Pontiff pans pontificating planet prophets

Pope Benedict XVI has sent a stern message to “climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.”

Just this last September, His Holiness led a sort of new-age hippie festival, which struck me as not a little odd. It suggested that he had bought into the whole eco-cultist thing, which seemed to confirm that environmentalism is, to borrow Michael Crichton’s memorable notion, nothing more than a religion for the secular age.

It looks like he may have changed his mind. Maybe it’s the hot air rising from the tropical splendour of Bali, where tax-guzzling party-goers are manufacturing consensus, or perhaps the efforts of a few rational skeptics to talk sense into the faithful (remember when skepticism was a good thing in science?), but apparently the cardinals are upset: “…senior cardinals close to the Vatican have since [the eco-festival] expressed doubts about a movement which has been likened by critics to be just as dogmatic in its assumptions as any religion.”

That the Pope is calling for some balance in the approach to environmental issues — favouring sensible care for the environment without succumbing to dogmatic fervour, melodramatic alarmism or grandiose notions of saving the planet no matter what the cost — is welcome indeed. Perhaps the Pope knows blind faith when he sees it, after all.

The same can’t be said for the Daily Mail, which ran the story. Beneath a saturated snapshot of a stern Pope, guess what picture they ran?

The caption? “Adrift: Polar bears on melting iceberg” Hey, guys, icebergs melt. All the time. That’s what they do. Polar bears are common around ice caps, ice floes, ice shelves, ice rivers, and, indeed, icebergs. That’s where they live. That’s where their food lives. This is normal. That’s nature. It’s not a catastrophe. It’s not a picture of impending doom. This is exactly the sort of unthinking, dogmatic alarmism the Pope is warning against.