AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE FRANCIS
Your Holiness:
As world leaders contemplate a climate agreement, many look to you for guidance. We commend you for your care for the earth and God's children, especially the poor. With this letter we raise some matters of concern that we ask you to consider as you convey that guidance.
Much of the debate over environmental stewardship is rooted in a clash of worldviews, with conflicting doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation. Unfortunately, that clash often works its way into the very conclusions of environmental science.
Rather than a careful reporting of the best evidence, we get highly speculative and theory-laden conclusions presented as the assured results of science. In the process, science itself is diminished, and many well-meaning moral and religious leaders risk offering solutions based on misleading science. The effect, tragically, is that the very people we seek to help could be harmed instead.
Specifically, the scientific method demands that theories be tested by empirical observation. By that test, computer climate models of the warming effect of enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming, and therefore no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming by restricting the use of fossil fuels or any other means.
Further, we ask you to consider that substituting low-density, intermittent energy sources like wind and solar for high-density, constant energy sources like fossil fuels would be catastrophic to the world's poor.
