Monckton: Me-too climate encyclical shows Papal contempt for the poor

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The Pope’s widely-touted me-too encyclical on climate and the environment repeats the error of his predecessor Urban VIII, who countenanced the house-arrest of Galileo for contending, correctly, that the Earth orbits the Sun. But the Pope doesn’t care.

Francis, no less absurdly than Urban VIII exactly 400 years ago, solipsistically accords to Man a centrality in the order of things that is not proving scientifically justifiable. The only thing we learn from history, as a wag once put it, is that we learn nothing from history. But the Pope doesn’t care.

On the climate, his scientifically illiterate encyclical gets every material climatological fact wrong. The Pontifical Academies should be ashamed of themselves for leading the Pope into error by excluding from preparatory discussions all scientists and all data questioning the climate-Communist party line they have inveigled him into adopting. But the Pope doesn’t care.

The encyclical says a strong scientific consensus finds recent warming mostly manmade, but only 0.3% of 11,944 climate papers published from 1991-2011 were even willing to go so far as to declare recent warming mostly manmade. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says the “consensus” reports significant warming; however, the surface has warmed since 1990 at well below half the then-predicted rate and has recently not been warming at all; the ocean, monitored reliably for only 11 years, is warming only at 1 degree in 430 years; and the air above the surface has not warmed at all for approaching 19 years. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says sea level is rising steadily, but sea level fell from 2003-2008. Over the 8-year life of the ENVISAT satellite, from 2004-2012, it rose at a rate equivalent to just over 1 inch a century. Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, the world’s leading expert on sea level says it will rise by 2 plus or minus 4 inches this century. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says polar ice-caps are melting, but thanks to a near-record high sea ice extent in the Antarctic the global extent of sea ice has barely changed in the past 35 years. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says rapid warming and consequent destruction of ecosystems may occur this century. Yet a growing body of scientific papers, entirely and culpably unmentioned in the encyclical, suggests the rate of warming will be slow, harmless and beneficial. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It childishly refers to carbon dioxide as “pollution”, when CO2 is in fact a trace gas essential to all life on Earth. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says rising CO2 will “increase the acidity of the oceans”, when that is impossible because the oceans are overwhelmingly buffered against acidity. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It says damage to the marine food chain will result from the increasing “acidity” of the oceans, but the oceans are pronouncedly alkaline and, in any event, estuarial studies show calcifying organisms such as corals thriving even along coasts where rainwater that is pronouncedly acid pours into the sea. The corals survived a 1000-year period 55 million years ago when the entire ocean actually became acid. But the Pope doesn’t care.

Each of these eight errors points strongly in the direction of needless alarm. The probability that all eight errors would have fallen in the same direction by inadvertence is less than 1 in 250. But the Pope doesn’t care.

It is not the business of the Holy See to make pronouncements on questions of science. The Pope may demand assent from the faithful on matters of faith and morals, but not on matters of science. No Catholic is in any way bound by this encyclical’s inaccurate and prejudiced presentation of climatology. But the Pope doesn’t care.

The Pontifical Academies were made aware of the true science, but wilfully suppressed it and chose to condemn those of us who went to Rome six weeks ago to present it. The encyclical acknowledges that the debate was raging as the encyclical was being prepared. However, in petulantly, inaccurately and uncharitably describing us as motivated by profit (none of us was paid to go to Rome, and all of us gave scientific presentations that would have led any fair-minded observer to appreciate that there are two sides to the climate story), this shoddy encyclical demeans the papacy, discounts its message and discredits the messenger. But the Pope doesn’t care.

Worse, it reveals that at long last the Forces of Darkness have captured the Holy See itself. The walls of the Vatican, which stood firm against Hitler and Stalin, have crumbled in the face of the latest form of totalitarianism: pietistic environmental extremism. But the Pope doesn’t care.

Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister and founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, one of the very few voices of sanity on the climate question in Britain, gave a fascinating address at Moses Znaimer’s Ideacity three-day event in Toronto last week. He ended with the word “wicked”. The decision by the global governing class, now joined by the me-too Pope, to ignore the growing body of scientific data that, even after the extremists have tampered with it, still persists in showing far less of a climate problem than they had predicted is indeed wicked. But the Pope doesn’t care.
The taxes and regulations for which the Pope, descending from the throne of impartiality, has become a mere bleating propagandist will harm the poor even more than anyone else. But the Pope doesn’t care.

Earlier this year, researchers at Stanford University studied the economic impacts of a carbon tax such as that proposed by Senators Sanders and Boxer for the United States. Their conclusion was that households in the lowest income group would pay more than twice as large a share of their income than households in the top 10%. A tax on energy is a poll tax on the poorest. But the Pope doesn’t care.

The real reason for the climate scare is set out all too clearly in the draft Treaty of Paris that was briefly available at the website of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change but now seems to have disappeared. World government is coming. This December, Mr Obama and many other world “leaders” will go to France to grandstand as they put their signatures on a document that will create a world “governing body” – in all but name an unelected, global, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. But the Pope doesn’t care.

The new global government will preside over a monstrous acceleration of what is already the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history. But the Pope doesn’t care.

His only job is to care. But he doesn’t care. History will remember him no more kindly than it remembered Pope Urban VIII. For the world will continue not to warm at anything like the rate predicted by the gaggle of extremist, atheist pseudo-scientists gathered over the past two years by the Pontifical Academy of Communists.

It will not be long before even the extremists for whom the Pope is now a bunco-booth caller are forced to concede that the world has not warmed, is not warming and will not warm at anything like the rate they predicted. It will be no less clear that this Pope was wrong than that his predecessor was wrong. But the Pope doesn’t care.

If you are poor, you no longer have an advocate at the Holy See. For the Pope doesn’t care.