VATICAN CITY – The Catholic Church and sound science just don’t seem to mix. Galileo was put under house arrest for drawing inappropriate theological conclusions from Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than vice versa.
Seven of the ten cardinals who sat in judgment over him agreed to a shoddy deal by which Galileo was not required to recant his actually daft theological notions if instead he was willing to pretend that the Sun goes around the Earth.
This 70 percent consensus, as today’s climate extremists would call it, reckoned that if Galileo were to deny that the Earth goes around the Sun then his notion that perhaps the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection were not of cosmic centrality would have no physical basis.
The skeptical 30 percent of the cardinals realized that any such deal would expose the Church to the justifiable scorn of subsequent generations, for it was already well established that Copernicus was right. The skeptics were as correct and perceptive then as they are now.
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for suggesting there might be life on other planets. Well, he may or may not have been right about that, but suppressing the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by executing its advocates suggests – to put it mildly – a deficiency of terrestrial intelligence.
Pope Francis now proposes to join the Church’s anti-science club. Cardinal Turkson of Ghana has already completed the draft of a bed-wetting encyclical letter in which the pope will – unless wiser counsels prevail at the last minute – commit the Church to the latest fashionable lunacy: catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC, for short).
St. Francis of Assisi, after whom the pope named himself, would be horrified. I’m no saint, but I’m horrified, too. That is why I am in Rome with a distinguished delegation of scientists and theologians to try to talk some sense into the incurious curia before it again takes the wrong side on a scientific question when it should really take no side at all.
By now, regular readers of this column will know there has been no global warming for 18 years 4 months; that the ocean has been warming at a rate equivalent to 0.2 C° per century; that global sea ice reached a satellite-era maximum as recently as September last year; that we are now in the longest period without a major hurricane landfall in the United States; that the area of the globe under drought has been falling for 30 years; that annual rainfall in the U.K., which has the world’s longest record, has increased by just 2 inches in a quarter of a millennium; that Antarctica has not warmed in the satellite era; that the Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 square kilometers as vegetation has spread from its margins; that the net primary productivity of plants has grown by 2 percent per decade thanks to CO2 fertilization; and that deaths from extreme weather are at an all-time low.
Yet in April last year there was a meeting of the world’s most prominent climate-Communist scientists at – of all places – the Vatican. Not a single skeptical scientist was invited to the joint session of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and of Social Sciences at which the pope was persuaded (without much difficulty, by all accounts) to adopt the hard-left political stance on the climate question.
The Holy See was the first nation to establish a diplomatic corps of permanent representatives in other nations. It values its ability to punch well above its tiny demographic weight on the world stage. And it has noticed – who could not? – that very nearly every government worldwide has fallen for the climate nonsense because it is politically expedient, socially convenient and, above all, financially profitable.
In today’s supra-national governing entities, from the U.N. and the World Bank to the EU, anyone who wants to be taken seriously has to swallow and then regurgitate the climate nonsense or be treated as anathema.
The Holy See longs to belong. It is this, above all, that has persuaded Pope Francis’ advisers to allow him to follow what are anyway his own political instincts and come out strongly in favor of the climate-Communist position.
Will the forthcoming encyclical make any difference to the climate debate? No, it won’t. The world’s governments favor world government and will vote for it at this December’s Paris climate summit, using the climate as an excuse. The Vatican’s forthcoming support for this nonsense comes far too late to have any effect on what is already a done deal.
Pope Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict, was far more cautious. He accepted that it is our duty not to cause undue harm to the life around us, but he also condemned the bullying of climate skeptics and said firmly that both sides of the debate should be heard.
The real damage done by Cardinal Turkson’s draft, if it survives unscathed until publication, will be to the Church itself. Science and religion are both seeking for the truth, but it is no more the province of religion to pronounce ex cathedra on scientific questions than it is the province of scientists to pronounce on religious questions.
For those of us who participate in the scientific debate about man’s rather small effect on the climate, the most startling aspect of the debate is the sheer, monumental stupidity of the extreme claims made with such extreme over-confidence by the extremely under-qualified and under-intelligent.
History is going to look back on the climate-change episode as a very strange intellectual aberration. Pope Francis, if he now takes the wrong side rather than allowing those of us who are doing the scientific research to slug it out among ourselves, will have done no less harm to the Church than the undistinguished 70 percent consensus among the 10 cardinals who tried Galileo.
What line should he take? The correct course would be to speak out against the crippling environmental damage being caused by windmills, and by the acid pollution in extracting the neodymium for electric-car batteries from the ore.
Above all, the pope should speak up for the poor. The thermo-fascists have craftily suggested that the poor will suffer the most from climate change. In fact, they will certainly suffer most from the staggering cost of trying to prevent it – a cost which, even if it were going to be as bad as the extremists say, would be 100 times greater than the cost of letting it happen and adapting to it.
Let Pope Francis speak up for the poor, then. That means opposing the climate extremists, as his predecessor did, and leaving the scientists to get on with the science.
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