The Vatican, having embarrassed the Church with numerous errors about climate science is at it again, this time still more embarrassingly. In a silly foreword to a document from the Holy See entitled Pastoral Guidelines on Climate-Displaced People, it maunders:
“We are engulfed by news and images of whole peoples uprooted by cataclysmic changes in our climate – forced to migrate … people driven out because their local environment has become uninhabitable … the deteriorating climate … crisis unfolding since the Industrial Revolution … huge and increasing numbers displaced by climate crises … great emergency of our age … devoured in conditions that make it impossible to survive … forced to abandon fields and shorelines … people flee in haste carrying just a few souvenirs … driven from their homes by the climate crisis … tragedy of prolonged uprootedness … Integral Ecology Sector …”
Gentle reader, here are the facts, in a single graph compiled by the amiable Bjørn Lomborg:

The objective truth is that annual climate-related deaths have fallen by 96% in a century, notwithstanding a tripling of the global population over the same period.
So, who are the populations that have been “forced to migrate”, and why? The Vatican is silent on the plight of the Rohingya Muslims, at least a million of whom have been displaced not by climate but by the unlamented regime of the Nobel laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi.
It is silent on the plight of the Uighur Muslims of Sinkiang, 2-3 million of whom the Chinese Communist Party (which, as best I can discern, the Pope has failed to call to account) has “forced to migrate” into concentration camps.
It is silent on the fate of the suffering people of Tibet, forced willy-nilly to work under slave-labour conditions in the lithium mines that power Mr Musk’s tax-farming Tesla milk-floats; obliged by law to interbreed with their Han Chinese occupiers, the most ruthlessly racialist nation on Earth; required, as are the Uighurs, to give up their organs, often harvested in vivo and without anaesthetic, to keep the trembling gerontocrats of the Chinese Communist Party alive.

It is silent on the Chinese Communist Party’s repudiation of the treaty with Britain intended to keep the people of Hong Kong free and democratic for 50 years. The people of Hong Kong have been “forced to migrate” from freedom to slavery overnight.
It is silent on the 3 million and counting who have been “forced to migrate” from life to death by the virus unleashed from the Wuhan biolab in October 2019, when it killed a graduate student who had mishandled a vial containing infected blood and urine from a bat collected in a cave in Yunnan province by the People’s Enslavement Army / Navy a few years previously. The automatic detonator on the vial had failed to explode, and the graduate was splashed with the contents. She was Patient Zero. She died.
Not only did the Chinese Communist Party dishonour its treaty obligation, under the International Health Regulations, to notify the international community at once: it used its total control of the World Death Organization not only to keep the new and fatal infection secret until it reached Taiwan and could be hidden no longer but also to instruct its poodle, the criminal against humanity Ghebreyesus, to tell people that it was perfectly safe for people to travel in and out of China without restriction when they and he knew perfectly well that travel would spread the deadly infection worldwide.
It is silent on the Christians persecuted in many Arab nations. Tens of millions have been “forced to migrate” from their homes, their businesses, their countries.
Now, the whole point of the Holy See is that it must strive to maintain its reputation for uttering unfashionable but sensible truths. However, the current leadership in the Vatican is prone to utter fashionable but half truths. And that makes it worse than useless.
For example, the Pope might have been able to persuade the Chinese – at present far and away the greatest threat to the global population – to bring their various genocides to an end, to get out of Tibet, to empty the concentration camps and forced-labour factories of Sinkiang, to give Hong Kong its independence, to abandon its plan to invade Taiwan now that President Harris, a socialist, has replaced President Trump and will not stand in China’s way.
But no, instead he appears to be deferential to the Chinese Politburo and ignores the very evident abuses of that regime.
The latest document from the Holy See says “Fierce storms, violent hurricanes and disastrous cyclones continue to rage.” Well, yes, they’ve been doing that since Biblical times. It’s called weather. “They have become more frequent and intense as the climate crisis worsens.” No, they haven’t. The publicly-available Accumulated Cyclone Index of the combined frequency, intensity and duration of hurricanes and tropical cyclones shows – if anything – a decline in storminess in recent decades, exactly as one would expect given the mildly warmer weather that our sins of emission cause. Warmer weather reduces temperature differentials in the atmosphere-ocean system, and thus reduces storminess.
“We see growing numbers of people displaced on account of the crippling impacts of the climate crisis …”. No, we don’t, as Mr Lomborg has demonstrated, using official international databases that are no less available to the Holy See than to him.
“… increases in droughts, floods …”. No. The Palmer Drought Severity Index – again publicly available – shows no trend in a century. And the land area under drought has fallen for 40 years.
“After more than 10,000 years of relative stability – the full span of human civilisation – our home planet’s climate is rapidly changing on account of human activities.” No, most of the past 10,000 years were at least as warm as the present. The Holocene Climate Optimum – which endured for 4000 years from 10,000 to 6000 years ago, with a brief dip in the middle – was warmer than today much of the time. So were the Egyptian Old Kingdom, Minoan, Roman and Mediaeval Climate Optima, during each of which great civilisations arose, for warmer weather is better than colder.
“The current rate of warming is faster than at any time in the past 65 million years.” No. The fastest rate of warming in any instrumental record was during the 40 years 1694-1733, when temperature in most of England rose at a rate equivalent to 4.33 degrees per century. Nothing like it has been seen since. Before the instrumental record, we had to rely on ice-cores. Those show that at the end of last Ice Age temperatures rose by 5 degrees in just 3 years.
“A temperature rise of just above 1 degree from the industrial era is already causing immense suffering to millions … “ No. It is causing greater crop yields, fewer droughts, fewer wildfires, less severe floods, fewer severe storms, and, therefore, far less climate-related loss of life than at any time in the century since reliable records began.
“The sea level will continue to rise as our climate warms”. But not by much. According to the late Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, who published more than 600 papers on sea level in his distinguished 50-year career, sea level is rising at a rate of 2-4 inches per century equivalent.
“Low-lying islands and atolls will be rendered completely uninhabitable.” No. Coral atolls grow as sea level grows, as numerous recent reports have confirmed. The only island that has disappeared is Lobnachara, in the Ganges delta, driven beneath the waves not by global warming but by tectonic subduction.
There is plenty more nonsense in the Holy See’s lamentably ill-researched document. Now, you can do two things on reading this article. You can look the other way and get on with other things. Or you can write to your Papal Nuncio, enclosing this article and demanding that the Nuncio should pass it on to the relevant dicasteries at the Holy See.
Frankly, the current stance of the Vatican on the climate question is unacceptably anti-scientific. It will not be long now before the central error of physics that led to the absurd over-predictions of global warming by inadequately-educated climatologists comes to the public gaze: the Marxstream news media cannot keep it secret indefinitely.