Environmentalists, including the advisors responsible for the content of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, and even many of their critics, routinely refer to a “balance of nature,” a concept that elicits visions of fragile nature knocked off balance by crossing “tipping points” that lead to catastrophes–concepts fundamental to global warming alarmism. Veteran ecologist Daniel Botkin finds that thinking common in Laudato Si’ and niftily nullifies it from a scientific standpoint.

Botkin goes on to write,

I happen to agree with what the pope says here about urban public transportation, and I am certainly no expert on religion nor of the history of previous Encyclical Letters.  I merely assumed they would be primarily focused on religious matters or, when discussing other topics that seemed part of and affected by religion, would remain philosophical and general.  For me, perhaps in my religious history naiveté, the pope’s jump into a specific technological issue seems somehow very strange and out of place for the person who is supposed to be one of the authorities on religion and religious philosophy.  It would be like me writing a major public statement about Catholicism, which I have no basis to do nor would ever do.

Be that as it may, the greatest importance of the pope’s document is that it makes clear once and for all that this issue is fundamentally a religious and an ideological one, not a scientific one. As I make clear in several of my books and many of my articles, the fundamental irony of environmental science is that it is premised on mythology, on the myth of the great balance of nature, which is not scientific and not scientifically correct.

It’s not only conservative Christians who find Laudato Si’ scientifically lacking.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Frank Kovalchek, Creative Commons, used by permission.