Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Guardian:

The Dalai Lama has endorsed the pope’s radical message on climate change and called on fellow religious leaders to “speak out about current affairs which affect the future of mankind”.

The spiritual Buddhist leader was speaking at Glastonbury festival on a panel discussing issues of global warming alongside Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor, and the Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

He praised the pope’s recent encyclical on climate change, which warned of the unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, adding that it was the duty of people to “say more – we have to make more of an effort, including demonstrations”.

The Dalai Lama, who will turn 80 next Monday, called for more pressure to be put on international governments to stop the burning of fossil fuels and mass deforestation and invest more in green energy sources.

He said: “The concept of war is outdated, but we do need to fight. Countries think about their own national interest rather than global interests and that needs to change because the environment is a global issue.

“It is not sufficient to just express views, we must set a timetable for change in the next two to four years.”

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:

TIME magazine website published today an exclusive article outlining the response of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Climate Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis Laudato Si’, presented this morning at the Vatican.

The article starts with the words of His All-Holiness as follows:

In a series of seminars organized between 1994 and 1998 on the island of Halki off the coast of Istanbul in Turkey, we drew attention to the close connection between ecology and economy. Both terms share the Greek root oikos, which signifies “home.” It therefore came as no surprise to us that our beloved brother Francis of Rome opens his encyclical, which is being released today in the New Synod Hall of the Vatican, with a reference to God’s creation as “our common home.”

His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew “has been the first one in the Christian world to draw the attention of the world community to the seriousness of the ecological problem and the duty of the Church to voice its concern and try to contribute with all the spiritual means at its disposal towards the protection of our natural environment,” said His Eminence Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, who represented the Ecumenical Patriarch at the presentation of the Pope’s Encyclical.

“The issuing of the Encyclical Laudato Si’ is, therefore, an occasion of great joy and satisfaction for the Orthodox,” said Metropolitan John.  “On behalf of them I should like to express our deep gratitude to His Holiness for raising his authoritative voice to draw the attention of the world to the urgent need to protect God’s creation from the damage we humans inflict on it with our behavior towards nature.”

He said the Encyclical comes at a “critical moment in human history” and will “undoubtedly have a worldwide effect on people’s consciousness.”

Hindu Declaration on Climate Change:

The Hindu tradition understands that man is not separate from nature, that we are linked by spiritual, psychological and physical bonds with the elements around us. Knowing that the Divine is present everywhereand in all things, Hindus strive to do no harm. We hold a deep reverence for life and an awareness that the great forces of nature—the earth, the water, the fire, the air and space—as well as all the various orders of life, including plants and trees, forests and animals, are bound to each other within life’s cosmic web.

Our beloved Earth, so touchingly looked upon as the Universal Mother, has nurtured mankind through

millions of years of growth and evolution. Now centuries of rapacious exploitation of the planet have caught

up with us, and a radical change in our relationship with nature is no longer an option. It is a matter of survival. We cannot continue to destroy nature without also destroying ourselves. The dire problems besetting

our world—war, disease, poverty and hunger—will all be magnified many fold by the predicted impacts of

climate change.