When President Trump visits the Vatican next week, he will be transformed by the radiant wisdom of His Holiness, the Pope, into a fully fledged climate change believer.

Or so – somewhat optimistically – the bishop in charge of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academies of Science and Social Sciences has claimed.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the Academies’ chancellor, said in an interview:

They will come to an agreement, since the president claims to be a Christian, and so he [Trump] will listen to him [the Pope].

Actually, you can bet your bottom dollar that this won’t happen, not least because the Pope’s views on climate change are in many ways profoundly unChristian.

This was why the Pope’s 2015 encyclical on environmental issues Laudato Si was so controversial. It bought into the extreme environmentalist view which sees mankind as a blight on the planet rather than a blessing, and sees the industrial progress which brings jobs and prosperity as a curse.

Here is a sample of the encyclical.

But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.

It also took at face value all the climate scaremongering which alarmists have been dishonestly propagating these last few decades, against all scientific evidence.

The melting in the polar ice caps and in high altitude plains can lead to the dangerous release of methane gas, while the decomposition of frozen organic material can further increase the emission of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide pollution increases the acidification of the oceans and compromises the marine food chain.

One U.S. Congressman – Rep Paul Gozar – complained it made the Pope sound like a “leftist politician.”

Perhaps that’s because the Pope’s main influence was indeed a leftist – and atheist to boot – by the name of Hans Schellnhuber.

Schellnhuber is a Gaia-worshipping eco-loon who has previously argued that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth is around 1 billion people. Since the planet is fast approaching a population 9 billion – expected by the middle of this century – this would mean that roughly eight billion of us have no place inhabiting Mother Gaia’s biosphere.

This may be a perfectly respectable eco fascist position. But it’s not necessarily what one would hope to hear from the leader of a church which still cleaves to the more traditional view that humans are a blessing and that one of their jobs is to go forth and multiply.