Last Call

The Vatican is urging the world's countries to act on climate change.  Granted, the Catholic Church has its own reasons to sell the end days, but at least they aren't as pigheadedly Luddite as our own Republican Party is.

The Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences has just released a strongly worded report (PDF) on global climate change demanding in the strongest possible language that humans act decisively to avert a coming crisis. “We call on all people and nations to recognize the serious and potentially reversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants," says the report. "If we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us.”

The report was not authored by the Pontifical Academy itself; rather, the Vatican convened a group of scientists with relevant experience, along with a few Nobel Prize winners. The group's focus was on increasing evidence of glacier retreat, and the report ended up focused on its causes. The group's co-chair, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, used a somewhat controversial name for the "man-made" geologic era in which we are now living: the "Anthropocene."

Best part?

It concludes: "The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish."

Yeah well, the way things are going right now, we're going to need a hell of a lot more than wishing to save this rock from ourselves.