What’s the Carbon Footprint of the PopeMobile?

(Via The Burning Platform)

The Pope, it’s said, wears Prada.

And travels by Mercedes, too.

But apparently, he’d prefer you (and millions of other ordinary human beings) not.

Because “global warming.”

Er… make that “climate change.”

The new – more general – term for the allegedly human-caused alteration of the planet’s weather. “Global warming” had to go because global cooling was also inconveniently happening.

This was becoming globally embarrassing.

“Climate change” is much better, because it always fits. The climate is constantly changing. And would do so (and has done so) regardless of the presence of man on this Earth. But why not just blame man for it?

For everything?

Perfect!

The fact that this re-branding was necessary says more about the politics of “climate change” than its scientific validity. Despite the near-unanimity of media Tele-Prompter readers and politicians, experts in the field (as opposed to “environmentalists,” a non-degreed title anyone can claim) are far less certain about the assertion that recent changes are abnormal, much less the result of human activity – and so reluctant to endorse the imposition of extreme (and expensive) government regulations and taxes on billions of humans that will impoverish them but not the elites (including the Pope) whose super-sized carbon footprints will continue to tromp the Earth.

The average TeeVee viewer, for instance, takes at face value the media’s lockstep assertion that the “science” is “settled.”

Not so.

What the TeeVee talking heads never mention is that the basis for the “climate change” assertion is a scientifically shaky United Nations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) position paper – not peer reviewed – that’s based on broad-brush computer modeling. Your local weatherman has about a 50-50 percent track record of accurately predicting whether it will rain next Sunday – but we are supposed to take as gospel that a UN computer model can predict – absolutely, with virtually no reasonable doubt – that the entire planet will suffer catastrophic “change” five (or is it ten? twenty?) years from now … unless massive taxes and controls are imposed on its populace right now.       

In others words, the IPCC Report is a political rather than a scientific document.

Indeed, many of the “scientists” who’ve endorsed the IPCC report are not credentialed experts in the relevant fields (see here for an excellent Forbes piece on the subject). The average person being fed the “climate change” line may be unaware of the fact that one need not be a climatologist (or even a meteorologist) to qualify as a “scientist” for purposes of hawking “climate change.”

Which is like going to see a podiatrist for a heart problem.   

Meanwhile, those who are credentialed experts – like MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science (and member of the National Academy of Science) Richard Sloan and UVA’s Fred Singer – but who disagree with the assertion that a changing climate is abnormal (and that human activity is the primary or even a significant driver of such change) are conveniently ignored.

Or vilified.

Not their questioning, per se, of the “climate change” religion. But rather, their motives for questioning it.

Again, politics – not science.

If the coverage of “climate change” were less about agenda-driven politics (create the sense of a looming crisis to browbeat the public into accepting more taxes and a reduction in their – but never the elites – standard of living) people might be more aware that  in excess of 31,000 actual scientists (as distinct from politicians – and popes) have openly questioned the scientific validity of the IPCC report, affixing their names (and their reputations, something no scientist does lightly) to a petition that reads, in part: “… there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Will the climate “change”?

Certainly. It changes hourly. Seasonally. Yearly. Sometimes – over time – it changes dramatically. But man did not cause the Little Ice Age – a period of unusual cold that the Earth has only recently snapped itself out of. And man did not cause the much higher global temperatures (and much higher atmospheric C02 concentrations) that allowed the dinosaurs to thrive, many millions of years ago.

The fact that pushers of global C02 taxes and such have had to fall back and adjust their terminology to fit warming and cooling and anything else in between – any “change” in the Earth’s climate – stinks of politics, not science.   

Pope Francis seems to be a nice man – but he is no more a scientific expert than Al Gore.

And while both the Pope and Al Gore have bought-in to “climate change,” neither of them have stopped shopping. Or traveling. Both of which – according to their own public scoldings – are environmental no-no’s that ought to be discouraged.

Perhaps they ought to lead by example.   

Why is it that they never do?