Where Pope Francis Got His Advice on Global Warming

Guest essay by Martin Fricke. Ph.D. (nuclear physics)

On behalf of legitimate scientists everywhere, I apologize for the bad advice Pope Francis has received about global warming and CO2.  I contacted our Papal Nuncio in New York and the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy expressing my concerns, and a delegation of the world’s most esteemed specialists in climate science went to Rome for a scheduled meeting which, according to the press, was blocked by Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras (who has been said to be Pope Francis’s closest friend and is commonly referred to as the “Vice Pope”).  He recently proclaimed at a news conference in Rome, “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”

The Holy Father’s encyclical will do greatest harm to the very people dearest to him, the poor.  It appears that radical environmentalist political ideology has trumped science in this field and given all of science a bad name in the process.  This all started from global warming theoretical predictions made by the highly politicized (and now discredited) United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC), predictions that have been thoroughly disproven by experimental data yet have been widely used as a benchmark by alarmist environmental groups.  In some circles this brouhaha is also giving the papacy a bad name by associating it with Pope Francis’ and Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga’s Marxist controlled home countries of Argentina and Honduras, since environmental extremism and liberalism/socialism are closely linked.

The above mentioned approaches to the pope have been turned away, and a “Galileo-like train wreck” now seems inevitable.

The real substance of the matter boils down to the pope promulgating the elimination of fossil fuel power plants based of the amount of the atmospheric gas CO2 they produce. In this, he is shooting his beloved poor in the foot. CO2 has been conclusively, experimentally, shown to have little if any effect on global warming, and there has no warming for the past 18 years. Further, CO2 has a huge effect on enhancing agriculture, so important to the poor. Lastly, the fossil fuel plants are the only inexpensive way to provide the poor with their immediate and essential energy needs (for heating, electricity, gasoline, and so forth).

I know that Pope Francis had been planning his Eco-Encyclical for a long time and surmise he had no desire to lose any steam by taking the time to work with real climate scientists instead of his people at his Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where there are none.  Had he done so, strong environmental statements could still have been made but for the right reasons, not those he adopted (scientists want a good environment too).  His social and economic arguments now revolve around a false scientific core, solidly shown to be false by every measurement made.

The main problem is that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has chosen advisors based on their prestige without regard to their fields.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Pontifical Academy of Science was the lead climate scientist Pope Francis consulted. Schellnhuber was present on the panel that presented the encyclical to the world’s press.

While I hadn’t seen his name before, I’m a nuclear physicist not a climate scientist, so I asked two of the most widely recognized top climate scientists in the world about him.  I haven’t sought permission to forward their opinions elsewhere, so I must refrain from impressing you with their names. I’ll call them Expert 1 Expert 2.

Expert 1:

“Schellnhuber is a well-known global warming fanatic, a sort of mirror image of our own Jim Hansen.  He runs the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.  I don’t think he knows very much climate science but he knows how to scare people with lurid “impacts.”  I am sending a copy of this note to [Substitution: “Expert 2”] who can tell you much more if he has time.”

Expert 2:

“Schellnhuber is actually closer to our John Holdren.  He is a fanatical Malthusian who believes the carrying capacity of the earth is 1 billion people.  He is also very close to Merkel.  In my personal experience he is even more dishonest than Holdren – if that be possible.  He manages to get into everything.  He is a foreign member of the NAS and was immediately placed on the editorial board of the PNAS.  He apparently boasted that he was responsible for preventing anyone questioning warming alarms from getting access to the pope.  He is (or at least was) on the board of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia [home of the well known email scandal that was instrumental in discrediting the IPCC]. They have a cooperative arrangement with the Potsdam Institute.”

And from reputable web sources I found,:

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is the founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).  PIK scientists send their reports to the discredited U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Coordination with the [corrupt] IPCC working group on Climate Change Mitigation is managed by Schelllnhuber’s institute’s deputy director.

The Chair of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences who appointed Schellnhuber is Wener Arber. He is a geneticist who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  In the physical sciences, however, a Nobel Prize in one field rarely carries weight in a different one, as the specialization is so great.  For example, a Nobel Prize even in the same field of nuclear or particle physics in one energy region would rarely imply competence in another; ditto for different theoretical approaches at the same energies.

So, the Pontifical Academy of Science is obviously puzzled by the physical sciences, thinking that a big name in one field, say biology, knows the best scientists in another field, say meteorology. But, even within meteorology, there are few who know much about the sub-specialty of climate science.