The Pope, it seems, has decided to involve himself in the climate debate, apparently because he wants to ensure that the 2015 Paris summit is a success (if you can call condemning millions of people to destitution "a success"). Via Andy Revkin I also learn that the Pope's new-found enthusiasm for green issues was the result of a workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences held in the middle of last year.
The proceedings of the workshop have been published online and they make interesting reading. For example, the list of attendees tells a story in itself, with familiar names such as Naomi Oreskes, Peter Wadhams, Martin Rees, Hans-Jochim Schellhuber, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz. There was also Daniel Kammen, the editor at Environmental Research Letters who is threw scientific integrity out of the window in a bid to prevent John Cook's fictions from being exposed. Needless to say, there were no familar names who could be put in the "global warming not a catastrophe" camp.
All of the talks are available online too, both in video format and in print. I've looked at a couple of them in brief.
A was amused by Schellnhuber's with its allusions to "insidious" changes in the jet streams and wondered where his science was. Does the Pope really want to have people presenting the latest cockeyed hypothesis to him as if it were settled science?
But best of all was Peter Wadhams. You have to say that for the Pontifex to be taking advice from a man who is seen as a bit of a fruitcake by both sides of the climate debate does make the Vatican look a bit silly. And Wadhams' presentation doesn't disappoint either, ending with this salvo of stupidity:
...a common view is that, morally and economically, we must reduce our carbon emissions at a rapid rate in order to save the world from dangerous climate warming. I wish that I could agree with this view but my own conclusion, based only on unconsidered Arctic feedbacks, is that even a rapid reduction in CO2 emissions will not work in time, so we must seriously and urgently consider emergency methods which could slow down the rate of warming and give us time to change to a new paradigm of living on this planet – that is, the use of geoengineering techniques, repugnant as these are to many people.