A Climate of Pessimism at the Vatican

Ross Clark in The Spectator reckons that Pope Francis has gone ‘full Greta’ over his recent document Laudate Deum, which he presented to the current and ongoing Synod of Synodality in Rome. He could well be right.

Popes issue several types of documents with different levels of authority, including Encyclicals, Apostolic Exhortations and Papal Bulls. Laudate Deum (an Apostolic Exhortation) breaks new ground as a piece of Papal bullshit.

‘Laudate Deum’, of course, means ‘praise God’. But poor old God hardly gets a mention. Mind you, what the exhortation lacks in theology is amply compensated by comedy.

The document is addressed to ‘all people of goodwill on the climate crisis’. So, from the outset, Pope Francis shows he has fallen for the climate crisis scam. To push home his point he refers to our ‘suffering planet’, how ‘the world in which we live is collapsing’ (how exactly can a world ‘collapse’?) and insists we are ‘nearing breaking point.’ He also ascribes without question to the theory of anthropogenic climate change; it’s all our fault.

He makes the usual conflation of fluctuating weather patterns with catastrophic climate change, and states that ‘probably in a few years many populations will have to move their homes because of these facts.’ The problem is that, up to this point in the document, he has referred only to opinions and not to any facts.

And on it goes…

Francis says ‘there are those who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries. As usual, it would seem that everything is the fault of the poor.’ Really? Is anyone blaming the poor? I don’t see Greta in Africa or India berating the poor there. Her shtick involves turning up in rich developed countries, berating us for being so successful. Pardon us, Greta, for managing to feed, house and transport our populations. Francis’s reference to ‘mutilating women’, abhorrent as that is, seems gratuitous. Does he read these things over again?

But then Pope Greta returns with ‘Yet the reality is that a low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50% of the total world population, and that per capita emissions of the richer countries are much greater than those of the poorer ones. How can we forget that Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people, is responsible for a minimal portion of historic emissions?’ If that’s the case Frankie boy, then how come so many people are moving from these paradisical low emission zones to our polluted hellhole?

The extraordinary and unsubstantiated claim is made that ‘millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels droughts and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift.’ If that is true, then he clearly has not been informed how many people will lose their jobs if we persist in our pursuit of net zero policies.

Interspersed with the papal rhetoric are ‘fact’ packed sections such as, with reference to carbon dioxide emissions ‘they hit a historic high – 400 parts per million – until arriving at 423 parts per million in June 2023. More than 42% of total net emissions since the year 1850 were produced after 1990.’ In some places, whole paragraphs are dedicated to trying to blind the reader with science. Popes are pretty bright guys, but it is doubtful if Francis has the time or the expertise to assimilate such detailed knowledge and to incorporate it into the document. In places, the responsibility for writing the exhortation must have been handed over to ‘expert’ adherents to the climate crisis agenda. In any case, the fuss about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be misguided, and some climate scientists say that its effect on global temperature is exaggerated.

Apparently, the temperature rise in the past fifty years is ‘greater than any time over the past two thousand years.’ There are methodological problems with historic and, especially, prehistoric measures of global temperatures, and at least one scientist has been known to fill in the gaps with what he assumed were the correct values (a less kind person than me would say he made them up). There are also credible explanations why the measurement of temperature in the past two centuries is flawed. More recently, claims of record temperatures during heatwaves have been contested. It transpires that these readings are taken on airfields and the sudden spikes in temperature, so beloved of the mainstream media, are explicable by aircraft movement, quite a common phenomenon at airfields.

‘The overwhelming majority of scientists’ agree that global temperatures are related to greenhouse gas emissions according to Francis. So that must be OK then; majorities are always right. He must know that the majority of people in the United Kingdom do not go to church; they must be right too.

Having gone ‘full Greta’, Francis then goes ‘full Karl (Marx)’ with: ‘Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time.’ Words fail me, and we are only at page four of an eighteen page document. Laudate Deum? La de da!

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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