The scientific consensus is NOT “overwhelming.”

Global climate change IS real, and has been since creation first began. It may be influenced by human activity, but is NOT “caused” by it.

It may, indeed, be “disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable,” so we who are in a position to do so should help them ADAPT to it, not waste valuable time, energy, and resources whining about it. Human beings have proven throughout their existence to be really ingenious at adaptation.

For the most part, bishops are not scientists, and thus, are as susceptible to badly-directed science as most other folks are. Their concern for the poor is certainly right and proper, however.

We should in particular avoid citing a few occurrences, unhappy as they may be, to infer a “global warming” cause-and-effect. Regional weather events and disasters did not just start happening in the past 35 years (the time from the reported threat of a new ice age, to today’s reported threat of excess warming). If the recent rainfall in Burkina Faso was the worst since 1919, that means that a bigger downpour occurred in 1919, before the global warming scare.

We should also be very wary of scare propaganda which urges us to take immediate action, under a cloud of great unknowing, to avert presumed disasters 100 and more years from now. If the actions prescribed (such as the Kyoto Protocols) were not draconian, but instead were affordable, then they would not be objectionable. But to take that kind of drastic action, which we know for sure would be economically devastating, to possibly (not surely) fix a problem (which may not be a problem) in the distant future (when there’s still time to fix it with greater knowledge and more developed technology) is surely the epitome of bad public policy.

And when we realize the murderous effect such drastic policies would have on the poor, then taking such actions at this time would not just be bad policy, it would be sinful.

God surely gave us a duty to exercise stewardship over the environment when He commanded us to “exercise dominion over the earth.” But it would be a malfeasance of duty if we followed every environmentalist enthusiasm in so doing, to the detriment of humanity. In this area, Prudence is a true virtue.