Vatican Newspaper Taints ‘Encounter of Faith and Reason’ With Climate Falsehood

By reporting the sensational claims of UNICEF, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano joins in the fearmongering of climate alarmists whose credibility suffers from a lack of scientific facts.

Drawing on UNICEF’s The Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026, the paper’s front-page, June 16 story, “Emergenze climatiche: Il cielo sopra i bam (Climate Emergencies: The Sky Above the Children),” claims that half of the world’s children are “threatened daily” by “extreme climate events.” The article lists the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as a way to mitigate “climate risks.” UNICEF’s report also urges the phasing out of fossil fuels in favor of “renewable” energy.

But are children, or anybody, really endangered by a climate crisis? Let’s see what the data say.

The EM-DAT database from the University of Louvain’s Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters confirms that natural disasters did not become more frequent from about 2000 onward. Before then, the system for disaster reporting was still in the process of being developed. That means that a rise in the stated number of disasters during the 20^th century reflects better reporting from more stations, rather than an increase in disaster frequency.

For instance, the global percentage of land area affected by drought has been decreasing since 1950. Similarly, in the United States, heat waves peaked in the 1930s, and the severity and frequency of wildfires dropped significantly from 1926 to 2025. The area burned annually by wildfires declined by about 90% since its peak in 1930.