understand if you know thermodynamics and fridges. With air condtioning, we enter the vicious circle of a Catch 22, with increasing consequences...

Of course the reverend who wrote this piece is also a full-blown climate sceptic with a dash of skepticism like a lemon wedge in his whisky. The Reverend is equiped with Entrenched Confirmation Bias Genesis 101:

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In the beginning, the very opening chapters of the book of Genesis, the Lord commanded mankind to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (Gen. 1:28). We are supposed to make use of the natural resources God has given us to make life better. Certainly, we are to be good stewards of these resources and not abuse them, but the radical environmentalists would push us toward a false sense of guilt and moralities, having us believe there is no good use of any form of energy that emits carbon dioxide. Thereby, producing global warming and threatening the sphere on which we live.

C'mon! Are we to believe the God who told us it was morally right to "have dominion" over the earth, to make use of its resources and improve life, would allow his creation to careen off into destruction for obeying him? Do we honestly believe the earth will catastrophically fail, if carbon dioxide rose from to 27 to 54 thousandths of one percent of the atmosphere, as global alarmists imply?

The fact is, like our bodies which are fearfully and wonderfully made by God (Psalm 139:14), our Creator also designed a remarkable planet that is immensely resilient and able to adapt to an unsearchable variety of circumstances.

The Scriptures assure us, "A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever" (Ec. 1:4). Life will continue in the earth much the same way as it always has until the Lord has completed every aspect of his redemption and ordered a new creation.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't dismiss science altogether. I just think the information we have at times can be interpreted the wrong way.

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Yes My dear reverend, YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD NOTHING ABOUT THIS PLANET, nothing about humanity and know nothing about GOD, really.  You make me sick... Please real all articles on this site in which the problem of global warming is outlaid. If you don't understand sciences, don't blame the scientists, blame yourself for being an ignoramus, or half of one which is far worse, because a little knowledge can be dangerous and the wrong knowledge ever more so...