It is rather cynical but also rather accurate to note that people like being warm in winter, and the Catholic Church is not going to make environmentalism their core mission. They already have a core mission, it involves human souls.

The environmentalists have faced stiff resistance in my life time not because anyone likes coal or oil, but because there were no alternatives. It isn't like the Catholics have ever had a point of doctrine like "and yea, your electricity shall only be sourced from fuels that are greater than 60% carbon by mass, for the atomic number 6 is especially holy!". They already have a longer term time horizon than most nations.

I feel like increasing the warmth to the point where large mammals cant live evokes another warm place Catholics generally want to avoid.

> Catholic Church is not going to make environmentalism their core mission

Being a good steward of nature is and has been a very important part of Catholic doctrine for a very long time.

Yet here we are, how does this improve the situation? I hold a cynical view as to the influence religion has on this particular subject as well.

I view religion as a large corporation, they have finally realized the long term impact of CC will be bad for business. Just like corporate BODs they are increasingly asking management to put forth a climate strategy. And investment firms that are moving their portfolio away from fossil fuel, it’s just modern corporate policy to have a stance that protects shareholder value in the long term. But really it’s just something to point to when asked “what are you doing about the climate?”

A bit of a rant there, but to reiterate, I don’t see how this influences action in a meaningful way. I’m glad they are doing it, it’s better than not.

Also, the Pope was not a scientist in my registers. Maybe it’s a match because climate change involves more “belief” than science, and they’re both about ideology adherence?

Maybe the ideological match is that this pope seems very fond of the idea that every human is equal, to the point one should not be measured by how much they work or how peaceful they are. And therefore, countries which have already implemented good things for climate change such as regulating their population and reaching lower density, should not, according to this pope, benefit from any permit to collectively consume as much as a dense country, which means that grossly overpopulated countries must not perform larger efforts than the West, and which also means that the country who grossly overpopulates itself is still bound to win the power balance. The West man holds, in this pope’s ideology, a very sour place anyway, he is practically the epitome of the current progressist ideology.

By "the current progressist ideology," are you referring to the ideology of, as the saying goes, "Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic" people? Or is this an ideology held by farmers in India or chemical plant workers in Lebanon or automotive plant workers in the Philippines?

If the former, I would say the Western man holds a pretty powerful place in this Pope's ideology.

Climate change involves more belief than science?

Well, do you “believe in science”? or are you persuaded after reading thousands of boring papers? which contradict each other? Philosophically, if you have an opinion, then it’s not science. More pragmatically, if science converges with an ideology, then the probability is high that both the researchers and the filtering networks have enough bias to invert the results to match the ideology.

Which, you know, we’re seeing that on the 3 main topics of our lives currently (feminism, racism and covid), so it’s not like it never happened.

Science is a methodology, not a destination. So of course your opinion is not science, but it can align with the current state of scientific findigs, or not. In the case of climate change, my opinion aligns with the current state of science. I would rather not believe in it, because the implications of climate change are rather unpleasant. I also do not think e.g. Margaret Thatcher was a strong believer of whatever ideology are you talking about, but she tought climate change is real enough, and that was 30 years ago.

In the last 15 or so years I have read hundreds (probably well over 1000) science papers about various topics. Those in climate change seem to me to be scientific enough compared with other fields.

Also racism and feminism are very far from main topics of my life, maybe because I am from a different part of the world and also left most social networks. But the climate change seems to be still happening around here.