ROME, Italy – Should the Pope stick to God or is it about time he embraced the fashionable cause of Gaia-worship?
This is going to be the big question in Rome over the next couple of days as two rival groups – one comprising green activists, lefty economists and world government apparatchiks, the other containing one or two actual climate scientists – battle for the environmental soul of the Vatican.
On one side is a delegation led by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and economist Jeffrey Sachs, a warmist so fanatically unrestrained that last year he decided it wasn’t at all beneath his dignity to tweet “Climate liars like Rupert Murdoch & Koch Brothers have more & more blood on their hands as climate disasters claim lives across the world.”
These will be speaking at an official Vatican event staged on Tuesday by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences called Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity.
On the other is a small group of scientists including a meteorologist, a physicist and member of the NASA team which put man on the moon who hope to warn the Pope that while his intentions may be good, the very last thing he should be doing if he means to help the world’s poor is to join the vainglorious mission to “combat climate change.”
They will be speaking at unofficial rival events today and tomorrow, where they’ll be presenting the facts that the Pope’s expert advisers might prefer him not to know. Awkward, inconvenient stuff like the fact there’s been no “global warming” for the last 220 months; that CO2 is greening the planet not killing it; and that the surest way to help the needy poor in the developing world is not to inflict on them renewable energy they can’t afford but let them benefit from cheap, effective, reliable fossil fuels.
Up until the weekend, I wouldn’t have fancied their chances: a gaggle of scientists, sponsored by the (relatively small, modestly funded) Heartland Institute versus the combined might of the UN, the Catholic Church (which like the C of E bought into the global warming agenda long ago) and the vast green crony capitalist lobby machine.
But then, very generously, over the weekend the Guardian gave the Heartland team a massive fillip by invoking the name of the Koch Brothers, who are the liberal left’s answer to the Anti-Christ. Had the greenies asked my advice I would have told them the best thing they could do would be to ignore the Heartland delegation completely. Unfortunately, the damage has been done and the enviro loons have been writhing and shrieking like Damien in the Omen when his parents try to take him into a church.
Some sample comments from the Guardian to give you a flavour:
The Koch Brothers will be dead in 20 years, can’t we get rid of them sooner? They are just bad people.
Arrogant little bastards those repubs. Heartland Institute – what a misnomer – absolutely no heart and they only see the land fit to rape and pillage.
When palm trees are growing at the South Pole, the ‘climate change deniers’ would still be denying the obvious.
Anyway, the Guardian’s generous plug should ensure a lively turn out of reporters keen to see for themselves the hand-stitched Brioni suits and Lamborghinis with personalised number plates which the Koch Brothers have provided for the Heartland delegation.
On those particular details they may be disappointed. But what they will hear – I think we can guarantee with at least 97 per cent certainty – is a lot more sense than anything coming from the lips of Ban Ki-Moon or Sachs over the road.
I’ll let you know how it goes because I’m here in Rome too. Don’t be too jealous. It’s true that the city is looking particularly lovely at this time of year, but the forecast for the next couple of days is torrential rain.
Or, as Jeffrey Sachs will no doubt choose to spin it in his speech, “incontrovertible evidence of Koch-Brothers-funded, Murdoch-sponsored global weirding extreme weather events.”
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