“As with most natural disasters, climate-related emergencies cause more suffering and personal loss on those who live in poverty,” Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, told members of the World Health Assembly in Geneva on May 21. He said preventing or mitigating the impact of climate change on those who are most vulnerable “will require more than economic allocations and policy-setting.” The world must promote a different culture guided by the values of compassion, respect, solidarity and a commitment to justice, he said. Archbishop Zimowski said climate change will affect the air, water and food supplies people depend on and aggravate “health problems that already exist,” including climate-related diseases. The world’s poor are the most vulnerable to climate change, he said, because they are the ones “who cannot afford protective structures to shield them from extreme forces of nature and who have little or no resources to arrange for temporary shelter and other basic necessities once their homes have been severely damaged or totally destroyed.”
Help for Victims Of Climate Change
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Richard Savage
9 years 11 months ago
I'm becomming very tired of ignorant theologians telling me that climate change affects the poor the most. Of course; the people who died in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were the people who didn't have automobiles or money to leave. The real horror story was Bangladesh in 1972, when hundreds of thousands died in a cyclone storm surge.
A little humility is in order: WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO CHANGE THE CLIMATE. WE CAN'T EVEN FORECAST THE CLIMATE. WE CAN'T EVEN FORECAST THE WEATHER BEYOND A WEEK, WHICH IS A SIMPLER PROBLEM.
What we can do is lift people out of poverty, so they have the resources to deal with storms and other natural events. As even archbishops should remember, God sends His rain on the just and the unjust. The just, however, can afford an umbrella.
Millions of Chinese and Indians - mostly non-Christian - have been lifted OUT of poverty by providing them cheap, on-grid electricity. Millions of Christian Africans remain in poverty because of idiots like Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski.
I hope the Editors will forward my remarks to the Archbishop, along with the facts: THERE HASN'T BEEN ANY GLOBAL WARMING FOR MORE THAN 16 YEARS. THERE HASN'T BEEN ANY INCREASE OF SEVERE WEATHER EITHER. CARBON DIOXIDE ISN'T A "POLLUTANT' AND IT DOESN'T CONTROL THE CLIMATE.
Richard C. Savage
Ph.D., Meteorology
Grad minor E.E.
Dissertation research: radiative transfer ("greenhouse effect")
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