The Pope has gone full AOC. It is faintly odd to read him lecturing us on the rate of glacial melting and the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans. I am no great reader of Papal exhortations, but do popes generally go into such detailed scientific detail? I guess he has sought advice on what to write, but at points it goes horribly wrong. “Droughts and floods, the dried-up lakes, communities swept away by seaquakes and flooding ultimately have the same origin.” Is Pope Francis really trying to blame the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on global warming?

But it gets even worse when he starts addressing social policy. Apparently, “in an attempt to simplify reality, there are those who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries.” Apologies if I have missed it, but is there really anyone advocating female genital mutilation as means of tackling climate change? Such a proposal certainly doesn’t seem to feature prominently in the publications of western governments.

[Quakes have no causal relation to climate, so that is sheer nonsense. I’m often asked about papal infallibility, and I always remind people that it only applies to doctrinal declarations made in conjunction with the entire episcopate. In fact, it’s only happened twice in the last two centuries. This declaration not only doesn’t qualify, it demonstrates that outside of those very narrow parameters, popes are just as fallible as everyone else. — Ed]