In matters of Catholic dogma the Holy Father in Rome is deemed infallible, but when it comes to more earthly matters surrounding climate change, Pope Francis is mostly talking through his Pontifical Posterior. At one point, Francis suggests humans emitting carbon dioxide are causing “seaquakes”, while his inner Guardian soul is on clear display with his claim that the world is “collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point”.
Pope Francis’s latest comments on climate change are contained in an ‘Apostolic Exhortation’ titled Laudate Deum. It is a follow up to an earlier doom-ridden encyclical letter in 2015 when he referred to CO2– a gas the Supreme Pontiff emits with every breath – as highly polluting. The latest letter is full of emotional errors, unsubstantiated scientific opinions and a cold condescension for the growing number of scientists who dispute the political narrative of a climate emergency. At one point these scientists are said to bring up “allegedly solid scientific facts”.
Francis is on very shaky ground with his contention that humans somehow cause submarine earthquakes. Even more nonsensical is his suggestion that the human-caused seaquakes are leading to communities being swept away. As the Daily Sceptic recently noted, the Holy Grail of climate alarmism is to link earthquakes to humans driving their cars. Sadly to date the suggestion is only to be found at the whacky end of climate fearmongering. A recent article in the Conversation noted “evidence” that the loss of surface ice in Scandinavia triggered numerous earthquake events around 7,000-11,000 years ago. Alas, further inquiry showed that the only tectonic plate action was to be found in the circuit boards of a researcher’s computer. Seaquakes would appear to be a new field of climate alarm, suggesting Francis is well ahead of the game on this one.
The Pope is also leading the pack with his contention that melting of the continental ice sheets at the poles will not be reversed for hundreds of years. What melting of the ice sheet in Antarctica Francis is referring to is not immediately clear. Alarmists usually find Antarctica a difficult neighbourhood to run the Thermogeddon narrative. According to Singh and Polvani, warming has been “almost non-existent” for at least 70 years. NASA reports the ice loss is 0.0005% a year. In 2021, the South Pole recorded its coldest winter since records began in 1957. Meanwhile in the Arctic, a small, little publicised, cyclical recovery in sea ice has been underway for over a decade.
At one point in his letter, Francis makes the claim that it is “verifiable that specific climate changes provoked by humanity are notably heightening the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense”. Quite how it is possible to verify something that is only probable is not immediately clear, but it seems Francis is referring to the computer model-driven pseudoscience of weather attribution that has grown up in recent years. In fact its popularity is partly in response to the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently holding back from directly linking individual weather events to longer term changes in the climate.
Read More: Earthquakes Blamed on Humans in New Climate Alarm Letter from Pope Francis
