Nick Cohen on the Pope and global warming

June 21, 2015 • 10:30 am

On Friday I reported on the reactions of Lawrence Krauss and Steve Pinker to the Pope’s new global-warming encyclical. Their reactions were mixed, but mostly negative, largely because the Pope, while calling attention to the problem, neglected one of its main causes: overpopulation and the ensuing generation of greenhouse gases. The Pope in fact dismissed the “population problem,” and we know why: the Vatican isn’t down with birth control. Francis’s encyclical says this, for instance:

Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”. Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”. To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.

Those are weasel words blaming those who even bring up overpopulation. This is the mealy-mouthed real Francis that the liberals love while overlooking what that mouth emits.

The Pope instead pinned the problem on consumerism, which of course is one cause. But seriously, as the world population grows exponentially, it will be impossible to stem the tide of carbon use by other methods alone. Everybody knows this, but nobody wants to talk about it. Instead, based on the Pope’s concern for the poor (something that’s hardly laudable these days, except among Republicans) and on his admission that global warming is real (does the Pope’s admission of this really change anything?), everyone is falling over themselves trying to praise the “new liberal Pope”.

Except, that is, for Krauss, Pinker, and now Nick Cohen. In a piece in the Guardian, “Pope Francis a liberal free thinker? Don’t kid yourself“, Cohen again praises the Pope’s more obvious sentiments and conclusions—but excoriates the Church.

When [Pope Francis] is forced to choose between intellectual honesty and dogma, the pope chooses dogma without hesitation. Like Aquinas, he descends into special pleading, without admitting to the reader or perhaps to himself that he is rigging the debate.

And, as it was for Krauss and Pinker, the problem is the church’s refusal to sanction population control, preferring to keep women as breeding stock, a philosophy that also squelches their economic empowerment and equality. Cohen points out that if you bring up the overpopulation problem, then those who support the Pope will argue that poor people, after all, don’t leave much of a carbon footprint. That is an Mother Teresa-ish argument for keeping the poor in poverty, as well as prohibiting their migration to countries where they could become better off—and generate more greenhouse gases. And, as Cohen argues, the double argument against both birth control and alleviating poverty is not a humane solution:

The pope does not say that the poor must stay poor to show their gratitude to the almighty or for the sake of the environment. Rather, he ducks the question of what will happen as the ever-expanding populations of poor countries grow richer. Demand the promotion of birth control – not abortion or eugenics, just contraception – and you are “refusing to face” the world’s unequal distribution of wealth, he writes. End “the extreme and selective consumerism” of the rich world and – eureka! –“demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.

Everything about his argument is slippery. Even if rich countries are prepared to redistribute wealth to poor countries, I have never met a secular campaigner against poverty who does not believe that educating women and giving them control of their fertility is the best way to reduce poverty. More pertinently, the pope is not against birth control because he believes in the redistribution of wealth but because Catholic teaching says he must damn it. For the little it is worth, which is next to nothing in my view, Francis has scriptural authority on his side. When Onan refused to impregnate his dead brother’s wife and “spilled his seed on the ground”, the Lord made him pay the ultimate price for pleasuring himself and slew him. The fathers of the church were only slightly less harsh. Clement of Alexandria said: “Seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted”, and Augustine thought that sex “for the sake of lust” rather than procreation led to sterility.

Given his bad faith, given, too, that he had the power to reduce poverty by changing the church’s theology and refused to do it, the mystery is why so many liberals believe the pope is not a Catholic

. . . The credulity of believers can be bad enough but the credulity of liberals can be worse. If you don’t wish to join the gormless herd, by all means welcome the pope’s commitment to the poor and to preserving the environment. But you must accept that if you believe in giving women the opportunity to expand their minds and control their bodies, the Vatican is against you – as it always was.

And until this happens, the Catholic church will continue to lose adherents everywhere but South America.

 

92 thoughts on “Nick Cohen on the Pope and global warming”

  1. We are approaching a future in which most drudge work will be robotized. This could happen within a hundred years. Already, many poor people have access to comforts and healthcare that exceed what the wealthiest could buy 50 years ago.

    If the population begins to decline — and there’s lots of evidence this can happen voluntarily — everyone could be materially wealthy by current standards. There will always be status signifiers. They are not always money.

  2. Having just read about half of Ann Gaylor’s book, “Abortion is a Blessing”, I expect that if the Pope did speak on the side of population control, abortion rights would finally come into reality, along with birth control and a woman’s right to control and make decisions over her own body without politicians getting in the way.

  3. The Catholic church is losing adherents (as a percentage of the population) in South America. They are probably still gaining in sub-Saharan Africa and possibly China. Admittedly they are losing to Pentecostal Christianity.

    Note another aspect, giving women equality (e.g., to education and in power) is also something the Catholic Church is not known for (how many women have any official authority in the higher reaches of the church?).

      1. Any article like this that has unmoderated (or weakly moderated) comment sections usually reinforces in a sadly ironic way the exact points the author was making. I ran across another case yesterday in Psychology Today. The comment section is a disaster.

        1. I regularly comment on The Atlantic and Mother Jones magazine. The comment sections are true disaster areas, with extremely rude folks talking down to everyone, kind of like Mr. Schneider here.

          I also read The Guardian, and I have to restrain myself from signing up to correct the idiots who say that IUDs are used by eugenicists to kill off humanity, and other dumb stuff.

        2. If Psychology Today is going to do that, I hope they’re at least using the comments to data mine for research on human behavior.

      2. The comment sections of two of the blogs over at Freethoughtblogs, Ed Brayton’s and PZ Myers’, were infected by prize moron, Michael Egnor, with climate change denial, overpopulation denial, evolution denial, and claims that restrictions on the use of DDT resulted in the deaths of more then 50 million persons. Hopefully, Dr. Egnor won’t show up here.

    2. Today [6/23] David Brooks has a NYT op-ed with what seems to me to be a fairly accurate criticism of the Pope [basically for being unrealistic in his dismissal of market-based solutions to climate change]. Even he gets raked over the coals by commenters defending the Pope.

  5. Of course it’s not always the Catholics that avoid birth control and degrade women the most, is it? The Pope does his part but in most of the industrial world the Catholics ignore birth control efforts and other nonsense. Islam is the other larger part of this population problem and with equal standing concerning women. Nearly all religion treats women as reproductive livestock for men.

    Some scientist think we are already into the 6th major mass extinction and there is not much time to do a lot about it. When it comes to the religious leaders or the politicians it is always best to pay more attention to what they do than what they say.

  6. “Instead, based on the Pope’s concern for the poor (something that’s hardly laudable these days, except among Republicans) and on his admission that global warming is real (does the Pope’s admission of this really change anything?), everyone is falling over themselves trying to praise the “new liberal Pope”.”

    Yes, his admission of man-made climate change and his call to action [phase out the use of fossil fuels, curtail mindless/planet-destroying consumerism] is a big deal. I’m sure it’s been noticed by the ruling elites all over the world.

    Here’s President’s Obama statement on Pope Francis’s encyclical:

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/18/statement-president-pope-francis%E2%80%99s-encyclical

    1. I trust that when the Pope visits Obama will ask him if the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.

      1. We should already have a very precise answer to this question, telling us how many people can live on this planet sustainably, given the available resources and technology, taking into account daily/monthly/yearly consumption patterns by individuals and households. The model should also include future technologies like vertical farming, etc, as well as show us dynamically how individual consumption levels (think lifestyle) affect the carrying capacity of Earth expressed in the max. # of people the planet can sustain.

        1. I don’t see how we have a very precise answer. A vague, hopeful answer maybe.
          Technology prediction is tricky.
          Led lighting is an example. Not so long ago not many people would know what a led was. Now more and more lighting is using led technology, with orders of magnitude more efficiency.

          On a side note, I think the hurry to ban traditional incandescent bulbs, in favour of florescent was, in hindsight a mistake.
          All the expense and energy of retooling to make those quite complicated bulbs with quite a lot of resources in them and high disposal requirements is probably too high.
          Because leds are coming to the rescue.
          Who knew?

          1. I’m not talking about “vague, hopeful” not-answers.

            Technology predictions are tricky, but if you see the technologies your model factors in don’t come to market on time, or don’t produce the predicted effect, you may quickly add this information to your model, provided that you have the model in the first place!

          2. The model would show us, for example, if the Earth can carry 5 billion obese and overweight people, among many other eye-opening things.

          3. Far better: google “graphene light bulb”! Graphene is amazing, and it will supplant both plastics and metals in many circumstances, make batteries beyond our current expectations, and more. I wasn’t expecting light emission, but I should have considered it. It makes sense.

            What’s more, it’s pure carbon, one single atom thick. In my mind, that means we could eventually remove excess CO2 from the air, use the carbon to make graphene, and release the O2 back into the atmosphere or use it in combustion with hydrogen to make more H2O.

            Granted that CO2 sourcing for graphene is far in the future, but what a good result, if we can reach it before sending ourselves into extinction.

          4. I read recently that in spite of the promise nobody has really been able to put any of the graphene super products into production. What will we see first?

          5. The very knowledge of the existence of graphene is quite new, in terms of scientific discoveries and their development. I think its discoverers were among, if not the, youngest Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. The fact that graphene has the properties that it does, and can theoretically be made infinitely large (though still only one atom thick), and move clouds of electrons above the plane of those atoms and, I think separately, below the plane at the same time, is astonishing.

            Research is moving fast, because of its unique promise. Still, it can’t happen overnight. Where it leads to mass production of publicly useful gadgets depends on research funding, I would imagine, and that depends on who thinks what products would give both the fastest and the best return on their investments plus tons of profits.

            I’m guessing computer chips and batteries for the really big monies, and light bulbs for the faster gadget for being useful in homes, environmentally promotable, and a step on the way to computer chips.

      2. But that’s a question that Obama should ask the interdisciplinary group of economists, ecologists, sociologists, environmentalists, engineers, who should be charged with providing a precise answer to this question, not the Pope!

          1. We must understand that the Pope can’t advocate for abortion, so that the 1.9 billion obese and overweight people in the developed world, can still eat 2 pizzas each day. That would be immoral.

          2. I was referring to Obama asking the anti-abortion crowd, here in the USA. The Pope is restrained. Were he to go against such rigid dogma as contraception/abortion, he’d likely be assassinated, perhaps in a way that could be claimed as a heart attack, so that his replacement could say god took him out for going against dogma.

          3. I seriously think that if he embraced abortion in this encyclical, he would have undermined his entire message on climate change, as today, the news sites wouldn’t be talking about his call for environmental action, but about the calls for his excommunication from the Vatican!

          4. For the third time: I wasn’t referring to the Pope. I was referring to President Barak Obama. I don’t know how to make this anymore clear, particularly after I previously commented that the Pope could not be expected break with such rigid dogma as the Church’s anti-abortion stance is.
            Can anyone help me understand why this message doesn’t seem to be getting through? I seriously don’t get it.

          5. I understand your point very well and agree with you. That’s why I reiterated your point with my previous comment.

          6. Anyone who would want to say “abort your child, so that I can continue to eat for two”, should get their moral compass straight!

  7. “On Friday I reported on the reactions of Lawrence Krauss and Steve Pinker to the Pope’s new global-warming encyclical. Their reactions were mixed, but mostly negative, largely because the Pope, while calling attention to the problem, neglected one of its main causes: overpopulation and the ensuing generation of greenhouse gases.”

    Their reaction is puzzling, for while it’s true that the Pope hasn’t changed his position on contraception and abortion, his acknowledgment of the climate change problem, and call for action, are a clear step in the right direction.

    1. I think it’s a step in the right direction too. I’m the last person to be defending the pope, but this is a helluva lot better than some US southern Protestant groups, which have come out saying anthropogenic climate change is a lie.

      Of course it would be better if he recognized factors like overpopulation too, but let’s face it – it was never going to happen. You’re never going to get a fully coherent position from an organization that relies on faith in a being whose existence has never and (probably) will never be proven.

      1. In my view he’s already done much.

        We already have folks screaming “hands off my coal!”, “hands of my lifestyle!”, “I have a right to consume till I get type 2 diabetes!”, “what excess consumerism?!”, “What deforestation?!, “What environment?!”

      2. Silly atheist! God cannot be said to exist in the way beings exist, if he can be said to exist at all. He exists in art, beauty and love. He manifests essentially (maybe even effervescently) in stale crackers. We know this because we’re conscious.

        1. Any decent omnipotent god should be able to exist and not exist at the same time.

    2. I fear that those who welcome the recognition of the climate change problem have fallen for the ‘rosy apple’ of the encyclical without realising that there is a worm buried inside it. The worm being Catholic dogma.

      I cannot read Mr Bergoglio’s mind, but if I were suspicious I could make a case that he is pointing at the ‘consumerist societies’ to distract people from the implementation of womens reproductive rights and the capabilities of science and economics.

      Does the Pope care? Perhaps, but not enough.

    3. In some ways, a negative interpretation of the encyclical gets the critic off the hook for the personal responsibility to reduce consumerist behaviors and carbon footprints, especially if ze has few or no children. Kind of the flip side of DiscoveredJoys’ point below about distracting attention from other causes of the climate change problem. That being said, I agree that Bergoglio, like the leaders of many other religious sects, perpetuates the abusive and detrimental control of women’s reproductive rights, as well as the mandate to produce more babies to swell the indoctrinated ranks of the faithful.

  8. And as I noted in the other article, the poor might not create a huge carbon footprint, but they will suffer terribly from high food prices and vanishing aquifers.

    But I guess that’s ok, as suffering will bring them closer to God.

  9. On the criticism of Bergoglio, agreed. But I think Jerry is the first to say that an analysis is more solid without the obvious errors or arguable points:

    – “the world population grows exponentially”.

    It doesn’t. The growth rate has been decreasing since the 60’s, so the growth has turned from superexponential to subexponential. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Population_growth ] Which is why earlier projections predicted a population peak 2040ish, but IIRC with better statistics it has been moved to 2100ish.

    – “it will be impossible to stem the tide of carbon use by other methods alone.”

    That is arguable. 2014 saw a constant carbon effluent release despite a 3 % (IIRC) global economical growth. That was mainly due to China replacing fossil fuel with sustainable energy.

    That in turn is, at least in mature economies like Sweden which already use a lot of renewables, shadowed by the curb that follows from increased energy efficiency (IIRC). (Which of course is depending on production and consumerism to replace wasteful old technologies.)

    On the other hand Cohen and Jerry has a point that migration could be problematic. 2014 show that it isn’t, I think, as of yet – especially since China is rapidly ‘migrating’ the whole population into a rich nation.

    – I guess one could also quibble with Cohen’s (Bergoglio’s) data: “humanity is presiding over a mass extinction of species.”

    Seems the consensus is that there is elevated extinction rates, but it is hard to get quantitative statistics (estimates all over the place, apparently no agreed on lower bound) and hard to pin it to human causes as of yet. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction ]

    1. Oh, I forgot to add:

      The problem is that it isn’t enough “to stem the tide of carbon use” if one wants to avoid a 2+ degC global temperature rise. (With 1.5 degC believed to be potentially a tipping point for mass extinctions, IIRC.)

      But that goes both ways I guess, keeping the population at a steady level isn’t enough and renewables & energy efficiency may not be enough.

    2. “China is rapidly ‘migrating’ the whole population into a rich nation.”

      And that’s the biggest problem for the short/mid-term future, which both Pope Francis and Prof. Michael E. Webber properly diagnose.

      “Population growth is indeed important, but it turns out that economic growth is a bigger deal: demand for food, energy and water are growing faster than population because people tend to demand more meat and electricity (both of which are water-intensive) as they are elevated out of poverty. The average Chinese citizen, for instance, consumes about a fourth of the energy of a typical U.S. citizen, and as the former becomes richer, that gap narrows. (Meanwhile urbanization, which reduces birth rates, is increasing.)

      Therefore, making sure that people have the energy, water and food they need for a free and prosperous life, without all the environmental and security challenges that plague our old approaches, is the most effective place to start. Plus, the policy levers (investing in new technologies, reinventing markets and pushing for a culture of conservation) for solving this nexus are more straightforward and palatable than population controls, which are objectionable on many levels.”

      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/readers-respond-to-ldquo-inside-the-neandertal-mind-rdquo/

      1. The meat problem could (relatively) easily be solved by encouraging a low-meat or even vegetarian diet globally, since it would be a more direct means of nourishing people than taking a long detour through animals that need maintenance and feeding. It would solve several other problems, too, such as high pollution around sites of industrial agriculture, downplayed or ignored animal welfare, and health problems associated with a meat-rich diet.

        1. I wonder how things would balance out, though, if we returned to cow manure and such for fertilizer, instead of petroleum-sourced chemicals for same?

          1. Don’t know for sure, but since cow manure hasn’t been locked away for hundreds of millions of years, it doesn’t strike me as being as destructive when it “emits” gases.

        2. Easier said than done, since one is not fighting just “I like meat”, and “meat is tasty” like one does in (say) much of Europe, but also “eating meat more shows I’ve made it”, which is what is traditional in China, Korea, Vietnam and so on from what I understand.

          As a friend of mine (Chinese-Canadian) was told by her (single) mother growing up, it was “I work hard to give you meat, and you want to eat like a nun?”

        1. So the plants that are grown to feed cows don’t need a lot of water? In fact, isn’t most agriculture in the USA grown specifically to feed meat animals?

    3. And while Pope Francis may have angered many by suggesting that we should consider changing our lifestyle of excessive consumption, the WHO statistics on obesity and overweight, again bear out his advice…

      “In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.”

      http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/

      ^^I think that we can all agree that these numbers are unsustainable 🙂

      1. Let me add that the obese and overweight are not only a big burden for the warming planet, but the healthcare system as well, since obesity is one of the main causes of type 2 diabetes, among other illnesses.

        1. The 2 billion obese and overweight people are very much the problem. And it has nothing to do with me picking on anyone.

          We simply can’t honestly say that there’s no more food available for any more people, so long as 2 billion of us are either obese or overweight. Pope Francis rightly stresses the need for the necessary lifestyle changes, for overconsumption is no longer an option on the resource-limited, warming planet.

        2. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/society-will-collapse-by-2040-due-to-catastrophic-food-shortages-says-foreign-officefunded-study-10336406.html

          A scientific model supported by the Foreign Office has suggested that society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages if policies do not change.

          The model, developed by a team at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, does not account for society reacting to escalating crises by changing global behaviour and policies.

          However the model does show that our current way of life appears to be unsustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.

          “The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.

          “In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

          1. Well, that’s probably more accurately described as subjectively permanent for the people who end up starving, but not objectively permanent for everyone. These things have a way of reverting to a balance. However, we can all agree that population reduction via immense suffering is the least preferable way for it to happen.

            I also don’t think anyone here is blaming individual fat people. The problem of global food distribution is a political problem that’s hardly addressed by specific people eating too much. A food shortage ultimately implies that this can’t continue. There’s much evidence that our obesity problems are due to environmental factors acting on the population. It’s pretty far fetched to say two thirds of America suddenly lost discipline in the last 30 years.

          2. Hmmm… If fat people are fat because modern corn derivatives drive obesity (and diabetes) — something I’ve never yet gotten around to looking up, though MSM suggests research in that direction — then turning the corn over to ethanol (for pleasure or fuel), would better serve humanity.

            Corn, then, would take CO2 out of the air to build itself, combust back to CO2, and make a nice surface cycle, instead of pulling carbon from under the earth’s surface, in the form of petroleum products, and adding that to the surface…

            wouldn’t it?

          3. “However the model does show that our current way of life appears to be unsustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.”

            I couldn’t agree more with this conclusion.

            BTW, I’ve read that if we take into account our current consumption levels, we today need 1.6 planets to provide the resources for our consumption. In other words, our reckless consumption is unsustainable. Why would anyone want to downplay the need for necessary changes to our lifestyle is beyond me.

  10. “[I]t must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development…”

    Taken in context with the public teachings of the Church including the historical prohibition on birth control and all other “grave” sexual disorders (shuffling pedophile priests around excluded), this also implies that demographic growth will always be compatible with integral and shared development.

    One would be hard pressed to find a more obvious statement where faith conflicts with fact, and I’d even lump creationist views with that. While creationists can go through all kinds of mental contortions, equivocations and misdirection to confuse their flock and keep them wallowing in ignorance, the same cannot be done with the Pope’s statement. In fact, the Pope doesn’t even try; he simply smears his opponents with ad hominem attacks and changes the topic (on this front, he’s right there with creationists). People can and should debate what the maximum sustainable global population is, but to state that there isn’t one is the ultimate denial of reality. As I posted the other day, the limit is certainly well in advance of the time when the entire Earth would be composed of human flesh.

    1. Yep, try to pull acknowledgement of a maximum carrying capacity of the Earth out of the Pope, and out of capitalist private corporate tyrants.

  11. It is amazingly contradictory to me to claim that humans are the pinnacle of gawd’s creation – presumably because we have brains that allow us to invent and express that silly notion – and that the entire universe was designed with us in mind but then to reduce us to the level of unthinking animals that breed until the resources run out because they don’t know any better.

    1. IIRC, close to 90% of European Catholics use contraception. As a result, the population of Europe is stagnating to declining.

      “According to the European Union, the total number of live births in 31 European countries fell by 3.5 percent, to 5.4 million from 5.6 million, between 2008 and 2011. In 1960 about 7.5 million children were born in 27 European countries.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/world/europe/germany-fights-population-drop.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1

      1. European countries are trying to increase their birth rate as several will soon have too many older people to be supported by the working population. Denmark’s is called “Doing it for Denmark” where they encourage people to take a holiday outside the country, as it’s been discovered that’s where most babies are conceived. Nothing like using statistics to inform public policy decisions! 🙂

        1. Given the already stagnating birth rates in Europe, I don’t know how Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker could have expected the Pope to call for population control…

        2. Which reminds me if the further point that traditional economies are basically big pyramid schemes and we know what happens to those, eventually.

    2. What’s particularly ridiculous is that many religionists claim that family planning and recreational sex are “mindless”, ” animalistic ” activities, wherreas breeding like rabbits is apparently a sign of superiority.

  12. Of COURSE the Vatican isn’t “down” with birth control:
    (1)if contraception is allowed, then people might start seeing sex as a form of recreation, and even enjoy it (as if they haven’t); we can’t have that, of course. Women are supposed to PAY for the enjoyment of sex: in years past, there have been Catholic obstetricians who refused go give women in labor any pain relief because of Genesis 3:16- “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you (which gives the go-ahead for all forms of oppression and misogyny, as well).
    (2) the church also needs a steady stream of new, gullible children to indoctrinate in their spurious, medieval belief system.

    1. The “rule over you” bit is a deliberate mistranslation of the original by the infamous misogynist (St) Jerome, and it’s not the only one he made to denigrate the status of women even further than the original. The Church is, of course, perfectly aware of this, but has never fixed it.

      1. Citation please Heather!

        The word used in Genesis is “mâshal” (מָשַׁל ) to the best of my knowledge, meaning to rule, have power, dominion or governing.

        I am more than prepared to bow to your knowledge, if you have evidence of alternative usages.

        Not that anyone should take such pronouncements in the babble seriously in any event.

        1. I always like to say, “If God wanted to write a book, He would have done a helluva better job than the Babble!”

          I heard this one years ago, as well: “If you make a list of all the bad things that God does in the Bible, and compare it to a list of all the bad things that Satan does, the Bible starts looking more and more like a book written by Satan ABOUT God!”

  15. The Pope, in a visit to Turin strongly critized what he called the major powers for not bombing the rail lines leading to the concentration camps, singling out Auschwitz. By the major powers, he must have meant the US and Britain.

    What was interesting was that he specifically included homosexuals among the victims of the Nazi regime.

    1. For the Pope to be criticizing anyone for anything during WWII. That is disgusting considering parts of the Catholic church practically joined the Nazi party.

    2. That impresses me, particularly considering the Church’s deliberately supportive role in the Holocaust and the previous but recent (and still?) pope who, in his younger years, was, I think, a part of that.

      1. The former Pope, Joe Ratzinger, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1944 at age 17 and assigned to an anti-aircraft unit. He was hardly much of a part of the Holocaust.

  16. Hi Charles,

    I suppose these are going to show up in my email for awhile. I subscribe to this blog for this and that. It’s a biology blog by a somewhat important geneticist, Gerry Coyne, who is also an outspoken atheist. Religion just gives him the hebbie-jeebies.

    I wouldn’t expect that a major statement by the Pope would reflect my worldview, so I’m not surprised, for example, that he’s still against birth control and downplays population growth. But I’m not about to make a big deal of it either. I’m just happy he’s said that we’ve got to change the way we relate to the earth, etc. And I surely hope Laudato Si has a strong effect on opinion and action worldwide.

    BB

    1. Hi back to ya Charles. Just a curious question for you…do you chew gum while you write?

  17. Every sperm is sacred,
    Every sperm is great.
    If a sperm is wasted,
    God gets quite irate!

  18. Although some have already commented, the world population is still increasing, but as prof. Noor shows in a slide at the recently finished “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution”, the rate is falling:
    http://yun.baidu.com/wap/shareview?&shareid=2806757370&uk=369385153&dir=%2Fmooc课程%2F遗传mkv&page=2&num=20&fsid=280091223627923&third=0&
    One click at (993.82KB) and download the pdf. At page 15, one graphic shows a declining rate growth with the following Tipping point: “The period of most rapid population growth is behind us. Since its peak 1965-1970, the growth rate has declined…”
    Others commented too about the decreasing in the numbers of catholics in South America and I can only comment better about Brazil. Here it happens too, but not because belivers are loosing the faith in christianity. Many are just changing to evangelicals denominations because there the pastors preaches much more about the theology of prosperity. Nowadays the only version of jesus myth that people want to buy os the one that will give “victory” and “prosperity” at some point of their lives… .

  19. “But seriously, as the world population grows exponentially,”

    In what sense is the world’s population growing exponentially? Recent growth is not well fitted by an exponential. Of course, you can find an exponential function that is tangent to the population curve at a given point, but that is true of any function.

    Sometimes I think “exponential” or “exponentially” is used as a scare word.

    1. And yet… being an Old Git I can observe that the world population has very nearly tripled in my lifetime.

      Depending on which figures you use:
      1950 2.5 billion
      2015 7.3 billion

      Should I still be living in 2060 (not too likely but not impossible) the world population is estimated to reach 10 billion, a growth of 4 times in just over 100 years, and more or less level out after that.

      Now tell me that population growth of 4 times in ‘living memory’ won’t cause greater problems.

    2. I have to point your own question back towards you…in what sense are you using exponentially? I think you’re confusing the coefficient with the exponent. 1.01^n is still exponential.

      Let’s take a contrived example where tomorrow our population starts linearly increasing by 10 billion people per year. In 100 years, we’ll have cracked 1 trillion people. Meanwhile, our exponential function with 1% growth per year will only have us at 18.9 billion. However, bump that up to 1000 years and our 1% grow rate is now acting on a population of 1.467e17 people growing at the rate of 1.467e15 (yes, that’s QUADRILLION) people per year. (Same paltry exponential 1% growth rate but far outpacing the seemingly immense linearly rate that at 10 billion people per year would put our population at less than 1/10,000 of what the 1% growth rate does.

      All exponential means here is that the population is growing year-over-year as a percentage of the whole population. I don’t know of any data that indicates otherwise. By the way, my 1% example is roughly the rate the world population actually is growing, which is indeed exponential.

      1. Perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly. I’m not arguing about whether the growth is exponential or not (indeed I mention the levelling off).

        I’m saying that the growth has increased 3 times in my memory and might increase 4 times in living memory. Whatever the shape of the curve that must have a huge effect and it’s one we have no prior experience of. The precautionary principle alone is enough to consider population control to be a sensible concern.

        Unlike the Pope who seems to think there are no limits to population growth and that small farming communities will be sufficient to support it.

        1. Oh yes, I understood your comment. My question was pointed at Paul D. about why he finds the use of “exponential” to be a scare word in the sense Jerry is using it. Your point about the population quadrupling in your lifetime would seem to fit the colloquial definition of exponential to me.

          Of course my example was merely demonstrating that even initially slow growth skyrockets if there’s any exponential component to it. Naturally, I don’t pretend to think that we’d reach 146 quadrillion people in another millennium. It’d level off well before that for myriad reasons. The important point here is even continuous positive linear growth gets us to carrying capacity (whatever that may be) eventually. Unless the Earth starts dynamically renewing resources faster than we use them, this is really a simple equation. The only question is how long does it take until we get there?

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