On the strongest of moral grounds, the Church ought to be vigorously outspoken in opposition to the indoctrination and exploitation of children for political ends.
Yet when the Pope recently met a 16-year-old climate-fanatic schoolgirl he failed to express dismay that her teachers, in common with many at State schools throughout the West, had numbed her mind with relentless, half-baked, totalitarian propaganda about the imagined (and imaginary) evils of global warming and the supposed need to Save The Planet by destroying capitalism.
Instead, His Holiness was delighted to find a supporter for his own extremist opinions on the subject. The four pages on global warming in his mawkish encyclical ‘Laudato Si’ are littered with elementary scientific errors – errors in which he wilfully persisted even after the Holy See had been given the clearest of evidence, before publication, that his assertions were justified neither by scientific theory nor by empirical data.
The Pope is not alone in fawning upon the indoctrinated, custard-faced, mantra-shrieking, teenage mutant ninja enviro-zombies who lack sufficient scientific knowledge to know how much warming to expect or whether somewhat warmer weather would be a good thing or a bad. The children are treated by the totalitarian news media with head-banging, adulatory deference, as though they were Nobel-prizewinning global authorities on everything from atmospheric climatology to mitigation economics.
As Pope Benedict wisely said, it is not the Church’s business to issue solemn pronunciamenti on the scientific aspects of questions such as global warming. Instead, he said, the role of the Church is to speak out in favour of open scientific debate on this and suchlike questions, and, in particular, to ensure that neither side of the debate is stifled, as debate on global warming is strangled by the many lavishly-paid rent-seekers in government and the news media.
This is not the place to review either the science or the economics of global warming. Suffice it to say, in passing, that the notion of warming fast enough and great enough to cause net harm is rooted in a single, elementary, catastrophic error of physics that arose when climatologists borrowed the mathematics of feedback from control theory, a branch of engineering physics.
They misunderstood feedback, misdefined it, misapplied the theory and ended up inadvertently multiplying their midrange global-warming predictions by three. At a vital point in their calculations, they had neglected to take account of the fact that the Sun is shining.
The climatologists did not realize their mistake because they were borrowing from a scientific discipline that was not their own. The control theorists from whom they had borrowed did not realize the mistake either, because they did not know what the climatologists had done with the mathematics they had borrowed. For decades, the error fell between two stools and went unnoticed.
That error, and that alone, is the reason why teachers in State schools throughout the West are foolishly terrifying innocent schoolchildren with the global-warming bugaboo.
Once the error is corrected – and a scientific paper by me and my distinguished colleagues has just been submitted to a top-five learned journal of climatology for peer review to make the correction –there will be far too little global warming to cause net harm.
Instead, the extra carbon dioxide in the air will double the yield of many staple crops by what plant biologists call CO2 fertilization. What is more, according to research conducted by the European Commission, even very much warmer weather will save more people who would have died in cold snaps than those who may die in rather more frequent heatwaves.
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It is precisely because your average Pope or prelate lacks the scientific knowledge or credibility to assess questions such as global warming competently that the Church should keep holy silence on scientific question such as this.
Instead, it should speak out for those scientists whom the grim, pietistic, Marxist academic establishment victimizes when they dare to ask questions about what we are told, falsely, is a Chicken-Little “scientific consensus” to the effect that the sky is falling.
Just a few days ago, on 17 counts, a court in Queensland found that a soi-disant “university” had unjustifiably harassed, silenced and dismissed Dr Peter Ridd, an expert on coral reefs, for the supposed crime of having stated that the quality of scientific research falsely suggesting that global warming was killing the corals had not been properly verified.
Dr Ridd could not afford to defend himself against his university’s misconduct. However, thanks to the energetic assistance of Jennifer Mahorasey, a climate blogger, he was able to raise enough funds from devotees of true science worldwide to take on the big battalions of Marxademe and win outright.
And what did the Church in Queensland have to say about the “university’s” long and relentless campaign calculated to suppress Dr Ridd’s freedom of academic thought, research and expression? As far as I can discover, it said precisely nothing, even though the “university” had inflicted upon Dr Ridd an illegal gagging order so fierce that he had not even been permitted to tell his wife about it.
Not long ago Dr Willie Soon, an award-winning solar astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian observatory, was threatened with dismissal because he had co-authored with me a paper published in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences explaining why global warming would not be as bad as had been feared. I had to intervene with the Chief Justice of the United States as chairman ex officio of the Smithsonian’s trustees, and to gather support from several hundred eminent professors and doctors of science throughout the world, to get the ghastly observatory director off Dr Soon’s back. Again, the Church had nothing to say.
On a growing range of subjects, the sullen totalitarians who have captured the universities of the West will brook no dissent. From now on, then, the Church must cease to parrot the totalitarians’ Party Line on climate or on anything else. She must stop acting as though climate-Communist babes and sucklings were learned scientists. Instead, she must speak out against those academic kommissars who, by forbidding scientists their ancient freedom to think and to question and to speak and to publish, are wilfully destroying our places of learning.
