(LifeSiteNews) — In his new apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum, Pope Francis warns us that the end is near, both for “our suffering planet” and, by extension, for us. “[T]he world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he writes. “[I]t is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many persons.”
Continuing on through 73 laborious paragraphs, each darker than the last, Francis warns us that we are facing the apocalypse.
The Pope reserves special rancor for America, citing a U.N. report that claims “emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries.”
READ: Pope Francis calls for obligatory global ‘climate change’ policies in new document ‘Laudate Deum’
He concludes from this that “a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.”
The Pope’s cure for our “irresponsible Western lifestyle” is the creation of “global mechanisms… in order to consolidate… the protection of our common home. It is a matter of establishing global and effective rules that can permit ‘providing for’ this global safeguarding.”
Suggesting that the previous climate conferences lacked the authority to make and enforce its decisions, he goes on to propose “the development of a new procedure for decision-making and legitimizing those decisions.”
It pains me to say that, like his earlier encyclical, Laudato Si’, the Pope’s latest apocalyptic warning contains many errors of fact. But in this follow up exhortation, he goes even further, proposing a new system of global governance to supervise and control our access to and use of energy.
Such a system would necessarily enable a global tyranny of a uniquely vicious kind, in that it would sharply restrict the living standards and freedoms that ready access to cheap energy has given billions of people worldwide. It would, in the interest of energy “equity,” impose draconian restrictions on energy usage by people in the developed nations. Equally indefensibly, it would prevent the world’s poor from every reaching the level of prosperity enjoyed by Europeans and Americans today. Not to mention that the transition to “renewable” energy itself would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars.
It would wreak all this havoc in pursuit of a fantasy: a fantasy that man can not only predict, but also to an extent control, the future climate of the world. Ignore all of the flawed models touted by the U.N. and others (I’ll talk about those in a moment) and ask yourself how likely it is that we can accurately predict what the climate will be in a hundred years, given that we can’t even predict the weather more than two weeks out.
The scientific “consensus” about global warming is nothing more than an artifact of the billions of dollars in research grants that have been spent to achieve precisely this outcome. Scientists are not more ethical than the general public. In fact, the opposite is surely the case. As we learned from the COVID vaccine debacle, if you have enough money to throw around, you can bribe or coerce the scientific establishment into endorsing whatever it is you are selling, even if it is harmful to the public at large.
I believe that the climate models that certain scientists have produced – predicting rising temperatures due to increased carbon dioxide in atmosphere from fossil fuel use – are also driven by the money. Why else would they ignore a couple of factors that, if taken into account, would largely invalidate their findings?
As it happens, I have an advanced degree in biological oceanography, with minors in chemical, geological, and physical oceanography, so I know something about the oceans which cover 70 percent of the planet:
- The climate models do not property account for the fact that the oceans are the biggest carbon sinks on the planet. They store 20 times more carbon than land plants and soil combined, and a whopping 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. It absorbs carbon dioxideout of the atmosphere at an enormous rate, helping to curb rising CO2 levels and temperatures.
- The models also do not properly taken into account the cooling effectof clouds. To put it in the simplest possible terms, as the earth warms, the cloud cover increases, reflecting sunlight back into space. If the earth cools, cloud cover diminishes, allowing more sunlight in. This negative feedback loop helps to reduce temperature swings.
Both the atmosphere and the oceans are very complex systems, the complexity of which current climate models totally fail to capture.
Now I understand that, among scientific illiterates – which include most of our present crop of college graduates – climate anxiety is raging out of control. The climate cultists are desecrating priceless works of art, staging sit-ins (“insurrections”) in the Capitol, and gluing themselves to the pavement of airport runways and freeways. But why would the Pope feel compelled to venture into areas in which he has absolutely no competence, and then make such strong statements?
Far be it from me to tell Pope Francis how to “pope.” (Having come into the Church when John Paul II was alive, I will say that he was a pope who really did know how to pope.) But shouldn’t he be preaching Christ and Him crucified, rather than rewriting the Apocalypse as a climate horror story?
After all, whether the climate predictions are right, wrong, or greatly exaggerated, they address events that are far in the future. By the end of the century, most of those now alive will have long since met their maker and be enjoying eternal life – or eternal damnation. In other words, for most of us, the state of our souls is be a more pressing concern than the state of the planet.
The same Pope who apparently believes that Hell may be empty says that it will be hell on earth if we don’t have global energy equity – with everyone presumably limited to a certain number of kilowatts every month. As for me, I vastly prefer warnings about hellfire and brimstone – which is real – to overblown predictions of global warming and rising sea levels that may never materialize.
I also prefer to believe in God’s providence. Our Heavenly Father knew at the beginning of time how our needs and numbers would grow. Surely he gave us a planet that would provide for us as this happened, prepositioned with the resources, including fossil fuels, that would provide us with the energy we need to lengthen lifespans and raise living standards.
Humanity’s major climate challenge since the creation of Adam and Eve has not been warming at all, but cooling. Cooling so dramatic, in fact, that we call them “Ice Ages.” The Pleistocene – the current geologic age – has seen some sixteen ice ages to date.
In other words, humanity’s long-term problem is not global warming – which may or may not be happening – but global cooling.
Winter is coming.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics.
