New material won’t be added to this blog until Autumn. You are invited to explore the six-years-worth of content already published here – as well as my two books.

Summer, which is too fleeting in my part of the world, has arrived. The poppies are in bloom, the beach beckons, and my soul is in need of renewal. We all have personal lives and the past few months of mine have included an automobile accident (we were rear-ended, but kept safe by our extremely well-engineered car), an unrelated ankle injury, distressing family melodrama, and a great deal of long distance driving.

I have long thought that journalists should take regular time-outs in order to regain perspective, and the thing about writing an unpaid blog is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to do so. So farewell, dear reader, until we meet again.

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Somewhere there’s a photo of me as a child in a white dress, white gloves, and a lace veil, holding a gilt-edged prayerbook. The occasion was my Roman Catholic First Communion. Back then I believed in a vengeful God who punishes disobedience. But, much like Richard Tol, my family was estranged from the Church. The reason for this was that, after my impoverished, poorly educated grandparents had brought their tenth child into the world they approached their parish priest, advising him that henceforth they were going to begin practicing birth control. That man slammed the church door in their face, declaring he’d never grant them absolution from such a sin. They didn’t return.

For my entire adult life I’ve rejected the Church’s position on numerous issues, including celibacy, birth control, masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion. I would hope that anyone who expects me to be persuaded by the Church’s climate views has been conscientiously heeding it on those other matters.

Here are four sensible reactions to the Pope’s recent climate document:

• The Pope on Climate
• What Pope Francis should do to really help the poor
• Pope Francis’s Relentless Pessimism…
• Pope Francis’s Vow of Poverty – for All

And a bit of comic relief:

click to see Ken Green’s bio

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