Steven W. Mosher expresses dismay at Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ not because it embraces fears of dangerous manmade global warming (though he points out those baseless fears in it, too) but because many of its ecological claims are just plain wrong. “Having read through Pope Francis’ new encyclical, I am dismayed at how many groundless assertions it makes. From a strictly scientific point of view, Laudato Si is an embarrassment.”

Examples:

On the issue of water, for example, the encyclical claims that “One particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor…the quality of available water is constantly diminishing.”

But according to the Millennium Development Goals 2014 Report, “Access to an improved drinking water source became a reality for 2.3 billion people” over the past 20 years. This United Nations report rightly celebrates the fact that “the target of halving the proportion of people without access to an improved drinking water source was achieved in 2010, five years ahead of schedule.”

And this:

Then there is the section of the encyclical called “The Loss of Biodiversity,” which makes the sweeping assertion that human beings are killing off other species at an alarming rate: “Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity.”

The evidence does not support this claim. While many species have seen their natural habitats reduced, the Convention on Biological Diversity set a goal of setting aside 17% of global terrestrial areas and 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020 as nature preserves. The good news is that such preserves currently include some “14.6% of the earth’s land surface area and 9.7% of its coastal marine areas.”

This means we are already very close to achieving our internationally agreed upon goal of protecting biodiversity and reducing anthropogenic species extinction in this way. There is no need for panic.

There are more examples, and Mosher gets to the root of the issue when he identifies the environmental extremists behind the encyclical, whom Pope Francis wrongly trusted for sound information. The whole article’s well worth reading.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Rob Waddington, Creative Commons, used by permission