ROME, Italy, August 10, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — Italian philosopher Luca Possati used a front page op-ed in the Aug. 6 L'Osservatore Romano – the Vatican's official newspaper – to warn that climate change must be addressed now before it is too late.
Possati based his piece on the latest report from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming 2015 was the warmest year on record. Possati lumped landslides and floods (caused by heavy rains) with droughts and record heat in select countries to call for a solution to the world’s social problems.
“Climate is not an isolated issue and cannot be resolved in an isolated manner, as if it were something untied compared to other major crises that mark our time, particularly the immigration crisis,” Possati insisted. He called for an unspecified solution encompassing “global warming, poverty, inequality and societal attitudes.” Possati closes with the ominous phrase: “Now or never.”
One problem with Possati’s piece is that the NASA-NOAA claim could be challenged on several grounds. Retired NASA scientist Roy Spencer notes that the report is based on land temperatures but 70 percent of the earth is ocean. Also, 2015 was “the third warmest year in the satellite record [which goes back only until 1979] behind 1998 … and 2010,” Spencer said. The Climate Depot website notes that regardless of which year is warmest, over the past 20 years the temperatures are so close that the real picture they present is one of stasis. It also notes that NASA-NOAA made the same claim about 2014 being the warmest but had to retract it.
And in Forbes Magazine this week, James Taylor, the head of the Spark of Freedom Foundation, comments that the NASA-NOAA claim about 2015 being the warmest on record is spurious because the record goes back only to the 1800s while “scientists measuring oxygen isotopes from ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica (among other methods) report that temperatures were significantly warmer than today for most of the past 10,000 years.”
Why is Taylor’s freedom group targeting the climate change shibboleth? The National Post’s Peter Foster provides an answer in his column. After the collapse of the Soviet Union discredited socialism, Foster says its adherents have migrated into the environmental movement, justifying their undying goal of government control over the economy and individual action with calls like Posatti’s for suppression of fossil fuel use combined with wealth redistribution. “Radical socialism has far from disappeared. It has simply gone green,” Foster writes.