Scientist faults Pope on population control and climate

Tuesday, September 29th, 2015

A scientist famous for demographic doom-saying has criticised Pope Francis for not admitting population control is needed to tackle climate change.

Paul Ehrlich said Pope Francis is simply wrong in trying to fight climate change without also addressing the strain on global resources from population rise.

“That’s raving nonsense,” the scientist said.

Ehrlich wrote on the subject in the journal Nature Climate Change.

His was a rare dissent in a special feature of commentary from scientists about Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’.

He told The Guardian that the Pope is right on some things, “but he is just dead wrong on that”.

“It is crystal clear. No one concerned with the state of the planet and the state of the global economy can avoid dealing with population.

“It is the elephant in the room,” he said.

In Laudato Si’, the idea of population growth as a strain on global resources is explicitly rejected.

“Demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development,” the Pope wrote.

“To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.”

Ehrlich, in his Nature Climate Change commentary, said Francis had fallen for the usual clerical “obsession” with contraception and abortion.

This is when he could have instead broken new ground on the Catholic Church’s approaches to women’s reproductive rights and family planning.

Ehrlich became a household name in the US nearly 50 years ago for warning of a global catastrophe because of population growth – a scenario he later conceded did not entirely materialise.

Sources