The Voltage Gate

Cardinal George Pell apparently has the answers to everything - the plight of today's youth, teetering Muslim/Catholic relations, the evils of paganism and secularism, hell, even climate change. I love intra-institutional interviews:

What are your more general views of the ecology movement that, rightly or wrongly, has been termed a new religion, but whose science is sometimes regarded as poor?

Ecology movement? A new religion? Oh lord, here we go...

Like Christians and Muslims, there are ecologists, ecologists and ecologists. There are some forms of deep-green ecology that are deeply pagan and deeply hostile to the special and central place of human beings and especially to Christianity. But as Christians, we must have a reference for nature.

As a generation, we have no right to gobble up the resources of nature disproportionately so there are none left for future generations. There are wonderful Christian ecologists with a genuine respect for God's creation and also a deep Christian faith, but there are some who are sympathetic to every form of life except human life. They will be very enthusiastic to protect whales and endangered species and be stridently in favor of the abortion of human babies. I mean it's grotesque.

The only thing that's grotesque is his eminence's proclivity for generalization. Let's set a few things straight before we move on to the rest.

First of all, there is no more of an ecology movement than there is an physiology movement or a analytical chemistry movement. Ecology is not synonymous with environmentalism, it is the scientific study of biological interactions within the biosphere. Environmentalism just a concern for the protection of natural places, and not very specific in itself; conservationism is a far more descriptive term.

Ecology is science. Environmentalism is philosophy. An ecologist is a working scientist; an environmentalist doesn't have to be working at all. All ecologists are environmentalists to some degree, but not all environmentalists are ecologists by any means.

But, according to the cardinal, the only good ecologist is a a Christian one, who inherently know that no sperm should be lost in service to Rome. Godless left ecologists are far from credible, savin' whales and killin' babies.

The cardinal is right about one thing: Deep ecology is a load of crap.

But on the whole, do you agree with the science behind climate change?

Once again, I think there's an enormous mixture there, and there's no unanimity amongst scientists about what is happening. A classic example I give is the Antarctic, whatever one says about the Arctic. Large chunks of ice have broken away, but about 70% of the Antarctic has been surveyed systematically, and it's getting colder. The ice there is increasing rather than decreasing, and many of what is described in the press sometimes as unprecedented, never seen before, sometimes they'll say "unprecedented in the last 10 years." So before we jump to the conclusion that something is radically new, we need to have a good look at the historical record to see just what happened.

Obviously, they didn't teach the meaning of the word average in seminary, as in average temperature increases. I smell party lines...

You see, people without religion are often looking for something to fear.

I can remember high school students 20 years ago being frightened of being destroyed by atomic warfare. And the press, over the last 100 years, you can document their programs, activities, and it's alternated. They've been warning us of global warming, and that's alternated with warnings of a coming ice-age. There have been gigantic climatic changes in the past and I think almost entirely they're beyond human control. I don't think there's anything like the evidence necessary to say that human pollution is provoking a catastrophic climate change. It's quite different to say that in different areas we're influencing the climate for ill. That's certainly true. One of the best guarantees against too much pollution is a free press, so that the free press can point out just what is happening.

The evidence for toxic cycling in ecosystems is often slight. At the AAAS conference, Jim Collins spoke at length about the failing populations of frogs in Central America, and was reluctant to point a solid finger at pollution as a contributing factor; there was very little solid evidence. In fact, Collins pinned the blame on climatic changes in the area, which have stimulated larger regional growth in the Chytrid fungus, which may - through a series of Typhoid Mary species - cause 100 or so species to go extinct without intervention.

I certainly hope that Pell's smarmy attitude does not reflect the official stance of the Catholic Church. The last thing they need is let the fundies get a foothold in the environmentalism PR gig.