“Your Holiness is reported as having told chief executives of oil companies and investment houses that inflicting heavy taxes on their corporate emissions of the satanic gas carbon dioxide was “essential” to prevent dangerous “global warming”. With respect, that was off message.” “Given the egregious lack of evidence for harm caused by warmer weather, and the overwhelming evidence that current global-warming policies are killing tens of millions, I invite Your Holiness to speak up for the poor who are poor, and dying, because the policies Your Holiness imprudently advocates are not just scientifically unjustifiable, not just theologically off message. They are – not to put too fine a point on it – actually genocidal.”

An open letter to His Holiness Pope Francis about the weather By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley – Former advisor to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

Christopherus Monachorum Brencleiensis servus Servi servorum Dei Servi servorum Dei salutem pluriman dat.

Now that the amiable British habit of talking about the weather – like so much that originates in these inventive islands – has been adopted worldwide, perhaps I may sound a respectful cautionary note.

A few days ago, at yet another meeting about global warming, er, climate change, um, climate disruption, aargh, climate emergency at the elegant palace of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican gardens, Your Holiness saw fit to stray from the missio canonica of the successors of St Peter, which is to uphold the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith. See:

Your Holiness is reported as having told chief executives of oil companies and investment houses that inflicting heavy taxes on their corporate emissions of the satanic gas carbon dioxide was “essential” to prevent dangerous “global warming”. With respect, that was off message.

What is more, Your Holiness proclaimed that “we have collectively failed to listen to the fruits of scientific analysis, and doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.”

Well, I have listened carefully, and I can inform Your Holiness that science is divided on the climate question. A small number of totalitarian profiteers of doom in various self-serving national academies have issued pompous statements about it, but a large number of papers from reputable scientists, and a larger amount of hard data, suggest that global warming is and will continue to be a non-event.

Consider the warming from 1850–2011. It was just 0.75 degrees, equivalent to 1 degree of warming in response to doubled CO2 concentration. That is less than a third of the 3.35 degrees that is the totalitarian scientists’ grossly inflated midrange prediction.

The totalitarians got the science wrong. They made a strikingly elementary error of physics. They forgot the Sun was shining. So they misallocated the feedback response to the Sun, erroneously counting it as part of the feedback response to greenhouse gases. Their predictions should be one-third of their current midrange estimates.

What that means, Your Holiness, is that the global warming that will happen between now and the exhaustion of accessible resources of coal, oil and gas will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial.

The same cannot be said of the insane policies currently being inflicted upon the world’s blameless population by crazed Western extremists, now unwisely supported by Your Holiness.

Why has Your Holiness never spoken out in condemnation of the World Bank, which, from 2010 onward, refused and still refuses – citing global warming as their rationale – to lend to developing countries so that they can build coal-fired power stations? This dismal institution has decided that from this year it will not lend for oil or gas projects either, for the same reason.

And what is the effect of this wicked policy? Let me repeat the figures I gave recently here. According to the International Energy Agency, 1.3 billion people – one in six worldwide – has no access to electrical power, even though the Agency defines “access” as the ability to turn on no more than one 60-Watt lightbulb for an average of just four hours a day.

The World Health Organization estimates that 4.3 million people die every year from particulate pollution in open cooking fires because they have no mains electricity or gas, and that another 500,000 women die in childbirth each year because they have no electricity. These are just a small fraction of the tens of millions who die in developing countries each year because they cannot so much as turn on a light.

In darkest sub-Saharan Africa, where there is hardly any electricity, life expectancy is about 65 years, compared with 80 years in the electrified West. And it’s no good telling third-world countries they should install solar panels and windfarms: the electricity produced by these boondoggles is up to five times costlier than proper electricity from coal-fired power stations. They can’t afford it (and nor, come to that, can we).

A few more scientific facts.

First, sea level, the mother of all scares. The sea is not rising at a rate equivalent to 33 cm/century, as the totalitarians claim. It is rising at only 11 cm/century.

Floods? Schumds. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, neither the frequency nor the intensity of flooding has changed or will change as a result of global warming.

Droughts, then? The most comprehensive survey ever conducted, just five years ago, showed that in the previous 35 years the percentage of global land area under drought had declined.

Food production? Output of all staple crops is increasing rapidly worldwide. Warmer weather is good for them, because they breathe in carbon dioxide. CO2 is not a satanic gas. It is plant food.

Forest fires? The acreages destroyed in forest fires have been declining worldwide for 30 years.

Hurricanes, tropical cyclones and tornadoes? All in decline. Why? Because warmer weather reduces the temperature differentials that power such storms.

Deaths from extreme weather? Over the past 100 years, the number of weather-related deaths has plummeted worldwide. What is more, research for the EU Commission found – to the unelected Kommissars’ horror – that in the next 100 years deaths from global warming will be comfortably outstripped by lives saved from cold weather. More people will live than will die if the world continues to warm, because warm weather is better than cold weather.

Cuddly polar bears? They’re not cuddly, but there are now thought to be 35,000 of them, compared with just 5000 in the 1940s. Hardly the profile of a species at imminent threat of extinction.

Given the egregious lack of evidence for harm caused by warmer weather, and the overwhelming evidence that current global-warming policies are killing tens of millions, I invite Your Holiness to speak up for the poor who are poor, and dying, because the policies Your Holiness imprudently advocates are not just scientifically unjustifiable, not just theologically off message. They are – not to put too fine a point on it – actually genocidal.

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