Polluting the Earth is now a mortal sin, according to the Vatican. And you thought I was being an alarmist when I wrote Hell and High Water. This is, I suppose, the ultimate form of waste-to-energy incineration:

The original Italian interview with Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary (!) which is in charge of confession, is here. Fortunately, Bloomberg has made an English cheat sheet for the seven new mortal sins:

1. ‘Bioethical’ violations such as birth control
2. Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

I’m afraid Americans in heaven will be as rare as … as rare as … pretty much every one else in the industrialized world.

I am interested in your thoughts on the appropriate punishment for polluters. Here are “The original offences and their punishments“:

1. Pride: Broken on the wheel
2. Envy: Put in freezing water
3. Gluttony: Forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
4. Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone
5. Anger: Dismembered alive
6. Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
7. Sloth: Thrown in snake pits

Assuming there is some threshold below which one’s pollution isn’t sinful, then I’d be okay with combining, in succession, the punishments for gluttony, pride, envy, and and greed. If there isn’t a threshold, then I’m thinking … heck, what am I worrying for — I’m not Catholic (don’t be fooled by my last name — it was shortened from Romanoff).

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Related Posts:

• An introduction to the core climate solutions
• Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution
• Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly

It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and sleeping. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something is happening in the world….

The 44th President, groggily: “Hello?”

Voice: “Mr(s) President, we have a situation.”

President: “Terrorists?”

Voice: “No, it’s the climate again. Another series of tornadoes has struck Manhattan. There’s massive damage and loss of life and a complete power outage.”

President: “Well, call FEMA.”

Voice: “I’m afraid FEMA is fully deployed on the Gulf Coast responding to Katrina II.”

President: “What about the National Guard?”

Voice: “Most of them are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who are still in country have been deployed to fight the massive outbreak of wildfires in the West.”

President: “We’d better call the Cabinet together…”

Voice: “That’s going to be a problem, too, Mr(s) President. The Secretary of Energy is in Atlanta trying to figure out how to get power restored in the southeast, now that there’s too little water to cool the region’s nuclear reactors. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is in Florida, working with the Governor on the malaria outbreak. It’s the latest epidemic since the disease vectors began moving in.”

President: “What about the locals. Can’t they handle it?”

Voice: “Well, as you know, federal grants for state and local preparedness have been declining for years. Local hospitals and public officials simply don’t have adequate resources.”

President: “All right. Where’s the rest of the Cabinet?”

Voice: “The Secretary of Agriculture is in Africa working with the United Nations on the famine and the Secretary of Defense is overseeing the defense of our military bases. At last report, they’re still managing to hold off the climate refugees trying to overrun our bases for food and water.”

President: “Are you telling me that we’re unprepared for this?”

Voice: “I’m afraid that’s correct, Mr(s) President. We’ve seen it coming for years, but it just hasn’t been our highest priority.”

* * *

Hillary Clinton’s “red telephone” ad apparently was successful in raising the national security fear factor just before the recent primaries. But two important elements were missing from the script.

First, we never heard what the crisis was. Second, since we didn’t know the nature of the crisis, we couldn’t judge whether any of the three viable presidential candidates is qualified to respond. There’s a good chance that in the years ahead, that 3 a.m. phone call will alert the President to a national security threat unlike those of the past — a clear and present danger linked to global climate change.

If this sounds like Chicken Little, consider these warnings from people who should know:

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What name can we possibly use for the people who are working feverishly to convince the public to ignore the broad scientific understanding of global warming and to delay taking serious action — action needed to avert a very grim fate for our children and their children and so on?

I suspect future generations will call them “climate destroyers” or worse — since if we actually (continue to) listen to them, that pretty much ensures carbon dioxide concentrations will hit catastrophic levels, 700 to 1000, this century, as explained in Part II. But what should we call these people in the meantime, while we still have time to ignore them and save the climate?

In this post I will explain why “skeptics” is certainly the wrong term, discuss why the current favorite among advocates (including me) — “deniers” — doesn’t work (except maybe in headlines), and offer my new alternative. [Tomorrow I'll give you the reaction of a genuine skeptic to the new alternative.] For now let’s call them “delayers,” since that this their primary, unifying goal — delaying action. As the NYT‘s Revkin explained about the recent skeptic denier delayer conference in New York, “The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases.” What unites these people is their desire to delay or stop action to cut GHGs, not any one particular view on the climate.

THEY AREN’T SKEPTICAL — THEIR MINDS ARE MADE UP

The traditional or mainstream media still call them “skeptics,” as in this NYT headline. As long as they do so they trivialize the problem and render the word “skeptic” devoid of meaning.

All scientists are skeptics. Hence the motto of the Royal Society of London, one of the world’s oldest scientific academies (founded in 1660), Nullius in verba: “Take nobody’s word.” Indeed, as Wikipedia explains in its entry on “Skepticism“:

A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation. The scientific method details the specific process by which this investigation of reality is conducted. Considering the rigor of the scientific method, science itself may simply be thought of as an organized form of skepticism. This does not mean that the scientific skeptic is necessarily a scientist who conducts live experiments (though this may be the case), but that the skeptic generally accepts claims that are in his/her view likely to be true based on testable hypotheses and critical thinking.

Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Delayers do. Skeptics believe in science, in well-tested theories backed up by real-world observations, but delayers do not.

My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known “skeptics.” I have debated Lomborg and he is very well versed in the science — he just chooses not to believe most of it. Indeed, if the overwhelming evidence of the last four years doesn’t convince someone, then they simply aren’t open to scientific reasoning, the basis of true skepticism.

The media — and everyone else — should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity’s self-destruction more likely.

THEY AREN’T ANYTHING LIKE HOLOCAUST DENIERS

I — and many if not most other advocates for action — have used the term “deniers” or “denialists” for these people. But the more I think about it, and the more comments I read from delayers, the more I realize that the term doesn’t work, especially as a broad brush.

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